Trekking Through the Holocaust – Why Christians Must Remember, with Kara Daniels

*This transcript was generated by AI, and may contain transcription errors. Please refer to the video, or contact us with any questions or discrepancies.*

Well, it’s still that me to we argument, right? At the end of the day, human nature is, well, I’m going to do what I have to do to take care of my family. I’m going to do what I have to do to protect whatever is mine, and how willing are we to put ourselves out there for another human being.

Welcome back to another episode of Covenant and Conflict. We have an amazing episode planned for you today we have with us Kara Daniels.
Hello.
Thank you for being with us.
Thank you for having me.
Kara has been a part of Gateway Church for 18 years. Kudos.
That’s, it’s been transformative for our family.
Longevity.
It was one of the best decisions my husband and I made.
That’s awesome. And you’ve been a pastor at Gateway and you have overseen lots of content, marriage content, men’s content, women’s content,
Freedom,
Freedom ministry, stewardship,
All kinds of stuff.
And you’re an amazing teacher as well. She’s an amazing teacher as well. And recently had the opportunity to go on a trip with gateway staff and gateway members to Europe, starting in Germany, then to Prague, and then ending in Poland. Poland at Auschwitz, Poland.
Yes, yes.
And basically it was a trek kind of Following the path, the Path of the Holocaust. So this is a newer trip that we’ve done and I was just excited to sit down with you because I think a lot of our listeners, Christian, predominantly Gentile, as the world is predominantly Gentile and we learn about the Holocaust, we maybe get a week in eighth grade about it, which is
It is
Enough time. Right.
No, it’s such a tragedy. The lack of attention that’s put on that in our education system. That’s probably one of the most frustrating things for me actually, that was really impactful in that trip is I talked to the people on our trip and learned that I came from a background where I was actually kind of inundated with World War II history and with Holocaust history, and so I was really familiar with everything even before the trip, just because it was a major part of my education.
But
As I raised my children and as I talked to people on the trip, I’ve seen how over the years in our educational system, we’ve really decreased the amount of time we’ve spent,
Spent less spent
Educating people on it.
Well, I’d love to start with just what was your understanding as a Christian of Israel, of the Jewish people, when did you really give your life to Jesus? And then how did that evolve to where you’re like, y’all go on hra. Probably something most Christians haven’t been excited to go
Do. Yeah, yeah. Oh, goodness. Raised Southern Baptist, which says a lot in and of itself.
Yeah. You love the Bible.
Yes, we did. Yes, we did. But just the nature of my relationship with Jesus. My parents weren’t super strong Christians until, goodness, I was probably five. My mother really started to dig in and then really kind of forced us as a family to go to church, and that was my introduction to Jesus. So I got saved probably six times at church camp, make it counted church camp, walk that aisle. I don’t know how many times I was 22 when I really gave my life to the Lord, but because of the background I had been raised in, I had, as we talk about replacement theology, that was very strong in the background. I came from that as Christians, we actually now replaced the Jewish people as God’s chosen people. So that was my understanding until I came to Gateway. And as we started to lean in here, that was like you said, 18 years ago. I was, goodness, I’m 47, so is that late twenties?
Yeah.
Math is hard right
Now. Yeah,
Late twenties for sure. Late twenties, thirties, something like that. It was like 29 and started to get introduced to, in my mind, a healthier perspective
Of the Jewish people and the role that they play in our history as Christians and in belief. It really started to just transform the way I looked at things. But a big marker for me, I’ll never forget, I guess it’s been six or seven years ago, we’ve offered Shabbat services for a while, and one day I just woke up one day and I told Jason, I think there’s a Shabbat service tonight. I want to go, let’s go. And he thought I had lost my mind, but because he’s a great husband, he was like, you know what, let’s check it out. And
We
Fell in love, just the experience. It was our first introduction to understand a little bit more. Then we started to attend the Shabbat services and sit under definitely some healthier teaching where that’s concerned. And then Gateway had offered a night at the Dallas campus with MJBI and got to hear a lot more about the heart, about why we have the beliefs that we have as a church about how to love the Jewish people. Well, and I can remember by the end of that night, Jason and I looked at each other and we said, we don’t know what this is, but we have a burden for the Jewish people and whatever that looks like from our perspective, we’re willing to do, we’re just open handedly saying, God, we don’t know what this means.
We
Know that you have spoken to us and we’ll do whatever we can. So whether that’s pray rarely for the Jewish people love them, well, as we encounter them in the community, support them as much as we possibly can give, where we can give. That’s what we had decided to do. What was interesting about that is that, I can’t remember when that meeting was. I think it was what, 2018? 19 something like that.
For what
The MJBI meeting. Oh yeah. It was right before we became Center for
Israel, which was 20 18, 20 19.
And so we walked in obedience to that, but didn’t understand why. It was kind of like we knew this is what we were called to do,
But
Didn’t necessarily for me have lack of a better word, heart or burden for it
Or know where it fit.
Yeah. We just knew it’s what we were supposed to do. And so we did that, but this opportunity came, we got to go to, actually, we got to be part of a trip to Israel a few years ago. Loved Israel. It was wonderful. But this trip, the one to Europe was the one that really awakened me to the burden as to why the Lord laid that on our heart.
I think, and I’m just diving right in. One of the areas that I think we miss it in our love for Israel is I think it’s something like 2 million Christians a year go to Israel. What I see is primarily Christians get a heart for the land, not the people.
Absolutely.
The ways that I see it in Act Out is a rocket strike will hit Israel and the response is, oh my gosh, I’ve been there. Not, oh my gosh, how are my friends doing?
Because
You didn’t go to Israel to create relationships. It was a bucket list trip and you filled that schedule from morning till night with sites,
Sites,
And the only Jewish person you met was maybe your tour guide, and that’s why you love your tour guide. Everyone comes back with, we had the best tour guide, and I’m like, I think it was the only Jewish person you met there. Maybe that’s why, however, and again, not putting down Israel trips, the Bible comes to life. It’s amazing.
It is.
The land is important, but a quote that has always stuck with me is if you value land over people, that’s a graveyard.
Absolutely.
We don’t value land over people. Absolutely. It’s people over land. So it has its place, but it should be in its proper place. And I think the beauty of this Holocaust trip is Israel is in the background. It’s very apparent that there’s a need for Israel when you trek through the Holocaust and realize they’ve been kicked out of every place. Europe was not their home. They had an ancient home, but with it not being front and center, this is where Jesus walked. That’s why a lot of Christians, I think, don’t value or wouldn’t value a holocaust Jesus in
This,
And yet why it’s so important, because it’s the Jewish people at the forefront.
I would absolutely agree that that’s really what happened for me on that trip. Like I said, I grew up with a really healthy understanding of the Holocaust and World War II history. So for me, what the experience was was I was actually standing on the ground of the places I had read about. It really kind of snapped into focus. I had grown up reading stories about what happened to the Jewish people. Now I’m standing in the places it happened, and it completely changes your perspective. It makes it more real. It brings it to life.
It sounds like you were a bit of a history buff maybe going into the trip. What were some of the major misconceptions that you may have had that were clarified on the trip or turned on the trip, or maybe just some of the biggest learnings on the trip other than just the experiencing it and kind of coming to life?
It’s interesting. I don’t know that I had really any misconceptions. I think the bigger part for me was taking what we have seen. I am a history buff. My degree actually is in history. I have a degree in world history with a specialization in Eastern European
History
Before I went into teaching. What it did for me is when we think about history, I know it’s kind of a cheesy quote, but when I would always teach my students when I was in public education is you cannot know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been and that I’m watching our world where it’s headed right now,
What’s
Happening in society, what’s happening to Jewish people, and it’s a world that clearly has no idea where it’s been because if it had a real understanding of what’s happened in history, I think we would approach what’s going on in culture very differently right now. And so going and seeing, one of the places we visited was the top topography of Terror museum. And while there’s not any specific artifacts, it’s really all primary resources, newspaper articles, photography of the pattern of history of what happened from the rise of Hitler to ultimately what happened in the Holocaust. And there is a picture that I could not walk away from. It’s a picture of Hitler standing on the steps of right now, it’s called the Altus Museum. I can’t remember exactly what it was called historically,
But
You will see pictures of him giving great speeches. We actually went to that site when we were there. He’s standing on the steps. There’s a sea of people in front of him and the flags behind him, and he’s reaching down and it’s a group of women in front of him, and they’re all reaching up, screaming and grabbing his arm. He’s a rock star celebrity. And I stood there and looked at it and thought, how often have I seen us, especially in America, we take leaders and we treat them like gods. And the second we deify a leader and turn them into our savior,
They’re
Going to hold the answers for everything. They’re going to save us from wherever we are. We have positioned ourselves to believe anything they tell us. And that standing in front of that picture just marked me
And
Thinking about how we’ve done this before in history and how many times, even through this election on either side,
People
Assume their leader
Has, this is the answer,
That person, they’re going to save us. They’re going to fix it. That’s where it begins, is when we put it all on one person to fix our world’s problems, because the second we do that, I think what we do, and you clearly see it in history with what happened with the Jewish people and with Hitler reason goes out the window. No reasonable person is going to sit down and think of another human being and think, yes, we need to do this with all a certain people group. You’re not reasonable at that point anymore.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a Messianic and I said, what do you think is the biggest lesson the church can learn from the Messianic community and what’s the biggest lesson the Messianic community can learn from the church? And I was like, oh, that’s a good question. I want to hear his answer. He’s grown up in the Messianic community. And his answer was,
What?
He said, you Christians have this godman complex. He was like, it’s so weird to me. He was like, I’ve heard you guys talk about your pastors and these senior pastors in megachurches. And he’s like, and it’s just like, yeah, yeah. I heard Pastor David say that John three 16 says, and you’re like, wait, how about what John three 16? Why do we have to give the preface of what he said? It’s the Bible. But it was like that was the level, level of fame and almost idolatry that we had towards them. And he was like, I grew up under one of the most prolific messianic rabbis in the world. And he’s like, and I will tell him to his face, that was the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. He was like, now I’ve gone too far. He’s like, maybe we need to introduce some reverence, a little bit, some respect in the Messianic community. But he was like, but the God man thing is an issue in the church.
It really is. And it’s a cultural thing, especially I think in American culture. One of the other really poignant moments for me, we had visited Platform 17, it’s defunct now, but it was one of the last train stations or platforms people would go through leaving Berlin to go to whatever camp they were destined for. I mean, it was really a moving place. But there, our tour guide actually asked us to gather together and we said the mourners could dish together. And he pointed out that in that language, if you notice that it’s a collective language, it’s a we language. It’s not about the suffering of an individual, but the suffering of a group. And what was so poignant for me was actually, I think it was that morning, I had just been in prayer over the day having my quiet time, and I felt like in that time I heard the Holy Spirit say, today I take you from me to we and thinking through the lens of how often do we see in the church and that it’s about my pain, my suffering, what I’m going through, instead of sitting back and looking at a people group as a whole, what are we going through together? It’s just a completely different mindset,
Or even the positive side. What is God saying to me? What is the word saying to me? Where am I in this story? Everything can be
Individualized. Absolutely. And that’s not the Jewish perspective,
Our father,
But it’s definitely an American perspective. Totally. There was so much about that trip, especially that moment. It changed the way I thought, and when I came back, a completely different person, and you can ask my family, I wasn’t myself for weeks. It redefined who I was, and it’s fascinating to me how it’s actually prepared me or it prepared me for a different perspective, even for the season we’re in as a church right now
And
What we’re walking through.
Well, I want to get there. I want to get to how the trip has changed you and how you’ve seen maybe the church gateway church, the global church in light of it. But before we jump to post trip, what were some other areas in the trip that maybe surprised you or that were just meaningful to you? Maybe start with Germany. What was Germany?
Germany, it was incredible. Some of the key things for me, one was the memorial for the murder Jews in Berlin. It’s completely abstract for the outside viewer, it makes no sense. It just looks like a whole bunch of stones to walk through.
But
As our tour guide explained to us, it was really very intentionally designed because the stones are all different, various heights. As you walk into the memorial, it’s almost like a maze that you’re walking through and there’s dips in the ground and all of that. It’s very disorienting. And he told us it was created that way as a reflection of what that was like for the Jewish people, what they were going through. When you wake up one day, and not just your whole family, but your entire people group are going through what they’re going through and walking through it, the experience of walking through it and getting that feeling of disorientation of you don’t know who’s walking past you when they’re going to go past you, you don’t know where you’re going to end up, it seems. I can’t even find the words for it. It was probably one of those moments that I thought, this has got to be what it feels like to not know where you’re going.
What tomorrow
Holds, not knowing what tomorrow holds when you’re, I am sorry, I’m having a moment, because tying it to where we are right
Now. Yeah, totally.
When you think life is going one direction and one way and all of a sudden due to nothing or something that’s not within your control at all.
Yeah. Not a decision you made.
Everything has been redefined find. So that place was really poignant for me. Another thing that really stood out to me was the golden tiles that are all over the streets,
Stumbling stones, what they’re called,
I think so I can’t remember exactly, but the tiles that are placed outside of homes where Jewish people lived, and I can remember walking upon one and there were five, and it was a mother and father and three children, and it has their names. Sometimes it has their occupations, their dates of birth, and then what camp they died in. And to know that you can walk anywhere in that city and there’s actual proof people existed here, it’s no longer abstract in concept. It makes it more
Concrete
That a family existed here that ceased to exist
Because
Of what happened to them. And knowing one person can impact so many lives, and you think about the fact that an entire family was eradicated from the earth, what does that mean for that city? What did that mean for that community? That was really, really poignant for me.
The stumbling stones, we saw those when we were in Italy, and I mean, I’m not even on a Holocaust trip
And
I’m broken because I see there’s a 4-year-old girl and I have a 4-year-old girl, and I’m like, we somehow got to the point where we could pull out a four-year-old girl from her home and take her to a death camp. What the heck are we doing?
Or even as an average citizen, turn a blind eye to it and be okay with it. I think the third place that really was poignant for me, as interesting as it is, is the lei where the group of the SS soldiers came together to plan the final solution because there’s such stark contrast. It’s a beautiful setting. It’s this beautiful home on this pristine lake, and this really, it’s an upper class area on the outskirts of Berlin. And knowing that somehow a group of men, well-educated human beings got together and decided this was the way to solve. I can’t even find words for it. My brain does not, it does not compute how a collective can come together and make those kinds of decisions about human lives.
And it was like 45 minutes, the
Meeting
Just a callous, here’s how to deal with this
Problem. How do we become so hardhearted that we turn people into objects as though we can just dispose of them? I cannot wrap my head around it, and
I know I’ve talked to a few people that have come back and also highlighted that spot as impactful, and I think one of them, and maybe the tour guide spoke to this that you could enlighten us, but it was basically that the people around Hitler, which is yes, men,
Absolutely. And with every yes, we kind of dull our own conscience. We become okay with things that we never would’ve been okay with.
It’s a steady kind of slide. Well, yeah. That’s crazy. So now Germany, Prague, what was some of the impactful moments in Prague?
Prague was on our way to Prague. Actually. I think my most impactful moment was Theat in Terezin. The camp where they had taken over a small fortress town, the I Nazis had taken over a small fortress town and turned it into a death camp, a working camp, but it was also a death camp
There. There was a museum to, and actually one of the barracks they had for children, they’ve turned it into a museum and it displayed all of the artwork that the children in the camp had done. And it wasn’t just artwork, it was poetry. It was stories these kids had written about their experiences and what they were going through. And you would read a very, very dark poem that clearly outlined the things they were seeing in the camp, and you would see it signed by the name of the child and their age, and you have an 8-year-old child talking about seeing gallows and those kinds of things. One of the pieces of art really, really struck me. I actually was there on that trip during my son’s 21st birthday. He turned 21 while I was on that trip. He there? No, he was not on the trip with us. But when we went to that site and I was looking at a piece of artwork, I saw a piece of artwork from a young girl who it had her name and her date of birth, and she shared the same date of birth with him, May 16th,
And she was 12 when she died in that camp. And it just marked me because like you said, you had talked about how a 4-year-old child like your daughter,
Thinking
Of my own son and how it seems redundant, but how we get to a place where we are okay with those kind of things, we’re able to somehow compartmentalize our minds to the place and justify even on our own mind, whether it’s being part of it and enacting it or turning a blind eye to it. I have no concept for it.
Yeah. Well, I think there’s the hard lesson, or one of the hard lessons, I think there’s probably lots of hard lessons, but one of the hard lessons to learn as you study history. When we put ourselves in history, we put ourselves in the hero’s position.
Absolutely.
And I remember having this conversation with a lead pastor who was going to talk about the Holocaust, and they were going to mention someone like a Schindler. We all know kind of Schindler’s list. He rescued hundreds of Jewish people and that’s great. We can totally talk about what they call the righteous gentiles among the nations. I want to say it was 0.02% of the population that hid Jews. I know that there was, in some countries it was like two people. The garden that has been planted at Yad Vhe, which is the Holocaust Museum in Israel. They have a tree planted for the righteous gen cells, not a lot of trees. It’s especially given a country with millions of people and the list is maybe double digits. So it’s that stark reality that if you existed in the time of the Holocaust in Germany and you were a Christian, odds are you would’ve turned a blind eye.
Absolutely.
We like to think that we would be that 0.01% that would risk our families and our lives and everything we hold dear to save our neighbor or potentially stranger. But the hard realities that we probably wouldn’t.
Right. Well, it’s still that meat of we argument, right? I mean, it’s still, at the end of the day, human nature is, well, I’m going to do what I have to do to take care of my family. I’m going to do what I have to do to protect whatever is mine, and how willing are we to put ourselves out there for another human being.
We end at Poland. And Poland I think is, I’m sure there’s a lot to talk about in Poland. Obviously you have Auschwitz, which is the most famous death camp, and you also have an interesting dynamic with how the Jewish people see Poland versus how they see Germany. Cause I think as Christians, we would think Jewish people probably want nothing to do with Germany. But I don’t know if it was your understanding as well that they’re actually more likely to go to Germany because they’ve repented for their decisions in their history and the Polish people, or maybe the Polish leadership has not.
Absolutely.
Was that the case? That
Was absolutely, absolutely. I mean, as we traveled through Germany, you could see the Jewish flags, the Israeli flag held up with the German flag on certain buildings. They clearly have the memorials there.
They’re
Clearly, for lack of a better word, owning
Their
Role in that. And then coming in and supporting the Jewish people. Poland, even visiting, we visited Trea and even there
Is TripLink, another camp,
And it was completely, there’s now a memorial site there. But it was interesting in Poland, we had to have a guide that would supplement our Jewish guides to kind of cover and make sure that we had the right narrative being shared with us
That Poland was basically not
At fault, at
Fault. They were just told what to do.
And we had a guest show up at the site that was Polish and that the focus of what they shared with us was more on the Polish people who died at this site, which comparatively in numbers was minute
Compared
To the number of Jewish people that were killed at this site. And while I don’t want to disregard that other people besides Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust, it’s obvious that the Holocaust was structured around obliterating a complete people group. I mean, I don’t want to negate or devalue other lives that were lost.
Yeah, totally.
But the Holocaust was not created and enacted because of those groups. I think Linco, all of Auschwitz was everything you would think. I mean it was, but experiencing some of those places, going to some of the sites, even within the city in Warsaw where groups were attacked. I can remember, I can’t remember what city we were in. Goodness, I wish I could remember, but they shared stories about, and this was post Holocaust, where Jewish people were still being, what word am I looking for?
Persecuted or
Yes, and thrown out of windows of their own apartment buildings.
Oh my gosh.
So even though the Holocaust had come and gone, there was still similar treatment of the Jewish people.
I’ve heard from a Jewish person, I’ll go to Germany, but I’ll never go to Poland. And they’ll tell their kids, never go to Poland. Which again, it’s not saying that that’s necessarily true for every Jewish person, but that there’s still a difference in the mind of the Jewish community because one was, there was ownership and one there wasn’t.
Well, and isn’t that true for any human nature, any relationship, even if you go through something with somebody, you’re probably not going to go hang out with the person that was unkind to you and never owned it. I mean, it’s just, it’s understandable. Absolutely.
Anything else in Poland that just sticks? Obviously you said Auschwitz was what you would expect it
To be.
Probably the hardest part of the trip, maybe
It seems so trite, I think might be the word for it. For our particular trip, we had a unique experience where we actually got to take a train ride overnight from Prague to Auschwitz. And because of the timing of the day, this is going to seem like the most ridiculous example, but in my very limited experience, it marked me. We had spent the day touring. It was actually hot that day. We didn’t have time to shower. We were nasty, we were tired. We had walked over 10 miles in the city that day. We get on a train where we really can’t get clean, anything like that. Then we go straight to the next morning, we go to Auschwitz and we spend the day touring and learning about all of that. And it had been so what, 24 hours of just a lot of physical activity and
It’s
Nowhere comparative to what those people
Had gone through. But they’re essentially putting you in the mindset of
They making
You uncomfortable.
Exactly. I didn’t think it would be as effective as it was, which the gentleman that orchestrated this whole tour, that was his heart behind it, was really to kind of get our hearts and minds in that place,
Get you at your end.
And I thought I was made of tougher stuff. But after our day of touring Auschwitz and we finally made it into Krakow and got to our hotels and I went to get in the shower, I stood there and cried, like grateful for a shower,
Grateful
To have a place to rest and think as small as that is comparative to what the Jewish people went through. You take something like that and multiply it times whatever exponent you have to get to where their actual experience was. It was impactful.
I want you to talk about the tour guides or tour educators as I think their title is, because they’ve taken, I know one of them has taken trips for 30 years. She’s been to Auschwitz 300 times, and this is the first group of Christians that she’s ever taken on this trip. They’re more interested in the reformation trip through Europe
Because
I think, again, there’s this very understandable Christian line that we can draw, oh, this affects us. It is about me, my Christianity. So was that as mind boggling for you? I mean, what was your take on
That? Absolutely. It is something to be led through a trip with someone who has family experience of what had happened.
They’re all related to Holocaust survivors. Survivors.
Yeah. It’s no longer, it is that whole abstract versus concrete argument. You take something you had learned about and you’ve imagined and you’ve theorized on, and now you’re not only seeing it in person and experiencing the places Auschwitz, seeing the fingernail markings on the walls in the gas chamber, those kinds of things. But then you’re talking to someone whose family has a lived experience of what happened. I think you and I talked before, and even when we were talking about earlier about the difference between the Israel trip and this, I loved Israel, it was incredible, but what really gave me a real burden for the Jewish people was this trip because I could now not necessarily identify with their suffering, but I had a greater understanding. And I mean, if you have any bit of a heart and love for people, you can’t not connect with a people group who have gone through what they’ve gone through and repeatedly go through it throughout all of history. Right, all of
History, most,
It’s not this one isolated incident in history. It has been their story since the beginning. I think that’s one of the things that just blows my mind is how and when we start talking about how different theologies around Jewish people and the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and our places within the story of what God is doing is how we as Christians can get to a place where we have anything other than love for Jewish people. I don’t understand
It. Yeah. How we get there. Yeah. I mean, two things come to my mind. One I’ve always said for David Belize, the greatest evidence that I can muster, that the God of the Bible is the one true God is the persecution of the Jewish people because there’s no logical way to get there. No people groups have been persecuted throughout history, but the same people group over and over and over and over and over and over, and not just in small numbers, hundreds of thousands all throughout, you get from BC to ad, you’re constantly seeing in history, I don’t know if it’s still up, but it’s called the history of atrocities of the Jewish people. And it’s exhausting to read through because it’s just burned at stake, burned at stake, burn synagogues, burn houses, burn community, 200,000, died, 300,000 were murdered. Spain, Portugal, Germany, Europe, Russia, they’ve been kicked out of every country in Europe at some point in time, you even go to England and you’re like, oh, this is where the Jews were kicked out. And you’re like, England
Everywhere.
I thought that was the one safe spot. And it’s like the history of the Jewish people being persecuted. There’s no logical reason because sometimes in history they were too weak. They were this race that was like rats, and there was all these pictures of them being just the bottom of the bottom. So we need to get rid of them because hurting the earth, they’re hurting mankind. And then now they’re too strong, they’re oppressing other people. And you’re like, that’s the polar opposite. They’re too weak and then they’re too strong. Maybe you just have an issue with the Jewish people. Right?
Exactly.
But I think it’s because it’s deep down, it’s demonic, it’s spiritual.
I would a hundred percent agree
With that, and that’s the only logical reason. It makes sense because one time in history you can find logic throughout all of history. Yeah. There’s no logic there. And then secondly, what you said was this trip, you can’t necessarily identify with their suffering like I’ve been through it, but you understand it. And we just had a conversation with Ryan Warren and the whole gist of the conversation was saying that you love the Jewish people is great, but we had an orthodox Jewish woman say, I think she was reformed, reformed Jewish woman, not a believer in Jesus say, I don’t care if you love me, I want you to understand me, which is a jarring statement for Christians to hear.
It’s
Like, what? But isn’t love better than understanding? And it’s like, well, we’ve seen where love gets us. I’d rather you understand, which is a form of love. And that’s what I hear you saying is you go to this Holocaust trip and you understand the Jewish people and that actually leads to a love versus just this kind of blatant, maybe shallow is a better word, shallow love.
I think one of the things that has marked me in my life is getting that understanding of that real compassion is that you’re joining people and they’re suffering. And that markers of true believers are people of compassion. And that if you cannot put yourself in a position, even if you’re a low empathy person, if you can’t put yourself in a position, especially when faced with facts, I know culturally right now everybody likes to throw around truth as though it’s whatever we choose it to be. I really ask someone who’s been educator as someone who’s gotten a degree in history, I am so frustrated by the fact that the majority of people, especially when it comes to the Jewish people, and especially when it comes to the Holocaust, take their education from TikTok or Instagram because all you really need to do is look at some primary resources and see the actual buildings existed,
Documents
That outline what happened to them existed. And then you’re dealing with facts, not some person’s third party opinion about something. But I think what really I struggle with in this is that we as believers have to come to the term where we’re willing to put ourselves in the place and say, okay, we love people. We love the Lord. So what does that mean? Then we’re people of compassion.
And
So when you’re standing there and you’re faced with the truth of what’s happened to a people group, even if you don’t necessarily agree with the theology
Of
Who God says they are, you were called as a believer to love and to care for people. And so how we can get to that place where we have used misguided theology to justify our opinions and our behaviors to a group of people that God created. When you sit there and claim to say, I believe all people are created in God’s image, it’s not something I think we can justify any longer. It’s a choice at that point.
Well, I think what you said too about even if you’re lower in empathy, empathy’s not compassion because you don’t need to necessarily feel what they feel in order to have compassion. Because compassion is, I think, more than just a feeling. It’s an action, it’s a step, and I think it preceded almost every miracle of Jesus was compassion. He was led, he was filled with compassion. They were sheep without a shepherd, he was full of compassion, and so that he did a miracle where he healed. As we wrap this up, you’ve landed back in the states, I’m sure there’s this processing time. I think you got no processing time from trauma to trauma and everything that we went on have gone through a gateway and are still going through, but how do you see the church differently?
For me, especially, we talked about a little bit earlier, it’s reframed the way that I even have experienced what we’re going through as a church. And then of course, when you look at what’s happening in the body of Christ, if you live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, you notice that not just one church went through what we went through, but several. It’s no longer about my experience, what this has done to me, how it’s impacted me, but how it’s impacted the body and watching the linking arms with even thinking through the lens of someone who has worked here of linking arms with other staff members and then the congregants and saying, we’re walking through this.
I
Can’t isolate and feel sorry for myself.
I
Have to take the perspective of where the body of Christ and the whole body is hurting right now. But I can really take that back to that moment where that morning I heard the Lord say, today, I take you from me to we, and then the experience of having our educator, Ron, share with us the experience of what the people went through at Platform 17, what that was for them, and then even leading us through that mourners dish. It prepared my heart for where we are right now, and it changed me. I came back a completely, completely different person. Wow.
Well, that’s not a plug for the trip. I don’t know what it’s, I dunno if we’re going to do it again soon, hopefully we do. I think it’s as important as a trip to Israel,
But if anything, whether you could get to go on a trip or not, if you call yourself a follower of Jesus, take the time to really educate yourself. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we find a theology or an idea that feels good to us and we latch onto it without really spending time to dig in and learn, well, why do I believe what I believe? What does this mean to me
And how can I actually wrestle with this in context of the whole scripture? Yeah, things can sound good in a vacuum. I know we’re pretty much out of time, but I’d love for you to just answer one last question because we’re in an interesting time in history as is related to the Jewish people because we’re in a postoc October 7th world where I think a lot of Israelis that you would talk to would hear sentiments from the older generation, the Holocaust, surviving generation. Don’t go to Poland. Okay, mom, you’re crazy. Or like, oh, be careful. Be careful of those. They’re going to turn on you. Okay. That’s the PTSD of the Holocaust talking and after October 7th, the overwhelming statement has been, they were right. I never thought it would happen again. I’d never thought we, especially in a time span where you can still talk to a Holocaust survivor, what’s it going to be like when they’re all gone?
If
We’re already doubting the Holocaust and saying it was dramatized or it was exaggerated, then where are we’re going to be when that generation is gone? So how has this impacted the way that you see Israel and Jewish people in a post-OC October 7th world, and what can we do about that?
Oh goodness. That’s a big question.
Yeah.
Because I think for me, it is not just what we do, and this might sound counterintuitive to what I was saying earlier, but kind of follow me on this. It’s not what we do collectively. It’s what we do individually in our own homes. It’s how I choose to educate my own children. It’s how we decide as a family, as the Daniels, when we encounter Jewish people out in our day-to-day life, how do we interact with them? How do we love them? How do we extend compassion? How do we link arms with people? I think what horrifies me is hearing how easily we have slipped back into behaviors that were happening. Then hearing stories of here in Texas of children being called names, Jewish children in schools, being called names or seeing, knowing people that I know that are Jewish, that depending on where they go, men that will not wear their kippahs in public, where they never would’ve considered that five years ago, that wasn’t anything they had to think about. But now they have to actively think about how much of my self do I express in my day-to-day life, depending upon where I go and what risk am I putting myself in or my family in by being fully who I am
And just trying to be as much as I possibly can. A safe place for people that look as they’re walking through their community, they don’t know who they can trust or who they can’t
Trust. And I think what I add is not to have blinders on, like you said, because when I tell stories like in Southlake, Texas, when there was a band trip and there was a Jewish girl who they didn’t give a bed and they said, you belong in the ovens with your ancestors. That was Texas. That was the Bible bell. That was a couple miles from where we’re talking right now. But we have this idea that antisemitism is dead. And I think hopefully we’ve all woken up to the fact that that’s not true.
But
I think we still can sometimes have these blinders on of, well, that happened in World War ii, where that’s nation,
No, what’s happening today? Every day.
Yeah. Well, thank you for spending time with us. Thank you
For having me
And sharing your trip and some of the things that we can take away having not experienced it, but like you said, even if we don’t go, we can still learn.
Absolutely.
And try our best to understand. Thank you so much for tuning in. Like we said many times, we have this saying, we want to pray, learn, and relate. People ask, what do I do now? What do I do now that I’ve heard this? What do I do? Well, first pray because prayer changes the way we think. It changes our heart. It allows God to give us his heart. Secondly, learn Center for Israel’s a place. It’s not the only place, but it’s a place you can learn centerforisrael.com, and then relate to the Jewish people in your community. Reach out to the Jewish friends that you have. Ask God to bring Jewish people into your life so that you can be a friend to understand and to love them. So thanks for spending time with us. We’ll see you next episode.