Sleeping at night

I don't have time to really meditate on this, but I'd recommend everyone who missed it listen to this very moving interview with Denis Avey this morning. There's some backstory linked to on the site about his role in the war and his actions in the camps. He's obviously an astonishing man, but more importantly, represents a sense of moral obligation that I don't think we've lost exactly, but we don't really consider in same way.

When he speaks of what he did, he explains that without doing it, he couldn't sleep at night; now, when we are called to do something as trivial as give some money to the poor, we expect the state to organise it for us, which - of course, they don't. We shouldn't exaggerate this, plenty of people volunteer and do an enormous amount, and not all men in the 40s were heroes. But, we do miss that feeling of moral obligation, obfuscated by a discomfort about moral absolutes, which is both facile and dangerous. Stories like this remind us of the prize for not thinking like that.

I'm not entirely a fan of a British national commemoration of the holocaust, and I'm glad these cases are - as is proper - being looked at by Yad Vashem as well. For Mr Avey though, I'm delighted, and much moved.