International Holocaust Memorial Day, you would think, should be focussed on the Holocaust in a unique way, yet it seems to be getting more and more diluted each time it comes around.
The date (which is marked on a different day in Israel) commemorates the day on which Auschwitz concentration camp was finally liberated on January 27th, 1945. In Israel we go by the Hebrew calendar, and on the anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, choosing to remember the courage of the Jewish people in the ghetto rising up against the Nazis, while elsewhere the date commemorates international rescue from Auschwitz.
Today Holocaust Memorial Day events around the world are no longer uniquely concerned with the Holocaust. They are often times to ponder on an assorted collection of wars, atrocities and mass murders from all over the globe, the Holocaust relegated to being just one of them. But Holocaust Memorial Day should be about the Holocaust – nothing else.
“I can’t believe I have to say this,” a frustrated Jewish man wrote. “Holocaust Memorial Day is about the Holocaust. Stop universalizing the Holocaust. Stop minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Stop weaponizing the Holocaust for your political agenda. Stop speaking over Jews. It’s that simple.” (Hen Mazzig)
In addition to the growing list of events, some are insisting that time to contemplate the “genocide in Gaza” should be part of the ceremony. The day has become so politicized and weaponized that this year more half of the schools in the UK who usually partake in the event declined to mark the day at all.
Why should the Holocaust be unique?
Apart from the basic fact that the date, January 27th, marks the date Holocaust victims were liberated from Auschwitz, a particularly and uniquely Holocaust focused event, the Holocaust should be remembered in its own right because there is nothing that compares to it. The attempt to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth is unique, and should be understood as such.
The urge to universalize Holocaust Memorial comes from a rejection of God’s choice of Israel.
The Holocaust is unique because God’s people are uniquely chosen.
The people of Israel are uniquely honored and blessed (Genesis 12:2-3).
The people of Israel are uniquely judged and held as an example (Amos 3:2).
They are also uniquely hated, and uniquely able to sift hearts and humanity’s ability to accept God’s sovereignty… or not (Isaiah 41:11-16).
The phenomenon and persistence of antisemitism has bewildered the Jewish people for generations. Trying to explain it, Dr. Einat Wilf, a leading Jewish thinker and former Israeli politician, points to the idea that Jewish people get in the the way of other people’s dreams of utopia.
“If anyone has a patience to actually read Nazi texts, Hitler’s texts, is very clear anti Semitism was not just any normal racism,” she explains.
“Yes, the Nazis had this… “junk science” of race. But the other races, they did not put through the final solution. The other races they wanted to conquer it to enslave, but it was just a normal hierarchy of races, of control,” she continues.
“But they needed to destroy the Jews because the Jews stood between the Nazis and salvation, or their version of salvation.”
Contemplating the extreme rise in hatred we see today, she describes what she calls the “placard strategy” in which the idea of Zionism and the symbol of the Star of David get equated with negative words on banners and signs — words like imperialism, colonialism, racism, apartheid, white supremacy, even Nazism, genocide, and the Holocaust. Of course, Zionism really equates to the political movement for self determination and liberation of the Jewish people their ancestral homeland, but as Wilf points out, the true meaning is replaced with a barrage of lies.
“These words are not chosen because they reflect reality. If anything, they’re the inversion of reality… The Jews have been the victims of literally each one of those from imperialism to genocide to Nazism,” she reminds us. “They’ve been the victims of all that. The words are chosen, not because not only because they invert reality, but because they are synonyms for evil… Israel’s Star of David equals evil. Now, what do you do with the evil? You eradicate it.”
“It’s no coincidence that while all the evil words are on the side of Israel’s Zionism [and the] Star of David, all the good words: justice, equality, freedom, rights, they’re on the side of the negation, which is Palestinianism, right? So you posit here a good versus evil, a clean world, utopia salvation, and the destruction of the collective Jew, as necessary to get to that utopia.”
Speaking specifically of Holocaust Memorial Day, she says she’s been following very closely how the has been hijacked and universalized. “It started earnestly as International Holocaust Commemoration Day, and then it descended to what I came to call International, ‘some bad people did something bad to other people’ day. And then, especially this year, it descended into ‘let’s show that the Jews are the Nazis of today’.”
The rapid descent from remembering the Holocaust to accusing Israel of one demonstrates the virulence and unique nature the hatred directed at the Jewish people.
The unique hatred of Israel is hatred of God Himself.
It’s not limited to one nation, one worldview, to right- or left-leaning people. The hatred of Israel is found across the board. It’s replete in Muslim countries, but also among liberal elites in Europe. Its extremities are seen in far right fascism and also the extreme left. Whether people despise the rich or the poor, the native or the stranger, the cultured or the assimilated, the people of Israel are still the butt of hatred because there is no logical basis for it.
Antisemitism, or “Sinat Sinai” as the Talmud calls it, is a demonic hatred of God, God’s laws and ways delivered to the Jewish people at Sinai, and ultimately, hatred of God’s sovereignty: His sovereign right to choose the Jewish people in the first place. Israel and the Jewish people are a constant and irritating reminder of God.
Just as Yeshua interrupted Paul on his way to Damascus, asking, “Why do you persecute ME?” (Acts 9:5), so we see the same principle of God identifying with His people in Psalm 83. To persecute followers of Yeshua is to persecute Yeshua Himself, and to fight against God’s people is to fight against God.
The Psalm begins by calling on God for help, equating the enemies of Israel with enemies of God in a chiasm identified by Kinzel and Korotkiy:1
83:3 (A) Enemies of God “For behold, Your enemies …”
“Those who hate You …”
83:4 (B) Enemies of Israel “… against Your people …”
“… against Your treasured ones
83:5 (B’) Enemies of Israel “… let us wipe them out as a nation …”
“… the name of Israel …”
83:6 (A’) Enemies of God “For they have conspired …”
“Against You …”
“The psalm further develops the recurring theme that to oppose Abraham’s descendants is to invoke God’s curse; those who hate God are the same ones that attack the chosen people,” Kinzel and Korotkiy clarify, listing the numerous attempts at genocide Israel has faced throughout the ages. Hatred of Israel is equated with hatred of God.
God chose to put His name here, in Israel, and upon the people of Israel, when the blood covenant was confirmed at Mount Sinai (Exodus 24). He said He would be our God, and we His people (Deuteronomy 26:16-19). We carry God’s name, and God carries ours: He is the God of Israel. By binding our names together at Sinai, the hatred of God is directed at the people of Israel. Similarly, the people of Israel remind people of their hatred of God. This is “Sinat Sinai” — the hatred generated by God’s covenant with Israel on that mountain.
God’s dealings with Israel are unique and prophetic… and not finished yet!
International Holocaust Memorial Day gets diluted and becomes a general collection of man’s inhumanity to man, but the day should really be a unique reminder of man’s inhumanity to the Jewish people, an expression of our rejection of God and His sovereignty. And so the nations rage against all the reminders, because the Judge of all the earth won’t go away.
Just as the people of Israel are a reminder, a thorn in the side of those who hate God, so Holocaust Memorial Day is also a pointer to God’s great purposes for Israel and the whole of Mankind. The horrors of the Holocaust were well predicted even in Deuteronomy, but in the same passage God’s promises restoration:
“And when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you, and return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice in all that I command you today, with all your heart and with all your soul, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have mercy on you, and he will gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you.”
“If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will take you. And the Lord your God will bring you into the land that your fathers possessed, that you may possess it. And he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. And the Lord your God will put all these curses on your foes and enemies who persecuted you. And you shall again obey the voice of the Lord and keep all his commandments that I command you today.” (Deuteronomy 30:1-8)
The Holocaust in many ways paved the way for the return of the Jewish people to the land of their forefathers after an exile of 2000 years. The rebirth of Israel is a prophetic sign, much like the existence of the Jewish people in the first place. The world’s increasing hostility to God can be seen in rejection of His people, and rejection of His handiwork of restoration.
But there’s more to come. Just imagine the moment when Yeshua comes back in glory, when all Israel looks upon the One they have pierced and are saved, and when God vindicates His people in front of the watching world:
“My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes. They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children’s children shall dwell there forever, and David my servant shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them.
And I will set them in their land and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.” (Ezekiel 37:24-28)
Picture by Benny Rotlevy on Unsplash
