Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum:
One must confront ultimately how a country, when it vaunted its great values and its great moral traditions, spoke of itself as a country of ancient Christian culture, which was in fact the seat of the Holy Roman Empire for almost a millennium, beginning with Charlemagne--it was possible for millions of Christians to sit by as spectators while millions of human beings who were their brothers and sisters, the sons of Abraham according to the flesh, were carried out ot their death in the most brutal, inhuman, uncivilized ways. And one must confront as one of the terrible facts of the history of this period the conversation that took place between Adolph Hitler and two bishops in April, 1933, when they began raising questions about the German policy toward Jews and Hitler said to them, as reported in the book Hitlers Table Talk, that he was simply completing what Christian teaching and preaching had been saying about the Jews for the better part of 1,900 years. "You should turn away from them as from a pest and a plague of the human race," said St. John Chrysostom, and 1,500 years later thousands of his disciples implemented his teaching literally.
Some thoughts I have been wrestling with while reading this book--
Can we really ask ourselves as followers of Christ some honest questions:
- Do we really believe in the sanctity of life?
- Do we really care about all those who don't know Christ or just those we want to come to know Christ?
- Is there anything in our saved soul's that cries when someone disconnected from God has to face inhumane life conditions without knowing their ABBA father in heaven longs for them to know his love?
- Do we really want to live our the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth?
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