Last year, I was invited to offer an invocation for the annual conference of VOAD, the Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster. After my words Leonard Marcus, the keynote speaker, thanked me for my remarks and revealed that he was about to tell a story he had never told in public.

The heart of the story was this: his father Jack was on a train in 1945, being transferred to Dachau. It was a coal car, open to the elements and the only thing they had to drink was falling snow. When the train would come into a station, sometimes people would throw bread to the Jews on the train. At the same time, the bodies of those who had died, would be unloaded at the station. At one station, a young boy approached the guards and said, “I am very cold. I see that one of the bodies on the platform has a coat. Could I jump off and get the coat, so I can be warm?” He asked this, knowing that jumping off the train meant instant death. The guard said, “sure.” When the boy got off, he went over to the body and as he started to remove the coat the guard walked behind him and shot him in the head. The other guards laughed. And with that, after all he had endured, Jack finally lost hope. The train continued on to the next station. Again, villagers came out and threw them bread. But one of the loaves hit the side of the car and fell to the ground. Jack looked at the bread and he looked at the guards and he decided to jump. So he jumped down and picked up the bread and when he looked up, there was a soldier with a gun. They stared at each other. And then, instead of taking his last morsel of bread, Jack flung the bread up into the car. And when he did that, the soldier’s whole facial expression changed. The soldier could have killed a thing, but he couldn’t kill a human being. In throwing the bread into the car, he transformed into a human being. And the soldier looked at him, and he looked at the soldier. And in that moment, we had that human contact. By the time he got back to the car, all the bread was gone but he said, “I got my humanity back because I connected with another human being.”

When Jack and the soldier saw each other, they literally saw each other. That small act caused a monumental shift and saved Jack’s life. It also restored the humanity of each of them in each other’s eyes.

As we do our work of teshuva today, I would like to suggest something that may not be the most pressing thing in the world, but it is at least something that we can all work on. That is: seeing the humanity in everyone we meet.

This is not a revolutionary idea. Quite the contrary, it is one of the first ideas that we encounter in the Torah. “Come, let us make God in our image.” From that very line, in the first chapter of Genesis, we learn that we are all created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. That is the first thing we learn about people. As we go, we learn about our identities, our morality and empathy, what makes us human.

The Talmud contains a number of texts that are aimed at reminding us of our shared humanity. Adam, it is said, is our common ancestor so that none of us can claim superior lineage. If only we remembered this teaching – we could never forget or deny anyone’s humanity if we retained the idea that we all come from the same human. And Adam was created b’tzelem elohim, in God’s image. It is not just that we all have a spark of the Divine, but as Scholar Nehama Leibowitz wrote “every individual is equally significant before God, since every man was created in His image.”

Jewish scholars and thinkers have continued to explore this idea for centuries. When we meet people, even if we know nothing about them, we know that they too are human beings, each with the Divine spark in them. All of the stuff of life – our own biases and prejudices, the diversity of humanity with its ideas, images, and implications, all of that can be a distraction from that fundamental truth. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel recognized this, in no small part due to his experiences under the Nazis. He had seen more than his fair share of dehumanization. “My first task in every encounter,” he wrote, “is to comprehend the personhood of the human being I face, to sense the kinship of being human, solidarity of being.” With Jack Marcus, with Rabbi Heschel, there is something to seeing the human face. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas also put stock in seeing the human face. Rather than an expression of divinity or God, for Levina, it was literally seeing the face, “the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill. In the relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other.” The face is honest, it can be scary or inviting, but it is uniquely human and according to Levinas, when we truly see the human face, we cannot kill. When we lose sight of the face of another, we lose sight of their humanity.

Literally or figuratively, when we lose sight of other people’s humanity, we allow ourselves to violate people in tragic ways. The dehumanization that we do in times of war, makes it easier to commit atrocities against our fellow human beings. After all, it is not a person who is being killed, but whatever slur or derogatory nickname has been assigned to our enemy and their inhuman acts.

The late American philosopher Richard Rorty observed “that we are as prone to dehumanize the victims of brutality as we are the perpetrators.” One of the dangers of permitting dehumanization is that it does work both ways and it is only power that differentiates the outcome. Indeed, we have seen many cases of an oppressed and victimized group coming to power and then committing similar atrocities to others, if not their erstwhile tormentors.

I do not need to further catalogue man’s inhumanity to man, while standing in this space before this congregation. We are all familiar with the atrocities wrought by our fellow and those wrought against us. What I do need to do is speak of how little it can sometimes take to bring people back to humanity.

Some people have been denied their humanity. And sometimes they believe it. Gerda Weissman Klein z’’l, a Holocaust survivor, author, and human rights advocate told the story about her liberation. The Americans liberated the camp where she was. They were starved, emaciated, scared, and barely recognizable as women. And then, as they were about to go inside, an American soldier did something that was so small to him, but of incalculable size to Gerda: he held the door for her. “And with that,” she said, “he ushered me back into humanity.” Imagine holding a door for someone and it changing their entire world. How tiny and kind a gesture, with an impossibly outsized effect. That young soldier had no idea how that small, simple act of courtesy would transform someone’s life. He also had no idea that he would someday marry that girl, and that she would go on to become an author, the feature of an Academy Award winning film, an activist and a humanitarian.

We cannot expect that everything we do will have such an outsized impact on other people’s lives. But we should treat it as though it could. Imagine being able to restore someone’s humanity by holding a door for them. Or just by seeing them. It does not take a lot. In Jack Marcus’ story, when he and the soldier met eyes, the soldier saw him as human again, and he saw the soldier as human again.

If Kurt Klein could restore Gerda’s humanity just by opening a door, imagine what our small acts could do for everyone we meet. Not every act will have as momentous an impact, but it could. All it takes to do something Divine, is a little humanity.

It is time that we saw everyone as equally significant, too. On Yom Kippur we throw around big words and ideas – transgression, sin, repentance. Sometimes it feels like the liturgy wants us to think we are irreparably evil, doomed to be blotted out of the Book of Life. In truth though, Yom Kippur is more about small changes. Certainly if we have hurt others, broken laws, or committed serious violations then we should absolutely repent and make peace with those who we hurt. The worst of the worst may be so narcissistic or deluded as to thinking they have not sinned. Or maybe they know that nothing can fix what they have done, so why bother? Somehow, I suspect most of the worst offenders are not in shul today. But we are. We know we have fallen short. And we know how to fix it. It may not take much. Teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah. The rabbis tell us “Mitzvah goreret mitzvah” – one act of righteousness, kindness, and goodness can lead to another. Perhaps the mitzvot build on one another. Even if they do not, that one mitzvah just might usher someone back to humanity.