In my temple and courts, I will give them

    a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.

    I will give to them an enduring name

    that won’t be removed.

-Isaiah 56:5

 

Today is Yom HaShoah, which translates from Hebrew to English to mean “Day of the Catastrophe.” Strictly, it’s from this evening at sunset through tomorrow at sunset, according to the Jewish calendar. It’s a day of remembering the six million Jews murdered by Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, observed especially in Israel and Jewish communities around the world. 

(A note on language: many Jewish groups prefer “Shoah” to “Holocaust” because of the meanings and roots of the words: “Shoah” is Hebrew, meaning catastrophe; “Holocaust” comes from Greek and means “burnt offering,” which fails to express the depth of the tragedy. I use Shoah, but either is appropriate. Most people also include the five million Romani, LGBTQ+, disabled, and other victims of the Nazi regime in their memorials for the Holocaust. Shoah remembrance is typically exclusive to the Jewish victims.)

Six years ago, I visited Yad Vashem, the memorial museum in Jerusalem that was established for “remembering the six million Jews murdered by the German Nazis and their collaborators; commemorating the destroyed Jewish communities, the ghetto and resistance fighters; and honoring the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust,” according to their website. Photos aren’t permitted inside the museum, so I only have a few from the outside of the building. I remember the inside of the building, though. I remember cruel cartoons from centuries before the Shoah, diminishing the humanity of Jews. I remember excerpts from speeches by political and religious leaders, first subtly then blatantly blaming Jews for the woes of the nation. I remember photos of broken windows in Jewish homes and businesses. I remember a crate, the size of a coffin, full of little shoes taken from Jewish children before they were murdered. I remember the room that displayed stories of the “Righteous Among Nations,” those non-Jews who risked their lives to save the lives of their Jewish neighbors or even strangers.

There is a separate small building that serves as a memorial to the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. Each child’s name, age, and place of death are read in sequence. The recording is three months long.

It is a somber place to visit, yet it is intermingled with determination and hope and perseverance. The very name, “Yad Vashem,” comes from the verse above, and it means “a hand and a name” or “a monument and a name.” Calling the museum Yad Vashem is staking a claim, that those six million lives were lost but not forgotten; that in fact they cannot and will not be forgotten, because God remembers them. It is a beautiful and bold name. I am grateful for the afternoon I spent there.

As a Christian, and especially as a Lutheran, I know that I am viewing Yom HaShoah from the outside. My grief is different from the grief of Jewish people. That’s okay. God’s call to love our neighbors means we approach such tragedies with empathy, understanding that difference among us does not mean division between us.

If you go to Isaiah 56 and read the whole passage, you find a whole bunch of beautiful bold promises. The book of Isaiah as we currently know it was compiled from two or maybe three different sources, all voices that spoke messages from God to God’s people as they needed them. The last portion of Isaiah seems to have been delivered to the Israelites while they were under Babylonian rule, about 500 years before Jesus was born. They certainly needed to hear that God would provide enduring care for them after Jerusalem and the Temple itself had been destroyed in 587/586 BCE. 

What strikes me about the context of Isaiah 56 is that the promise of a memorial and a name “better than sons and daughters” isn’t just for Israel: it’s specifically for outsiders, too. God’s voice is clear through the prophet: foreigners and immigrants who love and serve God will be completely welcome in God’s house. God’s voice is direct: eunuchs, who had been kept away by religious law for being sexually unclean, would be incorporated fully into the life of the community, welcome in all the places everyone else had been included. The promise of Isaiah 56 upended the rules and regulations set down generations earlier that kept certain people at arm’s length from God’s grace. Now everyone would be welcome in God’s house.

I think how easy it would have been for the Israelites who heard Isaiah’s message to scoff at the idea of welcome home for others while they themselves were in desperate need of coming home themselves. I think how the Yad Vashem curators could have skipped the display of the righteous Gentiles who protected the Jews. I think how often we humans turn inward when we are afraid, closing in with those who are most like us and shutting the doors on “outsiders.”

What if we did what Isaiah 56 proclaims instead? What if the moments when we feel most alone, most threatened, most insecure, were also the moments when we practice being brave by welcoming and including those who are not the same as us? What if we learn to believe that there is room in God’s house for all of us and all of them and all the ones we haven’t even thought of yet?

Reflecting on my visit to Yad Vashem and remembering the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah, the eleven million total victims of the Nazis– it makes me all the more grateful for the ways we already work to make God’s house at RLC a welcome place and all the more determined to continue and expand that welcome. I think of the financial commitment we’ve made to send kids to camp and on youth trips regardless of their family’s ability to pay. I think of the effort and money we’ve invested in helping José and Ana and their family get asylum. I think of the welcome statement we’re proposing so we can be clear that God’s house at RLC is patterned off the one in Isaiah 56 and so many other places in scripture.

We do all this because being called children of God is the greatest gift there is. God’s children have a home. God’s children have a name. God’s children have a promise, that God will never forget them.

Sometimes, it’s God’s children who need the reminder of just how big God’s house is. When we forget, catastrophe strikes. When we remember, well, it’s like it says in Psalm 133:1: “Look at how good and pleasing it is when families live together as one!”