To be Jewish is to assume the burden of the past, to include it in our concerns for the present and for the future. If events in the Mideast have any meaning, it is as a reminder of the need to remember. The peace between Israel and Egypt strikes us as miraculous not only because of Sedate and Begin, but because of Moses. As we recite the Haggadah, which retells the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt, we have the strange feeling that, once again, we are living in Biblical times. Sometimes the sheer speed of events makes us reel.
History advances at a dizzying pace.
Man has conquered space, but not his own heart. Witness the wars that rage all over the globe, the acts of terror that strike down the innocent, the children who are dying of hunger and disease in Africa and Asia every day. And so I return to the last holiday I celebrated at home with my family in my small town tucked away in the Carpathian Mountains. By then, the region was infested with Germans. In Budapest, they were already planning the deportation and liquidation of our communities, only we did not know it.