If evil in the universe was a given, how to fight against it? How to live a life filled with joy while holding this awareness?
When I was in high school, a friend of mine invited me and a few others to her home in the next town over. Her grandfather was there, and he showed us his tattoo from the camp he had survived (I believe it was Auschwitz but can’t be sure). He told us to ask anything we wanted to know. While some of my friends were bravely asking questions, I was shy and felt uncomfortable bringing him back to that time period. But he emphasized how important it was for him to share his stories so that this would never happen again. Never again.
I converted to Judaism in 1991 and while I spent time learning about observing Jewish holidays, trying Jewish recipes for passover, learning the order of Shabbat services and how to use the transliterations in our prayer book, I also read a great deal about the Holocaust.
I remember many of us gathering for Torah study a Saturday shortly after 9/11 trying to understand how something so evil could happen to people who were innocently going about their day. Our Rabbi said “Evil has always existed and it always will.”
I know he said more after that, but that one phrase stuck with me. If evil in the universe was a given, how to fight against it? How to live a life filled with joy while holding this awareness?
I cannot say for certain how to do so, but I can say fighting against evil against others and living with joy are both critical to the human experience.
For the past two years, I have read and watched countless stories about the Holocaust. All are first person accounts and every single one of those books and movies touches in some way on the same thing: How neighbors remained silent as Jews were rounded up or murdered, and also how there were heroes; people who acted despite the very real fear of losing their own lives. This studying is not fun reading, but doing my best to understand how such things happened is a way of honoring the many who cannot share their stories today. Those who cannot say, “Never again.”
I always ask myself what I would have done in many of these scenarios from the perspective of the persecuted or witnessing the horrible things being done to people I bought my bread from, who cared for me when sick, whose children played with my children. I like to believe I would have been brave like Norwegian Gunnar Sonsteby in the movie Number 24 or a photographer determined to document history despite the personal cost like Lee Miller, but the truth is, it’s impossible to know.
I hope I would have stood on the right side of history.
Today our country’s democracy is being torn apart according to Hitler’s playbook. This is not a drill. Consider the way our allies are viewing us today. Canada, Mexico and the European Union. Consider the way our administration is talking about Russia, rebuilding Gaza and buying Greenland (which is not for sale).
None of us can afford to remain silent in the midst of the events affecting us domestically and world-wide. Our friends and neighbors are being fired left and right, and the country’s infrastructure is being dismantled with an eye towards governing by AI. We might not have concentration camps (yet), but the push to create a fearful and vulnerable population is full steam ahead.
How do we fight evil? We firmly push back when friends make racist or sexist statements, have incorrect information or have minimal understanding of the danger we will face when our system of government halts and affects all of us. We do not remain silent. We do so not with the expectation of changing minds, but for ourselves, for the vulnerable in our society. We do so because it is the right thing to do.
We cannot afford to remain silent.
