Every day is Holocaust remembrance day.
We live in an indelibly post-Auschwitz world. There is no going back.
Auschwitz proved the depths to which man may sink if he rejects the image of God in his fellow man.
Revealed the abyss that gapes under the vaulted ceilings of modern civilizational achievement.
Demonstrated that the raucous call of blood and soil will easily drown out the thin still voice of the human soul.
Auschwitz showed us all these things and more, our worst reflection in a black mirror of entirely human horror.
Those who truly understand what Auschwitz was, can never forget what Auschwitz means. The warning its memory carries is real, tangible, and as inescapable as divine fire in our bones. It is a permanent part of our psyche and a nightmare against which we judge our waking world.
But there is more to living in a post-Auschwitz world, each and every day.
We must remember: there were many reasons the Nazis marshalled entire nation-states in their special quest to eradicate the Jewish people specifically, beyond their general quest to eliminate all possible alternatives to their ethnic monoculture. Many reasons for their obsessive hatred of us – political, economic, social, historical. Take your pick, believe them all if you like. But there stands an overarching reason, an underlying principle of the comprehensively anti-Jewish ideology they professed: regardless of where any one of us casts his or her lot, we inevitably stand together for the Difference – the alternate, the strange, the wondrous, the Ineffable – that lies at the heart of a humanity created in the image of its Creator, and that threatens the Nazi worldview, and the broken personality that seeks refuge from its brokenness in that worldview, to its very core.
This is but one of the many lessons we carry with us, post-Auschwitz: the knowledge of what it is that Nazis truly hate, in us and in the world.
This year, with the open popular resurgence of neonazism across the USA and Europe and with its embrasure by many supporters, apparatchiks, and even prominent members of the party led by POTUS, perfunctorily observing an international day of Holocaust “remembrance” feels like a cheap joke, at best (at worst, it proved to actually be an opportunity for publicly spreading anti-Jewish blood libels, as was seen in some locations).
So I invite you to take time on this day – and every day – to remember Auschwitz, remember the depths lurking under our feet as a race, but also to remember, love, promote, and protect the divine image within us all that Nazis work so very hard to destroy.
Be the Difference.