It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I gotta tell you, growing up Jewish in the 90s, I didn’t know why we had to learn about it. I remember reading Night in tenth grade and rolling my eyes because “here we go again”.

But for real this time, here in 2019, a mere, what, 80 years later? Here we go again. Look, it hasn’t been 100 years yet and I look at the state of the world and think “here we go again”. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but it seems we’re repeating history.

Did we forget the Cold War? Did we forget Reagan? Did we forget the Berlin Wall? If we’ve forgotten these things that happened a mere 30 years ago, have we also forgotten the Holocaust? Did we forget what happened to get us there? Last week we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr, but I think we’ve forgotten him too.

Honestly, I feel like I’m in one of those Star Trek episodes where they go back in time and look around them and wonder how humanity ever survived such barbaric times. (Oh a keyboard, how quaint.)

Speaking of Star Trek IV, somebody show that to the Japanese please. There was a whole big deal about this in the 80s. Why does “save the whales” have to be a talking point again? It’s like teenage me is coming back to bite me in the ass because, surprise, I took for granted the warnings of my elders, that these things might not need to happen again, that, perhaps, we might learn from our mistakes.

Judaism has a term that, at least American Reform Judaism latched on to in my youth. It’s called “Tikkun Olam” and it means to repair the world. To make it a better place. When all this is said and done, I really hope we can.

Never again.