THOU SHALT NEVER, BUT NEVER, BE A BYSTANDER

Mary and I chanced to be in York on 27 January, which was Holocaust Memorial Day 2015, and we attended the 600 Candles service in York Minster.
In his opening address to the readings, Paul Tyack of York Univeristy concluded with the words of Yehuda Bauer, one of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars and a driving force behind the foundation of Holocaust Memorial Day:  “We are all one  human race, interconnected and interdependent.  Politics that are not based on moral considerations are, at the end of the day, not practical politics at all.  I come from a people that gave the Ten Commandments to the world.  Let us agree that we need three more, and they are these: thou shalt not be a perpetrator; thou shalt not be a victim; and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.”
Those last eight words struck a chord.  It isn’t just genocide, it’s all forms of human exploitation, violence and abuse, and of course I thought of trafficking and how easy it is to do nothing because we feel ignorant or powerless.
We CAN do something
Posted in Weekly View.