The Value of a Life

Few events in the history define the history of an entire people the way World War II and the Holocaust define modernity and the Jewish people.  Today our group visited Yad Vashem, the memorial that the Israeli people have created to remember what happened.  Today the group visited the memorial to genocide, to an attempt to annihilate an entire race of people.  Today the group visited one of the defining moments in the history of the Jewish people.

One thing that stood out, among so many things at this memorial, is the deep sense of betrayal that is indelibly fixed in the minds of Jews.  As if the program of humiliation and extermination carried out by Nazi Germany wasn't bad enough, there was nowhere to which the Jews at the time could flee.  What happens when the whole world turns a blind eye to atrocious evil?  What happens when the whole world sits down and refuses to help those who cannot help themselves?  What happens when you and I sit down and allow people to continue to perpetrate evil?

But, one might ask, what can one person do?  Indeed, among seven billion people in the world I am but one person.  Well, in the case of Hitler, he galvanized a nation into exterminating twelve million people in the name of the false promise of a better future.  Nelson Mandela galvanized his people and the world into ending apartheid, and the future was better because of it.  John Paul II helped to galvanize people both inside and outside of the USSR to end the oppressive regime, and the future was better because of it.  An unknown priest at a parish you and I have never heard of lived an authentically priestly life, and his people were better because of him.  An unnamed father, an unnamed mother, sacrificed and loved and cared for their children, and their children were better because of it.