Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, established to correspond with the date when the first units of the Red Army reached Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. The horrors are unspeakable; many, including the second generation, feel more shocked, bewildered and bereft year by year. We live as Jews in solidarity with our own people and with victims everywhere.

This year’s theme is ‘Ordinary People.’ As the home page of the HMD website says:

Ordinary people turn a blind eye, believe propaganda, join murderous regimes. And those who are persecuted, oppressed and murdered in genocide aren’t persecuted because of crimes they’ve committed – they are persecuted simply because they are ordinary people who belong to a particular group (eg, Roma, Jewish community, Tutsi).

I don’t think the Bible has such concept as ‘ordinary people’. A ben adam, a human being, is, without exception, made in God’s image. The Mishnah (c. 200CE) elaborates: every person is yechidi, createdunique. I’ve stood by the broken concrete at Birkenau and wondered: who did each of these people love, for whom did they long, as they were forced toward those chambers?

Yet the words ‘ordinary people’ ring true. We are all other people’s ‘ordinary people’. In an excellent talk, Dr John Launer noted how so many ‘ordinary’ individuals allowed the Nazis to come to power. Then, speaking of bystanders in general, he said with brave frankness that the older he gets the less he feels like the judge, and the more he feels among the judged.

The Torah forbids us to be bystanders: ‘Don’t stand idly by your fellow human’s blood.’ (Vayikra 19:16) ‘If you know that someone intends to threaten another person’s life, you have to speak out,’ explained Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin (1816 – 1893), head of the Volozhyn Yeshivah destroyed half a century later by the Nazis.

This is incomparably easier said than done. It leaves the discomforting question: whose bystander, whose ‘ordinary person’, am I?

Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, was famed as a Torah educator. Who am I? he asked, before answering: I am those aspects of my potential self which my experiences have drawn out of me. That’s why it’s essential to live in environments which bring out the best and deepest within us.

He reminds me of when I was a guest of the church in Germany the 1990s. ‘Had the visit left me angry?’ I was asked on my return. In truth, something quite different had gripped me: relief that I lived in a country whose laws prevented me from doing the worst of which I might prove capable. How would I have behaved had I been an ‘ordinary’ Aryan under Nazi rule? How could I be sure? The consciences of so many people were so deeply infiltrated by the vicious yet alluring discourse around them that they failed to perceive they were doing evil.

But today? I’m less confident our society and world is helping prevent the worst in us.

I stress one hundredfold that there is no comparison with Nazi or other such evil regimes. But I fear the atrophy of conscience. Are we supposed to accept homelessness in our streets, the drowning of refugees in the Channel, the indefinite detention of asylum seekers, or mass food insecurity? What’s being done in the name of my own good country? What racism do some utter, profaning the name and true values of my beloved Judaism?

The Torah speaks not of ‘ordinary’ but of ‘holy people’, anshei kodesh. They aren’t priests or anyone special, but you and me. Anshei, from anoosh, indicates open-heartedness, empathy, humility. Holiness means being truly deeply human.

We can’t help sometimes being bystanders. There’s simply too much wrong. But we must never become inured to it, let alone make it worse. We must seek the courage to be, at least sometimes, not just ‘ordinary’ but ordinary holy people.

From time to time, I get a call on my mobile; the line’s often bad and it’s hard to hear, but the message is always the same: ‘I didn’t get a voucher this month.’ I note down the phone number and pass it on to the asylum seekers drop-in. They’d been supporting about four hundred people; during Covid it’s gone up to a thousand each month. That monthly voucher may be all these struggling people get on which to survive.

Once I was called by a woman who was already at the check-out: ‘The money didn’t come through to my card and I can’t pay for these few bits of food.’ I asked her to pass me to the cashier; for all I knew she or her child might be hungry right now. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘we’re not allowed to accept card payments over the phone.’ I’d hoped I could save the woman the humiliation.

Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day. A surprising series of connections left me thinking about it in an unexpected way. There’s a baby blessing in our community tomorrow:

‘The English name is Sidney,’ the parents explained, ‘So he’ll be Sidney Bloch, after our father’s lovely relative of that name.’

‘Sidney Bloch!’ I exclaimed, ‘After the Sidney Bloch who wrote No Time For Tears? I taught from that book just an hour ago!’

That beautiful book, full of charm, wit, and wisdom, describes growing up in a rabbinic household in the impoverished East End in the 1930s. In a chapter titled ‘One Man Alone’ Sidney recounts how his Uncle Julius toured the poor suburbs of London in the wind and rain addressing whatever audience could be mustered, begging people “to accept a refugee before Hitler did”:

“Any couple who leaves this synagogue hall tonight,” he would say, slowly and precisely, “without a commitment, is sentencing a child to an unknown fate…like death” he would add softly.

His words reminded me of a letter from my father’s aunt Trude, after she, her husband and their only son had been deported from their hometown of Poznan to a village near Lublin after the swift Nazi conquest of western Poland. On 31^st October 1941 she wrote to her brother Ernst in the then still neutral United States:

Have you had any news in the meantime from [our relatives in] San Francisco? Maybe you can write to them again, so that they remember that we still exist…

By then it was anyway too late; Trude was taken east a year later, probably to Treblinka.

In Jewish law no form of tzedakah, giving for social justice, takes precedence over pidyon shevu’im, the redemption of captives. Distributors of charity funds are, in an absolute emergency, theoretically permitted to divert to this purpose moneys collected for any other cause without consulting those who gave it.

‘Captive’ today can mean unable to escape the grasp of a murderous power. One thinks of families desperate to get out of Afghanistan, or Uygur people with relatives in Xinjiang they haven’t from for years.

Inscribed on the eastern wall of our synagogue are the three love commandments in the Torah. On either side are ‘Love your neighbour’ and ‘Love the stranger’. These are not alternatives; we have an unceasing obligation to care for our near and dear, as well as Jewish people in trouble and any persecuted or suffering people wherever they are.

In the middle, above the holy ark, is ‘You shall love the Lord your God.’ We cannot love God if we don’t care about that part or spark of the divine which lives in us and within each of our fellow human beings.

In the mystical understanding of the counting of the Omer, the fifty days which connect Pesach, the festival of freedom, to Shavuot, the giving of the Torah, the eighth day focuses on the quality of Hesed shebiGevurah, lovingkindness within strength. There is little we have greater need of now than precisely that courage of resilience coupled with a warm and open heart towards each other. I am deeply grateful to everyone who exemplifies this in our society, from our nurses and doctors and medical researchers to those who stack our shelves, deliver the post and call their neighbours to check if everyone’s alright. Thank you!

Through much of yesterday, the closing day of Passover, I had two books in front of me. The first was The Survivors, the account by Reverend Leslie Hardman of how, on precisely these days seventy-five years ago, he entered Bergen-Belsen as a chaplain with the British Army. This is what confronted me on 17 April, he writes: starvation, typhus, the dead and the living dead.

His testament, like that of Rabbi Isaac Levi, his Senior Chaplain who joined him at Belsen, is searing and shocking. But it does not solely engender despair. We are ‘the instruments of the first repudiation’ of the evil done to these people, he tells a fellow British officer, as he, like Rabbi Levi, spares no hour, no atom of energy, and sometimes no subterfuge to bypass the slow protocols of the military administration, to get water, food and medicine to the thousands on the border between life and death.

But the greatest repudiation comes from the survivors themselves: the resurgence of spirit as people slowly return to health, the tenacious hold onto life, the determination to find loved ones, heal the sick, care for children, build a new country in Palestine and create a new world of hope and faith.

My second book was the Machzor, the festival prayer book. I didn’t open my usual machzor; I needed to take out and hold in my hands the old family volume, printed in Breslau in 1830. With trepidation, anxious not to damage the venerable binding, I opened it to the page of the haftarah, the reading from Isaiah, chapter 11:

[God’s servant] will judge with justice for the poor and demand fair treatment for the humble of the earth. The wolf shall lie down with the lamb…They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

I do not know how this book survived the First World War, from which my father’s uncle returned a hero, twice wounded, followed less than twenty years later by the flight of the family from the very country it had served. I don’t know in the depth of what boxes it lay, on what shelves it gathered dust.

But its words preserved their power, garnered their strength. They survived war and mass murder, contradicting their horrors even as Isaiah himself had defied the might of Assyria twenty-seven hundred years earlier, to express from their still strong pages a different ideal: that one day such a deep awareness of the presence of God, of the need for justice, of the wonder of life, of the preciousness of each moment, will take hold not only of the hearts of individuals, but of the spirit of nations, and we will hurt and destroy no longer.

Like many of us, I sense that such a spirit is abroad in our world today, despite the pain of so many deaths, despite the injustices, the flaws and faults in our systems. An ancient vision, God-inspired, garnered in prayer books, nurtured in the human soul across faiths and over millennia, is touching our hearts and calling us, when lockdown ends, to work for a different world.