Does God care about individual lives, or merely the survival of the Jewish people as a nation?
God and the Holocaust (Topic 1, part 3)
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In April 2020, to coincide with Yom HaShoah, the day in the Jewish calendar dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, and the 75th anniversary of the liberation, Rabbi Sacks launched a series of videos offering his perspective on many of the big questions raised when studying the Holocaust.
We believe that God endowed His image and likeness on every single human being. Therefore, every single human being counts, matters, has dignity, is sacred.
Every human being is unique. Even identical twins only share 50% of their characteristics. Therefore, no human being is substitutable for any other.
God cares about us as individuals, and not as a totality, a class, or a group. That is what makes the Holocaust so unbearable to think about. The Sages said that every life is like a universe, and we as a people lost 6 million universes. Humanity as a whole lost, in the 20th century, over a 100 million universes as a result of man’s brutality against man.
Every one of us counts.
![holocaust educational trust logo 340](https://media.rabbisacks.org/20211028093229/holocaust-educational-trust-logo-340-400x400.png)
This series, created in partnership with the Holocaust Educational Trust, has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Richard Harris.
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