3/2008

I am honored and pleased to be here at my children’s shul, with several AJWS volunteers who have done service in the developing world here with me.  I accepted the invitation not only because I have family and friends in the community, but because I have great respect for your wonderful rabbi and knew that he would put forward, as he has, multiple theological explanations for the evil of the Holocaust, not expecting me or my fellow panelists to have a clearly developed single explanation for why this and subsequent evils exist in a world ruled by God.  In fact, I think Jews have survived as a people partly because we wrote down all the arguments and disagreements.

It is interesting that although I am exactly the same age as the last speaker I grew up in a different world than he did, knowing intimately and personally about the Holocaust from when he was young.  I am from a strange group that went to school and college before the universe of books and courses about the Shoah had exploded on the scene AND did not know people—either relatives or friends—who had themselves escaped or had a litany of relatives they had lost.  The impact on me came later and was less personal.

Did my family talk at all about was happening? Yes, but I think there was a sense that it was not a discussion for children.  I have a powerful memory from my teens of standing in a room in my grandparents’ home and listening to my mother and her father argue about whether or not I was old enough to “know the truth”.  It became clear that this referred to the truth about Roosevelt, that as great a leader as he might have been in my [and the world’s] view, he had not done enough to save Jews.  This was an early introduction to my subsequently learning all about this and other aspects of the Holocaust although when I asked my mother recently who would have been on which side of this discussion—an important fact that I could not recall—she swore it never happened!

As I became fully invested in learning about all that had happened in this greatest of evils I focused in on two aspects of the Shoah, neither of them the question Shmuel grappled with of how God could let such evil occur in the world.  What I read about and mulled over in great detail were two things: the first, what did the world know and when, how could so many have stood so idly by while lives were being destroyed, and the second, what was the motivation of righteous gentiles, of those too few people who risked everything to save the lives of friends and of strangers.

It is very interesting to note that these two inquiries relate closely to much of my life work first in New York City politics and then at American Jewish World Service.  What is and is not in our newspapers, what are we told about the state of the world, how much we do not know about the evils being perpetrated around us is a critical issue for all of us involved in the functioning of our democracy.  Too much is not covered, too much is covered in a way that makes it different and distant from us, that makes it hard to engage.  That is changing somewhat in this century when, no matter how silent our press chooses to be, we have access to the web and can learn whatever we want to know.  Still, I have been focused in on this issue both when I realized how hard it was for people to learn about their own government and its actions on their behalf, how challenging it is to convince people that there is a genocide in Darfur when it is covered so sporadically in the formal press.

Similarly, it is important to understand what it takes for some people to step forward, to be willing to act, to even risk their lives to save their fellow human beings.  What can we and should we understand about the instinct to intervene; can we find ways to encourage more people to care and take action?

Part of my agenda today is to point out how much relevance this has to our current world situation with several genocides since the Shoah and with the horrors of Darfur very present as that genocide—the first ever to have been identified as a genocide while it was occurring—enters its sixth year.  At some point, I would argue, we have to minimize our efforts to comprehend why these things happen, how God can allow such evil to occur, and ask ourselves how we stay informed and inform others about evil in the world and what we are obligated to do to try to stop the horrors from continuing.  And to the point that I might share any theology with you, it would be just this, that a God who allows evil to occur in the world expects us to be partners in trying to stop the evils and put the world to rights.

So I take those lessons to heart.  We need to learn to seek the truth, confront evil where it exists in our midst.  We need to be as sensitive to attacks on others as on ourselves, precisely because we know what it is like to suffer the indifference and silence of the rest of the world.  We need to test ourselves to step forward, to challenge evil, to each of us do what we can to make a difference in the world.

As we are taught: In a free society, where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty, but all are responsible. [Heschel].  We are not obligated to complete the task but we cannot refuse to participate. [Pirke Avot]

Ruth W. Messinger, President

American Jewish World Service

45 West 36th Street, New York NY 10018

t 212.792.2801   f 212.792.2930  www.ajws.org

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