Legacy of Light and Darkness

A bright torch greeted weary travelers, your ancestors, when they reached the shores of America.  She was a tall and stately woman with a beacon of light held in her outstretched arms.  It was the light of hope, refuge and all that America stands for- freedom, equality and opportunities to learn and grow.

Lady Liberty.

“In the beginning of God creating the heaven and earth, there was chaos, and darkness….”

So commences the holiest Book we possess, the foundation stone of our religious core.  God took that chaotic mix and made out if it order, where humanity might thrive.

And in our time out of a cauldron of chaos and darkness came survivors of a Holocaust that has traumatized our entire civilization.

The light in the harbor was not only a new beginning but a unique opportunity to teach the world what can happen when chaos and darkness returns its vise-like grip on the world.   

From the stories of the Holocaust emerges a legacy that teaches us what can happen when the light of freedom and hope is extinguished. 

Theirs is the lesson that we can measure up to God’s expectation and prayer for humanity, that we can care for one another.  Wasn’t that God’s first call to humanity?  “Where are you?  What have you done?  Your brother's blood cries out from the earth to Me!”

We need to keep that flame of hope aloft and bright.  We must tell the stories in each successive generation to avoid the horrors of what befell 1 ½ million children, millions of grandparents, paupers and innocent and brilliant luminaries who would have changed the world if given the chance to live.

We have a duty, a sacred responsibility, to educate the next generation to learn the lessons of evil that can churn into a miasma of chaos from the factories of death and destruction of 6 million innocents. Only then we will finally be able to respond to God’s epochal questions: “Where are you?  What have you done?” with a response that indicates that we are “our brother’s keeper.”

Perhaps then we prove ourselves truly responsible to God and the rest of His creation.