Tag Archives: Holocaust

Small Fires and Internet Slander

“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”

After this quote from Christian scriptures (James 3:5), Marilynne Robinson continues an essay on “Slander” in her book, What Are We Doing Here?

Both Christian and Hebrew scriptures emphasize the power of the tongue to harm. Robinson writes: “ . . malicious speech ranks among the gravest transgressions.” As an example of grievous harm by slanderers, she points out the slurs against Jews during the Middle Ages, paving the way for the Holocaust centuries later.

It’s not surprising that Robinson calls many of the stories circulating on the internet a modern version of slander.

Two final quotes from Robinson’s book:

“Many people now think in terms of a Manichaean struggle between secularism and all we hold dear. On these grounds they have launched an attack on American civil society, formally a famous strength, which they see as secular because it is nonsectarian. . .

“If we are to continue as a democracy, we must find a way to stabilize the language and temper of our debates and disputes.”

Elie Wiesel and Others Died This Week

During the past few days, hundreds have died violent deaths in the Middle East and South Asia. Other deaths included five police officers in Dallas, a man in Minnesota, and the named sniper of the police officers. A survivor of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, also died naturally at the age of 87.

Of all of them, Elie Wiesel knew the most about hatred. At the age of fifteen, he and his family—Elie, father, mother, and two sisters—were forced into cattle cars and taken to Nazi death camps. His mother and two sisters were taken from him. His mother and one sister died; the other survived. He saw his own father die in the camp, pleading for water.

Elie Wiesel did not kill anyone in revenge. Instead, he dedicated his life to a search for the meaning behind such senseless inhumanity. He earned the Nobel peace prize, and his writings are read widely.

He helped establish the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He set up a foundation to pursue human rights in Cambodia, Bosnia, South Africa, Chile, and Rwanda.

Wiesel did not seek revenge. Instead, he worked to save others from suffering as he had.

Surviving the End of the World

Hendrik Hartog, a Princeton professor whose parents survived the Holocaust, said he learned from his parents that everyday life was a momentary accident likely to disappear.

All of us have read about, and some of us have experienced, a moment when ordinary living did disappear in the face of some unexpected tragedy or momentous event.

Families must cope after an attack by a terrorist or a deranged individual kills innocent loved ones. A tornado obliterates an entire town, leaving survivors to live without familiar symbols. Jews in 1930’s Germany faced a madman calling for the complete extermination of their race.

We assumed that the demise of the Soviet Union meant a world order leading ever upward toward democracy and civil society. Then angry young men from the Middle East intruded on a quiet September day in 2001 and upended that assumption.

Any person living long enough will experience unhappiness—the natural death of a loved one or loss of a job or a child making a wrong choice. What we do not expect is a gigantic break with the ordinary for large numbers of people.

How do those Syrians deal with it, those who became, in a short time, refugees taken from ordinary lives as shopkeepers and teachers and housewives?

How do any of us deal with the possibility that the ordinary can disappear for us, too?

Learning from Jesus’ Stories in Today’s Conflicts; Guest Blog by Dr. Lloyd Johnson

 

I met Dr. Lloyd Johnson at the Northwest Christian Writers Association Renewal conference in May. We discovered a mutual interest in Middle East issues, though with different emphases.

Following are excerpts from the bio on Dr. Johnson’s blog  http://lloydjohnson.org/

“Following the man of Galilee, and learning from Jesus’ stories, I began to write tales about people struggling with the issues in their lives and the current conflicts in that part of the world.  We in the United States learn of the Arab Spring but have little information about ordinary people’s daily lives in Israel and the West Bank.

Previously, as Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington,  I taught and practiced general and thoracic surgery in Seattle for many years . . . . Additionally I worked as Professor of Surgery at the Haile Selassie I University in Gondar, Ethiopia for three years.  I served for two years in the U.S. Air Force as a flight surgeon,  and volunteered in hospitals for several weeks each in Kenya, India, and in Pakistan with Afghan refugees.”

Here is one of Dr. Johnson’s entries, posted on June 16, 2012

“THOSE WHO CANNOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT.”

from George Santayana (1863 – 1952), The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

Memory is a gift.  When you wake up in the morning, you may still remember what happened yesterday—or 20 years ago.  Sleep does not erase it.  Like memory in your computer, it should still be there on re-start.  You need the anchor of memory to know who you are and how you relate to the rest of the world around you.

Santayana addressed long term recollections of history, ours or others, that are crucial to teach us how to live in the present.  We can choose to learn from the past or not.  Both the good and the bad events.  Father’s Day brings inspiring memories to me.  Many are not so fortunate to have had a loving dad.  But at age 18 I lost him tragically, to a drunk driver. Devastated, I learned to forgive and not live in bitterness.  The past is history, only to inform the present, not paralyze it.

Paul, the famous Jewish apostle, wrote to his friends in Philippi, “Forgetting what is behind, and straining toward what is ahead, I press on…”  He had much to forget—persecution to death of Jesus followers, and then becoming one himself, his own beatings, shipwrecks, imprisonments and finally execution.  He determined to not let the past poison his life, or that of others.

“Never again” is the appropriate slogan for remembering the Holocaust.  But how do its survivors and their descendants deal with those memories?  Perhaps some do forget.  Others forgive and move on.  But dwelling on the tragedy seems to fuel Zionism’s fires to burn others.  Quoting from Jewish writer, Mark Braverman:

“…Israeli writer Avraham Burg sees the Holocaust as the central reality for Israel—infecting every aspect of daily life and even driving government policy:

‘In our eyes, we are still partisan fighters, ghetto rebels, shadows in the camps, no matter the nation, state, armed forces, gross domestic product, or international standing.  The Shoah is our life, and we will not forget it and we will not let anyone forget us.  We have pulled the Shoah out of its historic context and turned it into a plea and a generator for every deed.  All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges,…curfews, food and water deprivation, or unexplained killings…Everything seems dangerous to us…(2008, 78′” Braveman’s page 87

“Our world-view—our attitude toward the other—is so totally conditioned by our sense of our entitlement, undergirded by the idée fixe of our eternal victimhood, that we cannot see the other except as a threat that must be neutralized.”   Braverman’s “Fatal Embrace,” page 93.

Does a historic ethnic abuse seven decades ago justify another now, the oppressed becoming the oppressors?

 

Musings After A Christmas Tragedy

Our island community grieved when a tree fell on a car driven by a family on the way to a relative’s house on Christmas Day, causing death and injury. Could God not have stopped that tragedy? Could have but wouldn’t? Would have but couldn’t?

When I was about four, I was happily walking through a field of clover when a bee stung me.  I had unknowingly stepped on the bee, and the bee reacted as bees were supposed to, but I had not wilfully done wrong, any more than the family had done wrong by driving down a road. Nursing my bee sting, I sought my mother’s comfort. Because she loved me, I could overcome a world in which bees sting small children.

Bad things happen that we cannot prevent, even by our best efforts. Such things are evidence, whatever else they are, that we need a relationship outside ourselves to whom we can go for comfort when those things happen.

The Holocaust surely is a tragedy as evil as ever envisioned. It caused some to disavow the idea of a loving God. I see it as evidence, neither of God’s impotence nor of his lack of caring, but as evidence of human failing. The Holocaust was not sent by God. It happened because we sinned, chose hatred. Directly caused by Hitler and the Nazis, yes, but it also may be traced to choices as far back as the religious wars of the 1600’s, which left Germany a devastated nation and led eventually to more wars and ethnic cleansing. The Holocaust came, not from God, but from humans. It is evidence of our choices, for which we need repentance and confession and forgiveness, the only actions that will prevent more Holocausts.

Why should we expect God to solve a problem that we ourselves have created? Nor should we expect God to change the rules of nature, the reaction of a bee to a threat or the natural fall of a tree when its time has come.