Albert Einstein had his 50th birthday the year I was born. Many folks only know him by seeing his bad hair,
which he had every day. Others remember that his knowledge made the atom bomb possible. And still others remember him for
his realizing that “everything is relative.” In other words, you won’t hear the dropping a pin in a noisy
factory, but in a very quiet place, it IS noisy enough for you to hear it. The pin made the same sound in its dropping, but
outside forces made the sound relative. All things are relative.
But a thing I’ve been wondering for years, and have never seen anything the least bid clarifying…I finally
got an inkling of it from an article in an old “Time” magazine recently. In reading the Bible, we see how the
Jewish people had God’s favor, but would lose it, time after time, for their failing his requirements to love Him only,
and not to fall away after false idols. And the question that’s been in my mind, is whether the Jewish people may have
drifted away in their belief in Him in the years before World War Two, when six million of them were killed as Hitler tried
to rid the world of them.
And this small piece in that four-page article on Einstein in that Time magazine gives a small clue. It said the German
Jews, “with each generation, had become increasingly assimilated into the German culture they loved…or so they
thought. Although they…had little interest in the Jewish religion itself. It added that he had an uncle who went to
synagogue because, in his words, “you never know.” But Einstein’s parents were not religious at all. In
fact, they didn’t care that there was no Jewish school nearby when he was old enough to go, so they sent him to a Catholic
school…the only Jew in a class of 70. And that’s the only clue I’ve seen concerning the Jews in Nazi Germany
prior to World War Two. It may be an indication.
To close this, I repeat some brief passages: Einstein believed in God, but had decided that much in the stories of the
Bible could not be true. He had reverence for the harmony of God’s creation, and he believed that Jesus was a real person,
saying no one could read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. But he didn’t say that he believed
that Jesus is the Christ. He said “I’m not an atheist,” But he said he did not believe in free will, nor
in immortality, saying “One life is enough for me.”
The verdict: He was half-safe, and the question as to whether the Jewish people brought on the Holocaust through their
slipping away from God, remains a question in my mind. Just make sure that YOU stick to Him! Think about it.
37BT Bill Thornton May 29, 2007
