A few years back I was stunned and saddened by a high school student’s report on the “March of the Living.” The march brings Jewish teens to Poland on Yom Hashoa, Holocaust Memorial Day, where they walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Leaving Poland, they arrive in Israel, where they observe Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel Independence Day.

The trip is usually described in terms of redemption and rebirth, from the ashes of the concentration camps to the reflowering of the Jewish people in Israel. The student I heard, however, focused almost exclusively on the grim tour of the camps and his disturbing encounters with Poles. He saw in each the face of at best a collaborator and at worst a murderer. He took away from his visit the lesson that our enemies are always with us.

I saw this as a monumental educational failure, as if the goal of the march was to transfer one generation’s pathology to the next. It was one student’s reaction, to be sure, but it made me wonder how my own kids were assimilating the Holocaust into their own Jewish identities.

An Israel-based writer who calls himself Ahad La’am, whose article appears in this issue, seems to be asking the same question. In the essay, which originally appeared in the journal Sh’ma, he suggests that the Jewish community’s emphasis on Holocaust remembrance has distorted its values. “In seeking to affirm the value of memory around the Shoa,” he writes, “the Jewish people have crossed inadvertently over the line separating life-affirming civilizations from cults of death.”

I hesitated at first to publish the essay, in part because he writes under a pseudonym. The author should have the courage to face the consequences of expressing an opinion that is bound to rile and offend many in the Jewish community. In the end, however, the essay’s strength is indeed its ability to rile and offend — and perhaps, like all strong essays, help readers clarify their own thoughts on an often taboo subject. It certainly worked for me; I ended up not only disagreeing with the author, but also expanding my own views of the role of Shoa remembrance in Jewish life.

La’am takes up an argument that began almost as soon as the enormity of the Holocaust became known in the West. Israel’s founding generation preferred to emphasize the resistance of the ghetto fighters and partisans over the impotence of those led to slaughter. Survivors chose for many years not to dwell on their losses and escape, focusing instead on rebuilding their shattered lives, raising families, planting roots in their new countries.

Crises in Israel — the ominous prelude to the Six-Day War, the shocking setbacks of the Yom Kippur War — transformed Holocaust memory, and not only among survivors. Israel’s vulnerability seemed to release the floodgates of both personal and institutional memory. Survivors began to tell their stories; communities began to erect Holocaust memorials and museums.

A backlash of sorts was inevitable, and it crystallized around the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, starting in the late 1970s. Critics, much like La’am, feared the museum would signal to the nation that the Holocaust — not thousands of years of tradition, culture, learning, and peoplehood — defined the Jews. Perhaps worse, said critics, the memorials and museums were attracting money and resources that would be better spent on rebuilding Jewish life through ritual, education, and social action.

Much of this criticism now strikes me as offensive, because the debate has taken place within the living memory of the Holocaust itself. La’am and others seem prepared to “put the Shoa behind us,” even as its last eyewitnesses still live and breathe and as the world continues to struggle with its legacy.

And what is that legacy? The narrative of the major Holocaust museums, including Washington’s and Yad Vashem, links the Nazis’ attempts to annihilate the Jews with the life-affirming response of the Jews themselves. They detail the horrors of genocide — even understate them, because any attempt to grasp the deaths of six million is invariably an understatement — but also link the Holocaust to the birth of Israel, the resilience of the survivors, the courage of the ghetto fighters, and the rebirth of Jewish culture and charity throughout the Diaspora. Some students are bound to emerge from the March of the Living with morbid thoughts. But it is called the March of the Living, after all, and its most moving images are those of Jewish teenagers gathered at the gates of Auschwitz, mocking Hitler’s dreams of a “Final Solution.”

In describing the Jewish genius at “affirming life,” La’am appears to be invoking the writings of Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg. Greenberg has placed this affirmation at the center of his theology, and calls his educational outfit the Jewish Life Network. But remember too that Greenberg is a former chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. There is no contradiction here. The Holocaust, he writes, was “the most total assault of death on the people who teach that life will triumph.”

In urging Jews to “move on,” La’am is asking us to ignore this essential 20th- and 21st-century dialectic — one that repeats as a pattern throughout Jewish history. It is not morbid or death-obsessed to confront this struggle between life and death, especially in the light of the awesome Jewish responses to the Holocaust.

In his book The Jewish Way, Greenberg reminds us that Yom Hashoa occurs one week before Israel’s Independence Day. “The Jewish people responded to the total assault of death by an incredible outpouring of life,” he writes. “The survivors came and rebuilt their lives. Jewish life was made precious again.”

The true cult of death had been vanquished.

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