The Miraculous and The Monstrous
D'var
Torah: Shabbat Shirah
February 6, 2009
I have told the story before of the Hebrew School student, Marc, who comes out of Hebrew School one Sunday morning and is picked up by his grandfather. Marc's grandfather asks him what he learned in Hebrew School that morning. Marc answers "Zeidee, we learned about the Israelites escaping from Egypt. Right after they left Egypt they came up to a big body of water and they saw the Egyptians chasing after them. Well, Moses got the army corp of engineers to build a pontoon bridge so all of the Israelites could go across the water. As soon as the last Israelite made it over, the Egyptians started running over the bridge too. At that point, the army corp got out their TNT and blew up the bridge. Whatever Egyptians were on the bridge fell into the water. The grandfather said to Marc in some astonishment "Is that what you really learned in Hebrew School today?" Marc answers, "not really Zeidee, but if I told you what we really learned, you'd never believe it."
With Marc, there is room for scholarly debate regarding what exactly happened at the Sea. Did the waters really part just as the Torah describes it and Cecil B. Demille shows it (his chariot and ride He cast into the Sea) has the Torah taken some extraordinary liberties in recording this event?
If someone told you that a plane took off from a New York airport and birds flew into the jet engines and the plane had to make an emergency landing but couldn't make it back to the airport and so it landed right in the middle of the Hudson River and the plane landed smoothly and all of the people in the plane got out and stood on the wings. And there were a sufficient number of boats in the immediate area and more emergency boats arrived just in time to take each person, men, women, children and infants aboard so that not one life was lost and all 150 were saved, you might think someone made all of this up. But we know it happened and so maybe we shouldn't dismiss the idea that just about anything can happen.
Regrettably, some people are in the business of denying events that we know full well happened and the world needs to know they happened. One such story has come to light and has been the center of a storm of controversy these past couple of weeks.
The story involves a Roman Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson. Some twenty years ago, he and others in a ultra-conservative Catholic group Society of St. Pius X were excommunicated by Pope John Paul II for their beliefs and their rejection of the decisions of Vatican II. The present Pope Benedict XVI readmitted the members of this group into the church. An event of this nature would not be the business of the Jewish community but this one Bishop has been an avowed and active Holocaust denier. He gave a speech just days before he was readmitted to the church stating that the Holocaust never happened, that no Nazi gas chambers existed and at the most, some few thousand Jews were killed during the Second World War. The Pope's readmission of this Holocaust denier has set off a storm between the Church and leadership of the Jewish community in the United States and Israel. The Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel where it is against the law to deny the atrocities of the Holocaust, issued a rare statement of criticism of the Vatican.
It is rare for the Vatican to be swayed by popular sentiment. The Vatican has come to the point where this Bishop Williamson must recant his Holocaust denying views to be readmitted to the Church. What will it mean however for this man to recant today what he has been preaching for many years? He has also rejected the teachings of Vatican II which distanced the Church from the millennial belief that Jews are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. In his distorted view, the Jews are the eternal perpetrators and never the victims.
Perhaps the story that appeared on the front page of Thursday's New York times might prompt Bishop Williamson to think again. This lead article describes Dr. Aribert Heim who was known as Dr. Death in the concentration camp Mauthausen. He was the object of Nazi hunters for six decades. The monstrous atrocities that he committed are far too gruesome to describe here. I would say that it is unbelievable that one human being can commit such cruelty but we know it did happen. We know it happened but we can not comprehend it. This doctor lived in Germany until 1962 and when he knew authorities were closing in, he fled to Cairo, converted to Islam and took on an Arab name as an alias. Nazi hunters continued searching for him in South America. Just recently, a suitcase of his papers was found in Cairo. By all accounts he died in 1992 but authorities will not rest now until that is absolutely verified.
Just ten days ago, January 27 was the date of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The home page of the Holocaust Memorial Museum web site reads “In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 as an annual international day of commemoration to honor the victims of the Nazi era. This date marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. Every member nation of the U.N. has an obligation to honor the memory of Holocaust victims and develop educational programs as part of the resolve to help prevent future acts of genocide. The U.N. resolution rejects denial of the Holocaust, and condemns discrimination and violence based on religion or ethnicity.” Somehow, Iran never got the message. For some reason the UN did not choose the date of the Jewish observance of the Shoah, the 27th of the month of Nisan, the biblical first month of the year. Instead it chose the 27th of the first month on the Gregorian calendar. Most important is that there is an international remembrance and a rejection of denial.
And so we can continue to discuss and even debate exactly what happened at the Sea when the Israelites escaped from Egyptian Bondage. There is no debate regarding what happened when the children of these Israelites were far worse than enslaved in ghettos and death camps and we are responsible to never stop discussing it. That the most horrible things happen we know and so we are heartened by the knowledge that good and even seemingly miraculous occurrences happen as well. All of the passengers on a doomed flight were saved. Our people escaped from slavery to freedom and so on Shabbat morning, we will all rise during the Torah reading and listen to our Bar Mitzvah read the great Song of Moses, a song of thanksgiving. Because of what happened there at the Sea, Marc can learn this story in Hebrew School today and is free to understand it and report it according to his own interpretation.
Shabbat Shalom
