Bloom: Passover offers lessons in courage, past and present

Passover has arrived and Jewish families on Hilton Head Island will participate in the ancient festive ritual.

In the big theological picture, however, it is important to understand that the Exodus bequeath to Jewish history an expectation that God would - or at least could - save the Jewish people from all their adversaries. The centuries have taught us, to the contrary, that God’s intervention with the plagues and the eventual deliverance of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage would never be replicated for succeeding generations of Jews.

In a spiritual sense, Passover builds upon the biblical account of history to inspire, comfort and teach the Jewish people about memory and rejecting slavery of human beings as well as standing up like did Moses to Pharaoh to speak truth to power. Those are some of the powerful lessons of Passover.

The Jewish community has learned that it only can rely upon itself when it comes to surviving outbreaks of violence and terrorism. Many interpret the signs and texts of the passover story in light of the Holocaust and use it as a way of comparing two very different kinds of bondage under the reign of Pharaoh and Hitler. There are, in fact, similarities which show how both intended to destroy their Jewish populations, how they demonized the Jewish communities and how they instituted the selection process of sending Jewish children to their deaths.

Yet, in the case of the Exodus, Moses invited non-Israelites who also yearned for freedom to go up with his people and participate in the march for freedom. In the biblical account, they are called the mixed multitude, and proudly the Israelites saved the non-Israelites who were also enslaved.

In the case of the Holocaust, we know that non-Jews were either supportive of Nazi efforts to collect Jews or did nothing but stand by and watch as the Nazis dismantled and decimated Europe’s Jewish communities. Yet, there is a small but rich history of non-Jews, mostly Christian, who risked their lives to save Jews fleeing from the Nazis.

After the war, the new state of Israel established a research institution and museum - Yad v’Shem - in Jerusalem that all tourists should visit. The Hebrew words are from the book of Isaiah: “And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name ( yad v’shem) that shall not be cut off.”

The idea here was to create an institution devoted to chronicling the truth of the Nazi period so that the world would never forget. The Israelis understood that righteous people of all faiths, Oskar Schindler for example, risked their lives to save Jews whenever and wherever they could. Some were simple families. Others were communal leaders, foreign diplomats and a few Christian clergy who defied the Nazis. They deserved to be recognized as heroes and to be remembered in perpetuity for their bravery and courage.

In January, President Obama spoke at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in a special ceremony for four non-Jewish Americans who risked there lives in World War II to save Jews from genocide.

One was a Mennonite woman who left her home in Goshen, Ind., to work at first in a refugee camp in the south of France protecting refugee children fleeing the Spanish Civil War. She saved hundreds of Jewish children in France. She was arrested by the Gestapo and held under house arrest with other American officials until a prisoner swap was arranged. Her name was Lois Gunden and her niece lives on Hilton Head. That niece will tell her aunt’s story at Congregation Beth Yam’s annual Holocaust Memorial service. That service focuses on the heroic work of Christians and many others who hid and rescued Jewish people, especially children.

These Righteous Among the Nations not only hid Jewish people but they provided false papers and false identities and worked to assist Jews in their escape to nations not under German control.

Yad v’Shem’s honor - called The Righteous Among the Nations - represents the Israeli and the Jewish people worldwide who are grateful for all those who did the right thing for their Jewish neighbors because of an intrinsic respect for human life. How can the Jewish people forget that when the value of remembering is so much part of Judaism’s ethos of remembering the Exodus and that Jews were slaves in Egypt?

Today the enduring lessons of the Holocaust must serve as an ongoing teaching experience for young and old. The lesson is that standing up for righteousness is part and parcel of the good in all religions.

As President Obama said at the induction ceremony, “And finally, all of us have a responsibility to speak out, and to teach what’s right to our children, and to examine our own hearts. That’s the lesson of the Righteous we honor today - the lesson of the Holocaust itself: Where are you? Who are you? That's the question that the Holocaust poses to us. We have to consider, even in moments of peril, even when we might fear for our own lives, the fact that none of us are powerless. We always have a choice. And today, for most of us, standing up against intolerance doesn’t require the same risks that those we honor took. It doesn’t require imprisonment or that we face down the barrel of a gun. It does require us to speak out. It does require us to stand firm. We know that evil can flourish if we stand idly by.”

This story was originally published April 18, 2016 at 6:52 AM with the headline "Bloom: Passover offers lessons in courage, past and present."