At Buchenwald

President Obama is not a clueless politician. He sure knows how to put together a series of visual and verbal events that, taken as a whole, give you a much broader picture than any one alone. Starting this trip in Saudi Arabia and then the speech in Cairo he called for a new way for America, and the West in general, to think about the Middle East and our life as people of a very fragile world.

Then today he went to Buchenwald with Elie Wiesel and stood in the stark place where thousands were treated as less than human by a regime that in its action called into question their own understanding of what it means to be human and part of the greater human race.

To this day, there are those who perpetrate every form of intolerance — racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and more — hatred that degrades its victims and diminishes us all.... This place teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others suffering is not our problem, and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve our own interests.... To this day there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened, a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful.

A needed and excellent challenge to those who continue to minimize and even deny the Holocaust as historical fact. But on this day Obama's clear language and eloquence was surpassed by one whose eloquence about Buchenwald and what Buchenwald represents has been calling out for over five decades- Elie Wiesel.

As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visit my father's grave -- but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.

As I read his words I could her his courageous voice that even as he looks like the memories are so close to the surface he will be twisted by them, he presents the challenge of hope that this will one day be a curiosity of a barbarism that humans forget how to do.

When I was liberated in 1945, April 11, by the American army, somehow many of us were convinced that at least one lesson will have been learned -- that never again will there be war; that hatred is not an option, that racism is stupid; and the will to conquer other people's minds or territories or aspirations, that will is meaningless.

I was so hopeful. Paradoxically, I was so hopeful then. Many of us were, although we had the right to give up on humanity, to give up on culture, to give up on education, to give up on the possibility of living one's life with dignity in a world that has no place for dignity. We rejected that possibility and we said, no, we must continue believing in a future, because the world has learned.

But alas that was not to be.

But again, the world hasn't. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.

But it may be, Wiesel keeps saying whenever anyone will listed. We must keep that hope or we will never be able to live with ourselves. It must be stopped.

You spoke of humanity, Mr. President. Though unto us, in those times, it was human to be inhuman. And now the world has learned, I hope. And of course this hope includes so many of what now would be your vision for the future, Mr. President. A sense of security for Israel, a sense of security for its neighbors, to bring peace in that place. The time must come. It's enough -- enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for oceans. It's enough. There must come a moment -- a moment of bringing people together.

Now put these words and these images together with what Obama has been doing and saying on this trip. Go ahead, try to wrap your mind around the amazingly paradoxical, never before seen images in a moment of great drama and history. He is trying very hard. He may even be betting his reputation and presidency on it.

Change we can believe in?

Oh, God, our Creator who must weep at every sight of Buchenwald or genocide or torture, may it be so.

May it be so.