Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Pottstown

Moral courage and Resistance

Rev. Paul D. Daniel

 

Yom Ha’Shoah or as some refer to it as

 

 Holocaust Remembrance Day, was memorialized this past April 23^rd.

 

Jewish communities prefer not to call

 

the dreadful events of the 1930’s and 40’s the Holocaust,

 

because of that word’s original meaning was of a burnt offering made to God.

 

Jews and others know there was no sacred offering.

 

Rather, the lives of six million Jews (and many others) were murdered

 

and if there was an offering it was to

 

the evil idea of racial purification, not to God.

 

The Hebrew term, Yom Ha’ Shoah  means day of the destruction, or day of the catastrophe.

 

And indeed, it was a destruction and a catastrophe, marked each year.

 

So today we remember, and because

 

so many families were completely wiped out,

 

leaving no one to say Kaddish in honor of the parents after they died,

 

we will close this time of candles with an English translation of that traditional prayer.

 

I light this first candle for the Shoah, the extermination of so many Jews, gays, gypsies, the handicapped, intellectuals and artists and dissenters.

 

Some of our own UUs were included in that great destruction,

 

among whom we remember Norbert Capek, the Czech Unitarian who

 

left us the ceremony of flower communion.

 

This dreadful chapter in human history is still not over:

 

Within the last year, a Nazi prison guard

 

who is alleged to have been part of the killing of several thousand Jews

 

was ordered deported from the United States where he has been living all these years.

 

At 89, he was ruled too frail to stand trial, and

 

the disposition of the case for his deportation and trial is still under consideration.

We light our first  candle] as a symbol of the sadism and brutality committed against each other.

 

Human savagery has been endemic throughout the ages of man.

 

There have been mass exterminations throughout history

 

From Genghis Khan to the

 

Turkish slaughter of the Armenians in

 

the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century under the Turkish republic.

 

These same struggles continue in our time against, repression and brutality.

 

Resistance to these forces mandatory and never feudal.

 

Had the Jews and the rest of the world not cowered in denial

 

about the rhetoric and action of Hitler

 

millions of people would not have fallen to the forces of hatred and prejudice.

 

This very day, we are all called to

 

use truth and moral courage to resist

 

the anti-democratic fear inducing tweets that

 

uses vailed language of exclusion of minorities and the marginalized to

 

scapegoat whole groups of people as

 

the cause for all the ills of this country.

 

We ignore these events at our own peril

 

and doom ourselves to repeat the excesses of a previous hateful time.

 

One only has to look to this very day

 

in Syria, Iraq or the Ukraine to know

 

such disregard for human dignity and life itself is ubiquitous.

 

The grief of so many victims is a stain on all of humanity.

 

Such pain, death and destruction

 

have no national boundaries and too

 

many peoples across this globe and through all the ages have suffered

 

their own Yom Ha’shoah, each a day of personal destruction, despair and catastrophe.

 

Our own country has been complicit

 

in the extermination of so many, to many native people.

 

We all need to be ashamed of our duplicitous history that left between

 

20 to 100 million indigenous people murdered since white Europeans came to their lands.

 

This shaming and persecution of

 

native people has left deep scars of

 

humiliation, suffering that continue right to this very day.

 

Last February, the Trump administration has approved the

 

previously blocked Dakota/Keystone pipe line to run through sacred Indian lands

 

with the strong potential to pollute local drinking water.

 

This decision is one of greed over people.

 

Just a few short months ago, in recognition of these issues many UU

 

stood hand in hand in the cold with the tribes most negatively impacted.

 

Sadly, victory turned to defeat when

 

the government changed hand and

 

Republicans took back all of congress and the presidency.

 

History teaches us that power tends

 

to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton1837–1869).

 

In the political realm oppression and scapegoating begins at the highest levels of government.

 

We are already witnessing disturbing echo of totalitarian rule in

 

Washington with executive orders that violate the constitution,

 

administration officials who lie without flinching and violate ethics laws with ignorance or impunity.

 

The courts are attacked and the judges defamed personally on the

 

of their origins and because the

 

President does not understand or respect the strict separation of powers between our three branches of government.

 

The administration seems to be filled with those who have exhibited

 

prejudice against certain groups of Americans

 

starting with the new Attorney General tasked to impartially upholding the law.

 

When the rule of law is ignored or abridged,

 

then all our cherished rights are in danger.

 

Those with white privilege may not be first to lose their rights nor will they be spared.

I

f we were to extending what is now happening to its sinister conclusion,

 

it is not a far reach to see oppression of certain groups grow and fester into

 

outright hostility and violence like what we saw in the 1930s and 1940s.

 

Are we to have our own ethnic cleansing of brown people and

 

immigrants, and see further diminishment of people of color

 

through enhanced stop and frisk and increased mass incarceration and

 

other restrictions of basic human right under the guise of protecting the

 

public from terrorism and violence in our streets.

 

While I fully acknowledge, we have legitimate concerns in these areas we all know from history it can be

 

taken to extremes as we saw in the last century.

 

Groups can be singled out for special scrutiny and persecution if we do not

 

hold tight to and defend to our rights guaranteed in the constitution.

 

Regardless of our political views we

 

must all be vigilant that the rule of law is followed.

 

Resistance to tyranny is mandatory to save our very souls.

 

This is not a partisan issue.

 

Rather it is a time for all of us to

 

revisit our constitution and then stand up for democracy before it is too late.

 

As a Jew, I have always believed that

 

another holocaust could happen somewhere in the world

 

when good people do nothing in the face of oppression and unchecked power.

 

Those who stoke our fears to justify

 

oppression in its many forms must be

 

opposed by all people of faith and all of us who love this country.

 

As UUs, our core value is the believe in the worth and dignity of all people as part of the connected web of all existence.

 

It is our sacred duty and calling as Unitarian Universalists to

 

stand against governmental powers when used inappropriately to demean certain groups of people.

 

We UUs have a long and storied history of defending the right of

 

the oppressed and standing on the

 

side of love and justice against tyranny.

 

Now more than ever our commitment to justice calls us to resistance and action.

 

We are all called to stand up to

 

defend our freedom and speak out

 

again injustice where ever it rears its’ ugly head,

 

starting in our national and state capitals.

 

If we do nothing when we see people abused and maligned,

 

we open the door to another day of catastrophe somewhere in the world.

 

Now, I light another candle for the failures to act, and for the

 

remembrance of those times when it might have helped.

[light candle]

 

And I light another candle of hope

 

that the world community will find ways to intervene in situations where

 

religious, ethnic, economic or political tensions are threatening to

 

turn repressive and murderous.

 

May there be no more days of destruction, days of catastrophe, anywhere in the world. Never again.

 

[light candle]

 

Now in closing, Let us speak

 

the words of the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead,

 

on behalf of all those children who perished with their parents and those

 

children and young people who never had a chance to have children of their own.

 

These words are also for all who are

 

oppressed and endangered by the laws and actions that occur in every country.

 

The words are in your order of service.

 

Unison words to honor the dead:

 

Let the glory of God be extolled. Let Your great name be hallowed, in the world whose creation You willed. May Your sovereign rule soon prevail, in our own day, our own lives, and the life of all Israel, and let us say: Amen.

Let your great name be blessed forever and ever.

Let the name of the Holy Blessed One be glorified, exalted, and honored, although You are beyond all the praises, songs, and adorations that we can utter, and let us say: Amen.

For us and for all Israel (and by extension to the whole of creation), may the blessing of peace and the promise of life come true, and let us say: Amen.

May the one who makes peace in the high places, let peace descend on us, on all Israel (indeed, all the world), and let us say: Amen.