FOSTERING A VIBRANT RENEWAL OF JUDAISM IN POLAND
Let me start my reflection today with the quotation from the Talmud:
There are three partners in the forming of a person: The Holy One, Blessed be He, father and mother. When a person honors his father and mother, the Holy One, Blessed be He, says: I ascribe credit to them as if I dwelt between them and they honor Me as well. (Kiddushin 30b)
Our religious tradition emphasizes the importance of not only performing good deeds, but also having a positive inner motivation and mindset behind those actions. One’s thoughts, desires, and attitudes towards others are just as crucial as the outward behavior itself when considering morality, with the Torah and rabbinical teachings emphasizing the need to avoid negative feelings like hatred, covetousness, and envy alongside actively cultivating positive ones like love and compassion.
The Torah is the cornerstone of Judaism. It was given to us to be an instruction manual on how to live well, justly, with empathy and compassion. It was not given to us because we were “better” than other people, but precisely because we were imperfect, and sometimes even defective, to make ourselves and our lives better.
Poland, the epicentre of the Holocaust, began denying responsibility as soon as the Nazi atrocities ended. The nation’s distortion of history continues today – with disturbing consequences. World-renowned Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski examines how the government, museums, schools and state never came to grips with the dark past. This tour de force reminds one of the power of historical research based on documents and historical reasoning.
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Human history is, to say the least, complicated. While our tradition explicitly teaches us how to distinguish between (objective) right and wrong and (objective) good and evil, the historical fate of human communities and historical processes are rarely black and white. They are sometimes – we have no doubts that Nazi Germany had to be defeated in order bring peace, stability and growth to the world, but most of the time historical realities are more complex and nuanced. For this exact reason our tradition focuses on ethics and notions of right and wrong, good and evil – it is to give us tools to judge an infinite number of social and historical realities and to navigate within them…
