To fast or not to fast

My father was a simple man, not a learned scholar like Elyse Goldstein of Toronto. Elyse Goldstein wrote a blog published in the Times of Israel in which she explained why she stopped fasting on Tisha B'Av. She doesn't mourn for the destruction of the Temple. Knocking those old and corrupt priest off their perch was a good thing. All the argument about women praying at the wall only leads to trouble. She has no regrets about the destruction of the Temple. Perhaps she has nothing in her life to make her confront the big issues of her existence though fasting and commemoration. My father on the other hand did fast. He would have described himself as an agnostic. He was brought up in a traditional Jewish home, but the question of the existence of God didn't bother him. It was how to live his life and the purpose of living that mattered to him. When faced with a miracle he recognized it. He was fated to survive, to live and to live for a purpose. Early in November 1944 as a slave labourer, he was marched from Budapest, Hungary, towards the Austrian border to dig trenches to stop the invading Soviet tanks.  He then went on to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. When the camp was full to overflowing with prisoners who arrived from Hungary, a subcamp was set up in Gunskirchen 37 km from the main camp. In April 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, my father, with 17,000 others was transferred from the main camp to Gunskirchen, Only some 5000 of these men were still alive when the camp was liberated on May 4, 19 The forced march there took as long as three days because it was a march of dying people obliged to carry their dead companions along with them. While the column of men was trudging along in the snow through the narrow alpine pass, one of the soldiers, perhaps only a teenager, a bewildered member of the Hitler Jugend who escorted the group, took pot shot at the men just for the thrill of it.  In the instant when the shot was fired my father stumbled and was left behind for dead on the ground. When the column passed and was out of sight my father got up, and having no alternative, joined the next column of Jewish walking skeletons. My father survived through a miracle, the amazing miracle that the shot missed him. He commemorated this personal miracle for the rest of his life by fasting on the anniversary of that day. He came face to face with the personal miracle of survival. Those of us, who have not had such a personal encounter can only experience the tragedies of the lives of others through fasting and appreciating that we survived while Jews like us were massacred over the generations. It behoves us to remember and through fasting experience the destruction of the Temple, the annihilation of Jerusalem and the murder of Jews in ancient Palestine, and then in various parts of Europe from the early Medieval persecution by the Visigoths, to the Crusades, the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, the destruction of the Jewry of Ukraine by the Cossacks, the pogroms in Russia, the slaughter of Jews on an industrial scale during the Holocaust. When my father fasted on the anniversary of his miraculous survival he knew that fasting has nothing to do with priests of old, or the equality of women; it is about acknowledging the miracle.