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?

 

Denison Forum