Nourish Your Biblical Roots

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
On today's podcast, we're going to talk about Jomha sho Ah,
Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day. Every year, we remember the six
million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, but as
the years go by, it's becoming more and more important
that we also remember the lessons that we can learn
from that dark time in history. So on this episode,
we're going to look at two lessons from the Holocaust

(00:33):
that can give us some encouragement and guidance during these
very difficult times, and we'll discover what each one of
us can do to take the lessons of the past
and create a better future. Now, you may be familiar
with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which has been observed
on January twenty seventh since two thousand and five, but

(00:53):
Israel instituted this national day of remembrance back in nineteen
fifty one. They chose the twenty seventh day of the
Hebrew month of Nissan so that the day would always
fall out about one week after Passover and one week
before yomhatsma Ut, which is Israel's Independence Day. This year,

(01:13):
like every year, it will be a somber day in Israel.
Cafes and theaters will be closed and only Holocaust related
programs will be on television and radio. At ten o'clock
in the morning, a two minute siren will sound across
the country and everyone everywhere will stop whatever they are doing.

(01:35):
The entire country, with the siren blasting in the background,
will stop, will pause. Cars will pull over to the
side of the road or stop in the middle of
busy highways, and we will hold a nationwide two minutes
of silence in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
It's really incredible to see an experience. For me and

(01:59):
my family, Yomhashoa is deeply personal. My grandfather on my
mother's side was a Holocaust survivor, and most of his
extended family was wiped out by the Nazis. I grew
up hearing his stories and wondering how many cousins I
might have had if that part of my family hadn't
been destroyed. And my father in law was a Holocaust

(02:20):
survivor too. His experience shaped his life and of course
deeply influenced my husband's life as well. My children are
growing up in the light of the rebirth of the
State of Israel. Praise God, but we can't deny that
we are also living in the shadow of the Holocaust
and Yom hahasho'a. We recognize that the times we live

(02:43):
in are aharemote are after the death of so many
of our people. God is speaking to us today, after
the tragic death of so many Jews. He has important
lessons for us that we need to learn. Jewish approach
to tragedy has never been to ask why why such

(03:04):
a thing happened, or why God let it happen. Those
are questions that we will never be able to answer. Instead,
we ask the question what what can we learn from
the past and what can we do better now and
in the future. There are so many lessons that we
can take from the Holocaust, But today I want to
focus on the two lessons that speak most to my

(03:26):
heart right now in the context of everything going on
in our world today, and I think they're going to
resonate with you as well. The first lesson, one that
I'm thinking about a lot these days, is the value
of every single life and the importance of saving even
just one life. There's a famous Jewish saying, he who

(03:48):
saves one life saves an entire world. Have you ever
heard that It was made famous by the movie Schindler's List,
a movie about Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved
over one thousand, one hundred Jews by buying them as
workers for his factory. There's a dramatic scene at the

(04:09):
end of the movie when Schindler is forced to flee
because the Nazis are after him, but just before he leaves,
his Jewish workers present him with a gift, a gold
ring made from the gold teeth of a few grateful
Jews with the words from the Talmud inscribed on it.
He who saves one life saves an entire world. Schindler

(04:31):
looks around at the people he saved, and he says, regretfully,
I could have done more. The workers try to console him,
and they say, you have done so much, but Schindler says,
I wasted so much money, meaning the money he's spent
on fancy cars and luxuries could have been spent saving

(04:53):
more lives. The Jewish workers say back to him, one thousand,
one hundred hundred people are alive because of you. Generations
will be born because of you. Oscar Schindler had a
moment of clarity. He realized how meaningless the things he

(05:14):
bought were compared to the value of the lives he
could have saved. And I think that's one important lesson
that we can learn from him, that saving lives should
be a priority to all of us. But we can
also learn a lesson from what his Jewish worker said
to him, that even if we save or help to
save only one life, it's as though we saved an

(05:38):
entire world. Of course, we want to save everyone. We
should never underestimate the importance and impact of saving even
just one life. Let me tell you the context of
this teaching from the Talmud. It appears in a discussion
about why God started the world with just one person
when he could have just as easily created did twenty

(06:00):
people or twenty million people. The Talmud explains that God
began the world with just Adam, just one person, in
order to teach us that the whole world came from
one person. Therefore, to kill one person is to kill
an entire world, and on the contrary, to save one

(06:22):
life is to save an entire world. A few years ago,
I saw an amazing photo that went viral on the
Internet that really demonstrated this idea powerfully It was a
photo of a woman named Shoshana Ovitz on her one
hundred and fourth birthday. Shoshana was a survivor of Auschwitz,
one of the worst Nazi concentration camps. For her birthday,

(06:44):
she requested that all of her descendants, her four children,
her grandchildren, and her great grandchildren join her at the
Western Wall in Jerusalem. The photo that went viral was
Shoshana on her descendants and from the Western Wall. Because
there were over four hundred of them, it was a

(07:05):
testimony to the triumph of the Jewish people over the Nazis.
But it also demonstrated the truth that if we save someone,
we aren't just saving one person, we are saving future generations,
hundreds thousands of them. Over the last few decades, there

(07:26):
have been many reunions between righteous gentiles, those who risked
their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, and the
people that they saved. And what makes these reunions so
powerful is that most of the time, the Holocaust survivors
bring their children and grandchildren and even great grandchildren with them.

(07:46):
I can't even imagine the emotions of those righteous men
and women when they see with their own eyes, how
they didn't just save one or two people. They saved
a world of people and one more thing. Even if
one person's life was saved and that person never had
any children or grandchildren, like so many of the Holocaust

(08:08):
survivors that the Fellowship takes care of today. To God,
each person is an entire world. To God, they are
as valuable as an entire world, and that's why they
should be that valuable to us too. We need to
take this lesson and apply it to our lives today.
We need to make saving lives a priority. We need

(08:32):
to stretch further and open up our hearts wider to
do whatever is in our power to help save lives.
And at that same time, we can also take real
deep comfort in knowing that while we can't save everybody,
although I really wish we could, and sometimes I stay
up all night hoping that I could, every person that

(08:55):
we are able to save is a whole world. I'm
so grateful that the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews
has been able to save thousands of lives, and it's
only possible because of our dedicated staff and very generous
supporters who value every single life. We've moved mountains to

(09:17):
save lives and sometimes just to save one life. The
second lesson from the Holocaust that's on my heart today
is the power of just one person to have a
huge impact on the world. There are so many stories
from the Holocaust about individuals who are able to save
many lives in spite of the difficulties and the threats

(09:39):
to their own lives. They were the light inside of
the darkness. I'm going to share just one of those
stories with you, but if you want to read about
more heroes of the Holocaust, I invite you to check
out the Fellowship's website, where we tell stories of brave
men and women. They are so inspiring. The story that

(10:00):
I want to tell you now is about a man
named Nicholas Winton. In December of nineteen thirty eight, Nicholas
was just a young stockbroker in London. He was about
to go on a skiing vacation when a friend asked
him to come to Czechoslovakia to help out with what
he called an interesting project. Nicholas canceled his vacation and

(10:20):
went to Prague, where his friend showed him what was
happening to Jews there. By that time, the Jews had
already been forced out of their homes. They were living
in terrible conditions in refugee camps, and it was clear
that things were about to get a lot worse. So
Nicholas decided that he had to help in whatever way
he could. He realized that it would be impossible to get

(10:41):
the Jewish adults to safety, but that maybe he could
find a way to smuggle out the Jewish children. He
rented a room in a hotel to serve as a
makeshift office, and he spoke to hundreds of parents who
were desperate to give him their children, who they knew,
with out him, would probably die. Nicholas was the best

(11:04):
chance that at least their children would survive whatever was coming,
even if the parents would be killed. Nicholas returned to
London and he immediately got to work. He had no
experience that made him qualified to rescue anyone, but he
was determined to make it happen. Eventually, he came up
with a plan that involved a cover story and forged papers,

(11:26):
and he lined up families in London to take in
every Jewish child. It was a risky, dangerous mission, but
ultimately Nicholas went and rescued six hundred and sixty nine
children from almost certain death. No one knew about Nicholas's
heroism and bravery, not even his family until nineteen eighty

(11:49):
eight when his wife stumbled upon a notebook in their
addict and you know it was inside that notebook the
names and photos of hundreds of children. That discovery led
to a series of events, and eventually the notebook ended
up in the hands of BBC. They invited Nicholas to
be on a TV show called That's Life to be

(12:11):
recognized for his amazing work. But what he didn't know
was that VBC had tracked down hundreds of those children
from the notebook, the children that Nicholas had saved, and
many of them would be sitting in the studio audience
all around him. In a very dramatic and emotional moment,

(12:35):
the show's host asked anyone sitting in the audience who
owed their life to Nicholas Winton to please rise, and
all around Nicholas people stood up. Nicholas looked his right,
he looked to his left, and he saw dozens of
people standing and looking at him with tears in their eyes,

(13:00):
and he started to cry too. There in front of
his eyes, all around him were the grown up children
that he had saved. All around him, he saw people
who were alive because of what he had done fifty
years earlier. Later on, someone asked Nicholas why he did

(13:21):
what he did when everyone else did nothing at all.
He answered that his motto has always been, if something
is not impossible, then there must be a way to
do it. While most people during that time period threw
up their hands and said, I'm only one person, what
can I possibly do? Nicholas said, if it's possible, I'll

(13:44):
find a way, And because of that, thousands of people
descended from the six hundred and sixty nine children that
he saved. Our life today, when we look at what
people like Nicholas Winton, Asker, Shindler, or any other individual
who managed to save many lives or do other amazing things,

(14:08):
it's easy to think that we could never do what
they did. But the truth is that we could never
know as long as we haven't tried. Ultimately, our ability
to make a big difference in the world doesn't come
from the strength of our abilities or our influence. Our
power comes from the strength of our yes, our willingness

(14:30):
to do our best to help others, our willingness to
say yes to God when he calls upon us to
do something, or when he shows us a problem and
asks us to help solve it. Every one of us
can do amazing things if we're willing to try. Whether
you are an esther in a position of influence or

(14:52):
David with nothing more than a slingshot in the face
of a giant, we are willing to do what we
can in the name of God. We can make a
huge difference in the world. Sometimes the smallest actions just
by one person have huge ripple effects that can change
the world for generations for the better. And sometimes great

(15:15):
things happen when one person joins another person, and another
and another, so that the power of each individual combines
to create an incredibly powerful force for the good. I
see this power every day in the amazing work of
the Fellowship. It didn't exist during the Holocaust. The Jewish
people didn't have Christian friends from around the world who

(15:37):
came together to join forces to save lives. But thank God,
now we do, and we're seeing firsthand how that is
making a massive difference today. In the last two months alone,
we have saved thousands of Jews who have had a
flea Ukraine, and we provided life saving aid to those

(16:00):
stuck in Ukraine while bombs were falling all around them.
Many of them are even Holocaust survivors who we've helped.
Having such a large impact is a group effort. We
can't do it alone, but it all comes down to
the power of each individual, the power of one person

(16:20):
committed to saving lives. The Holocaust brought about the greatest
amount of death that the world has ever seen, but
we can look back on it and learn about the
value of life. Like Oscar Schindler, we can recognize the
value of each and every life. We can make saving
lives of priority into our part to ensure the safety

(16:42):
and well being of all of God's children. And we
can extend our value of human life to how we
treat all people, treating every person with dignity, care, kindness
that every single person deserves. And like Nicholas Winton, we
can recognize our ability to do more than we might
think we are capable of doing to help people in need.

(17:05):
Instead of throwing up our hands and thinking there is
nothing we can do, we need to set up our
hands to work at what we can do. And I
believe that with God's help we can accomplish more than
we ever thought was possible. My father Rabbeichail Ekstein of
Blessed Memory always said that memory without action is meaningless.

(17:31):
It's not enough to say never forget. We need to
follow that up with meaningful actions. So let's learn from
the past and let's let it influence our lives today.
Let's value every life and extend ourselves to help those
in need. There's no better tribute to the six million

(17:54):
who died in the Holocaust. May our lives honor them,
and may their memory be a blessing. Deuterotomy thirty nineteen
tells us to choose life. We can fulfill this directive
by saving lives, by valuing life, and by doing all
we can to preserve life. This week, let's help people

(18:18):
whose physical lives or emotional wellbeing are at risk. How
might you help just one person in need? How might
you help people in danger around the world? Can you
partner with a charity? Is there something that you can
do on your own? You may be just one person,
but it is in you you have the power to

(18:41):
help save another person, and by doing that you will
have saved an entire world. Chevueteau of my friends have
a wonderful week from here in the Holy Land. Thank
you for listening to the Nourish Your Biblical Roots podcast.

(19:01):
If you like what you have heard, visit me at
my biblicalroots dot org for more of my teachings, videos,
blogs and books. You can also follow me on Instagram
at Yell underscore Xtein or on Facebook at Ya l Xtein.
Chalom and see you next week.