From 1957 through 1978, my dad, Dr. A. Jase Jones (who passed away at 93 in 2007), served as an area missionary director in the Dept. of Interfaith Witness of the SBC’s Home Mission Board and was a leader in Jewish-Baptist dialogues. This article reflects his deep affection and admiration for the Jewish people; and his unwavering commitment to justice on their behalf. It’s relevant, in 2019, to the continuing struggle over anti-Semitic language, symbols, and actions; as well as those touching all forms of bigotry.
– Bill Jones
Yom Hashoah
These are the Hebrew words for Holocaust Day, an annual remembrance by the Jewish community of six million Jews who perished in Hitler’s death camps. They call up other words from humanity’s memories: Europe, 1933-1945; Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Eichmann, Mengele, Heydrich; Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Babi-Yar, Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Lidice. Words that throb with wails and drip with tears. Words that stir thoughts of emaciated bodies, of hollow, deep-set eyes staring through barbed wire, of cattle cars crammed full of hopeless people, of deep ditches filled with bodies, yellow stars, and small children holding on the hands of parents powerless to shield them from approaching death. Behind these words and making them reality was the Nazi goal, “the final solution to the Jewish problem,” or, less euphemistically, “kill all Jews.”
The Jewish people have experienced many “holocausts” throughout their long history. Today, in their homes, they know that another Holocaust could erupt suddenly, like a long-dormant volcano. So, each year they stop on Holocaust Day (on April 18 in 1985) to remember their family members and friends who perished in Europe’s death camps, to remind themselves that they are never to be free of the threat of a repeat of that madness, and to strengthen their resolve to do all in their power to prevent such a recurrence.
The ingredients of another Holocaust exist today. Anti-Semitism, or, more precisely, anti-Jewishness, finds constant expression in the Americas and Europe today. One has only to watch and read the news reports to find examples. On April 6, 1984, a newspaper article told of vandals in the Bronx, New York, who drew swastikas and painted slogans, such as, “Kill all the Jews before Passover,” on fifty-one apartment doors, on the door-frames of which were mezuzahs (Jewish objects containing words of Scripture, as enjoined in Deut. 6:9). Neo-Nazis spouted anti-Jewish hatred as they tried to march through the streets of predominantly-Jewish Skokie, Illinois. The Nazi headquarters building in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s sported huge black swastikas painted against a blood-red background. A large white van at the side bore several slogans. One of them read, “Communism is Jewish!” and another, “Gas van. Capacity: 70 Jews.”
Both the potential victimizers and victims of another Holocaust exist today. People of the Nazis’ ilk are all around us, and, given the proper mental, emotional, economic, social, and political ingredients, they would spring up like Johnson grass in a wet Texas spring. Hatred, bigotry, prejudice, cruelty, and brutality lie just under humanity’s skin. Their victims are also ready at hand. Instead of focusing attention on the death-camp victims of the Hitler era, whose forms, with the passage of time, become shadowy, wraith-like, unreal, today’s people should people a potential Holocaust scene with the faces of their live Jewish acquaintances and friends, young and old, and say to themselves, “In another Holocaust, people like my friends – warm, loving, caring, patriotic, civic-minded – would be ruthlessly, brutally, and without warning jerked out of their homes, offices, places of business, work areas, and schools, and carried away. It would be their faces looking through the barbed wire of some death camp, and smoke from their burning bodies filling the air.”
Christians cannot, in good conscience, leave their Jewish friends to stand alone in the struggle to prevent a repetition of the Holocaust. There are several reasons. First, the Holocaust was an evil thing, and Christians follow a righteous Lord who came to overthrow evil and establish righteousness. Engaging in this struggle is an expression of loving neighbor as self, of being the Good Samaritan instead of the callous passerby. Second, in Europe and the Americas, Christians form the majority and bear the responsibility for what transpires in their world. In Christian thinking, the strong bear responsibility for the weak, the many for the few.
Christians need to realize that they are often a part of the problem. Now, it is altogether unlikely that a genuine Christian is going to paint swastikas or anti-Jewish slogans on walls or sidewalks. On the other hand, it is altogether likely that most Christians would deny the presence of any anti-Jewishness in their make-up. Yet, Christians today, and good Christians, often totally unaware of the significance and possible consequences, think thoughts, countenance attitudes, and express themselves (even in their Christian literature) in ways that stoke the fires that power a future Holocaust’s engines. They do this by perpetuating derogatory and untrue misconceptions of Jewish people, such as, all Jews are rich, Jews are arrogant, pushy, clannish, stingy (“Isn’t that just like a Jew?”; but one never hears it said of a stingy non-Jew, “Isn’t that just like a non-Jew?” or words of praise for generous Jewish people by that person). They use the phrase, “Jewing them down.” (Why does one not hear, “Yankeeing them down”? Of course, shrewd bargaining in a Yankee brother becomes something virtuous.) Christians laugh at jokes that poke fun at Jews. They repeat such canards as, “The Jews killed Jesus,” and “The Jews rejected Jesus,” not acknowledging in the first instance that it was mankind’s sin, including their own, that put Jesus to death, and forgetting in the second instance that the twelve apostles were Jewish, that all of the New Testament writers, save one, were Jewish, and that the greater part of the earliest Christian community were Jewish. And, in poking fun at Jewish people, they overlook the fact that their own Savior was an observant Jewish man, and that one cannot fully understand Jesus and what he taught until he is interpreted against the background of his Jewishness and his Judaism.
Holocaust Day is a time for all who love freedom and justice to dedicate self and substance to creating a realization of the presence and danger of anti-Jewishness and the part it plays in generating Holocausts. Communities throughout the land can follow the lead of Dallas and Denver and Washington, D.C., in establishing centers and museums that memorialize the tragedy of Holocaust. Let Christians be sensitive to the presence in themselves of those attitudes, thoughts, words, and deeds which express and perpetuate anti-Jewishness, and purge themselves of such things. Let them understand the significance of the struggle of modern Israel to survive the efforts of a hundred million of their neighbors to destroy the state and to drive its citizens into the sea. Let Christians stand with their Jewish friends on Holocaust Day, either in a synagogue service or in their own church Holocaust memorial service to which they invite Jewish friends, and, by so doing say, “We are beginning to understand. We sorrow with you in your remembrance of those who perished. We join in the struggle against the persecution which has so often afflicted you. Show us where we have failed; show us how we can help.”
Let us close with a little “what if” exercise. What if the Holocaust had not happened? What if six million Jews had not been killed? Six million from a people who gave us Moses, Jesus, Paul; Freud, Einstein, Salk, and Sabin; Brandeis, Cardozo, and Frankfurter; Menuhin, Heifetz, Stern, and Perlman. Of the first five of these, it can be said that they changed the course of human history. Think of how poor our world would be if they, and thousands of other gifted Jewish people, had not lived. Then, post-Holocaust, think of how much richer our world would now be if the Einsteins and Salks and Menuhins among that six million had been allowed to live and contribute their gifts to the world.
Holocaust Day! Remembrance, yes. Resolve, also, that the world will never again suffer such a tragic loss.