Nameless: Witnessing the
Shoah's Future
President Macchiarola, members of the Board of Trustees, faculty,
students and guests, I stand here today to join St. Francis College in its
commemoration of Yom HaShoah and welcome the resulting opportunity to address
you here and now on behalf of those who suffered in the time of the Shoah, as
well as we who inherit the history of that suffering and the difficult
responsibility born in its hearing. And
in particular I would like to thank Alan Udoff who was kind enough to think of
me for this occasion. Alan has been far
and away the best reader that my book Suffering Witness has found to
date. His editorial comments during its
writing kept me from becoming a fool more than a few times in its pages.
What
should the succeeding generations be told of the Shoah? In an essay published twenty years after the
end of World War II and after, at least, the empirical destruction of the death
camps, Emmanuel Levinas, himself a survivor, asks whether it is fair at all
that the children of the next generation should be given to know what had
occurred there: "Should we insist
on bringing into this vertigo," Levinas wonders, "a portion of
humanity whose memory is not sick from its memory?"
I
bring this question to mind today in a circumstance that is most chastening for
me. For who am I to speak of these
matters to you, I, who was born after the event of the Shoah, who count among
my own kin no man or woman who suffered its indignities, and who, quite
frankly, was not even born of a Jewish lineage?
I stand here before this audience, which includes in it those who were
subjected to atrocities and those who are your children, and I ask myself what
could I possibly begin to say that you could not say with far more authority
and knowledge? A friend of mine, herself
a child of survivors, recently suggested that this is the moment, as that
generation who was there passes away, to be especially attentive to what it has
to say. Why am I up here at all?
In
puzzling over this question since Alan invited me to give this address, I have
decided that my role today before you could at least be partially justified by
this thought: beyond that generation who
survived the Shoah, there must come those who were not there and yet are still
called to witness it. The Shoah, in this
sense at least, calls for a future. My
own motivation to write about the responsibility to witness the death world of
the Shoah in my book was in fact inspired by the quandaries that arose as my
students, most of whom are not Jewish and all of whom were born decades after
In this vein, I am also asking today at least in
part in what manner might the Shoah become part of the cycle of commemoration
that so deeply characterizes Jewish religious life and traditions. This very lecture can be viewed as one
instance of that evolving practice of memory and memorial—at once scholarly and
historical and yet also religious and prayerful in its tone—that has led to the
many ceremonies and services, talks and discussions, taking place all over the
world over the next week in regard to Yom HaShoah. To take an initial measure of the possibility
of the Shoah's commemoration as a Jewish practice is, indeed, one aspect of the
intent of Levinas' essay—he has some recommendations I will share a bit
later. And we can add to the question of
Jewish commemoration, before today's audience, how might all the other others,
whether they be Catholic or Lutheran or Anabaptist, Muslim or Buddhist or
Hindu, atheist or agnostic or G-d fearing, take note of this day.
And yet, if we listen to Levinas' words, we hear, no matter what particular religious
perspective we might bring with us, that to witness the Shoah is to
become sick in one's memory. For
witnessing the Shoah demands not only that we, who come after it, remember the
details of its occurrence, its historical or empirical record, but also that we
strive to be true, in Levinas' own words, to its "chaos and
emptiness." Chaos and Emptiness: these words allude to the Hebrew
"tohu v'bohu," that initial faceless mass seething before the
Most High in the very act of Biblical creation.
"Tohu v'bohu" in the mind of the rabbis of Genesis
Rabbah, finds its sense respectively in the human figures of Adam and
particularly Cain, personages in whom the very sense of creation, of a calling
into society, into service, into responsibility, threatens to lapse into a
muteness, a wrathful and burning silence that ignores all response
whatsoever. Irresponsibility. Betrayal.
Impunious murder, in which the other is rubbed out to the point that the
very world becomes emptied of the human face.
And now Levinas calls us, as do all the writers of the Shoah, to face
again the making faceless of the world.
It
is important to note that in this call we are give a paradoxical, even
scandalous task. For the anti-world of
the Shoah inevitably displaces any attempt we who stand here today might do or
think to make sense of it. Yet another
survivor, Primo Levi, in his prologue to If this be
Let
us pause for a moment to read Levi's words:
You
who live safe
In
your warm houses,
You
who find returning in the evening,
Hot
food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate
that this came about:
I
commend these words to you.
Carve
them in your hearts
At
home, in the street,
Going
to bed, rising;
Repeat
them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
It
seems to me that Levi's prologue lays out the same two conditions for
witnessing the Shoah mentioned by Levinas above: first, we are called simply to remember—to
carve into our hearts these words picturing the lives of those who suffered in
the death camps. But second, we are also called to remember that remembering
the extremity of this suffering is an impossible task, one that places us in
crisis, that questions all that we justifiably assume is necessary for a normal
and blessed existence. As Primo Levi's
curse suggests, and I as myself witnessed in the classroom, to fulfill this
latter condition of witness, to let the weight of the dehumanization that was
Auschwitz be palpably imagined and felt by my students, is to put the very
notion of education itself in crisis.
For if education is to remain true to its etymology, to educate is to
draw out from the student that which is implicit in her or his person.
Yet,
what would I imply is implicit in the personhood of my students, not to mention
my own children, when I would have them become attentive to a time in which human
beings were not only murdered over six million times, as if that alone would
not be enough to demoralize each and every one of us, but that they were also
dispatched as if justice itself had disappeared from the face of the earth, as
if the victim's simply having a face were itself an inexcusable affront against
all who ruled? And most disturbingly,
what good comes from making clear in this memory how the malificence of such
actions had their effect not only upon those who perpetrated them but also those
who suffered them? Not only the
perpetrator was dehumanized by the cruelty of his or her actions but, as Levi's
prologue suggests, all too often the victim as well. Why add the succeeding generations to this
list as well?
Primo
Levi puts it bluntly, even provocatively:
He demands that his reader consider whether those who suffered within
the precincts of
Instead
he would have them consider how extraordinarily fragile is the hold their own
human personalities have upon themselves and their world. And he would render my students silent,
paralyzed in their response to that which in fact beggars all attempts to
respond to it. And how can this be
instructive to my students? What wisdom
in particular would Levi have carved into their hearts such that their hearts
might become more fully heartful instead of heartless? I am all too aware of how particular
students, often those who are bright but troubled, can become possessed by
images such as Levi's. The cruelty,
dehumanization and perversion pictured by those who remember the Shoah becomes
an exemplar against which the student now measures the meaningless of all else
that would affirm the goodness of the world.
The very existence of
How
might I answer this question here today?
When Alan invited me to give this lecture, he suggested that you might
be interested in hearing something of how my life has been affected by the
study of the Shoah. This suggestion is
in one sense quite dangerous—since the exact contours of my life, its small
successes, as well as its so-called tragedies, are of another order entirely
from those whom Emmanuel Levinas refers to as Nameless, those whose depredation
is so overwhelming as to defy my understanding it, even naming it, in the terms
of my own life, the secure life of food and friends that is looked upon with
such irony, even sarcasm, even hatred, in Primo Levi's prologue. To come to be attentive to the Nameless and
to speak of oneself—does this not risk the very curse invoked above by Levi?
And
yet there is one sense in which my life might anyway, in spite of its trivial
comforts, be relevant: for the manner in which I was uprooted from my own life
as I came to understand the significance of the Shoah is perhaps instructive of
how witnessing it can function as an education into moral seriousness that is
praiseworthy, even, if ironically, also demoralizing.
I
am embarrassed to admit that when I first came into contact with the poetry of
Paul Celan, whose work so insistently and carefully offered its testimony for
all who had suffered the Shoah—I totally misconstrued its meaning. It was as if the Shoah had not occurred at
all, given the manner in which I first read his poems. My initial encounter of the opening lines of
Celan's PSALM provoked in me what could be called an existential reverie. "No one moulds us again out of clay. /
No one conjours our dust. / No one."
In these words, I thought in my youth I had found the report of my own
death and the struggle of each human to imagine that basically unimaginable
possibility that is one's own death.
Here I could consider how the creation of my life, the breathing of G-d's
breath into wet clay, a ruach animating my actual existence, was unique
and miraculous. The poem seemed to
celebrate how I might discover myself precisely in my own vulnerability to
dying, to being a mortal, a creature whose death cannot be repeated but can be
undergone precisely only once. It was as
if the poem were about my death first and so the deaths of all the other others
as well. How subtly and assuredly I saw
the "us" of those lines transformed into "me."
Imagine
my astonishment when I learned later, during my study of Celan's poetry at the
Yet
as I confronted how profoundly I had misapprehended the sentiments of these
lines, I confronted as well a heretofore unexpected dimension of what it means
to call oneself human and, in particular, to call oneself a person of belief, a
person embraced by and embracing G-d's transcendence. And it turns out, the transcendence of the
human other too. My encounter with
Celan's poetry altered my life. And that
encounter in turn was nothing less than a subjection to the condition of
encountering all those who suffered the Shoah, who were submitted to a
destruction that could not be undone in any earthly or, finally, even more than
earthly terms. In the searing light of
that encounter, the question of whether these poems made my life more comfortable
or less dangerous or even more meaningful ceased to be an issue. What did begin to matter with a ferocity that
still stuns me, is the degree of attentiveness for others which was being
called for from me.
One
might even call this call to unswerving attentiveness miraculous. Yet this miracle, this gratuity or grace,
left no time for the thought of one's own comfort and safety. This attentiveness to the death of others,
particularly to those deaths not even granted the dignity of death, left me, as
Levinas would put it, in a restlessness in one's very entrails. Here were revealed dimensions of a responsibility and so of a personhood that
could not sleep and that had never been given the possibility of not caring, or
of treating the world, even if for a moment, as if it were an anonymous
plaything.
And
so, in conclusion and all too abruptly let me give you the three truths Levinas
would argue should sustain the future of the Shoah, those truths that we would
transmit to each succeeding generation about the chaos and emptiness, the tohu
v'bohu, which we only too briefly and tentatively have touched upon today.
1) To live humanly, people need infinitely
fewer things than they dispose of in the magnificent civilizations in which
they live.
2) In crucial times, when the perishability of
so many values is revealed, all human dignity consists in believing in their
return.
3) We must henceforth, in the inevitable
resumption of civilization and assimilation, teach the new generations that
strength necessary to be strong in isolation, and all that a fragile conscious
is called upon to contain at such times.
Of
this third precept, in particular, I have hoped to give some indication in my
words today. Words that are commended to
you to be carved into your hearts, as into mine.
PSALM
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjours our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the
no one's rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.