Shoah

You may remember that I visited Jerusalem about 16 months ago and spent two weeks studying at Yad Vashem, the World Centre for Holocaust Research. It is a place that serves two primary purposes - the first to give the 'memory and a name [yad vashem | ד ושם‎‎י ]' to the many millions of now nameless Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the second to educate the world about the causes. 

If you want to read a few of my thoughts from that visit, please visit an old blog of mine here. 

I read, watched and listened to many hours of testimony, primary source evidence and the scars left by that tragedy. A few things stuck:

1. The Holocaust ['Shoah' (Ha Shoah, catastrophe |  השואה) in Jewish circles] was unique among genocides because it was a whole-race destruction based on idealism and not on aggrandizement of land or property. Jews dies simply because they were Jews, not because the Nazis coveted the land or wealth of that population.

2. The ideology behind the Shoah has its roots in (among other places) Christianity and the first Christian tragedy of the death of Christ. Martin Luther joined many of the Early Fathers in an anti-semitism that was later nurtured in the heart of an Austrian artist and eventual Chancellor of Germany. Indeed, his book Mein Kampf cites Luther a number of times, regarding him in the light of a national hero. (I ought to note here and now, that the Jehovah Witnesses died in their thousands because they wouldn't support the Nazi ideology)

3. Three groups of people played their part - the victim, the perpetrator and the by-stander. The first two are perhaps obvious, with the third including you and me in this day when people still die in genocides. 

Of the accounts that I heard all those months ago, of all the faces of children I looked at as they played mere days before their screaming agonising frightening execution in the dark, of all the piles of personal paraphernalia that now characterises that event, of all the hours of evidence given by relatively banal civil servants defending their acts of genocide as 'orders', one encounter stuck. That was of a women who sat before us in the room where we were gathered.

She was a women in her seventies, a retired nurse. She was well dressed, well presented, the happy mother of children (one of her sons was our tutor). She had lived a broadly good life, except for one thing: she didn't know her name. She knew the name that her adoptive parents gave her, a women into whose arms she was thrown (yes, thrown) while her birth-mother queued for her death. She landed in the arms of a stranger who took her in (to their own mortal risk and against vast odds of landing in supportive arms) and raised her as their own. The lady didn't know who her real family were, who she really was. In many ways she still felt anonymous, rootless, the un-murdered victim.

Rarely do we see these people with our own eyes. We read of them in our history lessons or in books that we dare to glance through. This Shoah was real and the victims real. They are still among us today as we carry on with our business. Though they are the 'lucky' ones. They didn't have to dig their own grave before being shot into it. They didn't have to experience that moment when lights dimmed and poison filled the air. They didn't have to regard the taunting eye of a gun chamber or a line of uniformed boys pointing rifles.

This happened in our lifetime. This happened in the age of television and telephone. This happened because bystanders (on all sides) stood by and watched madmen construct vile ideologies.

Which means that it could, just could, happen again (if we let it). 

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, may Yahweh bless, preserve and watch over all those who died because of their heritage, and over us who can never fully comprehend their Passion.

An Eye for An Eye?

I was walking with my wife this morning, visiting a couple of shops when we happened past a news stand. One newspaper was emblazoned with the blood-covered face of a man whose eyes told the reader exactly what was to befall him. Another paper was emblazoned with his lifeless corpse. Those papers were two feet from the ground, being pondered by a passing child who was trying to fathom what the pictures meant.

Needless to say, the man in the pictures was one Mr. Gadaffi, the now dead former dictator of  Libya.

I am not a man given to fits of naivety or idealism, so I recognise that the man in those pictures was murderer, a slayer of children, a destroyer of families and a tyrant. He deserved justice in the face of the world and was answerable for the deaths of so many people around our world, including those who perished on our own shores.

Except that he didn't face justice.

The events of the last few months seem to me to have made killers of ordinary men (and women?). Plumbers and accountants have taken up arms (supplied by the enlightened West) and killed other people. It seems (even if the truth is not this simplistic) that we in the enlightened West let ordinary people do our dirty work for us while we stood on the sidelines and taunted (and threw a few jet fighters in for good measure). That is how it seems.

The newspapers that I saw this morning, and that were seen by a small child, tell us much about our own deepest instincts. We see injustice and we seek blood. We are delighting in a murder, an execution without hearing. That the man who was killed yesterday didn't' afford his victims that right does not mean that we are free of the responsibility to ensure that justice is done in a civilised way, that even Saddam Hussein received. Actually, it could easily be argued that Gaddafi got off lightly in his drain pipe. 

But I wonder what that child learned this morning? Why was that man covered in blood? Why is he dead? What happened? The man did wrong, very wrong and very often, so we let him get killed. We in the West, with our law and our justice systems, we stood back and let one more man die - we became bystanders in an act of murder.

And then we sold our newspapers with the money shot of his corpse.

I don't feel very civilised at all this morning. 

A New Perspective on Christianity

This weekend has caused a profound shift in my perspective of my own faith and the organisation to which I claim a long membership. It is a tectonic shift caused by the best of things and the worst of things - the latter being the stuff of global headlines even now. 

I have slowly come to realise that there are very different kinds of Christians: the ones for whom faith is life, and the ones for who whom faith is a soap-box. There are those who let their faith shine through them and their lives, and others who use faith as a Tyndall Beam in order to project their needs upon the world. The latter disposition, at best, yields a few wonky outbursts (perhaps this is one of them). At worst, it results in the death of the innocents. 

In my last post, I shared a moment of Shona praise. In other posts I have talked about the deaf community. Both communities, the deaf and the Zimbabwean, have taught me considerable lessons about my own faith. The deaf community has taught me so much about communication, the Zimbabwean about unbridled and unfettered trust in love. Both cause, I am sorry to say, standard Western Christianity in many of its forms to seem petty, self interested, self-important and as relevant as a Beta Max Video player. 

Some have spoken of Christian persecution, as it is found in Britain. As far as I can see, that amounts to strictures surrounding work-apparel and directives about using faith to impose a theology upon others in their lives. Real persecution is to be found in the lives of Christian men and women from Zimbabwe who, because of their faith, have had to leave homes and family behind, often never seeing those loved ones again. Because of their faith. Where funds were limited, the Christian men of Zimbabwe sent their women and children oversees to safety, and in more than one case that I know of, have died before the reunion. Because of their faith. Only in that context do I see true persecution, not in the affronts to middle-class choice that we bewail in the West. The astonishing thing, though, is that a drop of their worship expresses more joy and gratitude than a bucket of our own worship (in any of the brands it is available in). Some of the British Christians who attended the Shona Mass on Saturday commented upon how "poe-faced" it made us all seem. I couldn't disagree. Exilic Zimbabweans regard their removal and separation from their homes as a new calling from God, and embrace it in those terms. Perhaps this is why I can't get super-heated about pieces of paper, I just don't know.

And then of course we have this man, Anders Behring Breivik, the man responsible for the murder of 85 young people in Norway in a kind of 'social conservation' exercise. He did this, it seems, because of a wildly mis-guided set of views informed, among other things, by ... his faith. His brand of faith is labelled as 'fundamentalist', 'right wing' and 'conservative' - none which is reason enough to end the lives of others. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first such terrorist act in the name of Christ in my lifetime at least in the West. 

In the middle of all of this, I have a a renewed sense of being a bystander. I have also written elsewhere about being a bystander, and the responsibility that we share (the Holocaust is one such arena where the place of the bystander is important). I watch Norway and the events there; I find joy when I am taken from Western 'nice' to the untainted praise of exiles. I put these things together and I gain a new perspective on my faith. On one hand we can abuse and insult our spiritual leaders with impunity. On another, a man is killing on behalf of the Head of our Body. One community would give up everything for the church ... everything. Another community light their bonfires and dance around the glowing embers of a church that they claim to love. There is an impossible imbalance in all of this that I struggle with. 

Today, the Body of Christ is different. We cannot be the same as we were before the Norwegian killings. What we have is a treasure in clay jars - jars that we beat with rods in our own hands, or else we stand by and watch others doing the same. Christians must now stand together and remind the world once again that we are a people of love, tolerance, embracing people of all races, whatever their differences to us - and a people of joy and praise, of song and worship - in all circumstances. If we do not, the consequences are on our heads. 

God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. 

The Judgement of Genocides

It is only a few months ago when I sat in a room with Professor Yehuda Bauer and twenty other British clergy as he addressed European scholars by weblink. The topic of his talk was genocide, a subject he is well qualified to discuss. He is the Director of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and probably the single most significant authority on the subject of the Shoah (Holocaust / Heb: 'calamity' ). A tiny frail old man was helped into the tiny room where we were all crammed, but a man far younger than his considerable years emerged as he talked on the subject of genocide. 

He talked of the distinctiveness of the Shoah compared with, as it were, generic genocide, though this is not a matter for this post. What is a matter for this post is that he was quite clear how genocide-immune we seem to have become in Western civilization. Instinct would surely cause any right minded soul to react abruptly and angrily to such a damning claim, but we must not forget that even in my 38 years on this planet we call home Pol Pot ordered the murder of 1.7 million souls in Cambodia, Menghistu his 1.6 million in Ethiopia, Kambanda's near million in Rwanda, Saddam's count in Kurdistan and Iraq, Mullah Omar's in Afghanistan, the million murders orchestrated by Gowon in Biafra, Brezhnev's efforts also in Afghanistan - and those at the hands of the man featured here, Ratko Mladic. I sit here as a man of, hopefully, compassion and love, a crusader against injustice and inhuman crimes - yet I had to look all these genocides up to be able to write them here. Yes, I am only too aware of the Shoah, but that is more to do with it being a topic in my former history classes.

The very knowledge of these calamities, these grotesque mass-murders, is crushing. That they happen unchecked (or so it seems at times) in apparently enlightened, 'information overload' times adds to a growing sense of despondency that I could very quickly acquire at this realisation. Yet today's news gives me a little hope in global justice. It comes hot on the heels of a similar event fairly recently when 'the littlest of the little fishes', John Demjanjuk, was finally reeled in for his part in the  murder of 28,060 Jews in Sobibór during the Shoah. A frail old man, maybe, but a murderer who faced justice. And so we hear about the arrest of Ratko Mladic a 'mere' fifteen years after the Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys in the former Yugoslavia. Another frail old man of failing health has finally been dragged in. In and of itself, this is good, but it is altogether more important for another reason. It is a sure sign that genocide always faces justice in the end. Often it takes many decades, and often its perpetrators have died gentle and private deaths in comfy homes surrounded by loved ones. But judgement always seems to come. 

I am left to ponder why events that, to me, represent the worst of humanity's criminal capability, only become clearly visible in considerable retrospect. Why does it appear to take decades for civilised compassionate and educated societies to find the ability to formally judge these catastrophes. Perhaps the murder of millions of people we do not know is too big or distant to fully comprehend - unlike the murder of individuals in our own country where we can sense national outrage. There is a clear difference between how we react and yet that seems quite wrong. Perhaps such behaviour mitigates (though never full excuses) the apparent blindness so many of the 'bystanders' during the genocides that were unfolding in their midsts over ages.