Yesterday, January 27, was a day of great solemnity:  International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Yet evil is us.  We think, we make choices, we act.  And usually with little grasp of its full consequences.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.

     For some, it ends all poetry.
     Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical engage in such horror?  And why, he suggested, would a God other than one committed to the sanctity of human choice be present as such a thing happened?  Finally, he asked, why, unless Jesus really is humanity's savior, would God ever run away from such pain?
     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them. And believe:  at all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.