Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day, that moment when the nation and indeed the world remembers the atrocities not only of the Holocaust that murdered 6 million Jews as well as Roma and people with disabilities but also the subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan and Darfur. As always the memorial services have been very moving and inspiring. We are now at a stage, 76 years after the liberation of Auschwitz – Birkenau, when many of the survivors of the camps, who for years have courageously told their stories, have died. Now we hear their stories from their children and grandchildren and stories of those saved by the kindertransport which, while saving their lives, separated them from their families whom many of them never saw again.
 
One of the constant themes of Holocaust Memorial Days in ‘never again’. We remember for a reason – to reflect on the degradation that we human beings can sink to and to hope and pray that it will never happen again.  But it is happening again. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia happened after the Holocaust; the atrocities in Sudan and Dafur still continue; the world watches the discrimination and violence perpetrated against the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Uighar Muslims in China; we see refugees and asylum seekers turned away by affluent countries. And I am implicated in all of this because the perpetrators as well as the victims are related to me in this one human family of which we are all members. This connection and realisation are painful.
 
Joanna Macey talks about honouring the pain of the world, the importance of opening our heart to it and not running away from it.  This means lamenting my own sinfulness and that of my brothers and sisters and determining that things should be different. But what can I do to make a difference when so many of these atrocities are politically motivated and organised. Can I make a difference? 
 
The late Lord Jonathan Sacks has a story that he tells in an interview about the Holocaust. He calls it the butterfly story and it goes something like this: there was a holy, wise and distinguished rabbi who could see into the reality of things. On a visit to a certain village two troublemakers thought they could catch him out. One said to the other, see I have a butterfly cupped in my hand: I will ask the Rabbi if he knows what is there and, if he indeed answers that it is a butterfly, I will ask him if it alive or dead: if he says dead, I will open my hands and it will be alive: if he says alive, I will crush the butterfly and it will be seen to be dead. So they approached the Rabbi and asked what was in the fellow’s cupped hands- a butterfly answered the Rabbi. And is it dead or alive? The Rabbi looked them in the eye and said ‘the answer is in your hands’. Life and death – the answer is in our hands. What a good way to illustrate the verse from book of Deuteronomy which says “I call on heaven and earth to witness against you today: I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants might live” (Deut. 30: 19).
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The theme of this year’s Holocaust events says the same thing in another way, ‘Be a Light in the World’ which we will do by always standing up for and promoting life wherever we are. In his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis encourages us: “choose to cultivate kindness. Those who do so become stars shining in the midst of darkness”. Kindness is within the reach of all of us. It “frees us from the cruelty that at times infects human relationships, from the anxiety that prevents us from thinking of others, from the frantic flurry of activity that forgets that others also have a right to be happy……… (it) can create a healthy social atmosphere in which misunderstanding can be overcome and conflict forestalled…….it opens new paths where hostility and conflict would burn all bridges” (FT 224).

The Holocaust and other genocides succeeded because people, our brothers and sisters, were seen as less than human, described as vermin or cockroaches, classified as ‘them’ and not ‘us’. It’s not a long way from this kind of thinking to active discrimination and hate speech which we know from experience can lead to violence and even extermination. Kindness can rescue us from this path. It may seem insignificant but it has ripples and consequences that can lead our human family towards life, hope, peace and reconciliation. 

​The future too is in our hands.

This has been a busy interfaith week but one of the most interesting events was a lecture from Professor Amy-Jill Levine who is Jewish but also a scholar of the New Testament. As a Jew she is fascinated by Jesus who is perhaps the most famous Jew of all times and who has led millions of people to a knowledge and worship of the God of Israel. What Professor Levine wants to do is to set Jesus within his Jewish context which can be refreshing but also disturbing. It challenges ways of reading the New Testament that can be anti-Jewish.

For centuries Christians have believed that Jesus was unique, that he challenged the prevailing culture of his time and had a revolutionary approach to life. He was the one who liberated people from the dictates of the law to initiate a new freedom in the Spirit, he was the one who revealed a God of love compared to a God of wrath found in the Old Testament. But seen from a Jewish perspective Jesus’ uniqueness was not so much in challenging the mores of his time but in his teaching. Jesus evolved as we all have done from the dust of the earth and lived as a Jew in a particular context of time and place. The place where he lived, Galilee, was not a backwater. It was cosmopolitan, situated on the silk road route, people living there would have encountered other cultures and beliefs and it is possible that Jesus spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

A popular notion in Christianity is that Jesus had an intimate, filial relationship with God and called God Abba unlike the Old Testament God that was distant and transcendent.  But the God of Jesus is the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  It is the Christian heresy of Marcionism to reject the Old Testament and to say there is a distinction between the God of the Old Testament and New is doing just that suggests Professor Levine. There are wonderful passages in the Old Testament that speak of God as Father and God’s intimate love for human beings. One of my favourites is from the Book of Wisdom “Yes, You love all that exists, you hold nothing of what you have made in abhorrence, for had you hated anything you would not have formed it. And how, had you not willed it, could a thing persist, how be conserved if not called for the by you” (Wis. 11:24-26). The God of the Old Testament is the God of Jesus and where else would Jesus have learned and developed his relationship with God if not within the Judaism of his time.

Recently christian feminist scholars, in their efforts to find a place for women in a patriarchal institution, have depicted Jesus’ relationship with women as unique and contravening the mores of his day. Jesus did have a relationship with women, they were among his followers, he taught them and they cared for him. A favourite story used to illustrate how radical Jesus was in his relationship with women is that of the Samaritan Woman. It goes like this: Jews and Samaritans were enemies; Jesus is crossing Samaria and asks a woman from Samaria for a drink – something no Jew or man would do in public; has a conversation with the women which shows he is the Messiah; the woman (who is declared to have five husbands) brings her townspeople to Jesus. Professor Levine gave us another take on the story. The woman comes to the well of Jacob at mid-day, not because she is an outcast but because she’s likely to have needed water. In the previous chapter of John there’s the story of Nicodemus who comes to Jesus by night. In contrast the Samaritan woman comes in the full light of day at the same time as Rebecca came to the well and was recognised as a fitting wife for Isaac, reflecting as so many of the stories about Jesus do a story in the Old Testament. She could not have been an outcast but must have been respected by her townspeople or they would not have accepted her message and come to Jesus to see and hear for themselves. Nor need she have been a prostitute or shamed woman because she had five husbands. We do not know her circumstances. Did she have a levirate marriage whereby she married the brother of her dead husband?  Was she widowed?

Professor Levine’s work shows a deep love and respect for Jesus. He is, she says, the first person to be called Rabbi in literature, his parables are outstanding teaching aids for adults that “are the best stories ever”. However, she also feels that if we christians get Jesus’ context wrong we get him wrong. To make Jesus out to be different from his time or a rebel against his culture and religion is inaccurate and a ruse to underline the uniqueness of Jesus. It can lead to a denigration of the Judaism of his time and a rejection of the Judaism of our time which can have terrible consequences, the worst of which we remember at the end of the month on Holocaust Memorial Day.
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