9/10/13

Just days ago I observed Rosh Hashanah, having learned about a few of its lesser-known origins from a new rabbi friend. That makes me unable to shrug my shoulders and hold my palms up in a "waddya gonna do?" attitude as many of my fellow Americans are doing in following the lead of Sarah Palin where Syria is concerned: "Let Allah figure it out." Palin -- a never-ending source of blatant offense and ignorance.

 

Since the earliest days of my close association with the late humanist rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, I have been attentive to the sensibilities, hopes and aspirations of the Jewish community and have not infrequently attended Shabbat services. I was first drawn to the tradition by my study of Hebrew language and literature long ago in my graduate school days. That study has greatly enriched my life and work.

 

It helped me during my years of covering religion for a daily newspaper in Detroit. Being that southeastern Michigan had then and has now a significant Jewish population, I was careful to cultivate contacts among its leaders and tried my best to report from it for the edification of the paper's general readership.

 

Despite my best efforts to stay on the ball, I somehow missed one of the region's first public observations of Yom Hashoah -- the Day of Remembrance -- upon which Jews worldwide call upon the whole of humanity never to forget the Holocaust and its victims. I should have been more alert, having written a thesis on the Hebrew word zakhar, to remember.

 

That lapse in the paper's coverage was called to my attention by a telephone call from a soft-spoken, obviously cultured man named John Mames, a Southfield dentist. Dr. Mames wondered if I understood about Yom Hashoah and its significance. I said that I did but had been unaware its recent local observance.

 

Our conversation ended with an invitation to his home to meet "a few friends," as he put it. He said they could tell me "a bit about the Holocaust." I accepted the invitation, of course, but thought that, having put out a special edition of a church newspaper several years before on that very subject, I knew a great deal about it.

 

I found my way to the Mames' elegant home one late spring evening, was ushered in as if I were royalty and found myself among several couples of a certain age. They welcomed me in genuine cordiality, some offering compliments on my reporting and writing for the paper.

 

Dr. Mames had us sit in a circle, then one by one had his guests approach me. As they did, each spoke his or her name, then pushed up a sleeve so that I could see the numbers tattooed on their arms -- quite clearly part of a concentration camp identification system, that, as it turned out, of Auschwitz.

 

Again, one by one, they shared some of their stories -- of their treatment by the Nazi regime before and during their internment, of their personal face-to-face contact with the beastly Mengele, of the tearful farewells to loved ones they would never see again, the screams of horror, of the nauseating smoke from the ovens, of the loss of friends to the gas and their own eventual redemption by American soldiers just short of what they surely thought would soon be their own demise.

 

I had read all about Auschwitz and about the cruelly ironic Arbeit mach frei. I knew about the super-toxic pesticide known as zyklon B and its use by the Nazis to achieve their final solution. Yet, that evening at the Mames' home had a bone-deep galvanizing effect upon my mind and heart as indelible in its own way as the numbers on those people's forearms.

 

I saw then in an unforgettable way what I had known in an academic way about the willing executioners of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, B�chenwald and Sobibor. Under the dread command of Adolf Hitler and his gangsters, they crossed a very brilliant red line in their arrests, depredations, forced labor, imprisonment, torture, and gassing -- GASSING! -- to death of six million or more Jews.

 

Most unfortunately during the same decade, the United States of America crossed a red line in using weapons of mass destruction on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now Assad's Syria has crossed the red line in killing thousands of his own people with Sarin gas. So says President Obama. And why would such a man lie about a thing like that, given the enormous stakes involved?  

 

Now comes the proposition encouraged by Russia that Assad could avoid direct punishment for the gassing of innocent women and children by ceding his entire store of chemical weapons to the international community. Completely certified beyond a doubt, that would certainly benefit all sides, and to hear the diplomats talk, avoid immediate U.S. retaliation.

 

I wish I could gather together again those beautiful Jewish men and women who bared their arms to me in the Mames' living room all those years ago. I would ask them if the country that took them in and made citizens of them after the horror of Auschwitz should refrain from attacking Syria if Assad gives up his weapons of mass destruction.  

Would they remember the gas at Auschwitz and say, no doubt with great sadness, that, regardless, Assad must pay the price for his inhumanity to man? If they were so to say, it would be hard to argue the point with them. They barely escaped the gas themselves as friends and family were killed by it.