{"id":1157,"date":"2017-04-24T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2017-04-19T09:13:50","modified_gmt":"2017-04-19T14:13:50","slug":"a-brief-tale-of-uncertain-moral-for-yom-hashoa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2017\/04\/a-brief-tale-of-uncertain-moral-for-yom-hashoa\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brief Tale of Uncertain Moral for Yom Ha&#8217;Shoa"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Trump&#8217;s statement for international Holocaust Remembrance Day doesn&#8217;t include words like antisemitism or Jews <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/w0mTDc4718\">pic.twitter.com\/w0mTDc4718<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/BarakRavid\/status\/825019678854676482\">January 27, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I wrote about this <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SquiDaveo\/status\/825030429749112836\">via Twitter<\/a> back in January. \u00a0I&#8217;ll\u00a0more-or-less re-iterate what I shared then here. \u00a0I don&#8217;t know why I feel compelled to do this (again), apart from the fact that, as the years go on, I realize that this anecdote is, more so than the Torah or Midrash or anything else, the primary text by which I attempt to understand the nature of God. \u00a0And Judaism is a religion that has, despite poor odds, survived, and it has done so on the basis of repetition: I say the words that my\u00a0dad said that my grandfather said that his parents said; I teach them to my children to repeat, maybe out in front of a crowd, maybe in candlelight away from windows. \u00a0But the words are repeated, and we persist, a thin red thread stretching through human history. \u00a0And when I cannot believe in anything else\u2014as is frequently the case\u2014I can believe in the worthiness of that task, and my fitness toward taking it up: \u00a0I can persist in the repetition of the words, I can take them a little farther down the road.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI&#8217;ve got a lot to say about this but I bet you can guess most of it. And the parts you can&#8217;t guess&#8230; there&#8217;s no room for them here.<\/p>\n<p>Like, for example, here&#8217;s a thing: When I was in college I used to participate in this thing in the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Diag\">Diag<\/a>, where for 24hr we&#8217;d read names of\u2026<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026Holocaust victims. The names were on these ledger sheets in a big, thick binder. I&#8217;d always take an overnight shift, 3 or 4am, reading out\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026into the dark, telling cold air and trees and sleeping crows the names of the dead. The ledger sheets, there were columns for name, number\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u2026birth place and date, death place and date. Maybe some other stuff. The first time I did this, I hit a patch where there were no names\u2026<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026just numbers. The birth and death dates were close together\u2014not much more than a year, as I recall, some much less\u2014and the birth and death\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026places were both camps. These were infants born in camp, numbered, and then taken elsewhere to die or be executed. No names, so I read \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u2026 their numbers, told them to the cold air and the trees and the sleeping crows and the dark and the handful of Jews standing around w\/ me\u2026<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026I know a lot about the Holocaust. I know numbers, I know places, I know people. I&#8217;ve seen pictures and films, I know stories that are\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026published and well known, and others that are between me and the person who no longer remembers them (z&#8221;l). I think about all of them\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026 often. But I think of those pages of numbers, the empty column for names, those infants, that dark, the crows most often. B\/c I feel\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026 more than any other, that fact, that moment, has something important to tell me about the Nature of God and the Nature of Humans. And\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">\u2026 20 years on, I still have no idea what precisely that is.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">Except for maybe that, nowadays, I think of it and, for no particular reason, I think of Malachi 3:18\u2014which you can look up on your own.<\/span>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I lumped this into my &#8220;Take Action&#8221; category, not because there is any\u00a0particular action you should take today, but so that you maybe might <img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-1246\" src=\"http:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/seraphchamsa-IMG_7181-e1492611132845-300x286.jpg\" alt=\"seraphchamsa-IMG_7181\" width=\"250\" height=\"239\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/seraphchamsa-IMG_7181-e1492611132845-300x286.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/seraphchamsa-IMG_7181-e1492611132845.jpg 399w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 250px) 85vw, 250px\" \/>meditate on this story further, as you go about your days. \u00a0Because someday you will need to take action, and all I can do for you is prime you for that not-at-all-good moment.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, on reflection, there is an action to take today: \u00a0<strong>Tell this to your sons and daughters<\/strong>. \u00a0This is thing, it was a grand\u2014almost inconceivably grand\u2014project <em>humans<\/em> undertook. \u00a0Not monsters. \u00a0Not one Very Bad Man\u2014worse even than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_RvfzFv3c6Y\">Pharaoh or\u00a0Bashar al-Assad<\/a>\u2014but just normal human beings\u2014tons of them, whole nations of them, doing their jobs. \u00a0No more, no less.<\/p>\n<p>Human beings like you and me. \u00a0No more, no less.<\/p>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trump&#8217;s statement for international Holocaust Remembrance Day doesn&#8217;t include words like antisemitism or Jews pic.twitter.com\/w0mTDc4718 \u2014 Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) January 27, 2017 I wrote about this via Twitter back in January. \u00a0I&#8217;ll\u00a0more-or-less re-iterate what I shared then here. \u00a0I don&#8217;t know why I feel compelled to do this (again), apart from the fact that, as &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2017\/04\/a-brief-tale-of-uncertain-moral-for-yom-hashoa\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A Brief Tale of Uncertain Moral for Yom Ha&#8217;Shoa&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11,75],"tags":[30,83,53,43],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1342,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/1342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}