Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Kaddish

Simon Wiesenthal, one of the most incredible people to share the earth in my lifetime, is no longer sharing the earth. Nearly 90 members of his own family were killed in that dark night of the human soul known as the Holocaust, and Wiesenthal himself just barely survived. After the war, after the trials, when the world wanted to move on and forget, Wiesenthal persisted in his mission to bring the fugitive Nazis to justice. Ultimately, he helped bring 1,100 former Nazis to trial, including Adolph Eichmann, who had long been considered dead. Wiesenthal was controversial for a number of reasons; Mossad members felt that he got too much publicity for their work, many writers in the 50s and 60s felt that persecuting ex-Nazis was unnecessary. But, finally, I think that he was one of the few believers in the idea that the world has a natural order of right and wrong, which can be upset, and that sometimes we ourselves have to set it back to right.

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