Maybe the dream was a premonition, because it turns out, hundreds of synagogues across the country, including CRC, received bomb threats.  Apparently empty ones, but they brought in police with bomb detection dogs just in case.  Fortunately no trace was found.

Continuing on that morbid note, there’s a new film coming out, “The Zone of Interest”.  Just reading about it and watching the short previews was terrifying, the stuff of nightmares, but not what you’d think.  It’s based on a true story of a Nazi and his family moving into an idyllic home right next to Auschwitz in WW2.  You don’t see the atrocities going on in the gruesome concentration camp next door, but you hear the constant gunshots and sense it.

Meanwhile, the wife is happily showing off the plants in her garden.  You suspect human ashes from the ovens may be fertilizing it.  Some prisoners are forced to do housework for the family.  The children are looking at artifacts (teeth?) taken from victims next door.  Just by its understatement it’s a stark substantiation of how a whole nation of people can become complicit and complacent while hideous atrocities and genocide are committed by the government right under their noses.  Does that sound familiar?

I was afraid I’d have horrible nightmares just from viewing the previews, as one does coming from my generation, but instead I just lay awake thinking about the parallels, and how easy it is to become complicit in unthinkable crimes through being passive and nationalistic. We’re supposed to learn from history, not repeat it.  But human nature being what it is, it’s hard to feel optimistic.  Our kids are the ones who suffer when the adults who should know better are the perpetrators or enablers of hate and destruction.

(This is what happens when I’m left to my own devices without supervision!  I think too much.  I leave you with these eerie film images.)