Elul Thoughts

My brother-in-law recently discovered that one of his neighbors is a Holocaust denier. To make matters worse, he found out while he was riding in this person’s car, on a three-hour leg of a road trip. 

My wife and her brother are children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We make sure our children know about the history of the horrors committed against the Jewish people and others. We take teens to Holocaust museums every year to bear witness so the stories will never be lost. The idea that someone could deny that it happened at all feels like they are demanding that up is down, and there is no convincing them out of it. My brother-in-law was frustrated even relaying the story to us because there was no satisfying conclusion. In the end he told his neighbor that they should talk about other things.

In order to successfully argue l'shem shamayim, we must be fully informed both about what we know and about what they are learning. When someone flat out denies facts that we know are true, there is little we can do. Arming ourselves with information is the best defense against the ignorance of those swayed too far toward ignorance by misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies. While we are not responsible for the knowledge of others, we do have the ability to teach them gently when they use lies against us. And sometimes the solution is to talk about other things.