In the shadow of nuclear war, remember our children

President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Hiroshima provides us with an opportunity to reflect upon not only the historic significance of this eventbut also to consider the atomic bomb as a sober warning toward the future of humankind.

In 1987, Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel visited Japan and delivered a talk to the Japanese on this same subject. As reported in the New York Times, Wiesel observed “Maybe there is a metaphysical difference,” he said. “Auschwitz meant the end of an era, and Hiroshima means the beginning of another era.” He reminded his audience that Japan’s military aggression led their nation down the road to the cataclysmic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Furthermore it was up to them, he insisted, to come to grips with that past. Afterward, Wiesel and his wife laid a wreath at the memorial for the victims of Hiroshima. Finally, Wiesel said, “Woe to us, human beings of the 20th century, that we have seen innocent children pay the price for the mistakes of adults.”

The weapons of war challenge us to ask difficult questions about the wisdom of human beings, despite our advanced scientific knowledge and technological prowess. In the Torah, God destroyed mankind with a flood and still gave us another chance through Noah and his Ark, whose inhabitants repopulated the world. Today it is humankind that possesses the power to destroy the world without divine intervention. For years we worried about the Soviet Union and now, with the advent of more nuclear nations, we are even more vulnerable. We are still standing at the cliff, looking down into the abyss of mass annihilation, knowing that rogue states like Iran and North Korea could trigger another world war with nuclear weapons. What has really changed over the years?

Just as I could never fathom the genocide of my own people at Auschwitz, or any genocide, neither can I grasp the enormity of what nuclear bombs can do and how they can obliterate an entire city. We have seen the pictures of the mushroom clouds, but it never touched our borders or our lives. We accepted President Harry Truman’s moral justification when he explained that dropping two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved American soldiers and avoided enormous casualties that America forces would have suffered had we launched an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Seventy years later, Japan has refrained from violent military confrontations and expansionist aspirations. The post World War II years have demonstrated that Japan has made a difference and has chosen to become peaceful nation.

Despite the fact that Americans live without the daily fear of being attacked by nuclear weapons, it does not mean that we can ignore the cloud of nuclear war that hovers over us. Hostile nations, rogue states and terrorist organizations still pose a very real threat to our existence.

My own personal fear is not the Noah story, but more about the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel serves as a symbol of humankind’s drive to assert its power upon the world. Can we continue to trust in the leaders of the world who possess nuclear weapons to restrain themselves and preserve the world?

Let’s not forget the lesson from the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel. God said to Cain after he slew his brother, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

As Wiesel hinted, it is always the voice of the innocent, especially the children, which cries out to us in the aftermath of genocide or a nuclear holocaust. The teachings of Scripture can help remind us to keep perspective of just how fragile our world is and how our existence is subject to the guile and evil of nations who yearn for power and who do not respect human life.

The world’s religions can play an important role to remind governments of the consequences of nuclear war. Our role should be to pursue peace and to preserve the world so that ethics and values will be passed on from generation to generation. The children of the world have a right to live and grow up with the opportunity to do a better job in preserving peace than the former generations. War in general - and specifically nuclear war - threatens to deprive the children of the world of their dreams and hopes of achieve a fulfilling life.

My prayer is that no nation will put itself in a position that it will lead its citizens down a pathway of total destruction, and that nations will heed the lessons of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

Here is a prayer that is recited in my tradition on the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans and on the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust.

“The world is not the same since Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The decisions we make, the values we teach must be pondered not only in the halls of learning, but also before the inmates of extermination camps, and in the sight of the mushroom of a nuclear explosion.”

This story was originally published June 20, 2016 at 6:10 AM with the headline "In the shadow of nuclear war, remember our children."