Yom HaShoah and the solidarity of our souls

Next to my baptism and wedding vows, the most moving two minutes of my life came years ago when I stood next to a bus alongside a highway. I was leading a study tour in Israel, making our way toward Ben Gurion Airport for our flight home.

Suddenly, sirens sounded. My first thought was that the nation was under attack. But it was not, at least not in the sense I feared.

The date was April 14, otherwise known as Yom HaShoah, the day each year when Israelis remember the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. Across the country, everything stops. Vehicles on the road pull over, as ours did, and their occupants stand outside. Jobs, schools, and all other activities cease. For two minutes, the entire nation pauses in remembrance of those who perished in the worst atrocity in Jewish history.

I can think of nothing analogous to this in American experience. Even with regard to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, we do not all stop on a single day at a single moment to remember those who perished.

Nothing else happens with Yom HaShoah except what I have described. No actions are taken; no laws are passed; nothing substantive occurs in these moments to deter future holocausts. Many Israelis are highly secular and do not even pray during these two minutes.

Why, then, was remembering people who have been dead for more than eighty years so moving for me? Why did the Israelis on our bus have tears in their eyes? Why does an entire nation stop like this every year, without fail?

And why, after Yom HaShoah is over for another year, am I still remembering it as if it were yesterday?

As if their loved ones had perished

In The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, historian Susan Wise Bauer brilliantly illustrates one way the past shapes the present and predicts the future. We remember pandemics of earlier times so as to prevent them from recurring and to prepare if they do. The collective history of human sickness is a primer on avoiding and coping with sickness today.

In this sense, remembering Holocaust victims is an exercise in present-tense self-preservation, a way for Jewish people to call to mind the historic reality of antisemitism and find renewed stimulus to combat it.

But I sensed that there was something more in the hearts of the Israelis as they stopped that day. They genuinely felt themselves to be in solidarity with those who were murdered and those who grieve those who died. It was as if their own loved ones had perished, and they were pausing to internalize such suffering and make it their own.

For many of them, this is true. Given the fact that the Holocaust killed approximately one-third of the global Jewish population at the time, a large percentage of Jews today had ancestors who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

But there was even more going on as the sirens sounded. A sense of collective grief, resolve, and pride in their people and nation was tangible.

The historic and global solidarity of the Jews as a people, on clear display that day, goes a long way toward explaining their survival and flourishing across four millennia.

“All the families of the earth shall be blessed”

No race has been so persecuted as the Jews, from slavery in Egypt to crematoriums at Auschwitz to October 7 and the antisemitic reaction it illogically spurred. And yet no race has contributed so much to humanity.

For example, while the Jews comprise only 0.2 percent of the global population, they have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes.

God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants continues to be kept every day: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). We are not required to agree with everything the leaders of modern-day Israel do, but we can marvel at the perseverance and contributions of their people.

Such solidarity starts early. A Jewish father is his children’s first rabbi; the home is their first synagogue. The Shabbat (the Sabbath) and other Jewish rules and traditions permeate every day and area of their lives, not just their religious activities. And their shared connection with Jews of all nations and languages who keep the same rules and follow the same traditions infuses them with a sense of community that transcends their present challenges, no matter how difficult.

Such solidarity is one of the many lessons I treasure from more than thirty pilgrimages to the Holy Land over these many years. And one I encourage you to embrace with me today.

Taking a coal from the fire

In contrast with the communal worldview of historic Judaism, the individualism and existentialism of the West permeates our culture and thinking. America was founded on the principle of individual liberty; even the colonies that united to win independence from England struggled to stay united as a collective nation.

Here is where Christianity can bring unity amid diversity, transcending our divisions and transforming our future.

Regarding the individual: As Jesus stated, we must each be “born again” (John 3:7). No one can trust in Christ for us. Faith cannot be transmitted genetically or handed down generationally. We will each stand individually before Jesus one day (2 Corinthians 5:10). We each experience a personal relationship with God that is uniquely ours.

Regarding the collective: We are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God’s] own possession” (1 Peter 2:9). We are members of a collective body (1 Corinthians 12:27), branches of a single vine (John 15:1–8), children of a single Father (John 1:12) who will spend eternity as part of a “great multitude” in the presence of the Almighty (Revelation 7:9).

Here’s the problem: American evangelicalism is typically weighted far more toward the former than the latter. We emphasize the urgency of personal salvation (as we should) so fully that we do less to engage saved souls in the larger family and story of faith.

But if you take a coal from the fire, it goes out. If you sever a branch from the vine, the branch dies.

“So that the world may know”

Just as humans were created for community (Genesis 2:18), Christians are intended to do life together. We are instructed to pray for each other (James 5:16), to forgive each other (Colossians 3:13), to “serve one another” (1 Peter 4:10), and to “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2).

To these ends:

• For whom are you praying today? Who is praying for you?
• Whom are you forgiving today? Who is forgiving you?
• Whom are you serving today? Who is serving you?
• Whose burdens are you bearing today? Who is bearing yours?

Yom HaShoah is a powerful reminder to pray daily for the “peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:6) in these war-torn days. It is a powerful encouragement to love the Jewish people as God does and to pray and work for them to know their Messiah as their Lord.

And it is an invitation to imitate their solidarity by modeling Christian unity for a divided and divisive culture.

Dwight Moody observed, “I have never yet known the Spirit of God to work where the Lord’s people were divided.” Conversely, Jesus prayed that his followers “may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:23).

I believe Jesus is praying for our unity even now (Romans 8:34; Hebrews 7:25).

How will you answer his prayer today?

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Denison Ministries is a non-partisan, non-profit ministry. Accordingly, I would write the same article today if the subject were any political leader or individual.

In fact, that’s my point, as I’ll explain in a moment.

As you probably know by now, President Trump posted an image Sunday evening on Truth Social depicting himself in a white robe with a bronze cape draped over his shoulders. An American flag stands on the left and the Statue of Liberty on the right, with soldiers and military jets overhead. A brilliant light glows in his left hand. Light also emanates from his right hand, which is placed on the forehead of a patient lying on a bed.

Many across the political spectrum protested the image as sacrilegious. One writer called the post “blasphemous” and “reprehensible.” Conservative pundit Carmine Sabia stated, “As a Christian, I’m offended by this, and I don’t know how any Christian would not be offended by this. There is only one Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Mocking him is not OK.”

The post was subsequently deleted.

Continue reading Denison Forum – “Blasphemous” social media image of Donald Trump deleted →

When the crew of Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific Ocean last Friday evening, they had traveled further into space than any humans in history. As the editors of the Free Press said of their return, “It felt magical. It felt like a miracle. But it was neither.” They explained: “The ten-day Artemis II mission was a feat of disciplined human excellence, an expression of the sheer might of the human mind and spirit.”

Yes, and no.

The science it takes to lift a rocket weighing 5.75 million pounds off the ground staggers me. I don’t know how typing on my keyboard produces these words, much less how you get into space something that weighs more than thirty-six houses stacked on top of each other. Keeping four people alive in space for ten days in a space the size of a couple of minivans is mind-boggling as well.

Then there’s the return. The heat generated by the capsule as it flew through our atmosphere climbed to some five thousand degrees, half as hot as the visible surface of the sun. The crew’s lives depended on the heat shield that kept them from burning up, and then on the parachutes that kept them from plunging into the ocean at 325 mph.

But here’s something I didn’t know: after the space capsule separated from the rockets following the April 1 launch, gravity from the moon and then the earth was the primary “propellant” carrying it around the moon and back to earth.

As an astronaut on Apollo 8 said when asked who was driving the spaceship, “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.”

So, a mission costing $4.1 billion and composed of more than twenty thousand parts humans can see depended on a force we cannot.

Here’s why this fact is so relevant to our faith today.

Is gravity caused by “insubstantial pixies”?

The law of gravity is not actually a law in the sense of a proven fact. Scientists demonstrate its existence by seeing gravity at work—objects fall, planets orbit, and so on. They can also measure the attraction between objects. The Theory of Gravity is the best explanation for these observations.

But scientific theories, by nature, are not “proven” in the way math is, as they are always subject to refinement by new evidence. And as Forbes notes, “There is no way to absolutely rule out the idea that gravity is caused by invisible, insubstantial pixies that have an obsession with everything having to be as close together as possible.”

In facing such a possibility, scientists rely on what is known as “Occam’s Razor,” a principle suggesting that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should choose the simpler one. In the case of gravity, if we can explain the phenomena without resorting to pixies, we should do so.

Here’s my point: what works for scientific endeavors works for spiritual truth as well.

“I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist”

Consider Jesus’s resurrection. A skeptic could claim that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but they would then have to explain the plethora of non-biblical contemporary evidence showing that he did. They could claim that he didn’t really die on the cross, but then he would have to survive crucifixion, a spear that pierced the pericardial sac of his heart, and being mummified in an airtight shroud. He would then have to shove aside the burial stone in his emaciated condition, overpower the battle-hardened Roman guards, appear through locked doors to his disciples, and perform the greatest high jump in history at the Ascension.

Perhaps the disciples stole his body. But they had no reason to do so and did not even expect the resurrection, nor would they keep the secret without failure and then die in horrible ways for what—in this scenario—they knew to be a lie.

If the disciples went to the wrong tomb, its owner or the authorities would have pointed out the right tomb. If the Romans stole the corpse, they would then have produced it.

A skeptic might claim that the resurrection was a hallucination, but five hundred people don’t have the same hallucination (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:6). And there’s the matter of the changed lives of the disciples, who went from hiding behind locked doors to boldly preaching the gospel and sacrificing their lives to share the message of the risen Christ with the world.

As a former skeptic once said upon examining the evidence, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”

Of course, you can decide that miracles simply do not occur and that the resurrection thus could not have happened. But this is just as much a faith assertion as claiming that miracles do in fact happen. Neither can be proven scientifically or mathematically.

In fact, faith in the risen Christ is a relationship, and no relationship can be proven, only experienced. In this sense, trusting in the living Lord Jesus is like trusting in gravity—we know he is real because we experience what he does in and through our lives.

The paradox is that the more we try to prove him rather than experience him, the less we do either.

Zo s, yu[omh yjr eptfd

I say all of that to say this: The next time you wonder if Jesus is relevant to your problems and issues, remember a time in the past when he did what you hope he will do in the present. The Artemis II crew could stake their lives on gravity because countless people across human history have successfully done the same. You can stake your life on the risen Lord Jesus because countless Christians across Christian history have done the same.

Having sincere faith is not enough—it’s having faith in the right object that makes the difference.

If you place your fingers in the wrong position on your computer keyboard, you are sincerely attempting to type, but the result is gibberish. Here is an example: as I set my fingers one place to the right of “home” and type the words, “I am typing the words,” I produce “zo s, yu[omh yjr eptfd.”

Every time I trust someone or something to do what only Jesus can do, I produce spiritual gibberish as well.

In John 6, Jesus tells the crowds, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has set his seal” (v. 27). He changes metaphors in John 8, declaring, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (v. 12).

Jesus is the only “food that endures” and the only “light of the world.” Everything else I trust perishes in darkness.

The great poet, scientist, and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed,

“The glory of life comes not from the things we can command but from the things that we can reverence.”

Whom or what will you “reverence” most today?

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