Oh yeahhhhhhh!!!!

Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?

(In 1940, refugees fled Paris in anticipation of the German invasion. Credit FPG/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images).

WHEN representatives from the United States and other countries gathered in Evian, France, in 1938 to discuss the Jewish refugee crisis caused by the Nazis, they exuded sympathy for Jews — and excuses about why they couldn’t admit them. Unto the breach stepped a 33-year-old woman from Massachusetts named Martha Sharp.

With steely nerve, she led one anti-Nazi journalist through police checkpoints in Nazi-occupied Prague to safety by pretending that he was her husband.

Another time, she smuggled prominent Jewish opponents of Nazism, including a leading surgeon and two journalists, by train through Germany, by pretending that they were her household workers.

“If the Gestapo should charge us with assisting the refugees to escape, prison would be a light sentence,” she later wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Torture and death were the usual punishments.”

Sharp was in Europe because the Unitarian Church had asked her and her husband, Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, if they would assist Jewish refugees. Seventeen others had refused the mission, but the Sharps agreed — and left their two small children behind in Wellesley, Mass.

Their story is told in a timely and powerful new Ken Burns documentary, “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War.” The documentary will air on PBS on Tuesday evening — just as world leaders conclude two days of meetings in New York City about today’s global refugee crisis, an echo of the one in the late 1930s.

“There are parallels,” notes Artemis Joukowsky, a grandson of the Sharps who conceived of the film and worked on it with Burns. “The vitriol in public speech, the xenophobia, the accusing of Muslims of all of our problems — these are similar to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and ’40s.”

The Sharps’ story is a reminder that in the last great refugee crisis, in the 1930s and ’40s, the United States denied visas to most Jews. We feared the economic burden and worried that their ranks might include spies. It was the Nazis who committed genocide, but the U.S. and other countries also bear moral responsibility for refusing to help desperate people.

That’s a thought world leaders should reflect on as they gather in New York to discuss today’s refugee crisis — and they might find inspiration from those like the Sharps who saw the humanity in refugees and are today honored because of it.

Take Poland, where some Poles responded to Nazi occupation by murdering Jews, while the Polish resistance (including, I’m proud to say, my father’s family) fought back and tried to wake the world’s conscience. One Pole, Witold Pilecki, sneaked into Auschwitz to gather intelligence and alert the world to what was happening.

(Martha Sharp, who helped smuggle Jews out of danger from the Nazis, presented a trainload of powdered milk to the mayor of Pau, France, in 1940. Credit Sharp Family Archives).

Likewise, a Polish farmer named Jozef Ulma and his wife, Wiktoria, sheltered desperate members of two Jewish families in their house. The Ulmas had six small children and every reason to be cautious, but they instead showed compassion.

Someone reported them, and the Gestapo raided the Ulmas’ farmhouse. The Nazis first shot the Jews dead, and then took retribution by executing not just Jozef and Wiktoria (who was seven months pregnant) but also all their children. The entire family was massacred.

Another great hero was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul general in France as the war began.

Portugal issued strict instructions to its diplomats to reject most visa requests from Jews, but Sousa Mendes violated those orders. “I would rather stand with The Lord and against man,” he said, “than with man and against The Lord.”

By some estimates, he issued visas for 30,000 refugees.

Furious at the insubordination, Portugal’s dictator recalled Sousa Mendes and put him on trial for violating orders. Sousa Mendes was convicted and his entire family was blacklisted, so almost all his children were forced to emigrate. Sousa Mendes survived by eating at soup kitchens and selling family furniture; he died in 1954 in poverty, debt and disgrace.

“The family was destroyed,” notes Olivia Mattis, president of a foundation set up in 2010 to honor Sousa Mendes, who saved her father’s family.

As today’s leaders gather for their summit sessions, they should remember that history eventually sides with those who help refugees, not with those who vilify them.

Without greater political will, this week’s meetings may be remembered as no better than the 1938 Evian Conference, and history will be unforgiving.

“We must think of Sousa Mendes’s heroism in today’s context,” Jorge Helft, a Holocaust survivor who as a French boy received one of Sousa Mendes’s visas, told me. “I have dinners in Paris where people start saying we have to kick all these people out, there are dangerous people among them.” He paused and added, “I remember being on a ship to New York and hearing that some Americans didn’t want to let us in because there were Nazi spies among us.

“Yes, there might have been Nazi spies, but a tiny minority,” he said, just as there might be spies among Syrian refugees today, but again a tiny minority. “Ninety-five percent or more of these people are decent, and they are fleeing from death. So let’s not forget them.” (Nicholas Kristof SEPT. 2016).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/would-you-hide-a-jew-from-the-nazis.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

It is standard information in all the big Dictionaries and Encyclopedias that Judaism, based on its Scriptures, believed God to be a single Person, a single undifferentiated Self. That is what I and many others call unitary monotheism or uni-personal monotheism. Often referred to as strict monotheism, although I see this last phrase could be ambiguous.

The Bible is turned into chaos if one superimposes philosophical language on to its simple realism. God is said to be a single Self (nephesh, He calls Himself a nephesh) thousands and thousands of times. This is the massive, pervasive and obvious evidence to be dealt with.

The Shema and Scripture convinced Judaism always to believe in unitary monotheism. Thus at Oxford, the Regis Prof lecturing on the Trinity said “Judaism was always unitarian.”

The major point to be taken in is that Yeshua (the real name of Jesus) affirmed that unitary monotheism of Judaism. The Jew who agreed with Jesus showed that Yeshua was entirely Jewish in his description of who God is: One single self.

The Jew echoed back Yeshua words by saying “there is no other except HIM.” It takes no special learning to know that He is one WHO! One Self. What good is a creed if it is so unclear? It really impugns the integrity of Holy Scripture (and Jesus said that “salvation is from the Jews”) if we are unable to give a clear meaning to the Shema.

I need only quote three sources which are echoed by many:

Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Judaism): “Abraham, Moses and Elijah were all equally zealous monotheists and in none of their successors was there any retrogression from the highest and purest form of unitarian belief.”

Leonard Hodgson D. D., Regius Professor at Oxford:

Christian Faith and Practice, 1952, p. 74: “The monotheism of the Jews was then, as it is still, unitarian.”

The Jewish Encyclopedia, “Deism”, 1906: “Judaism has always been rigorously Unitarian.”

Emil Brunner, Dogmatic, vol. 1, p 205: “Judaism [is] Unitarian.”

Yeshua agreed with the Jews in Mark 12:29, and as Dr. Dennis Nineham says in his commentary on Mark, this passage is meant to demonstrate that Yeshua was thoroughly orthodox in his description of God.

These non-complicated facts should settle our discussion, since we are all agreed that our Christian task is to follow the teaching of Yeshua.

What Yeshua did so brilliantly, anticipating no doubt controversy about his own status in relation to the One GOD, YHVH, was to teach them about Ps. 110:1. That Psalm, vv. 1-4, is alluded to or cited 33 times in the NT and was decisive and should be decisive for us too. In the Psalm YHVH is still one single SELF (as 7,000 times in the OT). YHVH directs an oracle to some other SELF. This of course defeats Modalism, and Modalism shows how terribly mired in controversy our subject can become!

Surely one does not need a PHD to tell us that a Father cannot be his own Son! Yeshua never imagined such a thing.

What Yeshua shows in Ps 110:1 is that the exalted He is not a second YHWH or a second Person “in YHWH.” Rather he is the supremely exalted MAN Messiah, my lord, tragically mis-rendered in many versions (not all) as “my Lord”! Paul said it all very easily in 1 Tim 2:5!

“One God and one Man Messiah.” Two individuals, one of them is GOD.

The issues we are discussing are simply huge, since billions of human beings deserve to hear who HYWH and Yeshua really are. At present the very complex philosophical Trinity smothers good information. And few seem to know that the church fathers, the orchestrators of the Trinity, admitted that they were deliberately eliminating the “Jewish error”! That “Jewish error” was in fact that teaching of Yeshua.

How much does the public know of what really went on?

(Anthony F. Buzzard).