Open Our Hearts

I recently heard an interview with the Rabbi, Arial Burger. He shared a story about his son who was on a semester-long program in Israel and then Poland. While abroad, his son made a new friend named Mason. And when they got to Poland, Mason disappeared for a day with one of the counselors on the program.

Later, Mason told the Rabbi’s son that his grandparents were survivors. They were married three weeks before the deportation to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, of course, they were separated, and his grandmother was transferred to a rabbit farm on the outskirts of the camp. The Nazis were doing experiments on rabbits that had to do with finding a cure for typhus. And the rabbit farm was run by a Polish man who noticed, pretty early on, that the rabbits were getting better quality food and attention and care than the Jewish slave laborers. So he started to sneak in food for the Jewish slave laborers and the inmates.

At some point, Mason’s grandmother cut her arm on a piece of barbed wire, and the cut became infected. It wasn’t a serious infection if you had antibiotics. But of course, if you were a Jew in that place, there was no way you were going to get antibiotics. In what was an amazing and selfless act, this Polish man cut his own arm open, and he placed his wound on her wound so that he would get the infection that she had, and he became infected. He then went to the Nazis, and he said, “I’m one of your most productive managers. I need medicine.” When they gave him medicine, he shared it with her. And he saved her life.

So Mason told the Rabbi’s son, “When I left the other day, I went to see that Polish man. He’s still alive and living on the outskirts of Warsaw, and I went to say, thank you for my life. Thank you for my life.”

Ariel Burger brought up the point, “This story raises a lot of questions about, what does it take to be the kind of person who will share someone else’s wound, in spite of all the pressure to see them as less valuable than a rabbit? What does it take to see another person as a person, when everything around you is telling you not to?” He went on to say, “That question is — really, for me, that’s the motivating question right now… not in those extreme situations alone, but in everyday life…”

Today, in a society that is so deeply divided, in a time when polarization has led to demonization and even hatred, it’s worth asking the question, what does it take to see another person as a person… as a human being, and to even share in their wounds – even when they stand on the other side of the cultural and political divide?

Let us pray: We remember today O God, that Jesus taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Open our hearts to our neighbors near and far, and in that opening may we also open ourselves to your healing and peace, through Christ our Lord. Amen.