Bernie and I visited the Dachau concentration camp many years ago. Dachau lies 10 miles outside the big German metropolis of Munich. The main road of the camp led to a giant crucifix rising high into the sky. Of course, many Christian Germans and Poles suffered there; nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable with its size, and the Polish woman next to me, herself raised Catholic, said: “If you think of what the Church did and didn’t do in the war, they have no business putting up such a giant cross.”

I silently agreed with her. Not just at how remiss the churches were in protecting the innocent regardless of their religion, but the anti-Semitic dogma spewed by both Catholic and Protestant churches that was a major cause of the Holocaust.

I remembered our visit to Dachau last night as I drove home from a celebratory birthday party. Feeling happy and lighthearted, home just 5 minutes away, I passed by a large red, glittering neon crucifix. It’s been there every winter since we came to New England and the photo doesn’t do justice to its size and to how it blazes forth across slumbering farmhouses and farmland.

In our area, it’s rare to see a religious symbol dominate the landscape. I respect people with a religious or spiritual practice of any kind, recognizing that many (though not all) are seekers wishing, in their own way, to find God. Unfortunately, there are some who are sure they’ve found Him (in their case, it’s almost always Him).

By choice and temperament, I am more private about my practice. Lay Zen practice has no robes, collars, head coverings, or other accoutrements that you’re encouraged to wear. We don’t advertise. Both Judaism and Buddhism do not evangelize. I recognize that other traditions do, but I’ve always appreciated more religious humility, especially in the Christian tradition, and especially around Christmas and Easter.

Services for Christmas and Easter used to end up with pogroms that destroyed Jewish communities over many hundreds of years in Russia and Europe. I personally have always responded to the Easter theme of resurrection, but I do not forget that many priests and ministers used their homilies to call for murder and rampage against “Christ-killers,” including women and children.

While most Christians have only happy, celebratory associations with these holidays, Jews have lots of other memories. It’s hard for me to understand how people can kill in the name of God, including Crusaders and pilgrims marching behind an enormous cross and taking time out to kill, rape, and pillage on their way, respectively, to Jerusalem and Rome.

Inter-religious warfare goes on. In India, Muslims shut their doors and shops during certain Hindu holidays. I feel that any religion that has provoked people to kill non-adherents, often egged on by their own religious leaders, needs to atone, or at least be humbler with its symbols and motifs. Make them a little smaller, less grand and domineering.

  I give credit to the Catholic Church that, in the wake of the Holocaust and the iniquities of colonialism, including the horrors it brought on through enslavement in Latin America and disease in Pacific islands and elsewhere, has gone to great lengths to train its missionaries to be more modest in their aspirations and bear witness to the people they live among, rather than just preaching to them. We are now going through a similar process with our history of the kidnapping of Native American children and raising them as Christians in boarding schools.

All of us need to know the history of our traditions, I shake my head at those who say that Buddhists have never done what other religions have. They ignore the roles that Buddhist monks played in the expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar. They don’t know that Tibetan monasteries long ago had their own armies or that Japanese Zen monks volunteered to be kamikaze pilots during World War II.

It’s important to understand that not everyone loves Christmas or Easter. The holidays bring up bad memories for some.

I recently read The Safekeep, by Dutch writer Yael Van Der Wouden, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s about the love affair that grows between two women. One is a Christian Dutch woman whose family moved into an “empty” house towards the end of World War II, and the other is a Jewish Dutch woman who, unknown to the first, had lived in that house as a child only to see that house taken over by a family that denied her mother’s claim to the house.

The diary entry written by the Jewish woman after first visiting the house, whose inhabitants have no idea of her history, reads like this: “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I can’t stop touching everything. Mum’s room. I now touch things that she once touched. Her secretary—still here. The initials I carved into the drawer. Who do they think that is [the initials]? Who do they think that is? Have they ever wondered? They have never wondered. These people do not wonder.”

I am reminded of walking the streets of Jerusalem and reading the large plaques outside certain beautiful old Arab homes. The plaques sometimes report on the Palestinian families that once lived in these houses and then tell you who owns them now. What they leave out is what happened to the families that lived there. Did they leave, and if so, why? Were they expelled? Did they ever receive any acknowledgment of their ownership of those beautiful, expensive houses? Did they ever receive any compensation?

Do we wonder? Or are we, too, people who don’t wonder?