True Ancestor: Remember

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They said it couldn't happen. Some are still saying it never did.

Many claim to have witnessed it, survived it, fought against it. They are heroes to many, but sometimes they are called fools, liars or worse by many others.

Every year, those who perished are commemorated. As the grass blushes over their anoymous graves, their memories are invoked, against a tide of denial and hatred, by the ones who survived, or the ones born to the survivors.

The survivors' stories are ones of super-human determination to simply be human in the way that they were born to be human.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has put it concisely:

Judaism is the world's most sustained protest against empires, because imperialism is the attempt to impose a single truth, culture or faith on a plural world. God, said the rabbis, makes everyone in His image, yet He makes everyone different to teach us to respect difference. And since difference is constitutive of humanity, a world that has no space for difference has no space for humanity.

The act of remembering beyond this lifetime -- of consecrating a terrain of experience on which you may never have stood, but which is mapped in your bones -- is the central project not just of Jews but of any individual who insists that the world can be made whole, or at least better.

If you haven't already, please pause a moment -- soon, today; even now -- in remembrance of all those who have perished at the hands of empires.

Shabbat Shalom.

--T.A.