Yesterday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, but for me every day is Holocaust Remembrance Day. For the past year I’ve averaged about one “Shoah moment” a day—that is to say I stop and think about the Holocaust more than frequently. The Holocaust is my psychology. At least I think that’s what my therapist thinks. She says that I have a depth of knowledge of humanity that is at once an extremely difficult burden to carry and also a privilege. I told her that everything in my life feels heavy, that even when I’m at my happiest, I have a dull aching gnawing inside. I see the latest Adam Sandler comedy about a “cobbler,” and I stop to think—my family survived the Holocaust, at first, because my great-grandfather was a shoe-maker. My family survived because some Nazis liked my great-grandfather’s work and he was able to make their feet a bit more comfortable. My therapist observed that this fact made my family complicit in the Nazi regim e. I have never thought of my history like this. Whenever I ask my grandmother, what were you thinking of back then?, her answer is always, “What we think? We think they going to kill us. We think we going to die. We think we will be dead.” My therapist doesn’t blame me for having a preoccupation with death, human suffering, and the spread or not of anti-semitism. Instead, she helps me ponder the depth of human good and human evil as calmly as can be, even if I continue to confuse myself constantly.

Suffering is everywhere. It’s personal. It’s universal. It’s basic. It’s international. How much are we complicit in perpetuating it? Try to trace every piece of clothing in your wardrobe. How much suffering are you complicit in for simply clothing yourself? The food we eat, the phones we play on, the plastic we throw away without thinking. As if I didn’t already carry enough guilt, all the simple materials of my life seem to be products of oppression, greed, and, of course, suffering. What are we to do? Make all of our own clothes? Grow all of our own food? I don’t have the perfect answers.

Personally, my response is as follows. I do not yet directly possess the resources to bring a complete end to systematic corruption, cruelty without consequences, wide-spread brutality of man against man, or even the collective thinking that forgets such horrors exist. But there are small changes I can make. I can google the brands of clothing I’m considering purchasing before handing over my money. I can eat less meat. I can recycle. I’m really sorry, but I really like my iPhone, and I’m not ready to change that just yet. When a friend is in need, I will listen. I can realize that all the materials of my life did not start off looking like they did when I came to acquire them. I will learn the history of objects. I will learn the history of people. I will learn the history of my friends.

Yesterday was Yom HaShoah. My blessing to you: May you suffer a little less and may you help someone else suffer a little less, too.