We do not yet know how history will tell this story. We do not know what they will write about these days—about what we have lived, about what we have lost.
We only know this: we are inside it now.
We are touching history—not as something distant, something remembered, but as something unfolding beneath our feet.
It was a Friday afternoon, grey and rain soaked. I was 32 years old, standing for the first time in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside my wife, Vered.
At the entrance, they handed me a passport—a small, unassuming booklet. Inside was the name of a young man, Yitzchak, who had lived through those unimaginable years. His story became my guide. In that instant, the museum ceased being a museum. It became a mirror.
The journey began in an elevator shaped like a cattle car. The doors closed, and the darkness pressed in—not an absence of light, but an absence of self. When the doors opened, the world unravelled in fragments. Faces in photographs. Shoes in piles. A violin, cracked and worn. Traces of lives erased.
I am the child of refugees. My father fled Germany. My mother escaped Poland. My grandfather—my mother’s father—lost his entire family. A family tree reduced to a fragile branch: my grandfather, his wife, their children. And me.
I walked through the museum, but the weight of it was unbearable. These weren’t stories. These were ghosts. These were my ancestors.
Then I reached the gate of the Warsaw Ghetto. Iron bars before me—cold, unyielding, final. Behind these gates, my people had been crammed into a living tomb. Hunger and humiliation consumed them, yet they fought to remain human. They prayed. They taught their children. They resisted.
And I read the story of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He was 32—my age then.
And something inside me broke.
I cried—not just for him, not just for the ghetto, but for myself. Because I stood outside that gate, free to cry, free to remember, free to walk away.
And with that freedom came a question that has never left me:
What does it mean to live in a time when history touches you?
Now We Are Touching History
That was thirty years ago.
Back then, history felt contained—something to step into and out of, something held within books and museums. It was heavy, but it was settled.
Perhaps that is how most of us lived for so long. We carried history, but we did not touch it. It pressed upon us in memory but not in urgency. It shaped who we were, but it did not ask us to shape it in return.
Until now.
Until this moment.
Now, we are touching history.
Not watching. Not remembering. Touching.
There are times when history moves quietly - passing through ordinary days, unremarked, unnoticed.
And then there are times like this.
Times when history is no longer something that will be written later, but something that is being shaped now. Times when history is not just something lived through but something grasped, something forged, something held with trembling hands.
This is one of those times.
Now, history moves through us. Presses against us. It does not ask if we are ready—only whether we will rise to meet it.
It does not feel like the past, settled and known. It does not feel like the history we studied in books, its meaning already understood. It feels unsteady, uncertain, undetermined—because we are the ones who must give it meaning.
It feels like standing at a threshold, knowing the world before is gone, but the world ahead is still unknown.
It feels like being both participant and witness—inside it, yet also outside, knowing that one day others will look back and ask:
What was it like? What did you do?
It feels vast. Irreversible. Something we cannot yet fully see—but we know we are inside it.
And that knowledge is heavy.
Because history, when you touch it, does not allow you to remain passive.
It demands.
It demands something of us now, in this moment.
Purim—A Story of Touching History
And tonight is Purim.
A day that reminds us that history does not simply unfold—it demands something from those who live it.
Once before, another Mordechai stood before history.
He did not choose his moment. But it came for him.
“If you remain silent at this time, relief and salvation will arise from elsewhere. But who knows if it was for this very moment that you became queen?”
He could have bowed. He could have stayed silent.
Instead, he stood.
Esther could have remained hidden. She could have waited for history to pass over her.
Instead, she stepped forward.
She touched history. She shaped it.
This evening we will go to the synagogue. We will hear the names—Mordechai, Esther, Haman—and we will remember that this is not just a story of then.
It is the story of now.
Because history is not distant. It is not settled. It is not something we inherit—it is something we shape.
And now, once again, it is pressing upon us.
Those who came before us stood in moments like this. Some resisted. Some fought. Some remained silent. And some chose to step forward.
Now it is our turn.
One day, our children will ask what we did in this moment.
They will ask what it was like, how we stood, how we chose, how we bore the weight of history pressing into our hands. They will ask if we were worthy of the legacy we inherited.
And what will we tell them?
Because history does not write itself.
We write it.
And now, we are touching it again.