Vanessa Zoltan describes herself as a Jewish atheist whose outlook on the world and her spiritual life is defined by the Holocaust.
I'm really not trying to be provocative, I know how it sounds, but all four of my grandparents were Auschwitz survivors. My parents were both born right after the war to recent survivors. And every law I was taught, as to how to walk through the world, was through the orientation of the Holocaust.
But also at any moment, someone else might be the person who needs to leave or needs help. So keep your eye out as to who you can help. Even just a seamstress who lived next door to my dad's parents hid my grandparents' wedding album. They got married before the war and both survived, which is wild. But we have their wedding pictures because this woman saved them for us. And like, this was not like a great heroic act. She didn't risk anything.
But I think that the absence of God can be really beautiful. It means it's our responsibility to take care of each other on this earth. And everything courageous and beautiful that we do is on us. And so I see my atheism very much as an act of optimism, that it is our job to make this world as good of a place as possible for as many people as possible.Zoltan and her brothers, David and Jonathan, during Hanukkah with her grandfather in the early 1990s.
There still didn't seem to be any sort of belief in God. It was just, that's how you show someone you love them, is that they die knowing that that is what you will do for them and then you honor that commitment and do it.live show in Washington, D.C. at Sixth and I Synagogue.How have you fixed on atheism instead of taking an agnostic approach? Which would leave open the possibility that something is out there, something bigger than us.
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