The Art of Mentoring Pt.2: Seeing the Person
The Holocaust and Numbers
Several years ago, a classmate of mine who had volunteered at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, CA, said that the reason they invite Holocaust survivors to come and share, and the reason they make sure that visitors hear the individual stories of victims and survivors is to ensure that people see the victim or survivor as a person. My classmate went on to say that our brains cannot process the idea that six million Jewish people died in the Holocaust. At a certain point, the brain’s ability to process that type of tragedy shuts down, and the individuals who collectively make up the 6,000,000 cease to be individuals and instead simply become a number.
The Museum understood the necessity of helping people see these victims as persons, with a name, a face, a family, a birth date and a death date. They understood that their story needed to be shared to humanize these victims; otherwise, the victims become a mere number and our ability to empathize and see the tragedy for what it was, fails.
This reminds me of the use of numbers during the Holocaust for Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. Throughout the period of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis methodically stole all of the Jewish homes, businesses, possessions, clothes, hair, freedom, and finally, their names. They gave each victim instead a number, tattooed on their arms, which ultimately stole their humanity. Each Jewish victim became a number and ceased to be a person.
Humanity’s Value
Beautiful humanity, whom God fashioned carefully from the dirt with His own hands and whom He made in His image (Genesis 1), is often reduced to a number, a mere fact in the annals of history. Tragically, this reduction of the person makes it easier to ignore their suffering and pain, their challenges and triumphs, and the essence of what makes them human.
Fortunately, we have a Savior who showed us how to not merely “minister” to others but to acknowledge their humanness: to see them, hear them, and know them. Jesus illustrated the way to care for others, which is the foundation of leadership and mentoring: Jesus saw the person, acknowledged their existence and their need, and then ministered to them.
He saw Zaccheus up in a tree and invited himself to Zaccheus’ house to eat with him (Luke 19).
He acknowledged the woman who had the issue of blood for twelve years and gave her back her identity as a person rather than an unclean entity by the side of the road (Mark 5).
He saw and understood Peter’s attempt to shift the focus from himself to others after a forewarning of difficult things to come (John 21).
Jesus saw people not as numbers, but as individuals in need of care, support, guidance, and healing. To quote some of John Maxwell’s simple yet powerful sayings, “Leaders touch people’s hearts before they ask for a hand,” and “People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care,” mentoring others requires seeing the person for who they are rather than just as a student in our classes, a member of our congregation, a coworker, or a family member. It requires seeing the person beyond their actions or their appearance and acknowledging their humanity. This is the way of Jesus.
May we do the same.