David Bailey|dreamstime.com

Singing with the choir on a Sunday morning, we plodded through I Will Sing of My Redeemer as if it were a dirge. I felt the weight of the cruel cross on my back as we sang.  Then a chorister reminded us that the song was supposed to be sung Energetically. Lightening our hearts, picking up the pace and focusing on the outcome of Christ’s sacrifice, we sang of His wondrous love and being made free. Oh, the joy!

In a couple of weeks I’m heading for Eastern Europe on a Rick Steves tour. Why Eastern Europe, people ask me?  To blog in a café by the Charles Bridge will be a fantasy fulfilled. But also on my itinerary is something I never wanted to see—Auschwitz. Does my discovery that I have Jewish heritage change my reticence? Not really. However, reading the review of a three volume tome, The Jews in Poland and Russia by Antony Polonsky, has given me added focus for this trip.

Polonsky reminds us that memory is about what we choose to record. The Jews have an eastern European history and Eastern Europe has a Jewish history that is vivid, deep and rich.  To feel only the weight of the Holocaust does my ancestors, the Wolffs, a disservice. I will reach out to this unexplored corner of my history by paying attention to the cultural history in the Jewish quarters I will be visiting.

Joy was meant to play a central role in Jewish life—feasting, singing, the love of family and friends.  The writer of Deuteronomy 30:19 exhorts us: Choose life, so that you and your descendants might live! To truly live takes the kind of energy that Marty Parks infused into his arrangement of the Philip B. Bliss hymn.

L’chaim!