Raiders of the Found Ark

I am going to try to cover more of my DC trip. I had too much to do yesterday. I had to go to church to test Grande 50/50 Italian Blend cheese (unsuccessfully), and then I had to drive a VIP to church from his hotel on the beach. After that, I served as an armorbearer at the Tuesday night service, and then we had a meeting, putting volunteers together for next week’s conference.

You could say I was busy.

Here is the verdict on Grande 50/50. It has too much of the funk of provolone, without enough of the sourness of good mozzarella. I can’t use it. Distressing.

It helped me understand how unlikely and remarkable my recipe is. The combination of cheeses I use seems to be impossible to imitate. Wonder who put the idea in my head.

Where did I leave you last time? It looks like Mike and I had attended the National Day of Prayer, and we were on our way out of the Cannon office building.

The nature of the event surprised me. It was very clear that the room was full of Bible-believing Christians. My best guess is that a big portion were charismatics. From what I hear of non-charismatic churches, I have deduced that any person who waves a hand or raises both hands during prayer or a religious speech is probably charismatic. I saw some of that at the National Day of Prayer, so my best guess is that charismatics were represented to a disproportionate degree.

The speakers did not come across as charismatic. They had a Catholic priest and a Southern Baptist congressman (Lincoln Davis, from Tennessee), and of course, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein spoke. Franklin Graham was the main speaker, and his message seemed pretty dry and works-based, leading me to figure him for a non-charismatic. Still, in the crowd, I saw hands.

If I recall correctly, speakers were allowed to pray in Jesus’s name.

I felt that many of the people in the crowd were sincere believers with personal relationships with God, and I suspected that God had drawn them to the Cannon building on this special day for a very important purpose. I suppose this may be why I ended up there. My prayer life has been going great guns.

Prayer is not a joke; it is infinitely more powerful than direct action. Elijah’s prayer prevented rain from falling in Israel for three years. Abraham’s prayer preserved two entire cities until the righteous could leave. Moses’s prayer saved the Jewish people from instant mass execution. If God drew powerful prayer warriors to Washington last week, even if there were only a few dozen of them–even if only one had shown up–it would be a very big deal for our nation.

We affirmed God’s place in America’s affairs, and we prayed that God would cause our leaders to rule in righteousness and faith. We were reminded that every Christian has an obligation to pray for his secular leaders. We prayed for God to guide America. Who knows what results the prayers will bring? I know this: God didn’t drag all of us up there to pray so he could ignore us.

After the event, Mike and I found a Five Guys, and then we made our way to the National Holocaust Memorial, to rejoin the group. I was disgusted to see Jimmy Carter’s name under an inscription by the door. All I can say is, “Remember Haman.” I’ll bet the people at the Memorial wish they could get some patching compound and fill in the letters and paint over that whole section of the wall.

Inside the building, we were taken to a special classroom. Each of us was given an “ID” booklet, with the photo of a Holocaust victim inside it, along with some information about that person’s life. My victim was a survivor. I don’t know about the others.

Archivist Stephen Mize came out and gave us a wonderful illustrated lecture about James G. McDonald, an academic and League of Nations official who tried to avert the Holocaust in the decade before World War Two. I wish I could recall all the details of the intricate “coincidence”-filled story that led to the recovery of McDonald’s voluminous diary; it’s one of those tales that has God’s fingerprints all over it.

McDonald was an American of partial German extraction. He was six feet seven inches tall, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. He spoke fluent aristocratic German, which he learned from his German mother. He looked like the very goal of Hitler’s perverted eugenics program. Oddly, he was chosen by God to meet with political and religious dignitaries all over the globe, to try to motivate them to provide the chosen with a way out of Europe.

McDonald met with the future Pope. He met with Hitler himself. Hitler sent him on a tour of Dachau, thinking McDonald would be impressed by the “medical research” the Nazis were conducting to “improve” mankind. McDonald became ill as he witnessed the atrocities. Hitler told him he would gladly release the Jews to other countries, including the United States.

That surprised me. I knew we turned Jews away, but I did not know Hitler had offered to give the entire Jewish population its freedom. If that is true, who is really to blame for the Holocaust? It’s as though Hitler were Pontius Pilate, and we refused his offer to let the innocent go free.

In negligence law, there is a doctrine called “last clear chance.” If you lie down drunk in the street, you are negligent. If I see you and somehow manage to back over you anyway, I am liable in spite of your negligence, because I had the last clear chance to prevent the harm. Similarly, it seems to me that the nations who refused to admit Jews had the last clear chance to help, and they are very nearly as guilty as Germany and Austria.

Mize said the Dominican Republic was the only nation that accepted Hitler’s offer. They admitted a hundred thousand Jews, for political reasons. The government wanted to “whiten up” the population.

As most Christians know, God has made numerous promises to bless those who are good to the Jews. Here is another familiar fact: the Dominican Republic occupies the green and relatively prosperous side of the island of Hispaniola. Haiti, where voodoo (demon worship and necromancy) is the national religion, occupies the other side. If you go to Google Earth and look at Hispaniola as seen from space, you will see that the DR looks pretty good, while Haiti is a brown and lifeless mess. The division is clear enough to permit you to identify the border fairly well just from the color change. The Dominicans may have had a bad motive when they invited the Jews, but they still did a good thing, and it appears that God noticed.

The Memorial’s staff has worked up some books on McDonald. I don’t know if they’re available yet. I think Mize said one would be coming out in a month or two. Well worth buying.

It was distressing to hear that McDonald had gotten nowhere with the Catholic Church. He went to the Vatican’s Cardinal Secretary of State–the Rahm Emanuel of the Vatican, you might say–and asked for Vatican visas to get Jews from the Saar region to safety. That was all he asked for. No money, no land, no trains, no ships. Just visas. The cardinal said he would take it up with the Pope. Nothing happened. Mize showed us a photo of him, as a cardinal, signing a 1933 agreement with the Nazis, intended to preserve Catholicism within Germany. It makes you wonder what was on his mind when he chose not to help the Saar Jews.

You can see that photograph here, on Wikipedia’s Reichskonkordat page. “Reichskonkordat” is the name of the agreement.

The Vatican eventually provided assistance, but only after McDonald promised that prominent American Jews would apply pressure to get Washington to work to protect church property in Mexico.

The lesson I took away from the lecture is that guilt for the Shoah is much more widespread than I realized.

The Memorial was moving, naturally. You can’t look at piles of decaying razors and shoes and eyeglasses or watch films of naked, emaciated corpses sliding into ditches without marveling at the permissible magnitude of the depth of human suffering. The shoes came near the end of the exibits, which are structured so you have to see them in a certain order. There were two areas filled with them, to either side of the walkway. The smell of the old leather was unavoidable. There was even a photograph of an enormous pile of human hair taken from murdered prisoners. Originally, the Memorial’s creators intended to have the actual hair on display, but survivors and their families objected. They did not want to wonder, as they looked at the pile, whether they were looking at hair taken from their own relatives.

Every time I saw a shoe or a pair of glasses or a kitchen utensil or a limp, naked body in a pile of corpses, I understood that God had an intimate knowledge of what I was seeing. He knew each body’s name, and that person’s thoughts, and their relatives and accomplishments. He knew their suffering. He knew who every item belonged to, and he knew where they were that day, whether on earth or in the afterlife. None of these people have ceased to exist. They still live, somewhere.

I remember looking at a kitchen strainer a Jew had left behind, and I knew God remembered every meal it was used to prepare. He knew who sat around the table every time, and he knew their fates. To the human eye, a pile of eyeglasses is just a pile, but to God, there is no such thing as a pile. He does not have to use that kind of cognitive shorthand. He knows every item in a pile for what it is, what it has been, and what it will be, at every instant of its existence.

I had a couple of odd experiences at the Memorial. On the way in, we were all in reasonably good spirits. We were enjoying meeting new people and talking about our time in Washington. As we entered the building and moved toward the elevators that would take us to the exhibits, however, I felt waves of grief pouring over me. I don’t think the grief originated inside me. It seemed to arise independently, with no obvious trigger. My suspicion is that what I felt was not my grief, but the grief of the Holy Spirit.

Later, I saw what proved to be the most disturbing item in the Memorial. It was a glass case full of desecrated and separated Torah scrolls. I could not believe Jews would permit it to be put on display. There are rules about the disposition of damaged scrolls. As I leaned over the edge of the case and looked at the Hebrew letters, I felt outrage rise up inside me, over the sheer profanity of the desecration and the unspeakable human pride that drove it. I felt I was looking at the very essence of sin. A symbolic depiction of the error Lucifer committed before the creation of the world, and the error Adam and Eve committed in the garden. The error of the first couple is the primary reason for war and suffering, so it makes sense to put these scrolls on display at a Holocaust memorial, which reminds humanity of the direst repercussions of rebellion, and that the repercussions may not even spare those who are most precious to God.

Here was God’s word–his undeserved, redeeming gift, which Jews traditionally revere and protect for the good of the human race–torn and scattered by the smelly paws of unlettered humans who were barely better than apes. In this parchment, I saw the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tribulation, and perhaps even the Shoah itself. I saw provocation in its most extreme and vile and culpable form. I wondered how God restrains himself.

I stared at the letters and wondered which scriptures I was looking at. I understood nothing. I did not know which books I was looking at. That was fitting. The people who destroyed these books were blind to their meaning, too. Blinder than I.

I couldn’t stay by the exhibit and look at it for very long. I felt an intense, oppressive sensation when I looked. I had to walk away and come back.

Again, I don’t think the emotion or the thoughts came from me. In my own right, I am sure I would have been more upset by the concentration camp footage.

Near the parchment, there was a desecrated ark. This is a cabinet in which a Torah scroll is stored. Only the outer frame–like a doorway–was there. There was Hebrew lettering across the top, obscured by axe marks. This was the part of the cabinet on which the Jew-hater’s rage had been focused. It is extremely unlikely that he understood the letters.

The meaning of the Hebrew was “Know before whom you stand.” It is hard to think of a greater irony.

What have the Jews been, throughout history, if not God’s ark? They are the shelter in which the Torah has been preserved, and when you oppose them in hatred, whom do you really oppose? Before whom do you stand?

To Christians, the Jewish Messiah was the living ark, and through him, by the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the sanctification of tongues, each of us becomes an ark, with God’s law written on our hearts, just as the Commandments are stored on tablets in the original Ark of the Covenant. This is part of the symbolic significance of the Ark and its contents.

It occurred to me that it was ironic that the Torah was written on the skins of sheep. Maybe that’s because observance of the law, under the old covenant, is somehow external, like letters on one’s skin, compared to the indwelling of the Spirit experienced by new-covenant believers. What animal did Jesus compare us to, over and over?

I know now that the Torah is generally written on the skins of cattle, but that makes sense to me, too. When the Word is external to you, your relationship with God can be a little like the relationship a beast of burden has with its owner. The willingness to serve is there, but the understanding and the heartfelt sense of unity may not be. I have been told that, to Jews, obedience is more important than the state of mind in which you obey. Christianity is somewhat different, to put it mildly.

That’s all I have for now.

More

I guess I have a little more. After writing that, I wondered if ancient Torah scrolls were written on cowhide or sheepskin, since sheep were much more common in the ancient world. I Googled a little. It looks like sheepskin and goatskin used to be the standard materials, so maybe I really was hearing from God when I thought about the symbolic significance of sheepskin.

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According to the Orthodox Union, “Torah scrolls and mezuzot are generally written on sheepskin parchment.”

And they also have some lamb recipes!