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Editorial

1995 - Fifty years after the end of World War II - is a year of many anniversaires, a year for remembering. It is fitting that the first one on 27 January commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz, the death camp that is the symbol of the SHOAH. This day brought with it intolerable pain for survivors, who are for the most part now elderly people. Being no longer under pressure of bringing up a family and making a new life, there is more "space" for memories of "the unthinkable" to invade them as they invaded civilisation. Much of the world remembered with them, the media in many countries reliving the past in documentaries, drama, meetings, articles and in prayer. This anniversary has evoked much soul-searching, revealing a lot of unfinished business.
This aftermath of the SHOAH overshadows influences and questions the search for God today for Jews and Christians. Where was the loving covenantal almighty God of the Bible? Why were the innocent men and women of his chosen people the first helpless victims of a ruthless oppressor? Why did the Churches, also God's chosen remain, for the most part, silent, indifferent by-standers? Can the anguish and bitter memories of vicitims, oppressors and by-standers be healed and reconciled? How are Jews and Christians to respond to the Bible 50 years after Auschwitz? Those are among the urgent concerns of believers today.
Human experience and human history is the ground where God is both revealed and hidden. The tragedies, achievements, joys, failures, happiness, suffering E-,d abbve all else the ordinary daily grind bring their own opportunity and challenge to love, to believe, to persevere, to hope, to repent, to begin again. The book of the Psalms embodies the whole span of human experience and emotions - joy, despair, anguish, grief, outbursts of anger, calls for revenge, shouts of praise, expressions of repentance, are among the reactions of believers of yeserday and today. These poems are more than 2500 years old. Whatever historic occasions, community events, individual needs gave rise to a particular psalm, generations of worshippers have found them appropriate expression for public worship and private devotion. Christians of all denominations have a long tradition of praying and singing the psalms. - Jews have an even longer one. The question this issue of SIDIC wishes to explore is "How do the Psalms express the human search for God today, after the SHOAH"?
Jews and Christians have access to the same biblical text but the way the Psalms are understood, their liturgical use and the identity with a long tradition are different. Readers of this issue of SIDIC can enter into the richness of both communities. Rabbi Fred Morgan shows the contemporary significance of the ancient text for the Jewish believer in the community but it is in their liturgical and communal character that the Psalms become most fully a living and sacred text. He illustrates this through the midrashic reading of Ps. 114. Dr.Jenny Dines describes the understanding of the Psalms in the Christian consciousness and from the point of view of a modern Christian. She also shows how they reflect and respond to authentic human experience beyond particular Jewish and Christian perspectives. Dom Benoît Standaert recounts the long monastic tradition of praying the Psalms. Their challenge to us is to pray them today in the light of and after the SHOAH.