I don't know what it means to live in an uncivilized world...
I wish I didn’t have to learn this. That there is no end to the evil human beings can perpetrate on innocent victims. I thought I was exempt from experiencing the worst horrors of humanity because I was born after the Shoah1. But the most horrid things have resurfaced again, haunting me daily and throughout the night. Like the stench of vomit rising up from the very depths of a putrid source, so has Hamas emerged to terrorize, maim, murder, and butcher innocent people.
And I can’t write them off as extreme, or crazed. Because people in my own country, the United States, people that identify with being Pro-Palestinian, stand alongside them. With pride. With a ‘you deserved this’ on their faces. I have seen it. Videos of shouting rallies in support of the killings, statements by the student law group at NYU and student groups at Harvard that this was what Israel ‘asked for’. I’ve seen militant groups all over the US shouting '“Death to the Jews” and even posters from the University of Berkeley depicting with joyful faces, Hamas parachutists landing into a crowd of over 250 shocked concertgoers. We know what they did then. They indiscriminately shot and killed anyone in their path. The bodies, hauled away days later in trucks, by Israelis. Like the images we saw from Nazi Germany. Bodies piled up. Babies shot and beheaded. The evil is unspeakable.
But we have to know. We have to look. And we have to speak.
We have to speak in the name of civility. Of moral law. Of the value of conscience. The alternative is to become numb. It does hurt. It is emotional. But we have to halt the barbarism in the name of what is best about being human. Otherwise we lose touch with the most holy part of ourselves.
Pick whatever path you need to. But do not let this evil go by you. Write, call, protest, send money, or all of the above. But do not be a silent witness to the atrocity that permeates our society and our very soul.
We may not have a choice about how we are to live in this new, uncivilized world. But we can decide to set ourselves apart. To bring the holy into the profane. To be able to sanctify our very lives with different choices.
Shoah is a word of biblical origin meaning “total and utter destruction”. I use it instead of the word Holocaust to refer to the murder of millions of Jews during World War II. The word Holocaust technically means “totally burnt offering” which implies that the event was an “offering”, containing overtones of a sacrifice acceptable by God. Additionally, the word Holocaust has been used in other contexts to refer to other events.