This is reunion week in New Hampshire for Jan's and my (by marriage) family, an event we look forward to all year long. In the reunion "down time" between meals and activities, I've been reading a book by Ori Soltes entitled The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust. --Yes, it's a strange topic for what's supposed to be a relaxed, fun weekend.
A main thesis of Professor Soltes' book is that an event of the enormity and import of the Holocaust can never be understood solely through reviewing the facts and figures, knowing the details, reading the descriptions, or even through exhaustive and ongoing analysis; that the arts can present another way of knowing and interpreting what is and will remain an essentially unfathomable event in huamn history. As if to prove his point, he has written a book that is engaging and well presented. It fascinates and repulses, and prompts the thinking of new thoughts and the grappling with questions of enormous import. But at the same time, the book has it's greatest impact in the oblique comment, quote, or description that provides a flash of visceral insight, adding new layers of meaning or connecting on a level not possible through the intellect alone.
A second, less explicit but all the more deeply embedded thesis of the book is that all contemplation, discussion or analysis of the Holocaust is ultimately a theological question; Where was God? Where is God? Is there a God? Is it morally possible to even believe in a compassionate God, a just God, in the face of such utter evil and the negation of everything we like to believe defines our humanity? At the same time, if there are those who went through this worst imaginable manifestation of the world we create for each other and still wrestle with and affirm the Divine--still seek, and sometimes find, meaning even in the middle of a such a travesty--then who am I to so easily dismiss what they have proven with greater perseverance and sacrifices than I could ever imagine?
As ever, the contemplation of the Holocaust (or any of humanity's unfortunately all too numerous examples of atrocities that belie our clam to being "humanity") begs the question that has no answer, but that we must, nevertheless, try to comprehend. How could such things happen? Beyond the simple but powerful "fear of other," I think that three "biggies"are the malleability of memory, our need to be right and to think of our own actions as good and just, and the very human tendency to want our own suffering to be acknowledged first, before opening our hearts to respond with compassion to another's suffering. It's disturbing that these tendencies are ones I recognize very strongly in myself.
Why is it that I am so stingy with compassion? From childhood, where the excuse for hitting a sibling is, "but I was upset" or "I wanted what she had" to my responses to social injustices -- isn't it always, "but I have suffered too"? When faced with the Holocaust, I shy away from knowing too many of the actual details, the too convincing proof that, as Soltes writes, "never before or since has the entire apparatus of a sophisticated state been turned so obsessively and completely toward the destruction of an entire people." I want to be able to point to the suffereng that my family felt during th war; my uncles who fought, my German grandmother and family who bore the ill will of their community in the US because we were at war with Germany, even the small depravations that the "war effort" constituted for those who were so far from the true reality of that dreadful time. I definitely DON'T want to ask myself what being Christian means, what being German means, in any context of culpability for any part of such a series of events. Even in ultimate breakthrough, when the clear presentation in words and analysis, as well as in art and emotion, of the terrific magnitude of the suffering of the Jewish people finally unmakes me and I fall in awe out of my petty protestations before the unfathomable, there is still the insidious voice inside my head that whispers, "NOW do I deserve compassion? Look how sorry I am, how sympathetic, how GOOD."
Even the idea that ordinary people did inhuman things because they succeeded in mentally dehumanized their enemy bears questioning. Would it have been possible or necessary to devise more and more elaborate and cruel tortures if the Other were seen simply as nothing, less than a gnat to flick away? To arrive at such an attitude about a fellow human being is in itself appalling, but if that were the whole case, why not simple efficiency? Why the sadism and grim delight in mind games of the worst imaginable? For some there may have been only simple indifference, but the imagination and cruelty that characterized the "final solution" could only come from intense hatred, the kind of hatred that is the tragic flip side to admiration and respect. If I can recognize something in the other that I would wish for myself but do not possess, a quality I admire but cannot achieve, a light in another to which I pale by comparison, and if I cannot find in myself the ability to confront and be reconciled to my relative inadequacies, then I must hate. Without humility, I must destroy what threatens to blow away the house of cards of my self-concept.
The need to feel good about myself is so strong, so consuming. Might I too be willing to destroy the other to preserve the pleasant fiction of my own goodness? How would I even know where the line is drawn, to descend, but not TOO far? When I do or say or feel something that I cannot call "good," I find myself immediately in need of finding an alternate reality, an alternate memory that puts me in the right, shows my action as just. I realized long ago that my memory is altogether too malleable. I am unnervingly accomplished, if I am honest with myself, at rewriting memory to erase what I can't countenance. I can quickly bring myself to a point where I truly do not know what is truth and what is fiction. I find I've rehearsed over and over the events until I am convinced of the goodness, the necessity of even my most unworthy deeds. Yes, small self-deceptions to start with. However, with layers upon layers of rewritten memories, what distortion of truth have I wrought? In how many of those compromises will I hurt others to keep my self-justification intact? Ultimately, what perversion could result -- Doesn't history give us enough examples? And yet, I cannot seem to keep myeslf from repeating the "little" self-deceptions each new time I frighten myself with a glimpse of my own capacity for evil.
What would it take to live with the reality of those parts of myself that I simply cannot face? I think I would have to believe in the existence of love. I would have to believe that to question myself is not the ultimate abandonment, not self-annihilation; that there is some "safe space" for my soul carved in the heart of an Other. If there IS some Other who upholds and affirms my meaning and value then perhaps I can risk relaxing my own efforts at self-deception.
And so, as Soltes predicts, my response to his book is to find myself confronting the ultimate question of theology, of God. And for me too, there is no easy answer. If there is a Divinity, it does not make it easy. There is no proof that love exists, that there is meaning, that there is any such thing as goodness, or immanence, or transcendence. I feel no lightning bolt, see no signs. I am no Moses visited with a burning bush, no Paul on a Damascus road... I am left only to consider and chose; to believe, or to trust in my own devices. I fear, and yet my soul longs to believe, and my heart longs to be free, to love.
No comments:
Post a Comment