A man in crisis goes to his shul and says, Rabbi, I have made a mistake. I have hurt someone I love. How do I find forgiveness? The Rabbi considers this, then asks that he bring him a feather pillow. The man complies with his request and brings the him a pillow. Go to the top of the temple, he says, and shake the feathers out of the pillow, into the wind. The man climbs to the roof, and does as the wise Rabbi says. 

The man returns to the Rabbi and asks him, now what? He instructs the man to collect all the feathers that he discarded.

The troubled man is incredulous. How could I possibly do that? The feathers must be miles away now!

Exactly, says the Rabbi. It is impossible.

This is supposed to teach us that we must collect the feathers we see, or something, I often fell asleep during the pre-Adon Olam spiel. I was so hungry and bored, and grape juice and challah was so close.

My mother watched this show called Finding Hitler. It was some History Channel conspiracy show about how Hitler didn’t actually kill himself in a bunker in Berlin, but faked his death and escaped to live out his years in Argentina. She’s always enjoyed those types of shows, within reason, so long as they provide sources she can follow up on. She always said, “If they found Bigfoot, he’d be on the news.”

My best friend’s mother only reads books about the Holocaust. She says she doesn’t know why she does. She says, “I just need to know.” That same woman and her family laughed at the train models in the Germany Pavilion at Epcot.

My grandmother, whose mother fled from Ukraine during the pogroms, watches every documentary about the Holocaust that she possibly can. When I stayed with her while her husband went to a funeral, we watched a documentary about the Jewish refugees in Shanghai. It was depressing.

My sister, mother, grandmother and I went to a one woman show at the Jewish Heritage Museum in downtown Manhattan about a German-American sex therapist. I cried the entire show, sobs held in so my grandmother wouldn’t hear me so broken.

Why are we obsessed with death? There is a song by Rachel Bloom called Remember That We Suffered. There is an old Jewish joke that suggests there are three parts of a Jewish holiday- they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!

I just need to know. I cannot escape this sentiment. The first time I met a Holocaust survivor was before I could read. The first time I could read, I knew about the Holocaust. I knew about the pogroms. I knew about my great-grandmother’s younger sister who was too young to understand why they were hiding in the barrels and would cry and call out for her mother, and I knew about how my family had to make a choice. Suffering is so deeply part of the DNA of Jewishness. It’s why our prayers are all in a minor key!- so says my former rabbi.

The feathers aren’t about forgiveness. I think they’re about hurt. You will never collect all the feathers. But life should not be miserable. Judaism teaches us to do mitzvot because the life we live on this earth should be lived, not because we should suffer. My grandfather does not believe in G-d. He told me he prays because it is tradition. He lights yahrzeit candles and he is not talking to G-d, he is talking to his family. A Torah can never be truly destroyed, because every Torah is an exact replica of another.