I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when feeling it not.
I believe in God even when God is silent.
text found written on a wall after Kristallnacht.
we are studying the beginning of the holocaust and the whole day this song, a song i performed years ago when i could only begin to grasp what it meant, was running thorugh my head, giving me chills. how. even while i'm studying exactly why and how this could happen, i still just...don't understand.
and i don't understand how my classmates can sit in class and hear it and not feel like crying for all of the pain, hatred and horror. how it can be a subject. it was life. human lives, blood, tears, souls.
3 comments:
... and now you know why I cried every time you guys sang it. Not only for the poignancy of the words and the horror of that night and the nights yet to come, but also for the heart-rending beauty of the music...
Meet jewish history. It sucks. People can go their entire lives without realizing what real suffering is...its not when you cut yourself, or when someone you know dies, or even when entire races of people are shamelessly slaughtered: Its when we cease to belive. So the lesson to be learned is, belive, belive, belive, in something, no matter what it is, no matter what others say, and no matter how much it may hurt from time to time. Keep breathing and believing.
Peace,
-IMA
the holocaust was not a signularity, history and our present is full of such patterns of fear and hate, of such cruelty, and of such stubborn endurance in the face of it all. those other historical incidents just don't sting as much because they are distant enough in time to be stories in textbooks instead of people like ourselves. the holocaust has managed to be kept alive in the present of our imaginations, and so it seems real to us. perhaps to your classmates, it is history, the way that, say, the conquest of new spain or halagu khan's annihilation of baghdad seem to us.
it is good to know them for people as well as stories, to know that the threat of such things is ever with us, because they are a product of human societies, just as art and music and justice and mutual aid and festivals and working to right our age's wrongs are.
the past is ever present, if we would but recognize ourselves mirrored in it, good and ill combined.
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