I do not understand.
I live uncomfortably with mystery, feel threatened by confusion, and troubled by the limitations of my ability to comprehend. Life is an endless series of incomprehensible conundrums and unanswerable questions.
Human questions are puzzling enough. Who can begin to make sense of the ways of we humans on this earth? But, when we move out beyond the confines of human experience, the depths of our ignorance reaches profound proportions.
Elie Wiesel has spent a lifetime struggling to come to terms with the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust of 1939 to 1945. He has poured out millions of written and spoken words in his attempt to find some rational explanation for this unspeakable horror. But he has always come up against the same blank wall of silence and death.
Wiesel wrote in his essay “The Death of My Father”,
Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries. (Legends Of Our Time, p. 6)
In a later essay in the same book, Wiesel explains our desire for understanding saying that,
We want to know, to understand, so we can turn the page: is that not true? So we can say to ourselves: the matter is closed and everything is back in order. (Legends Of Our Time, p. 184)
I struggle to understand in the hope that I might make the universe seem a safer more inhabitable place. I long for the predictable. I want life to unfold along rational lines, clearly governed by reasonable principles.
Wiesel suggests that the horror of Auschwitz must put an end to any attempt to arrive at understanding.
In truth, Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning – with a capital M – in history. What Auschwitz embodied has none. The executioner killed for nothing, the victim died for nothing. No God ordered the one to prepare the stake, nor the other to mount it. During the Middle Ages, the Jews, when they chose death, were convinced that by their sacrifice they were glorifying and sanctifying God’s name. At Auschwitz the sacrifices were without point, without faith, without divine inspiration. If the suffering of one human being has any meaning, that of six million has none. (Legends Of Our Time, p. 183)
But I do not need to look all the way back to Auschwitz. Most days, many times, even small M meaning eludes me. I simply do not understand why life unfolds as it does.
All I can do is hold the questions and allow them to bring me to a deeper more genuine experience of life. Indeed, Wiesel suggests this is the purpose, perhaps even the meaning, of questions.
I have nothing against questions: they are useful. What is more, they alone are. To turn away from them would be to fail in our duty, to lose our only chance to be able one day to lead an authentic life. (Legends Of Our Time, p. 181,182)
The words “I do not understand” need not be a cry of despair. If they bring me to the place of surrender, they can become a door opening to deeper vulnerability and greater trust in the forces of life.
9 comments
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May 30, 2012 at 7:54 am
brokenstones
There is mystery to the Holocaust because we assume human beings ought not to be capable of such. There is no mystery if we look at human nature honestly in the face. And no mystery if we finally understand that Auschwitz and the Holocaust is the pit of death at the centre of the human heart finally unveiled.
There is mystery about God ‘allowing this’, but would there be if we assume that ‘this’ is the ultimate evidence of humanity’s depravity, and the ultimate evidence of the need of our salvation and evidence of our deserving of anything BUT salvation?
Human beings are, and have proved it again and again throughout history that we are capable of this. Even in Hitlers own time just across the border…. So many Jews fled the pogroms of 1930′s Russia to Germany.
The only difference here is that their are survivors to tell it and thousands of young, fresh, innocent boys saw it first hand, and via film and photo, it finally went through their eyes to the heart of the world.
May 30, 2012 at 10:23 am
jaqueline
too often “I do not understand” are words that signal our shutting down and walking away from the door…
calling us back to their true call are these words :
‘The words “I do not understand” need not be a cry of despair. If they bring me to the place of surrender, they can become a door opening to deeper vulnerability and greater trust in the forces of life.’
gorgeous
June 3, 2012 at 11:35 pm
kimgye
Totally agree Jacqueline.
May 30, 2012 at 5:06 pm
John
In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust the influential culture critic Theodor Adorno famously wrote: “after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.” Adorno’s words always stuck with me – perhaps because of my lifelong love of literature. At one time I even aspired to become a poet myself.
As far as the 20th century is concerned, I always think in terms of humanity having crossed two unanticipated thresholds into unexpected evil. Both occurred during the Second World War. The first is the Holocaust, which mostly targeted European Jews – although other groups were also systematically targeted, including the disabled, for example. (And we ought not to forget that between 23 and 27 million Russians were killed during the Second World War, and that Hitler was largely defeated by the Soviet Union). The Holocaust is the first case of industrial style mass murder (though the idea was prefigured for some time – consider the guillotine during the ‘Reign of Terror’ during the French Revolution).
The second threshold crossings were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which primarily targeted Japanese civilians. In these cases, mass murder was wedded to physical and environmental destruction on an unprecedented scale, something arguably more insidious. This bomb was dropped, not by a dictatorship, moreover, but by one of our world’s allegedly greatest democracies, the United States, and whereas today Germany has taken full responsibility for its role in Nazism, the United States has yet to fully acknowledge its conduct against Japan. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still routinely rationalized or justified in America.
Probably nuclear weapons were inevitable – if the United States had not discovered them first and therefore gained a strategic advantage, Hitler or some other outright dictator might have got the bomb first, and he certainly wouldn’t have taken any ethical precautions, whereas the Americans surely did.
During the Cold War the notion of Holocaust was expanded to include the idea of Nuclear Holocaust, at the time the greatest peril human beings faced (and we still actually face it today). In a nuclear holocaust not just a people, but potentially all people – perhaps even life itself – can be exterminated, and in a very short stretch of time. This threat was controlled from above in the past: only the president or the Kremlin could push the big red button and initiate MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Since then, nuclear weapons have proliferated, and now, with the integration and diffusion of technology, the question of who can maintain control over which such destructive weapons is much less clear than it once was.
May 30, 2012 at 6:18 pm
lindsay
Oh, John, yes! … we seldom consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki when we think about WW2 … it’s horrible to think of what we are capable of doing … what we have actually done …
May 30, 2012 at 10:37 pm
jaqueline
we seldom consider them? I am surprised.
Your surprise highlights for me how much of the remembrance of WW2 has become Holocaust- centric.even though the war was so much bigger and more complex than that, and a wound on the soul of the world even without considering the Holocaust. The Holocaust is better understood as a crime that was committed under cover of war.but certainly not the goal or result of war itself.
However when it comes to the allied bombing of Germany and Japan..that crime was justified as warfare and intended as a means to victory….and perhaps that is why there is still so much justification of it. Even without the atomic bomb, and certainly the scale of destruction was the same even without it being atomic, the Americans and the allies were doing a great job of the annihilation of civilians in Japan and Germany with aerial incendiary bombing, which itself is a threshold that had never been crossed before.
June 3, 2012 at 11:29 pm
kimgye
Have never respected the revisionist historians regarding incendiary bombing and reasons for the use of the Atomic bomb while the people who knew the truth of the whole story are still with us. Have not heard many of them parroting those theories.
June 5, 2012 at 1:59 pm
jaqueline
“When President Roosevelt approved the Manhattan Project (again, note that his happened beforethe United States actually entered World War II), he set in motion forces that have remained largely unrestrained in their dominance of American policies and endangering of the entire world’s
welfare. The use of nuclear weapons on two defenseless Japanese cities with incalculable consequences for the people in those cities stands as an unmitigated moral disaster. However, this disaster was then exacerbated by the unwillingness of American leaders to step away from a future of extraordinary danger and threatened violence.”
http://thinkingpacifism.net/2012/05/28/why-world-war-ii-was-a-moral-disaster-for-the-united-states-part-two/#more-1078
June 5, 2012 at 11:35 pm
kimgye
I could go on about the very real threat that the Germans were at the time etc, or the hard won knowledge that the Japanese would fight to the last man etc, but again, “I have never respected the revisionist historians regarding incendiary bombing and reasons for the use of the Atomic bomb while the people who knew the truth of the whole story are still with us. Have not heard many of them parroting those theories.”