A
week today we shall observe Holocaust Memorial Day on the anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January
1945. So I should like in this lecture
to offer some reflections on the Holocaust from the standpoint of an episode of
ancient history that is one of the major defining events in the Hebrew scriptures. I am aware, of course, that Holocaust
Memorial Day is designed to be a commemoration of all acts of genocide in the
modern world, such as for instance the Armenian Massacre, Cambodia and Rwanda. But I focus on the Nazi era for two
reasons. The first is purely personal,
as I shall explain presently. The second is that I am an Old Testament
theologian, not an historian. My
interest is in how historical events shape human experience both collectively
and personally, and how that experience is reflected upon, and becomes embedded
in the stories people tell, especially the discourse of religious faith. We do not perhaps immediately turn to ancient
history to illuminate the recent past and our contemporary experience. Nevertheless, I believe we have much to learn
from it as I shall try to show this evening.
Some
of you may have read Eva Hoffman’s acclaimed memoir Lost in Translation published in 1989. The title was stolen by
the well-known film of that name which tells a different story – about
different people and a different situation, that is, though the theme is
related. That theme is exile in a
strange land and the consequences of being far from home, with the loss of what
is familiar, the heightened significance attached to memory, the reconfiguring of
the landscapes of the mind, and the need to become a practitioner of
‘translation’, meaning not simply acquiring a new spoken language but, at a far
deeper level, learning entirely new rules about how human beings interact and
relate to one another.
Eva
Hoffman was born in Poland
just after the end of the war. Her
Jewish parents had been victims of the holocaust who had lost family members in
the death camps. They were among the few
survivors of a once flourishing Polish Jewry.
While Eva lovingly describes her childhood in Cracow
as ‘paradise’, her parents decided, like many of their generation, that there
was no future for them in Poland. Unlike most of their contemporaries who went
east to the newly established State of Israel, they emigrated westwards to the
new world to make their home in Canada. For Eva, leaving her beloved homeland and
learning to make her way in an alien country was traumatic in the extreme. She describes a dream she had a few days
after arriving in Canada.
I’m drowning in the ocean while my mother and father swim
further and further away from me. I
know, in this dream, what it is to be cast adrift in incomprehensible space; I
know what it is to lose one’s mooring. I
wake up in the middle of a prolonged scream.
The fear is stronger than anything I’ve ever known…. I try to calm
myself and go back to sleep, but I feel as though I’ve stepped through a door
into a dark place. Psychoanalysts talk
about ‘mutative insights’ through which a patient gains an entirely new
perspective and discards some part of a cherished neurosis. The primal scream of my birth into the New World is a mutative insight of a negative kind – and
I know that I can never lose the knowledge it brings me. The black, bituminous terror of the dream
solders itself to the chemical base of my being – and from then on fragments of
the fear lodge themselves in my consciousness, thorns and pinpricks of anxiety,
loose electricity floating in a psyche that has been forcibly plied from its
structures. Eventually I become
accustomed to it; I know that it comes and that it also goes, but when it hits
with full force, in its pure form, I call it the Big Fear.[1]
As
I read that, I have to conclude that this is more than simply a frightened
response to endings and beginnings. It
has all the hallmarks of what we now call the experience of the holocaust
survivor, in her case of the second generation. This is the inherited memory of the ordeals
either or both parents underwent during the Nazi shoah. It was not recognised
until comparatively recently through psychoanalytic engagement with children of
survivors that such memories could be transmitted to the next generation, often
unconsciously. This ‘colouring’ of life
is frequently described as an unexplained shadow that haunts existence. And if second-generation trauma is not
restricted to the holocaust (for the memory of any terrifying experience, particularly
if endured for a substantial period of time, may well be inherited by
children), the events of the shoah undoubtedly
provide the most extreme instance of it in the history of the past century.
I
recognise something of Eva Hoffman’s story in myself. My mother was born into a prosperous
middle-class Jewish family in Düsseldorf.
Her father owned a thriving business in the town. He had fought for Germany in the Great War and was proud
to be an assimilated Jew in a civilised and flourishing nation. They were liberal Jews who observed Passover, did not eat pork and would not have
been seen shopping on Yom Kippur,
though they did not attend synagogue regularly.
They loved what Richard Wagner called in Die Meistersinger ‘holy German art’: it was a cultured home full of
books and paintings and music. The 20th
century was for them a time of optimism.
Then came the rise of Hitler.
Like most of their family and friends in the Jewish community that time,
they did not at first see in Nazism more than a temporary aberration from the
historical values of a great nation, a fit of madness that would soon exhaust
itself.
Almost
too late, they realised that they must act to save themselves. Thanks to the intervention and generosity of my
grandfather’s cousin Wilhelm Levison, the eminent medieval historian who fled
his professorship at Bonn to come to Durham in the 1930s and spent the rest of
his life here, my mother’s brother Karl Leyser, who himself became a
distinguished historian of Ottonian Saxony, was able to leave Germany and
continue his education in England. My
mother followed in 1938. My grandparents
fled to Holland, leaving behind family and
friends most of whom ended their days in Auschwitz. After the invasion of Holland,
they went underground, being hidden by an amazing family in Edam.
In 1945, my uncle who had joined the Black Watch drove his tank into the
town square of Edam, and calling through his
loud-hailer asked if anyone knew the whereabouts of his parents. My grandfather died shortly afterwards,
broken by the war. But my grandmother
lived on to a great age, first in Holland
and then in this country where she exercised a profound influence on all her
grandchildren, particularly the one who is speaking to you now.
It
did not dawn on me at once that the Holocaust was part of my own
formation. My mother had married my
father in 1947. He was an Englishman she
had met during the war. He was a
disenchanted Anglican who had discarded churchgoing along with short trousers
and model railways. He regarded religion
as a principal cause of human division and conflict, of which the war was a
recent instance. Any vestigial faith my
mother might have had was shattered by the experience she had lived
through. So I grew up in a home in which
religion was not to be spoken about other than with disparagement: at best as
an irrelevance, at worst, as malignant.
But we did not speak much about the Holocaust either. It was not one of those ‘secrets in the
family’: it was simply too painful. At
times the spectre of anti-semitism would come up, and I was reminded by my
mother that as a child born to a Jewish mother, I was myself Jewish according
to rabbinic law and while this was not something to make too much of, neither
was it to be forgotten.
It
was only as I became a teenager and a Christian, that I became curious about my
family’s story and my own identity. Even
now, I can only say that at best it is work in progress. For instance, I was not expecting when I first
drove my family through Holland
on holiday in the 1990s how moved I would be to find myself in the country that
had taken in my family when they needed asylum and kept them safe. Similarly when I helped lead a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 2000, and we
visited the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem,
I was not anticipating that I would be incapable of speech in the face of
what overwhelmed me there, particularly the memorial to the millions of
children who perished at that time. I
think it was only then that I began to understand three things. Firstly, that I was a ‘survivor’, and that it
was really rather extraordinary that I was alive. Second, that the personal history I have been
describing was for me a participation in the fragility and dislocation that so
often emerge as the dark heart of things in a broken world, Eva Hoffmann’s ‘Big
Fear’. But third, that we must never
succumb to despair and that tragedy must always purify our vision. If it does not do this, if it does not lead
to a more just and humane aspiration for life, then the last word will have
been uttered by all that is evil and destructive. This is why Holocaust Memorial Day is
important.
********
At
Yad Vashem, fugitive pieces of ancient history began to coalesce as a narrative
with profound meaning for our times. That history, enshrined in the Hebrew Bible,
is semitic rather than classical, but like the classical historians, its
writers demonstrate remarkable insight into the nature of history not simply as
the chronicling of uninterpreted events (which is not history) but as carrying meanings. The locus
classicus of this is the way in which they tell of the cataclysmic crisis
that overtook the nation of Judah
in the 6th century BCE, the exile in Babylon.
The narrative is easily told, and those of you who have visited the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum
will have no shortage of images to furnish your imaginations at this
point.
What
we call the ‘Fertile Crescent’, stretching north-westwards from the Persian
Gulf up valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates and then southward down the
Mediterranean seaboard was the cradle of a succession of great civilisations in
the ancient near east. Like the Hebrews
(and unlike the Egyptians), these cultures were semitic. The Babylonian empire was at the height of
its power by the middle of the 6th century, having supplanted its
Assyrian predecessor with the destruction of its capital Nineveh in the year 605. In the arid conditions of the near-east,
land-hunger for the acquisition of productive terrain was the driving force of
every imperial power. At the other end
of the Crescent, the small kingdoms of Israel
and Judah,
divided since the end of the 10th century, were increasingly
vulnerable. They were not only squeezed
between competing hostile hegemonies, the Mesopotamian empires to the north and
Egypt
to the south. There were equally hostile
natural environments that hemmed in its scarce, precious resources: the desert
to the east and the sea to the west. The
northern kingdom
of Israel had succumbed
in 721 when ‘the Assyrian came down like a wolf to the fold’ as Byron
graphically put it. Judah struggled on, surviving the onslaughts on
its cities by Sennacherib whose siege engines are so graphically depicted in
the marvellous Assyrian relief sculptures in the British Museum. But the days of the Assyrian Empire were
numbered. In Babylon,
always a source of trouble, the powerful Nebuchadrezzar acceded to the throne
in 605, that year defeating Egyptians at the Battle of Carchemish and thereby
placing the entire Fertile Crescent under
within his influence. In 597 he captured
Jerusalem,
installing a vassal king and exacting tribute.
A decade of futile attempts on the part of ineffective Judan kings to
foment rebellion culminated in a final, catastrophic invasion by
Nebuchadnezzar’s forces in 586. The land
was overrun, its cities ruined, Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem destroyed, and a large proportion
of its population were deported.
As
an experience of physical suffering, the exile was not the most extreme event
in the history of Israel. The persecution of Jews under the Hellenistic
Seleucids, notably Antiochus Epiphanes four centuries later was far more
brutal, more like the Holocaust in what it did to thousands of human lives cut
short without mercy. But I want to
suggest that the exile did have a similar psychological, emotional and
spiritual impact on the nation. This
history defined them irrevocably, just as the Holocaust defines Judaism
today. I mean more than that the events
of the 6th century became embedded in the long history of an ancient
people. I mean that its effects in
fashioning the identity, culture and self-understanding of the Jewish community
were permanent. I think that there are maybe
only three such decisive ‘kairos’ events in the history of Judaism: the exodus,
the exile and the Holocaust.
So
we need to consider what exile meant for the people of Judah. Three institutions had been crucial to her
identity. The first was the land,
understood to have been her inheritance promised to the patriarchs and the goal
of her long march out of Egypt
and across the wilderness under the leadership of Moses. The second was the monarchy, inaugurated in
the time of David to whom an unending dynasty had been pledged through an
eternal covenant. The third was the temple
built by Solomon according to divine command, the locus of divine presence and
blessing, of which the Davidic kings were the guardians. All three had been removed at a stroke. So central had they been that it was
inconceivable that the nation’s identity as the people of Yhwh could continue
in exile with no land of their own, no monarch and no shrine.
This
sense of loss and desolation is quintessentially captured in one of the
best-known Psalms, 137:
By the rivers
of Babylon – there
we sat down and wept
when we
remembered Zion.
On the
willows there
we hung
up our harps.
For there
our captors asked us for songs,
and our
tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’[2]
It
is not the last time in history that the oppressor requires entertainment by
the oppressed. Yet no taunts will evoke
a song out of exiles. ‘How could we sing
the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
Instead, they lay upon themselves the solemn duty always to remember
their homeland, sealed with an oath:
If I
forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my
tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
What
this psalm testifies to is more than a kind of bereavement that is incapable of
healing. It is that exile has opened up
a black hole, a singularity, at the core of a people’s identity. There are no precedents for this experience,
no road-map by which to travel a this wholly unfamiliar landscape. So we are not altogether unprepared for the
vicious curse on the enemy with which the Psalm ends:
Remember,
O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
How they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!’
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
happy shall they be who pay you back what you
have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
The thread throughout this important Psalm is
the word ‘remember’: ‘there we wept when we remembered Zion’;
‘let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you’;
‘remember, O Lord, the day of Jerusalem’s
fall’. There is a profound theological
and spiritual dynamic here that recalls the ancient Passover ritual in which the
Hebrews ‘remembered’ their Egyptian captivity and how their deliverance from it
was the result of God himself ‘remembering’ them.
Among
many other texts of exile in the Psalms and prophets, Psalm 74 gives a graphic
account of what the invader has inflicted on the holy place. After a twofold plea to Yhwh to ‘remember’
his people and ruinous Zion
once his dwelling place, it continues:
Your
foes have roared within your holy place;
They set up their emblems there.
At the upper entrance they hacked
The wooden trellises with axes.
And then, with hatchets and hammers,
They smashed all its carved work.
They set your sanctuary on fire;
They desecrated the dwelling place of your
name, bringing it to the ground.
They said to themselves, ‘We will utterly subdue them’;
They burned all the meeting places of God in
the land.[3]
It
is not simply the depredation and destruction wrought by the enemy, but the
apparent abandonment of the covenant community by God himself that is so
bitterly felt. ‘We do not see our
emblems; there is no longer any prophet, and there is no-one among us who knows
how long.’ The prayer culminates in a
desperate plea to a god who is perceived as not only absent but unable, or
unwilling, to take action against the enemy:
How long,
O God, is the foe to scoff?
Is the enemy to revile your name for ever?
Why do you hold back your hand;
Why do you keep your hand in your bosom?
At
this point the psalmist reminds himself of the sources of his faith, how God is
the mighty creator who subdued the mythical monsters of the primordial deep so
as to effect creation. Therefore, he is
able to conquer the enemy too. But there
is a constant undertow of hopelessness.
There is another twofold plea to God to remember the havoc the enemy has
wreaked, for where there had once been peace, now the ‘dark places of the land
are full of the haunts of violence’. ‘Do
not forget the clamour of your foes, the uproar of your adversaries that goes
up continually.’ They are not the
peoples’ enemy only. They are
God’s.
Let
me consider one more text of exile.
Psalm 89 is one of the most important of the Psalms in that it appears
to have undergone several adaptations in its long history. It seems to have
originated as a hymn of praise to God, to which a celebration of the Davidic
dynasty was added later, making it one of an important group of Psalms known as
the ‘royal’ psalms. This section lauds
God’s promised faithfulness to David and his descendants ‘for ever’, describing
the king as God’s son and firstborn, from whom it is impossible that God’s
favour could ever fail. But later still,
during the exile, another psalmist adds a powerful and poignant section
mourning the loss of the precious monarchy that had been the inalienable sign
of divine presence and favour.
You
have renounced the covenant with your servant;
You have defiled his crown in the dust.
You have broken through all his wall;
You have laid his strongholds in ruins.
You have removed the sceptre from his hand,
And hurled his throne to the ground.[4]
Like
Psalm 74, this rehearsal of catastrophe turns into the prayer of
desperation. ‘How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire?
But
the remarkable thing about this psalm is that it is prepared to contemplate the
unthinkable, that with the collapse of the Davidic dynasty, God’s covenant with
Judah
is effectively at an end.
Lord,
where is your steadfast love of old,
Which by your faithfulness you swore to
David?
Remember O Lord how your servant is taunted…
The
psalmist cannot say what future awaits the people. It seems as though all hope and possibility
is striped away in this bleak historical moment. But there is an acute insight into the
psychology of exile in all these texts. When
everything else is stripped away from them, all that is left to exiles is the
power of memory. In one sense it is
nothing: ‘how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ Without the institutions that defined
religion, faith was no more than a cherished memory. The literal definition of nostalgia is ‘aching for home’ and in
that technical sense this Psalm is deeply nostalgic for an era that had
vanished for ever. Yet in another sense,
memory is everything, especially when it is collectively harnessed and
externalised through ceremony and ritual.
It preserves identity and confers it on succeeding generations. For Israel, undergoing the desolating
experience of exile, this meant returning to the primitive sources of faith and
nourishing them so as to preserve the essence of what had defined them as the
people of the covenant. So the seventy
years of exile saw the birth of diaspora Judaism
marked by visible signs of faith among a community in dispersion: devotion to the
holy books of the Torah, the
beginnings of synagogue worship, and circumcision as the sign of the covenant
engraved like the tablets of the law on the flesh of human beings. The exile of the 6th century was
to prove the most fertile period in the entire history of Judaism.
As
the 6th century neared its end, so did the Babylonian Empire,
bloated with its own power and wealth, unstable at its core. Another world power had already entered the
stage of the Fertile Crescent. This was the legendary Persian
Empire led by the charismatic Cyrus, one of history’s great
military tacticians. In 538 BCE Cyrus
took Babylon and designated himself, according to a contemporary inscription,
‘King of the world, great king, king of Babylon, king of the four rims [of the
earth]’.[5] He proclaimed himself a liberator both to the
Babylonians, restoring pre-eminence to their god Marduk, and to their vassal
states by permitting them to return to their homelands and rebuild their
shrines. ‘May all the gods whom I have resettled in their sacred cities ask
daily Bel and Nebo for a long life for me.’[6]
One of these communities was of course the Jewish people in exile. At this time they were being fortified by an
unnamed prophet we call the Second Isaiah because his peerless oracles have
become attached to the earlier utterances of the 8th century prophet
Isaiah of Jerusalem. Second Isaiah read
the signs of the times accurately. He
saw in Cyrus ‘the Lord’s anointed’[7],
a claim even more extraordinary than Herodotus’ epithet ‘father to his people’:
extraordinary when we consider that to a Hebrew, the phrase ‘the Lord’s
anointed’ or ‘messiah’ was reserved for the kings of Israel and Judah[8]. In this oracle, God gives Cyrus the vocation
‘to subdue nations’ and ‘to strip kings of their robes’, that is, to de-throne
the powers in order that God himself may be seen to be sovereign so that the
exiled community might be returned to their home and rebuild their broken
institutions. There would be a new
exodus, a second long march to freedom like the first but more glorious, for
which God himself would prepare a mighty highway, levelling the mountains,
shattering defensive walls and himself leading the people back to the Zion neither he nor they
had for one moment forgotten.
This
prophet did not naïvely believe that Cyrus the Persian was somehow an anonymous
Jew. ‘I call you by your name…., though
you do not know me. I am the Lord and
there is no other; besides me there is no god.
I arm you, though you do not know me’.
In the history of religions this is an important statement for its unequivocal
monotheism (the doctrine that there is only one god and that the pantheon of
deities in Canaanite, Egyptian and Babylonian religion have no real
metaphysical existence). A consequence
of this is the unambiguous conviction that historical events are determined by
a divine hand, what theologians call providence. I am saying that the prophet could see, in
the political strategies of Cyrus, the work of God. That strategy was based on the shrewd observation
that vassal states were more compliant and productive when they were in their
own land rather than exiled. So in the
530s, many of the exiles returned to Canaan
and began to rebuild the temple. Many,
but not all: some of the best educated and most influential Jews remained in
Babylon where, following Jeremiah’s advice, they had settled and flourished, and
had learned to speak the new language both literally and metaphorically, realising
that Judaism could not only survive but prosper in the new environment of
strange lands that had themselves become familiar.
The
new (or ‘second’) temple proved something of a paradox. It was the natural fulfilment of three
generations’ hopes and longings, attended by expectations of a powerful divine
epiphany such as had graced the dedication of Solomon’s temple five centuries
previously. It was confidently predicted
that the second temple would result in the whole world acknowledging Yhwh’s
supremacy: ‘the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it
together’[9]. This symbolised the problems of return. Who and what were this people reinstalled in
their land, yet now without a king, and with the ties that had once irrevocably
connected them to the temple fatally unravelled by the exile? Tomorrow, now that it had become today, was
not what had been hoped for. One
narrative tells how some of the elderly who had remembered Solomon’s temple
wept when they saw the new one, so inferior was it to the glorious building
whose memory they had carried with them for three score years and more. (In this city we have our own unique instance
of a temple’s remembered glory in the Rites
of Durham written in the 1590s - through his tears we might almost say - by
a very old man who had possibly been a young professed monk or a novice in the 1530s
in the last days of the Benedictine Cathedral Priory, who writes lovingly of
the church as it had been in those distant times, now stripped of its
glory.)
A
faltering economy and an uncertain vision of the future were compounded by tentativeness
in religious faith that had become habituated to the abrasion of exile and did
not easily transplant back into the soil of Canaan. Many of the post exilic writings testify to
what sociologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’: the effect of failed
expectations on how a community understands itself, the stories it tells and the
ambitions it harbours for the years ahead.
It is hard not to conclude that the Jewish community remained
metaphorically in exile even when it had been reinstated in its historic
homeland. And just as the Hebrews in the
wilderness wondered in their desperate ordeals of hunger and thirst why Moses
had ever led them out of Egypt if it had come to this, so it would have been
natural for the question at least to be whispered when it was observed how
those who had remained in Babylon continued to flourish: should they perhaps have
stayed there? Was the return a terrible mistake?
********
Let
me return to the Holocaust. It seems to
me that there are a number of themes in the history of the exile that are
important in the way we appropriate and interpret the events of the 1930s and
1940s. Here I am inevitably speaking as
a person of faith within the Judaeo-Christian community, but I should like to
think that some of these concluding reflections have universal value, whatever
our own religious faith or outlook on life.
The
first theme is the importance of memory. ‘Lest we forget’ is a noble aspiration for
the nation when it stops to focus its thoughts and recollections on Armistice
Day. But it is essential if the human race
is to be genuinely humane. Without it, the Jewish community could not
have survived the exile, whether it was through remembering a past when all
seemed well, or the memory of a cataclysmic event that almost destroyed the
nation. Every community and every individual
is kept alive by the faculty of memory. Memory
is the golden string we hold on to in the dark labyrinth of existence so that a
story can be told. Without it, we are
dissociated, helpless in the chaotic seas of meaninglessness. Eva Hoffmann’s book charts the luminous power
of her memories of Cracow
as life-saving in the new world. The
stories of the death camps, both from those who perished and those who
survived, testify to the supreme importance of memory.
So
we in turn must remember those who were the victims of the Holocaust and
remember the evil that was inflicted on them.
It is a form of ‘bearing witness’, the phrase that is now used to
describe what is required of visitors who go to Auschwitz,
Yad Vashem and other places of memorial.
And although I am a Jewish man for whom the Nazi genocide is a personal
as well as a global tragedy, we must not forget the homosexuals, the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, the gypsies and those who courageously attempted to resist Nazism:
these too were its victims. Memory is
not an infallible defence against the awful possibility that we may repeat
these horrors in another age: the genocides of the post-war period are evidence
of that. But Holocaust Memorial Day is a
symbolic act of anamnesis that pulls
us out of ignorance or indifference into solidarity with the victim against the
oppressor, with the truth against the lie.
Through such rituals, attitudes and motives can be scrutinised and their
dark side redeemed.
The
second theme is the inevitability of
lament. The shocking conclusion to Psalm 137 offends
our wish for resolution, the happy ending.
If we are Church of England people, we will not wish to hear the choir utter
such violent screams of vengeance at Cathedral evensong on the 28th
evening of the month: it violates our wish for everything to be ‘nice’.
Yet
we should perhaps examine ourselves here.
For one thing, literature and piety flourished in the death camps, as if
the inalienable human urge to practise creativity was itself an act of defiance
in the face of extinction.[10] What is more, poetry and art provide
coherence and meaning, if not solace, at times of bewilderment, despair, shock
and outrage. They help order chaotic
worlds and create solidarity. This
recognition that disorientation needs to be articulated if a new orientation is
to be achieved is one of the functions of lament in ancient communities,
whether the sorrow is public or personal.
The Psalms I have quoted are among a large class of Hebrew poems in the
Psalter that scholars call ‘laments’.
Some are laments of a suffering individual; others, like these three,
are laments of a whole community. Some
of these, like our Psalm, include terrible imprecations against the enemy who
has done such wrong to the innocent. In
the Psalter, these are not in fact curses at all. They are prayers that God may
put right what is wrong; that he may restore ethical order to the chaotically
amoral or immoral world in which such wrong can happen. We are not surprised to learn that Psalm 137
came into its own in the USA
at prayer services following 9/11. ‘Its mix of mourning, rage, imprecation and
petition reflected the anguished mix in the souls and hearts of many persons as
they mourned that terrible destruction and cried out to God.’[11] So it is not only justifiable but required
that we stand with the victims of the Holocaust in imaginative empathy and make
their screams of pain or defiance our own.
Only when we dare to express passion can we truly engage in compassion for victims and protest dispassionately against injustice. To do
this, we need the literature of suffering such as the laments to provide us
with words we would not dare to invent for ourselves. This is why the register of lament needs to
be kept alive even in our contemporary society.
It is powerfully cathartic, if we use it wisely.
The
third theme is the persistence of exile. The Babylonian invasion was a catastrophe
because Judah
did not believe it was even a possibility.
She had taken, or mistaken, the teaching of the prophets and the rituals
of temple worship to mean that Jerusalem
was inviolable, and that Yhwh would guarantee the security of the temple as his
eternal dwelling place. This shock to an
easy theological system was not quickly assimilated. But once the insight had entered the
bloodstream of Judaism that nowhere
was uniquely sacred and divinely guaranteed, the astonishing consequence began
to be absorbed that everywhere was
the place of divine presence and therefore the possibility of worship. We could call this a kind of secularisation. (Saeculum means ‘world’: so etymologically, ‘secularism’ does not
mean per se an anti-religious
standpoint, only that faith has come to be practised ‘in the world’ as well as
at the shrine, a vital coming of age for every faith tradition.)
But
the corollary of this was the growing sense, not always conscious, that Judaism
would for evermore be ‘exilic’ and ‘dispersed’ in character. The return did not change this as we
saw. Holocaust survivors like Eva
Hoffmann speak of their disorientation in a world where things do not stay in
place, where surface readings of things will often be wrong and not to be
trusted. So she speaks of being ‘lost in
translation’, for exile is a state of mind and can never be sloughed off like
some un-needed, discarded skin. It’s
akin to the experience of Great War soldiers who having survived the trenches
found that their return home to bewildered families and friends perpetuated the
sense of being in a strange land with its own alien discourse. Perhaps the disorientation and lassitude of so
much of contemporary Europe owes something to
the legacy of the Holocaust. It would be
odd if this darkest singularity in our history did not scar the psyche of our
continent.
The
fourth theme is the necessity of hope. The exile proved to be the crucible not of
despair but of expectancy. Perhaps we
see in the Psalm a community peering into the abyss. But their gaze did not rest there. Somehow, hope was re-born, the belief that
life could begin again. Where did this
hope come from? Its roots were the
belief that life was purposeful and not random; and in that coherent meaning lay
the seeds of the future. Eva Hoffmann draws
on the metaphor of triangulation in
her book. She says: ‘we need to triangulate
to something – the past, the future, our own untamed perceptions, another place
– if we’re not to be subsumed by the temporal and temporary ideas of our
time. Perhaps finding such a point of
calibration is particularly difficult now, when our collective air is
oversaturated with trivial and important and contradictory and mutually
cancelling messages.’[12]
One implication of this is that it is not
enough to live only in the past, the
present or the future. Each of these
offers temptations to which whole societies can rapidly succumb, respectively nostalgia,
hedonism and fantasy. Triangulation
means reading the landscape as accurately as we can by establishing reference points
of trustworthiness from where a chart or map may safely be drawn. In a postmodern age that suspects ‘grand
narratives’ this is peculiarly difficult.
But the key idea is trust, not certainty. The first triangulation to the summit of Mount Everest did not get the height quite right, though
it was perhaps ‘good enough’ for the time.[13] Perhaps Holocaust Memorial Day can keep alive
in us the need to triangulate frequently as the landscape shifts, sometimes
seismically, so that we can read it in a way that is ‘good enough’ for us to be
responsible citizens who live by and promote the values of justice, integrity,
compassion and truth.
To
acknowledge our own homelessness in this new millennium when we face so many
threats may paradoxically be to begin to find our home in it, learn its
language, realise its possibilities and recover hope. We do not need forever to be ‘lost in
translation’. Napoleon said that a
leader is a dealer in hope. If I am
asked what I believe my vocation as Christian priest is for, publicly, I often say that it is to keep hope alive. But leadership can be a chimera, an illusion
that all is well when it isn’t. Today
Barack Obama has taken office as President of the United States. The hopes surrounding him are positively
messianic: many see in him a new Cyrus, the anointed of the Lord who will lead
us back from exile. We wish him well, not
least an incumbency free from the illusions that have corrupted so many leaders
in history.
But
what matters for hope is what we all do next as societies and individual men
and women, however well or badly led we are.
It is a summons to action to each of us: not simply understanding or
awareness, much as those things are important, but commitment to act in pursuit
of a kinder, more just world. As James Burke
famously said, evil triumphs when good men do nothing. This much the history of the Holocaust
teaches us. It requires of us that we
consider the awful possibility that we might be complicit in genocide simply
through the consent of silence or choosing not to know what we ought to know,
or not knowing that we know it. The cry
‘never again!’ which greeted the appalling shock of realising what had taken
place in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau and Belsen is an imperative to us all. So it is impossible that we should ever
forget it.
January
2009
[1]
Hoffmann, Eva, Lost in Translation, London 1989, 104.
[5]
Pritchard, J. B., Ancient Near-Eastern
Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton
1950, 316.
[10]
Berben Paul, Dachau 1933-1945: The Official History, Brussels 1975, 175.
[11]
Brown, Sally & Miller, Patrick D., Lament:
Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew and Public Square, Louisville, 2005, xvi.
[12]
Hoffmann, op cit., 276.
[13]
Keay, John, The Great Arc, London
2001, 7-8.
