A Good News Story

Life goes on in America. Good things happen. On July 9th, The American Spectator posted an article about a wedding the author of the article had recently attended.

The article provides some biographical information on the rabbi who was officiating at the wedding:

After the war (WWII), Coughlin (Father Coughlin who hosted a popular radio show blaming Jews for much of the evil in the world) was off the air and America opened its gates to thousands of survivors. America also became a powerful champion of the cause for honoring the mandate given by Britain to allow Jews to have a homeland again in the land promised their ancestors by God millennia before. President Harry Truman made sure that within minutes of Israel’s declaration of independence, America offered it recognition.

Among those let in during the post-war years was a young man from Czechoslovakia who had lost most of his family. As a teenager, he had been swept into Auschwitz, which he survived until the camp was closed. Eventually, he was forced to walk on a death march. In an abnormally cold winter, the lightly clad prisoners had to walk hundreds of miles westward into German territory away from the advancing Russian troops. He miraculously survived and was liberated. Without family in Europe, he came first to Canada and then to the U.S.

Here in America, he was taken under the sheltering wings of a great rabbi who took close care of him, taking a deep personal interest in his life. He supervised a program of studies that led the young survivor to the highest achievements in the literary and oral traditions of rabbinic law and theology and he also guided him through a doctoral program at New York University. He went on to become a community leader, a teacher, and a brilliant translator while raising a family in which all the children became community leaders themselves.

It was that one-time inmate in a death camp who was the officiating rabbi at the wedding that I went to last week. The groom was his grandson. The occasion was joyous and happy.

The article notes:

American men and women sacrificed themselves to beat the Nazi evil and paid a steep price in blood and suffering. We agonize over our mistakes, yet we have turned again and again to correct our own wrongs and have given of ourselves to stop rampant evil, time and again.

Just as it took proof to understand that such an evil as the Holocaust could be real, so it takes vision to understand how great a good is possible.

American has been a force for good in the world. Those who criticize America for its involvement in slavery need to understand that slavery was part of the acceptable social structure of the time. I wonder if our descendants will view abortion the same way we view slavery.