I moved out of the house when I was 16.
As I recall, the process started sometime before then. I expressed an interest to my parents in becoming an exchange student, and once the idea had won their acceptance, we began exploring the process together.
No one really knew what the process involved, except that it started with an application. There were questions I had to answer, essays I had to write, endorsements from adults I had to procure. There were interviews I had to go through, in person and on the phone. More questions, more essays. and finally resolution: I was going to Rotorua, New Zealand, where I'd been matched with a family called the Hannahs.
At the end of the process was another process. I'd already got a passport. Now I had mere weeks to learn about New Zealand, get any necessary vaccinations for travel, buy tickets and supplies, and do whatever else I had to do to prepare my life and the people whose lives intersected it for the massive disruption that was about to ensue.
I've moved a number of times since then. Back to Pittsburgh. To college. To Haiti. To an apartment in Easton, Pa. To New Jersey. It's never as simple as going from A to B; there's always a process, there's always planning, and there's always a change in store: for me, for those who live with me, for those I move among, and for those I leave behind.
And isn't that what this season is? Advent is a moving notice. God is moving into the empty apartment next door. He hopes his parties don't get too loud, but if they do, please come knock on his door and let him know.
God's from a far-off country, but he's been dreaming for years of coming to town and being neighbors with us. Which pubs serve the best beer for thirsty people, cook the best food for hungry people, and provide the best place for strangers to meet?
When you're new in town, what's a good place to go for a walk? Where can you go to unwind?
The first advent ended, we're told, when God got a lease with some working-class newlyweds who taught him the local language, set him up with a trade, and helped him for a while to keep a low profile and blend in. That move-in, we are told, turned the world on its ear.
And now in the season in which we celebrate that first Advent, we wait for the second one, harder to see because it's by faith, when the move will be permanent, and the glory will be unhidden.
Monday, December 28, 2020
Saturday, December 26, 2020
Never again: Remembering is our responsibility
I never thought I'd be here again, but the river has many twists and turns, and it's surprising at times where life will bring us back.
In 2003 I was the managing editor of the Cranford Eagle. One day my reporter, Josh Salt, came back from an outing he'd been on with a group of Cranford High School students. As part of their education on the Holocaust, the students had all been to see "The Pianist," a movie set during World War II and focused on a Jewish concert pianist's efforts to avoid capture and stay alive during this time.
The movie affected its teen audience, and Josh had found it well done.
"You should see it," he said.
"No thanks," I said. "I'm good."
We'd worked side by side for months, kabbitzed about life outside the newsroom, and generally got along well. My reaction caught him off-guard.
"Why not?" he asked, so I explained.
I had read "Night" in the dawning months of 1989, in one of my religion classes at college, and I had been so shaken to the core by Elie Wiesel's account of the Shoah that I think I cried for three days. At one point, he writes of his arrival at Auschwitz, "I will never forget that first night in the camp." I wasn't there, but I will never forget either.
That same class we saw "Night and Holocaust," a black-and-white documentary of Nazi atrocities, filmed around the Nuremberg hearings. There were piles of hair shaved from the heads of Jewish prisoners, snippets of film where Jews at the camps were shot for entertainment, and more horror presented matter-of-factly. I was so upset by that one I couldn't eat.
"We keep saying 'Never forget,'" I told him. "I won't."
Josh nodded thoughtfully and accepted my explanation.
"Fair enough," he said.
Yet here we are, and here I am. In the past four years we've seen a groundswell of racism and anti-Semitism in the country and around the world. Four years ago, Donald Trump linked Hillary Clinton to the imaginary cabal of Jews running the world economy; more recently he's repeated the tired calumny that America can't count on her Jewish citizens because their first loyalty is to Israel. Our country has seen armed gunmen shooting worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and we've witnessed a parade of white supremacists marching through an American city and chanting "Jews will not replace us!" I've heard people at my church who should know better talk about George Soros and the riots and caravans of illegal immigrants he finances to destabilize America.
And let's not forget Candace Owens, who in 2019 said Hitler would have been just fine if he'd focused on making Germany great, as though foreign policy were his only flaw.
So I find myself returning to Holocaust literature deliberately for the first time in decades. Earlier this month I finished reading Wiesel's existentialist novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," set against the backdrop of the Shoah. Now I'm opening Malka Adler's "The Brothers of Auschwitz." More of these books and these stories, I am sure, lie in my reading list in the coming weeks and months.
Hitler and his fellows, it should be remembered, systematically killed six million Jews during the period of World War II, in an act we remember as the Shoah, or the Holocaust. This was not a crime against humanity; as Wiesel once argued, it was aimed at Jews specifically because they were Jews, and in the eyes of the Nazis and much of the rest of the world that made them less than human. There were others who died at the camps, but none was targeted for extermination as methodically nor as purposefully as the Jews were.
Never again. We dare not let ourselves forget.
In 2003 I was the managing editor of the Cranford Eagle. One day my reporter, Josh Salt, came back from an outing he'd been on with a group of Cranford High School students. As part of their education on the Holocaust, the students had all been to see "The Pianist," a movie set during World War II and focused on a Jewish concert pianist's efforts to avoid capture and stay alive during this time.
The movie affected its teen audience, and Josh had found it well done.
"You should see it," he said.
"No thanks," I said. "I'm good."
We'd worked side by side for months, kabbitzed about life outside the newsroom, and generally got along well. My reaction caught him off-guard.
"Why not?" he asked, so I explained.
I had read "Night" in the dawning months of 1989, in one of my religion classes at college, and I had been so shaken to the core by Elie Wiesel's account of the Shoah that I think I cried for three days. At one point, he writes of his arrival at Auschwitz, "I will never forget that first night in the camp." I wasn't there, but I will never forget either.
That same class we saw "Night and Holocaust," a black-and-white documentary of Nazi atrocities, filmed around the Nuremberg hearings. There were piles of hair shaved from the heads of Jewish prisoners, snippets of film where Jews at the camps were shot for entertainment, and more horror presented matter-of-factly. I was so upset by that one I couldn't eat.
"We keep saying 'Never forget,'" I told him. "I won't."
Josh nodded thoughtfully and accepted my explanation.
"Fair enough," he said.
Yet here we are, and here I am. In the past four years we've seen a groundswell of racism and anti-Semitism in the country and around the world. Four years ago, Donald Trump linked Hillary Clinton to the imaginary cabal of Jews running the world economy; more recently he's repeated the tired calumny that America can't count on her Jewish citizens because their first loyalty is to Israel. Our country has seen armed gunmen shooting worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and we've witnessed a parade of white supremacists marching through an American city and chanting "Jews will not replace us!" I've heard people at my church who should know better talk about George Soros and the riots and caravans of illegal immigrants he finances to destabilize America.
And let's not forget Candace Owens, who in 2019 said Hitler would have been just fine if he'd focused on making Germany great, as though foreign policy were his only flaw.
So I find myself returning to Holocaust literature deliberately for the first time in decades. Earlier this month I finished reading Wiesel's existentialist novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," set against the backdrop of the Shoah. Now I'm opening Malka Adler's "The Brothers of Auschwitz." More of these books and these stories, I am sure, lie in my reading list in the coming weeks and months.
Hitler and his fellows, it should be remembered, systematically killed six million Jews during the period of World War II, in an act we remember as the Shoah, or the Holocaust. This was not a crime against humanity; as Wiesel once argued, it was aimed at Jews specifically because they were Jews, and in the eyes of the Nazis and much of the rest of the world that made them less than human. There were others who died at the camps, but none was targeted for extermination as methodically nor as purposefully as the Jews were.
Never again. We dare not let ourselves forget.
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