Loving One Another

May 2, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

I have written four books about the Holocaust and edited more than a dozen by some of the best Holocaust scholars of the last fifty years. The one thing I can tell you is that when I am writing about the Holocaust or editing  books on the Holocaust, you do not want to know me. You do not want to approach me or to be with me. I am a different person then. I am consumed by it. I hate writing about it. I hate thinking about it. And I hate being with people who are not thinking about and not talking about it.

The Holocaust is the single most important human event of the last century. Jews may rank the birth of the State of Israel as the most Jewish event, but the Holocaust stands apart from everything else -- it is more essential to understand than the Second World War, the Cold War, and the atomic bomb. Its full meaning of the Holocaust is still unfolding.

It is still difficult to get a grip on how the best of Western civilization could give birth to the most savage human event, how the apex of all we achieved through the millenniums could suddenly become a live volcano of venomous vituperation and massive cruelty. And it is not over. There are reverberations of the Holocaust all around us. Slavery and repression, excision and incarceration, outright murder and deliberate starvation are all being practiced in countries around the world.

I could speak of Rwanda and Darfur, of Bosnia and Iraq, about places that are distant and far away, but I choose Detroit. It is no accident that we refer to the black section of Detroit as a "ghetto." The odds of living through your teenage years if you are a black in the City of Detroit are not high.

To quote statistics: More than 800 people were shot in Detroit in the first six months of 2004. Experts and police blame many factors: upheaval, scarce resources in the police department, high unemployment rates among young males, the drug culture, and a hip-hop culture that condones gunfire to solve disputes.

To quote the human side, consider the family of Monya Lyons, an employee of the Detroit Public Schools. Monya was interviewed by The Detroit News. She said, "We have our own war over here, we don't have to go to Iraq. ... Over the years," she said, "I have gone to more funerals than graduations."

Monya should know. Monya's brother was shot in a robbery attempt when he was 16. Monya went on to have three sons. Her oldest, Venoy, was 21 when he was shot and killed by two teenage carjackers. Her middle son, Darnell, was 18 when he was shot in the back as he left his job. Her youngest son, Mitchell, was shot in his right leg by a robber at a gas station in 2004.

Now you might think that what set the Holocaust apart was that it was highly organized and efficient, that it was sponsored by the government of Germany. But I have studied the Holocaust intently and frankly I wonder.

Here is what I think: What made the Holocaust the most important event of recent history is the fact that ordinary people were complicit -- ordinary citizens were complacent, silent, cooperative, and happy to profit from the discomfit and the demise of the Jews. The Nazis were always a small minority even if they had a big voice. Ordinary people were always the majority which chose to feign ignorance even as they watched in silence and played essential roles in bringing the evil into being.

We ordinarily blame the Nazis, but I blame the engineers and mechanics of Germany, Poland, France, Italy, Rumania, and so many other countries, who kept the trains running, knowing that the boxcars were loaded with human beings. I blame the people who designed the mechanisms of death, accepting contracts to build chimneys and ovens in concentration and death camps all over Europe. I blame the people who ran local governments and cooperated with the Nazis when the Nazis themselves were too few in number to force their will upon the population. I blame the soldiers of Germany who obeyed orders to murder civilians. I blame the women and men who attended church on Sunday and went home to loot whatever was left in vacant apartments as Jews were sent to the ghettos. I blame the men and women who stood by as whole towns of Jews disappeared throughout Eastern Europe -- never resisting, never caring, never saying a word except possibly of approval, even though the Germans were their enemies, too. Ordinary people were the majority and they deliberately stood aside, ignoring the dictates of the heart and the demands of the soul.

In Kedoshim, this week's portion, the Torah tells us, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Eternal." Christians live by the same golden rule. So, if we comprehend the complicity of silence and the rapacity of those who profited by the enterprise of the Holocaust, then when we ignore murder and violence in the ghettos of Detroit; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; and Houston -- when we do not raise our voices, when we profit from poverty by deliberately paying low wages to those who live in these ghettos, by spending more and more on police forces to keep them locked down instead of spending more and more on education and projects to promote self-help, when we condone hip-hop music that glorifies gun play and buy X-boxes so that we can play games that make light of the use of guns and glamorize revenge and lethal violence; when we profit those who prey on the weak and defenseless, those who run the drug trades and organize the murder -- my God, we are perpetrating a Holocaust in our own country.

Calling this a Holocaust Memorial Day and building Holocaust Memorial museums -- these salve our conscience and make us feel that the Holocaust is over. But the event of the Holocaust is the Ebola of modern human behavior. We need to speak out against violence and refuse to support those who turn it into sport and profit. We need to teach our children to see what is negative and hurtful before what is negative and hurtful becomes just a way of life for them. We need to speak out against violence and hatred and to support every movement and every individual who can possibly lead us back to the light. We need to love one another -- white and black -- as we love ourselves. We do this because God demands it, but we also do it because it is high time that the Holocaust came to an end. And let us say: Amen.