"Do This . . . "

Remembrance is at the heart of the Jewish faith, and considering Jesus' instructions at the Last Supper, is the core of Christian practice as well. Cultural and personal amnesia might then be our greatest bane: forgetting the big picture, forgetting what God has already accomplished.

To forget the dark side of our past is also disastrous. Santayana's quote is well known: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Our tunnel vision seems to create the illusion that we won't get into the same trouble that we've flaunted before. Like an alcoholic who justifies just one drink, our ability to pretend the past didn't happen allows us dance where the landmines are. In this light the work of Father Patrick Desbois is particularly acute. Encapsulated in a current exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, Father Desbois' pilgrimage into the Ukraine to chronicle the Nazi slaughter of the Jews reveals again what the human race is capable of.

In a recent article, Jordana Horn describes Father Desbois' endurance as he and his fellow workers with Yahad in Unum return to the Ukraine to encounter the ever expanding revelations of human atrocity. Father Desbois confirms that we are in fact our brother's keeper as he recalls the words of Genesis: "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground."

Horn presses him on the burden of the encounter:

Even so, I ask him: How can you bear to listen to a woman talk about when she was 14 years old and was forced to walk on corpses, between shootings, in order to pack them down in a mass grave? "I keep my faith in God," Father Desbois responds, "not in humanity."