Opium in Israel

On her 10-day trip to Israel this summer (through Birthright) my fiance', The Lady, visited the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem along with 39 other young Jewish men and women. It was an overwhelming experience which left an incredibly strong imprint upon her. In one of the most powerful exhibits, the visitors walk across a glass floor, beneath which lie thousands of shoes from Holocaust victims. Some are the boots of grown men, some are the stylish shoes of adult women... and some are childrens' or even babies shoes. She has often described her emotional state after seeing the museum as "a wreck."

But this time in the retelling she mentioned something that she hadn't before. As she stood in the final room of the museum (more on that later), weeping and heartbroken over the evil and suffering and over the lives destroyed forever, the tour director, came to get her and bring her to the rest of the group. They were standing outside, waiting and seemingly bored. They had walked blithely through the museum and then left emotionally unaffected. They had endured another obligatory Jewish history lesson and could now get on to the more important business of drunken club-hopping.

Why the difference? How could anyone not be affected by a remembrance of the most barbaric acts committed in the 20th century? How could genocide against one's own ethnic group elicit so little response? Why did The Lady weep while the others remained stoic or even apathetic?

There is an important difference between The Lady and her 39 fellow travelers. Her compatriots were all thoroughly secular, not practicing Judaism or any faith whatsoever. She, although raised secular, is a committed Christian and Bible college graduate.

Karl Marx is often quoted as saying that "religion is an opiate of the masses." He actually said religion "is the opium of the people," and did recognize that it may serve some legitimate purpose. But he was an atheist, and the misquote--and its common interpretation--sum up a common objection to religion: that it is simply a way to make people feel better, to escape the reality of evil in the world, or to distract them from challenging the injustices they face. Given the horrendous religious hyprocrisy he witnessed as a youth, Marx's view is understandable.

But as Gary Thomas puts it, "Marx had it exactly backwards, at least as far as his words pertain to Christianity. Opium deadens the senses; Christianity makes them come alive." The Lady's peers were too sedated with casual sex, alcohol, and shallow materialism to feel the weight of what many of their ancestors suffered. Secularism had stripped them of any intellectual basis for recognizing evil or being concerned about injustice and blinded them to any reality greater than themselves. Lives filled with thoroughly selfish pursuits had deadened their hearts.

Jesus never promised a life free from suffering. Throughout Scripture, we are commanded to look beyond our lives and have compassion for others. We are told to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. We are encouraged to embrace suffering. We are told to truly love others, and in doing so we open ourselves to being hurt and suffering their own hurts. In embracing Jesus, our conscience is awakened by the Holy Spirit, and suddenly the things over which God weeps, which we could formerly ignore, now grip us emotionally. The people who were formerly a means to an end are seen as priceless creations whose every degradation by sin is an atrocious attack on their dignity and humanity. Those silver-tongued television preachers who sell a "prosperity gospel" in which God is a means to our own ends and Jesus came to make us happy and comfortable have distorted the gospel beyond recognition.

I mentioned the final room of the museum. The walls are filled with hundreds of binders, containing everything that is known about the lives of all recorded Holocaust victims. In the center is a reflecting pool. Each visitor is asked to look into the pool and not leave the museum until he or she has forgiven every one of the perpertrators of this monstrous evil. Forgiveness has been described as the most unnatural act in the world. For those such as Richard Dawkins who excuse evil as mankind merely "dancing to his genes," for the social scientists and philosophers who try to offer some sort of "good, rational explanation," or for those who see the world as under an ultimate anarchy where the only law is what the powerful can get away with, the concept of forgiveness is truly absurd. Perhaps those who strode so nonchalantly through the Holocaust Museum spent no more than seconds in the final room because they truly had nothing to forgive.

But The Ladydid have something to forgive. She not only acknowledges the reality of evil--and has a good basis for doing so--she follows Someone who commanded his followers to forgive "seventy times seven." Someone who forgave his own executioners as they crucified him despite his manifest innocence. Someone who demanded that we love our enemies, observed that "he who is forgiven little loves little, but he who is forgiven much loves much"--and then proclaimed that we were all in need of much forgiveness.

Jesus said, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." Not only abundant joy, but abudant sorrow. Not only a heart that exhuberantly celebrates what is good and loves with abandon, but that is broken over evil and compassionate to those who suffer. But for those who prefer opium, our entertainment-driven culture and atheistic philosophies offer anaesthesia for the heart and mind.