Every year, as we close out January, we would do well to take a step back and reflect on the history that all humanity lives through during the last two weeks of the month. Reflect, and remember, special men and special times.
These weeks take us into the midst of solemnity and awe. Holy days of spirit and conscience. Days that should rend our souls asunder. A period that begins with a date held sacred to all those of conscience who engage in the struggle for mankind’s transcendent yearning for redemptive change. A period that ends with a date that challenges us to fulfil that struggle as we bear witness to mankind’s debased desertion of any of its noble aspirations.
January 15 would have been the 97th birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. January 17 was the 81st anniversary of the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg. And January 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 81st commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Astonishingly, the United Nations, at whose entrance are carved the words of Isaiah that “Swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and nation shall not make war against nation anymore,” officially commemorated the Holocaust for the first time sixty years after.
The contrasts are telling, and their lessons are our last best hope for our own humanity. Wallenberg and King personified the prophecy that the day will come when “Justice shall roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Without fidelity to that goal, we will be left with little more than a future of Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones, forever parched by the horrors of Auschwitz, making this already debased world even more brittle and arid and stench-filled.
During these days, the heavens themselves seem to challenge us to rage. All these sad dates stand as confirmation of the low limitations of the era in which we still live.
Particularly after October 7, it is an era characterized by the retreat of reason and the advance of hate. It is an era that, with rare exceptions, has been permeated with the odious odours of justice compromised by timidity, honour cheapened through expediency and promise mortgaged to avarice.
Our possibilities of greatness and generosity are constantly compromised by an ungracious modernity and a suffocating self-absorption filled with false pieties as excuses for inaction. Little resolve abounds to remedy the malignancies of hate, jealousy and greed with the compass of compassionate conscience and the courage of character to protect right from wrong.
Poisonous hypocrisies that are nothing more than promotions of venal self-interests overwhelm what King called the “fierce urgency of now” — the fierce urgency to bring to an end the spectacular and frequent failures of man. For in the dead of night we will forever be haunted by those failures as the thin, humid rivulets of sweat crawl over us like vermin.
As we face today’s dire challenges, we must all become Wallenbergs and Kings — ready to assume individual responsibility, each drawing strength from the sure knowledge that one person can make a difference. We have a responsibility to follow Gandhi’s counsel and act quickly to arrest “the evil in governments that stagger drunkenly from wrong to wrong merely to perpetuate their own immortality.”
For all our demonstrations and petitions, we have been ambivalent and apathetic toward the insolence and inaction of authority. We have perpetuated sins of silence with voices too often mute when confronted with the evils that men do. Wrapping ourselves in cloaks of charity will not absolve us of our complicity in impotent acquiescence to the daily torrent of state-sponsored deceptions and institutional betrayals.
We seem to react when it costs us little in terms of our personal bottom lines. We readily accept whatever manipulated mages and opinions flood us from media as reality. We eagerly digest political sound bites as quickly as any fast food. Our surrender has demonstrated nothing less than an abdication of the possibilities of our own capacities.
Wallenberg, King and the generation of survivors refused to surrender. Their testaments are living ones to this day. Testaments to conscience that sees wrongs and tries to right them, sees suffering and tries to heal it, sees injustice and tries to stop it. A universal conscience that rejects the cowardice of the fey and feckless that would have us acquiesce in our own self-abnegation.
If we do not heed the lessons of these days and act on them, then, as the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote, when the false prophets cry “Peace! Peace!” there will be none left to shout back, “There is no peace!” And then we will have nothing more to comfort us, as we struggle with our own redemption, than a poignant plea for heaven to have mercy.
