I’m not Jewish: I’ve got Jewish friends (I think) and I’ve got a lot more friends where I don’t know if they’re Jewish or not. To me, that’s as it should be. A person’s religion should be ‘transparent’ in that sense: you can’t discriminate on what you don’t notice or care about! :)
That said, I’ve just finished working (as part of our 13% Presentations Promise) on the day of our Holocaust Memorial Day Service itself. (I blogged recently about some of the things the readers and I explored on a day’s workshop earlier.) This blog post represents only a few semi-random reflections and observations about the day – not in any particular order and not with any great master-plan… :)
The stage in final tests
Firstly though, I should probably set the scene: by the time the stage was ready to go, it looked more or less like this. The lighting was tightened up later so that it didn’t spill onto the screens, obviously (but I didn’t have time to get a pic). To the left, as you look at it, is the lectern where the MCs stood; in the middle of the stage is the podium for the guest speakers and on the right is the candle that was used in the later stages as a symbol of hope.
Perhaps more important that what it looked like though is what it stood for and what I was doing there. Going back to the opening sentences of this entry I need to correct myself: I assumed, when I first agreed to help, that Holocaust was a particularly and specially Jewish tragedy. In a sense it is – but when you use a different name, genocide, it’s sadly no longer unique.
As the speakers delivered their messages of hope, tragedy and (sometimes) redemption I was struck time and time again not just by how beautifully powerful the human condition can be (as well as how ugly) but also by how often genocide is and how common it was.
I, for one, will be looking at Bosnia in a different light, for example.
As for the speakers… well the main characteristic of this year’s celebration is that it was to involve young people. Teenagers in front of big, big audiences can go badly wrong, as anyone in my line of work will tell you. I’m proud to say it didn’t: speaker after speaker stood tall and spoke clearly. All were eloquent and some were passionate. Some were better than others, obviously, but every one of them looked their audience in the eye (not that they could see them because of the 15000 Watts of light they were plastered in!) and said what they were they to say. I was proud to have spent some time with some of them.
The world is just a little bit brighter for me this morning – and I’m not (I promise you) normally given to fits of sentimentality.
Long may the young people of our country (and the world) continue to know what is right and what is wrong and long, long my they continue to stand up to say it.
On a technical aside to finish with, I’d say that the most common problem we encountered while coaching the speakers was speed. If you’re unused to speaking into a microphone into a big (and acoustically badly designed) space, remember to slow down. In training I often found myself using the metronome app on my iPhone, sitting in an acoustic dock to make it louder, to slow people down. Having a ticking box on the floor beside you at only 60 words per minute doesn’t slow you down to 60 words, but it slows you down from nearer 300!
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