Living Judaism by Wayne D. Dosick

Author:Wayne D. Dosick [RABBI WAYNE DOSICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061748530
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

THE MAGNITUDE

How shall we begin to speak of 6 million people—among them one and a half million innocent children—brutally but purposefully murdered, snuffed out forever—they and their generations yet unborn?

Six million anything is a hard number to grasp, much less 6 million living, breathing human beings.

How many is 6 million? How do we count to 6 million? How can we comprehend 6 million deaths? Here’s how one teacher tried to help her class understand: At the beginning of the school year, a teacher announced a contest. The class that brought in the most soda and beer bottlecaps by the end of the year would win a prize.

All through the year, the students collected bottlecaps from their parents, their grandparents, their neighbors, their friends. Each week, the students brought bags filled with bottlecaps to the school. The teacher took the bags and stored them in a closet.

Near the end of the school year, the teacher brought all the bags to the school auditorium, and spilled out the bottlecaps on the floor.

For hours and hours, the students counted and counted.

At the end of the counting, the students learned that over the course of the whole year, collecting bottlecaps from everyone they knew, competing with each other to bring in the most caps, they had collected a few more than 200,000 bottlecaps.

The students understood. With their combined and enthusiastic effort, they had collected a mere 200,000 bottlecaps. That’s not even a quarter of a million; not anywhere close to a half a million; very, very far away from 1 million; and incredibly far, far away from 6 million.

And these were bottlecaps—pieces of metal and cork, not human beings of flesh and blood, human beings who were husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. These were bottlecaps; not human beings who could think and love and laugh.

The enormity of the number 6 million, and the overwhelming sense of pain and loss, became just a little more real to those collecting children, and now, perhaps, to each one of us.

The teacher’s little game may be silly, even inane, in trying to understand something so serious as the death of 6 million in the horrors of Hitler’s hell.

Yet, consider this: In a little more than five years, kill every man, woman, and child in Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, the District of Columbia, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Rhode Island, and you kill just over 6 million people. It would take the deaths of the entire population of eight states and the nation’s capital to equal the number of Jews systematically murdered in the Holocaust.

The death of 6 million Jews, 6 million human beings, is almost too implausible to imagine, too inconceivable to fathom. Yet die they did.

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