My recent reading has helped me fill in a gaping void in my thinking. In the past I have spoken so carelessly, glibly, with much ignorance about “the Jews” in the world today, the Holocaust, and persecution they have endured (often in the name of Christ). My education has improved in this area lately, starting with Chaim Potok’s Davita’s Harp, which I mentioned in an earlier blog. I recommend that book to you, along with these:

My Name is Asher Lev (1972) by Chaim Potok. Can a father and son both love God, be devoted to their religion, love each other, and yet be so different that they cannot live together? Potok explores that theme in Asher Lev. The father is a missionary of sorts, traveling to dangerous parts of post WW2 Europe to plant congregations of his orthodox Jewish sect. The son is an artist with a once-in-a-generation talent. The father has no place for art in his world view, except to see it as something from “The Other Side”, the evil spiritual realm. Asher Lev touches deeply because sons need their fathers’ blessing and approval, the acceptance that what they do is worthwhile (something I have always been blessed to have with my Dad). Also, Asher Lev showed me clearly how much pain Christianity has caused the Jewish people. The father in the story can only speak of Jesus as “that man” and asks his son if he realizes how much Jewish blood has been spilled in the name of “that man”. This book was easy to read and very enjoyable.

Night by Elie Wiesel. John (our youth minister) recommended this to me about ten years ago. It was first published in the 1950s but just came out in a new translation and was selected by Oprah’s Book Club this year, so it is everywhere. Night is a short nightmare of a book in which Wiesel describes his experience as a teen of being ripped from his home and humanity and pushed through the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel lost his mother and sister, and finally his father, in the camps. He lost his faith as well: “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.” (Yet in spite of this passage, Wiesel still believes in God, as later writing and interviews confirm).

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Originally published in 1947, this book is the diary of an intelligent, ordinary Jewish girl of 13, 14 and 15 years old (she wrote it between 1942 and 1944). I’m only a few pages in and this strikes me: I could be reading the work of one of my younger friends at MHCC or on MySpace.

Anne Frank’s diary is that ordinary (as it begins), that human. It is beautiful with the wonderful innocent vain self-absorbed beauty of a young girl. Now, to think that Anne died along with her sister at the Bergen-Belsen camp in early 1945…just fifteen years old…and to think that she was probably buried in a mass grave near the camp, bulldozed in with hundreds of others…makes the rage boil inside me. We can never forget the crimes Hitler’s people committed and God help us if we turn a blind eye to such things happening elsewhere today…

And if ever I wonder how a loving God could allow a place called hell, Mr. Mengele, you remind me of the answer!