I think that the absence of God can be really beautiful. It means it's our responsibility to take care of each other on this earth. And everything courageous and beautiful that we do is on us. And so I see my atheism very much as an act of optimism, that it is our job to make this world as good of a place as possible for as many people as possible.
-- Vanessa Zoltan, in an interview with NPR. Zoltan is a humanist chaplain who describes herself as an atheist chaplain. She is the chaplain at UnityPoint Health – Meriter, a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. Martin says that the religion she was raised in, the theology she was raised in, was the Holocaust. All four of her grandparents were Auschwitz survivors and her parents were born right after World War II.
"..every law I was taught, as to how to walk through the world, was through the orientation of the Holocaust." She calls it the "theology of the Holocaust." She says in the interview that, because of this theology, taught through her family's experience, that her family had certain core values they lived by: that you always get involved if you see anything going on with your neighbors. That you question bureaucracy before you follow it. And you look at friends and neighbors and wonder whether or not they would hide you if you ever needed to be hidden.
I LOVE her statement about the absence of God being beautiful. Because it is. I wrote back in 2015 why I love being an atheist, so I won't repeat myself but, yeah, I still love being an atheist, and I'm not using the word love lightly.
Her statement about the Holocaust being her theology really struck me. I am not Jewish. I have no Jewish ancestry. I would never assume anything about my experience is anything like hers or her families. But there's no denying that learning about Holocaust when I was a teenager played a MASSIVE role in my finally embracing not just my atheism, but my humanism. It was not Christianity that taught me of the utterly vital importance of believing in the equal and inherent dignity of all humans. It was not Christianity that emphasized the vital importance, the essential nature, of a concern for all humans and a belief that we must look out for our neighbors. It was the Holocaust.
I grew up in rural Kentucky, in an overwhelmingly evangelical Christian area. I grew up being told repeatedly that Jesus was a Jew, but I wasn't entire sure what that was. My first Jewish experience was probably when I read the play The Diary of Anne Frank in junior high school - and it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was immediately horrified and terrified. I could not understand why I had never heard of the Holocaust. I thought not only what I would do in hiding but how I would or could hide someone. I understood, for the first time, that your own country and neighbors could turn on you. I have no idea how many times I read that play outside of school hours and then, in high school, it was not only again something we read in an English class, it was not only the play we did my junior year of high school (I was Miep), but it was the prelude to an entire semester where we studied the Holocaust in my Kentucky pubic high school.
Yes, the only high school in a county in Kentucky, in the early 1980s, made every student, no matter what academic track they were on, study the Holocaust. The films we watched were tied to our English classes instead of history classes, because not every student had a history class, but every student had an English class. We watched at least two documentaries, including one I saw again, decades later, when I visited Dachau. We watched Playing for Time in class. Sophie's Choice came on one of the movie channels my parents subscribed to and I watched it, alone. At university, still in Kentucky, I attended a talk by Alfons Heck, who at one time was the highest ranking Hitler youth, at the end of World War II, and and Jewish Holocaust survivor Helen Waterford. They visited more than 150 universities over nine years, urging us to avoid Hitler-type brainwashing. I took the message to deeply to heart. It's dominated my thinking ever since. (I highly recommend you read Heck's book, A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika).
I've never stopped thinking about the Shoah. And its framed my outlook on the world ever since. I've never stopped thinking about how I would flee nor how I would help someone hide and flee. I have taken to heart what I read once: "Do you wonder what you would have done in Germany in the 1930s? You're doing it now."
The Holocaust, and all genocides that I've studied, have changed how I view the enslavement and oppression black Americans - and in understanding what the underground railroad really did, what that work really entailed, and the risk the participants were really taking. What would you have done in the 1850s and 1860s in the USA? You're doing it now.
My studies of the Holocaust has made me go down many a rabbit hole in trying to learn what happened to neighbors and communities that lead to the purges in Cambodia and the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. I am appalled at the murders of the Rohingya in Burma and the denial of it by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, someone once celebrated as a champion of human rights - how does that happen? The Holocaust makes me see the demonization of immigrants world wide, not just the USA, the rise in nationalism in so many countries, not only the USA, requiring people to not question nor criticize their governments, the celebration and election of people who are Nazi-adjacent and Nazi-friendly in my own country as well as in others, and the massive rise in anti-Semitism globally, including in my own country, and it has me horrified and terrified.
But I also come back to my humanity. My humanism. In all those horrors, I do read hope, like the Muslims who hid Christian Tutsis from death squads and murderous mobs. Or I see it for myself, when I went to a local mosque in the county where I live, for a meeting to show support for Muslims in the face of comments and actions by the then President of the USA, and there were members of a Jewish congregation there, and one of them standing up to say, "We will encircle this mosque if we have to. They will have to get through us to ever get to you."
What would I have done in Germany in the 1930s? I like to think I'm doing it now. But I know I come up short. I could do more. I should do more. I write my elected officials and I show up at their pubic town halls. I use my privilege to ask tough questions of the police in public forums. I don't push my views on everyone - but I also don't hide them, and it's cost me friends, friendly relations with some neighbors and regular visits with much of my family. And those are real costs, costs I sometimes mourn. But not worth betraying my humanism.
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