science of being in twenty seven lessons

Lesson 2: The Danger of State-Sanctioned Incitement to Hatred and Genocide - The Responsibility to Prevent And so the abiding imperative - that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other’s destiny. As our sages tell us: “whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.” Just as whoever has killed a single person, it is as if they have killed an entire universe. For as we remember the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah - defamed, demonized and dehumanized, as prologue or justification for genocide - we have to understand that the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews is not a matter of abstract statistics.įor unto each person there is a name - unto each person, there is an identity. The first lesson is the importance of Zachor, of the duty of remembrance itself. Lesson 1: The Importance of Holocaust Remembrance – The Responsibility of Memory For the Holocaust was uniquely evil in its genocidal singularity, where biology was inescapably destiny, a war against the Jews in which, as Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel put it, “not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”īut while the Holocaust was “uniquely unique” as Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer put it, there are important universal lessons to be acted upon. Words may ease the pain, but they may also dwarf the tragedy.

Whenever I write on the Holocaust – the Shoah – I do so with a certain degree of humility, and not without a deep sense of pain.įor I am reminded of what my parents taught me while still a young boy - the profundity and pain of which I realized only years later - that there are things in Jewish history that are too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened that Oswiencim, Majdanek, Dachau, Treblinka - these are beyond vocabulary.

Science of being in twenty seven lessons