So That It Will Never Happen Again

There is a section of my evil and suffering course that never fails to touch me. I have been teaching this course for 7 years and whenever we get to the section on Post-Holocaust theology I get sucked in; I get sucked in to the horror, the disbelief and the evil. By “sucked in,” I don’t mean tantalized or tempted like one who strains one’s neck to gawk at a traffic accident one is passing on the highway. Though when reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, one gets a sense that one is reading something that one should not, like a voyeur peeking in on secret things one has no right to. The honesty is so raw, so brutal; I want to whisper to him, “Elie, you didn’t have to tell us that. You didn’t have to confess.” No, when I say, “sucked in,” I mean swallowed, spiraled downward, sunk-in-the-chest sorrowful. There is a part of me that is drawn to Holocaust literature; poetry and memoir, history and theology. I am drawn to the pain like a moth to a flame and I think I know why. I think I know why. I want it to touch me. I want to offer to Elie Wiesel my pledge that I will never forget; that I will always remember and by entering into it, in the only way I can, I find a way to bring a passion into the classroom that will hopefully spark in my students an appreciation for the power of memory that Wiesel has been writing about for 50 years. And perhaps, they will join me in my pledge to Wiesel never to forget. And so the memory will live on. This is no grand gesture. It is a small thing. But it’s my thing.

 

But I enter into it not only for my students. It is not just a professional strategy. I attempt to enter into it also because there is a part of me that forgets the magnitude of cruelty. On a daily basis I walk around in the world believing that people seek the good for others; that human beings are compassionate and kind and truthful. And then I read Night. And I am reminded not only of the suffering endured, but of the cruelty inflicted. As I read there is a tension in me that understands the reality of the page and yet cries out, “How could this happen? How could this happen? And how could the world watch and do nothing?” I expressed this to a friend once; my disbelief at the unfathomable depth of the capacity for human beings to enact evil and he said to me, “Why are you so surprised at that? What is more extraordinary is that human beings can actually be altruistic.”  His statement was stunning to me. The idea had never occurred to me that it could be the other way around; that cruelty might be the norm and benevolence the rarity. It is a startling statement and though I can entertain the thought academically, I cannot accept it categorically.

 

When my students read Night they are required to write a two page response to it. Some of them allow their horror and anguish to spill out onto their own pages and their heartbreak is evident. Others are rendered speechless and tell me that for them to attempt to even comment on Wiesel’s memoir seems to them impossible, if not obscene. And yet, they try. Others read it and though they may have been deeply moved, they do not express it in their own writing. They write about the book as they would any other and their papers read like dry book reports one might write about Moby Dick or Jane Eyre. And some stubbornly hang on to their theodicies and attempt to offer a “reason” for it. In their attempts to defend God in the face of God’s silence and absence at Auschwitz and thereby justify the evil, I become impatient. I write things in the margin in the heat of the moment. Within the hour I must return to their papers with White-Out and take back my scathing comments and biting sarcasm. But over and over again I read the same statement; that Wiesel wrote it “so that it will never happen again.” So that it will never happen again.

 

But it is happening again. It is happening now. Genocide is occurring in the Sudan as I write this and the world is silent again. And perhaps we can delude ourselves into thinking that 60 years ago the world did not act because it did not know, but not now. We read about this modern genocide every day on the Internet, in the New York Times and in Newsweek. We cannot plead ignorance. What shall we plead then, when future generations charge us with apathy, or cruelty, or immeasurable sins of omission? Shall our defense be that apathy and silence in the face of evil are in fact simply the norm for human beings? That we were simply displaying our true natures? Shall we protest the accusations by confirming that for the privileged and powerful to rush to the defense of the weak and vulnerable (when there is no self-interest involved) is an act that is just too extraordinary to be expected? Or will we read the memoir of a man or woman from Darfur who survived the horror, and pledge to remember “so that it will never happen again?”