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Suffering and Sorrows

Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourself, as it were, for a little moment, until the indignation is past. For behold, the LORD comes out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; the earth will also disclose her blood, and will no more cover her slain. (Isaiah 26:20-21)

Surely no nation has suffered as have the Jews.

For days, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, centuries, decades, years, months, days, Jews have been sought out by those who have hated them, and have been killed, simply for being Jews.

Jews are hated the world over. They are hated in Moscow and in Paris and in Rome and in Athens and in Madrid and in Bratislava and in London and in Oslo and in Cape Town and in Sidney and in New York.

Most of all they are hated in their land, in the land that was meant to be their sanctuary from the hatred of the world, meant to be the place where they could grow and thrive and develop and, simply, live.

Hatred of the Jews in their homeland began long before Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount. It began long before Israel invaded Lebanon. It began long before the Yom Kippur War; long before the Six Day War; long before the War of Independence. It began long before the State of Israel was born; long before the United Nations voted to partition Palestine.

Since late in the 1800s, Jews in Eretz Israel have paid with their lives for being Jews. And those who have been left behind have wept the bitter, agonizing tears of grief as they have committed the remains of their loved ones to the soil of their cherished land.

We cannot put that grief down on paper, cannot describe what these endless numbers of Jews have been through. Perhaps, though, if we can take a close look at the way this hatred has impacted the lives of just a few, we will be able to sense in some small way the grief experienced by the Jews, and by their God.