Isaiah 45: 1-25 (links validated 9/5/23)

If you Google “righteous gentiles” today, you’ll be led straight to the website of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, which keeps track of the Righteous of the Nations in its database. There are more than 28,000 names on the list now, from 51 countries—righteous gentiles who protected their Jewish neighbors at great risk during the Second World War. Oskar Schindler’s name jumps out thanks to Stephen Spielberg’s movie about him. He was a member of the Nazi party, so he was no paragon of virtue, but that was not a requirement. What mattered was that when he saw a way to prevent more than a thousand Jewish workers in his factories from being sent to concentration camps, he did it. But not everyone on the list Yad Vashem keeps is that famous. Feng Shan-Ho was the Chinese Consul-General in Vienna in 1938, when Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany and Jews needed to show visas or boat tickets to other countries to leave. Ho issued hundreds of visas to Shanghai for anyone who asked for them, over the direct orders of the Chinese ambassador to Berlin. (and others...)

One summer day in 1940 Bonhoeffer and his student Eberhard Bethge were sitting in a café on the Baltic coast when news reached them that France had surrendered to Germany. Everyone immediately rose to their feet in celebration and began singing the Nazi Party anthem known as the Horst Wessel Song. Making a good show, Bonhoeffer joined in, shooting a triumphant 'Heil Hitler' for emphasis...

("Barbara Brown Taylor refers frequently to a sort of personal darkness and loss that has more to do with John of the Cross's "dark night of the soul" than with social suffering. In reflecting on Jesus' unexpected answer to the pharisees, however, Rowan Williams's words in A Ray of Darkness seem to bring the two together: The dark night is God's attack on religion...")