Anthony
J. Sciolino is a retired New York State
Family Court judge and a graduate of Columbia University and Cornell Law
School. He holds a master’s degree in theology from St. Bernard’s School of
Theology and Ministry and is an ordained Roman Catholic permanent deacon. We
highly recommend his book, The Holocaust,
The Church, and the Law of Unintended Consequences. The quotes below are
from his book.
The Holocaust, a.k.a. Shoah (“catastrophe”),
was the systematic, state-organized persecution and murder of six million Jews, including 1.5
million children, by Nazi Germany and its European collaborators. Also targeted
were five million members of other
groups — homosexuals, Sinti and
Roma (Gypsies), Poles and other Slavic people, Soviet POWs, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Freemasons, people with mental and physical disabilities,
communists, socialists, and other political and religious dissidents.
With poison gas, bullets, noose, knives,
combustion engine exhaust, clubs, fists, disease, starvation, death marches,
and overwork, the perpetrators slaughtered two-thirds of Europe’s Jews and
one-third of world Jewry. . .
For many years, I have been troubled by
one of those moral and spiritual questions: How
could one of the worst catastrophes in human history have started in one of the
most Christian countries of Christian Europe, birthplace of Martin Luther and
the Protestant Reformation?1
Something that has been left out of history classes
about World War II in America is the information that would provide the answer to
Judge Sciolino’s question. When we, people who were raised in Christian homes,
read about Nazi Germany in our textbooks, we never viewed the Germans this way:
. . . as baptized, taxpaying members of
an established Christian church. They were raised in homes, schools, and
churches where the Christian Bible was read and taught, where commemorations of
the birth and death of Jesus marked the high points of the year, where
Christian prayers and hymns were familiar parts of daily life.2
Judge
Sciolino’s journey and research led to conclusions that are extremely important
and relevant to what’s happening in America today:
History is the study of human behavior
and the human spirit, even when both have been profoundly corrupted. The
Holocaust is an extreme example of what can happen when prejudice and
intolerance run amok, when some people dehumanize and target other people.3
One of the lessons of history is that
religion can be a source of good or evil. Absolutist claims of religion,
therefore, ought to be open to scrutiny, including claims that certain dicta be
accepted “on faith.” When it comes to
issues of moral ambiguity, after all, religion ought to be part of the
solution, not the problem. “God is
greater than religion,” wrote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Faith is greater than dogma.” In other
words, God should not be confused with religion. It is rank human
presumptuousness and arrogance to claim that God, who is beyond human
comprehension, is the exclusive property of any one faith tradition—to the
exclusion of others.4
For
those who have been reading the Real
Yeshua Blog for a while or following our work at the Biblical Heritage Center, you will be very familiar with what our
research has concluded was the cornerstone message of Jesus’ teachings and
movement:
From Jesus’ point of view, all humans
have one obligation to God -- love
Him with all of their hearts, souls and minds – and the only way to fulfill
that obligation is by -- loving their
neighbors as themselves.
Doing
what Christians did to other humans in Nazi Germany would have been incomprehensible
to Jesus and his followers. However, they would have immediately recognized
that not all Christians and other Germans were like those above. Judge Sciolino
includes some of their stories in his book too:
In the face of unimaginable horror,
people of conscience modeled respect for human life and empathic behavior.
Making the moral choice, they engaged in acts of kindness, large and small,
reaching out to suffering people surely among “the least of (Jesus’s) brethren.”
Clergy, religious, and laypeople were among the over 23,788 people who risked their
lives to rescue Jews, as recognized as Righteous Gentiles by the Israeli
government at Yad Vashem (The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem).5
Christians have
the potential to transform the conflicts taking place in America today into
opportunities to make life safer, better, more fulfilled and happier than ever
before in history by doing what the Real Yeshua taught. The first step
is making transparency a primary
value and own up to the good and
evil things Christians have done in the past – often in the name of God.
Sharing
this type of information and helping people more accurately understand the
teachings of Jesus (Yeshua) are two of our top priorities at the Biblical Heritage Center. If our
mission is something that you consider important and valuable, join in and help
us reach more people by doing the following:
(1) “18” is the numerical value of the
Hebrew word for “life.” Make an $18
donation by clicking here.
(2) Let people know that you stand with us by “Liking” the Real Yeshua
Facebook Page by clicking here.
(3) Share this blog with others and talk
about it.
Shalom,
Jim
Myers
__________________________
1 The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law of Unintended
Consequences
by Anthony J. Sciolino © 2012 iUniverse, Bloomington, IN; p. xix
2
The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law
of Unintended Consequences; p. xiii.
3
The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law
of Unintended Consequences; p. xxii.
4
The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law
of Unintended Consequences; p. 221.
5
The Holocaust, The Church, and the Law
of Unintended Consequences; p. 194.
Comments
Post a Comment