Ignorance of history can lead to misunderstanding religious commemorations
February 11, 2023
When we somehow take note of anniversary dates that are important to this or that faith or ethnic tradition, we should be especially careful to try to understand the meaning of those dates as the people of that tradition understand them.
It's far too easy to overlay such commemorations with our own attempt at meaning and, in the process, either misunderstand or, worse, dismiss the meaning they have for people in the tradition commemorating the events, as this column from The Tablet shows.
In this case, the problem was revealed by a no-doubt well-meant but culturally ignorant editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal, a newspaper that long has had a good reputation for high-quality journalism.
As Dara Horn says about the Louisville editorial in The Tablet piece, "In it, a group of noble public servants explained to primitive dolts like me that International Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27) is not, in fact, a day to remember the Holocaust. Instead, it is a day when we must 'remember all the hate speech and all the violence that is perpetuated against religions, races and genders, all those acts committed in the past and those that continue to this day,' because 'for one group, for one person, to claim that the hate and violence towards them is more important than another’s, only encourages more acts of violence against others.' Most of all, as the authors put it in their middle-school-worthy topic sentence, 'Jews do not have a monopoly on persecution and atrocities.'”
As I say, no doubt good intentions, but written out of an abundance of ignorance about the Holocaust, its commemorative dates and Jewish history.
As Horn then writes, "I don’t need to do the work of shredding this deeply antisemitic take, because the good people of the internet did it for me — pointing out that Genocide Prevention Day already exists, for instance, or that ''with Black History Month coming up, it’s good to remember there are more races than black,' or 'This September 11, we should also remember all those other plane crashes over the years.'”
All of this raises the question of the difference between International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Yom HaShoah (April 17-18 this year), which essentially is the Jewish version of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Horn writes: "International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Yom HaShoah are fundamentally different, and not only because one is 'international' while the other is Jewish. The two days commemorate different things—in fact, opposite things. International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the date of Allied (in this case, Soviet) forces liberating Auschwitz."
In that way of thinking about it, Horn writes, the day "celebrates non-Jews 'liberating' Jews, while honoring Jews precisely for being passive victims with no agency — a condition that happens to make human dignity impossible. The world often seems to prefer its Jews that way.
"Yom HaShoah is exactly the opposite. The day’s full Hebrew name is Yom hashoah vehagevurah, or 'Holocaust and Heroism Day.' Its spring date does not commemorate Jews being 'liberated' by others, but rather the heroic and doomed Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on the first night of Passover in 1943."
The writers of the Louisville editorial should have known those differences. Similarly, Christmas on the Christian calendar isn't primarily about gift-giving and lights in the darkness of winter. Rather, it's about the incarnation, when Christians believe that the one God of the cosmos entered mortality by being born as a helpless baby named Jesus.
Name an annual religious commemoration in any tradition -- from Ramadan in Islam to Passover in Judaism to Diwali in Hinduism -- and you will find layers and layers of meaning that should not be reduced to a stereotype. Religion, after all, is complex and many-headed, and even followers of the same faith sometimes disagree about the meaning of this or that commemoration.
What this calls for is religious literacy. A good place to start to improve yours is a book called Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't, by Stephen Prothero.
And next time I see you, I hope you'll know a little more about who St. Valentine was so you're more appreciative of Valentine's Day. (For a different and funny take on Valentine's Day, see below.)
Finally, a great regional source to draw from for learning about the Holocaust and its causes is the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, on the board of which I serve.
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IDEAS FOR FIXING SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDALS
In the wake of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal and its coverup by bishops, 10 Jesuit institutions began to search for some answers. This RNS story says a new report on all this from Fordham University may be a good guide not just for how Catholics can move forward in a healthy way from this scandal but also how others can learn from what the Jesuits learned. The story gives these examples: "At Georgetown University, a priest began studying the healing effect of abuse survivors’ stories; an ethicist at New York’s Fordham University began investigating how Black survivors had been erased from the clergy abuse crisis; in Milwaukee, an interdisciplinary team at Marquette University started a workshop for Catholic teens on abusive power dynamics." Sexual abuse is far from just a Catholic story or a story rooted in institutional religion. But the ideas from this Fordham report may point all of us toward a less-scandalous future.
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P.S.: For Black History Month, The Conversation offers this interesting look at the history of historically Black churches and how they're doing today. It's a pretty brief summation, but it perhaps can enlighten you about things you either didn't know or had forgotten.
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NO VALENTINES ON 'COW HUG DAY?'
My friend Markandey Katju (we were school chums together in India in the 1950s) has sent me a note about his reaction to the suggestion from the India's government that people there not celebrate Valentine's Day but, rather, something called "Cow Hug Day." Really. (As the story to which I've linked you notes, the government then, uh, mooooved away from that idea. But when it looked like Cow Hug Day might be a real thing, Katju wrote this: "I am quite willing to celebrate Cow Hug Day. But how can I hug a cow when I don't have one? And I can't be expected to go on the street hugging stray cows I find there.
"So I request the government to provide me with a cow which I can hug. Moreover, how can I be sure I won't be gored by the cow's horns when I hug it? So either the government provides me medical insurance or a cow with no horns. It appears from this video (move ahead in the video to 1:07) that cows don't like being hugged." I've suggested to Markandey that he simply hug his wife Rupa, instead. (If you want to read everything Markandey wrote about this, uh, B.S., click here.)
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