If I Forget You, Jerusalem

I had been working on this before the murder and violence at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California on Saturday. Like you, I have no answers for the too-many-to-ask questions.
   
Tomorrow is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Hebrew, it's called Yom Hashoah. And for those of the Jewish faith, the remembrance actually begins tonight at sundown.

The date is actually always the 27th day of Nisan on the Jewish calendar and commemorates Poland's Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a gallant but doomed armed resistance to forced deportations to the Nazi concentration camps.  

Looking at headlines and TV reports from across the country and around the world and reflecting on the animus and enmity we direct at one another for being different, I'm not sure we've learned anything from our past except how to ignore it when we so choose.

Growing up, I'd heard whispers by the adults, many who'd served in the wartime military about the death camps, never grasping the enormity of the horror. 

While living in Germany I went to the Bergen-Belsen death camp where, even decades after the horror, the early summer sky never seemed as blue overhead as it did on the Landstrasse leading to Celle and where I never saw an insect of any kind or heard the song of any bird.

Science dictates that surely they were there, in this place where Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, died of typhus, two of the over fifty thousand people who perished in captivity there, along with the millions elsewhere across Eastern Europe, for the crime of being different. 

Intolerance and hatred of the other have a long history with the human race. Some have speculated the first tool fashioned by the earliest man was a weapon to kill his neighbor. I'd suggest the Shoah marked the successful combining of primitive, superstitious, and mindless hatred with the unfeeling, uncaring, and antiseptic precision of the Industrial Revolution. 

In a perverse, and reverse, triumph we had outmachined the machines in dispatching those unlike us with a uniformity and a consistency never before seen in our history on this planet 

That it continues to happen, across our very small planet on a daily basis, in a variety of ways so numerous and subtle we often don't actually feel the hate, should bring each of us to the brink of tears. To have come as far as we have-we, the self-anointed Crown of Creation, and still be able to stoop so low. 

To be so willing to harness the ingenuity and intelligence of millions of years of evolution and education in the service of the most venal and loathsome of all of our emotions is to stand naked before a world whose judgment we have chosen to disregard.

"There on the poplars, we hung our harps; for there, our captors asked us for songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us. He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." 

And Poway may be just the latest in a cycle, I fear, that will never end.

-bill kenny