As a people with a history riddled with pain, we frequently pause during our services to remember the difficult periods in our collective past: Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Treblinka.
We also take time to remember those who are no longer with us, honoring their contributions to our lives.
Just as the state of Israel emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust, one of our strengths as a people is to heal ourselves by taking positive action after difficult passages. After a death, instead of filling a synagogue with flowers, we contribute to the well-being of those who remain. For it is ultimately life that we choose to honor.
In that spirit, the family of a 12-year-old girl decided to honor her memory by presenting San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom with its first new Torah last week.
“Nothing expresses the continuity of life more than the Torah,” said the synagogue’s rabbi, Alan Lew. “And nothing could be more appropriate for keeping the spirit of Eva Gunther alive.”
Eva was struck and killed by a car in 1997 while she was in Charlotte, N.C., for the Junior Olympics. Those who knew her speak of her devotion to Judaism, her generosity, her spiritedness and a life too soon cut short.
Eva never got to celebrate her bat mitzvah. But in a boisterous procession down Clement Street, her friends, family and congregants celebrated Eva’s life — and the giving of the Torah, which was created by a scribe commissioned for that specific purpose.
Just as youth of all faiths read the words of Anne Frank, renewing their belief that “people are basically good,” even in dark times of history, those taking up the Torah provided by Eva’s family will remember that the human spirit has a way of transcending death.
Let us follow the example of the Gunthers, moving beyond personal pain and tears to turn sorrow into acts of lovingkindness.
It is the Jewish way.