Speaking from Exile: The Struggle over Jewish Dissent

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.7.2.0192
• Pages: 192-197
• Published date: 14 December 2022
• Date: 14 December 2022
• Author: Sara Roy

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

Harvard University

SPEAKING FROM EXILE: THE STRUGGLE

OVER JEWISH DISSENT

Sara Roy

I would like to begin with a story I published a long time ago, in a review of Marc

Ellis’s seminal work:

When I was a child of five, I attended a yeshiva, a Jewish parochial school. My

parents were not religious people, but they were survivors of the Holocaust, and

in the aftermath of Auschwitz they believed that a yeshiva was the best place for

me to learn about Judaism and what it means to be a Jew. One day I brought

home a magazine published by the school, and in it was a fictional story set in a

Nazi concentration camp. In this camp on this day, the story told, hundreds of

Jews were about to be murdered. They were all starving and emaciated and

listlessly stood in line before their final march into the gas chambers. As the Jews

huddled together awaiting death, a miracle suddenly occurred: manna began to

fall from the sky. The manna was everywhere and fell in great abundance, and the

Jews ate voraciously. Once they had eaten and were no longer hungry, the

doomed marched happily to their death, thanking God for his gift….

I vividly remember sitting with my mother and father at our kitchen table as my

father read the story, not knowing its intended message until the end. When he

finished reading there was a moment of stunned silence followed by fierce

outrage. Both my parents became palpably upset, but it is my father’s pain I

remember the most. Even at the age of five, I understood why. I was soon

withdrawn from the yeshiva and sent to public school….

With the Holocaust, the Jewish covenant with God as it had existed for thousands

of years had been shattered, and little if anything, including manna for the dying,

could repair it. (Roy 2003: 667–8)

I published this story nearly twenty years ago and had not thought of it for a long

time. But when I began to think about my response to Atalia Omer’s excellent

and compelling book, it suddenly and unexpectedly forced its way back into my

consciousness. There are, I believe, two reasons why it did. The first points to

DOI:10.13169/reorient.7.2.0192