night

Today I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Now, that is an encounter with human history that is hard to comprehend. It is hard to understand how such a large number of people were able to suspend their inner sense of dignity and respect for other human beings. Was it desperation, fear or just simple depravity?

As I walked through the Museum I remembered and thought about the book "Night" by Elie Wiesel that read a little while back. The sense of despair that he experienced when he encountered the death and abuse of all of his family and people. Recently, I heard an interview with Elie Wiesel in the which he expressed his approach to God in the midst of the unspeakable and unexplainable atrocities experienced and committed by humanity.

The awful events that occurred to Wiesel haunt him. In one of his speeches he said, "No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. And yet, I sense their presence. I always do - and at this moment more than ever." He urges us and reminds us that "Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately." How should we respond to the atrocities which continue all over the world? What does it mean that our lives "no longer belong to us alone"?