Barack and Elie’s Prescient Adventure
Radbam June 9th, 2009
It’s an incredibly powerful brace of travels within one journey. In 1998, the year of Israel’s 50th birthday, I escorted a group of high school students on the March of the Living. The March spans two weeks of visits, first to European concentration camps followed by a week in Israel. The exquisite poignancy of this teen tramping through Auschwitz/Birkenau just a few short days before standing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street for the 50th indelibly etched my soul.
The structure and timing of the trip is deliberate. How better to endure the despair of a face-to-face encounter with the Shoah than to counter it with a celebration of the Jewish people’s continuing triumph over oppression in its reconstituted homeland. The balanced message of the March came to mind as I watched Obama’s traverse of the Middle East and Mitteleuropa last week.
Obama’s journey was a March in reverse, yet it conveyed its own meaningful symmetry. The President spoke in the heart of the current Muslim world at an academic institution that reflected Islam’s more scholarly past. What he said and didn’t say is fodder for critique and condemnation from the right and the left. But the power and promise of his appearance lay more in its symbolic significance than messaging. The recent election of the pro-America slate in Lebanon, and the increasing likelihood of a victory for moderate Iranians in the upcoming presidential election are due, in part, to evolving perceptions of America in the Muslim world—perceptions based, largely and literally, on the new face of America’s leader.
Obama’s timely trek reached a subsequent peak moment at the Birkenau camp. There, inspired by Elie Wiesel’s eyewitness testimony, Obama personalized the overwhelming magnitude of the Shoah by sharing memories of his grandfather’s account as a camp liberator. The critical point came with Wiesel’s words. There was expected eloquence and evocation. But the Nobel-laureate included a few choice words, deliberate in their placement, which rang out from that memorial to the blood-soaked sands and hate-infused hearts of the Middle East. Wiesel prophesied, “All war is absurd and meaningless.”
This was not a philosophical treatise or a political-science postulate. It was not open to debate or deconstruction. It was elemental, indisputable and all-encompassing. From the hole in Europe’s heart, where the rationalizations of war-craft and realpolitik rendered millions to smoke and ash, Wiesel called to conscience those who “constructively engage” tyranny, relegate decisions for discretionary war to abstractions, and justify the murder of millions as “collateral damage.” This inverse March of the Living spoke powerfully to our current moment and current need with its lesson not of redemption after loss, but of future horror averted through hearkened memory.
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