Names Set Into the Pavement

What's happening

The Anti-Defamation League released its 2025 audit of antisemitic incidents in the United States this week. The total number declined for the first time in five years, driven by a sharp drop in campus incidents. The trend inside the data went the other way. Thirty-two attacks involved a deadly weapon, the highest count the audit has ever recorded.

Three people were killed, the first antisemitic murders in the country since 2019. The methodology behind the overall count remains contested; critics inside and outside the Jewish community have raised objections, including how the audit treats certain campus protests. The assault and homicide data is not.

The attacks included a shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Boulder rally for Israeli hostages, and a firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's residence with his family inside.

Two days after the report came out, on the eve of V-E Day's 81st anniversary, the Berlin artist Gunter Demnig was laying Stolpersteine in another European city. The palm-sized brass stones are set into the sidewalk outside the homes of people who were deported and murdered. Demnig has been laying them since 1992. There are now more than a hundred thousand. He is still going.

What the Text says

Paul wrote his letter to the Romans to a church that was already starting to forget where it came from. After Claudius expelled Jews from Rome in 49 CE, the Roman church had become a mostly Gentile community. When Jews returned after Claudius's death five years later, they came back to a church whose leadership was no longer theirs. Gentile converts were tempted to assume the Jewish people themselves had been written out of the story, replaced, surpassed, made obsolete.

Paul spends three full chapters (Romans 9, 10, and 11) explaining why this assumption is wrong. At the end of the argument he says this:

Romans 11:28-2928Concerning the Good News, they are enemies for your sake. But concerning the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sake.29For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

The Greek word at the heart of that sentence is ametamelēta. It means without change of mind. God does not reconsider, does not have second thoughts, does not revise the call. Paul puts the word at the very end of the Greek sentence, which is where Greek sentences put the words they want to land hardest. The whole argument builds to it.

This is one of the most important verses in the New Testament for thinking about Jewish-Christian relations, and it has a specific edge. Any Christianity that uses "globalist" as code for "Jewish" is arguing with that word. Any Christianity that lets opposition to Israeli policy slide into hostility toward Jewish neighbors is arguing with the same word.

Paul, himself a Jew writing to a mixed congregation, refuses both moves before either had a name.

The reflection

The Stolpersteine are designed to be encountered. They are set flush with the pavement so that anyone who wants to read them has to physically stop walking and bend down to do it. The information comes up one stone at a time. Johanna Berger, born 1893. Deported November 17, 1941. Murdered November 25, 1941. Eight days between the train and the death.

Read enough of them and you start to understand what the design is doing. The stones refuse to let the catastrophe be a number. They make you encounter it as a person, in their own neighborhood, on the sidewalk they actually walked. The whole point is that you cannot read a Stolperstein from a comfortable distance.

Scripture works the same way. It will not let a people be counted in millions or assaults be counted in hundreds without first naming someone. Ametamelēta is not an abstract theological principle floating somewhere above history. It is a claim about specific people whose names God still knows.

Three people were killed in the United States last year. Their names exist. The Stolpersteine teach what bending down looks like. So does Romans 11.