Profaning the Sacred

Apologies for posting this on a nonstandard day, but I wanted to post this in time for January 27th, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I’ve been thinking about Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass. It’s a strangely beautiful name for such horror, and the word has actually fallen out of favor in Germany, where people now recognize it as a euphemism that downplays the violence and brutality of the pogroms. They prefer alternative names: Novemberpogrome (November Pogroms) or Reichspogromnacht (Reich Pogrom Night). These names capture the truth more honestly—violence, desecration, a turning point.

A few years ago, listening to a survivor speak at our synagogue, something struck me about that night. Not just its historical significance, but something more fundamental about the nature of evil itself.

The Banality of Evil

The woman who spoke was quite old. She had been a child during Kristallnacht, which means we’re approaching the end of an era when people who actually experienced the Holocaust can speak on their own behalf. Once they’re gone, these events become history—easier to file away, easier to forget the ordinary horror of it all.

She described how people came into synagogues and desecrated the Torah. Synagogues were torched. Torah scrolls were ripped and trampled. Cemeteries were defiled. Jewish books were burned. Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

We like to think that if we had been there, we would have known. We would have seen the evil clearly and stood against it. We imagine we could have explained things to people, made them understand. But the reality is that evil is far more banal than that. It doesn’t always announce itself with horns and pitchforks. It begins quietly, by gradually stripping away their humanity, and what better way of destroying their humanity than destroying the things they hold most sacred?

That’s why the desecration of the Torah hit me particularly hard that day.

From Sacred to Profane

The word “profane” originally means to make something ordinary, to strip away its holiness. I thought about my son when he was two years old, trying to climb into the ark that stores the Torah scrolls in our synagogue. To him, it was just a cabinet—an object with its profane, functional purpose. But to us, it’s sacred space, the holder of our most important text, our connection to thousands of years of tradition and meaning.

Profane also means to violate or treat with contempt. That’s what happened during the Jewish pogrom that night—the systematic profaning of sacred objects, the desecration of things that held deep meaning for an entire people.

When they destroyed the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, it wasn’t simply about destroying Judaism or trying to destroy the Jews. When you destroy the sacred objects of a people you’re ripping away their humanity. Once you do that, you can do whatever horrible thing you want to them, because these people are no longer human in your eyes. They’re objects. Worse than objects, actually—they look like humans but you’ve decided they’re not. That’s why the Nazis could do all of these horrible things to the Jews—because we were no longer human.

Where are We Now

Dara Horn captures something devastating in her Atlantic article Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? She writes that Holocaust education treats Jewish murder as a universal metaphor instead of honoring Jews who died. The dead Jews of the Holocaust are being used to teach a general lesson on tolerance and genocide—profaning their memories.

She points out that the National Museum of African American History doesn’t end its slavery exhibition by pivoting to “other enslaved peoples throughout history.” That would be insulting. But Holocaust museums routinely do this to Jews, ending with other genocides and generic “upstander” pledges. Jewish experience becomes a metaphor, never something valued for its own sake.

While we talk about the atrocities of the Holocaust, students make “Jew jokes” without stigma. People throw pennies at Jews in 21st-century America. Shopping carts “accidentally” ram someone wearing a kippah. When you set the bar for bigotry at mass murder, most of it doesn’t make the cut.

David Baddiel captures the double standard in Jews Don’t Count. We’ve created a hierarchy of protected minorities, and Jews don’t make the list. Whoopi Goldberg can say the Holocaust “wasn’t about race”—just “white people doing it to white people”—as if Jewish identity doesn’t count. “What should we do about Israel?” has become the new “What should we do about the Jews?” The rhetoric around Israeli “misdeeds against humanitarianism” is eerily similar to the Nazis’ reliance on science—different vocabulary, same structure.

When those men desecrated the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, they stripped away Jewish humanity by profaning the sacred. We can’t just teach people about gas chambers and expect them to recognize anti-Semitism—yet that’s exactly what we’re doing. Holocaust education has trained a generation of “upstanders” who will spring into action the moment they see another Holocaust—and do nothing about everything that comes before it. We need to teach the continuum: the constant dehumanization of Jews throughout history and today.

Jews don’t count. Except they should. They must. That’s how we honor both the dead and the living.