Yom HaShoah: Consider

You who live secureIn your warm housesWho return at evening to findHot food and friendly faces: 

Consider whether this is a man,Who labours in the mudWho knows no peaceWho fights for a crust of breadWho dies at a yes or a no.Consider whether this is a woman,Without hair or nameWith no more strength to rememberEyes empty and womb coldAs a frog in winter. 

Consider that this has been:I commend these words to you.Engrave them on your heartsWhen you are in your house, when you walk on your way,When you go to bed, when you rise.Repeat them to your children.Or may your house crumble,Disease render you powerless,Your offspring avert their faces from you.--Shema, Primo Levi

Tonight begins Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, or "The Day of Catastrophe"). It is a day filled with meaning for Jews. For some, it is a painful reminder of what it means to be a people always chosen (as if the most recent antisemitism on American campuses and in Europe don't accentuate that idea). For too many, it is their primary mode of Jewish identification. For non-Jews as well, as if they are more comfortable with us as victims rather than active, joyful, principled partners in God's efforts of creation. And for some, it has become an excuse to be dismissive of identity, or a cudgel wielded to stifle dissent, or at least feared as such.

Nevertheless, it is there. It is present in the life of the modern Jew, even one removed by three generations from the Holocaust. It is present, and it demands something of us, not only as a community, but as individuals as well.

Tonight, the Hebrew School students will gather in our Holocaust garden at 5pm to light candles and say prayers and reflect. Tomorrow, our community (Jewish and non-Jewish) will gather at the Carvel State building in downtown Wilmington to learn and share and remember. All are welcome to both. And, as you sit in your homes, secure and warm, consider that this has been. Consider what these men and women, and their memories, demand of us.