Have you read the Diary of Anne Frank?  If you have, you know it is the recovered diary of a young Jewish girl who, along with her father, mother, and sister, and another family (and one more man) were hidden in an apartment during the Nazi reign of terror in World War II Europe.  Unfortunately, not too long before the war ended, everyone was betrayed, removed from their hiding place, and shipped to various concentration camps to the east.  Most of them lost their lives.  Anne's father, however, survived, and after the war returned to the Netherlands and retrieved her diary.
     I read the diary decades ago, but had occasion to think about it again when I saw a play production, The Diary of Anne Frank, recently.  Though dozens of thoughts flooded my head during the two and a half hours of the play, one to which I kept returning was the bittersweet nexus of familial love and abject terror in which everyone constantly moved.  Ensconced in love, they were also trapped in terror, unwilling to leave the one, unable to abandon the other.  They lived with a profound and unyielding tension, physical as well as spiritual, a tension which most of us may never experience, their lives as fragile as gossamer yet potent as the mightiest army to stride the earth.
     All the people had was love, love for each other, and love for their creator.  They lived in the former, they rested--and trusted--in the latter.  No doubt they were familiar with Psalm 46:10, which reads, translated from the Hebrew, "Relax, let go, and know that I am God."  In the end, this trust was all they had.  Did it let them down?  Some might say yes:  nearly all of them died.  Others will say no, for they died believing that they had lived, and would continue to live, a life larger than life itself.  Caught in a most painful tension, they set themselves free.
     As many a rabbi will say, "The eyes of God are everywhere."