First blogged 28 Jan 2008. The post was written by Kim, re-blogged by Richard.
Richard and I went to a lecture tonight at Swansea University. Given to a packed theatre by Dr. Margie Tolstoy, who teaches at Cambridge, it was entitled “Jewish and Christian Responses to the Holocaust”. As chaplains, Richard and I also had an opportunity to speak with Margie (as she insisted on being called) before the lecture.
One of the observations she made, in critique of Moltmann, is that Christian theologians have a habit of playing the Jesus card (my words, not hers) rather too quickly when it comes to the Shoa. The paradigm case is the way we have colonised Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical memoir Night, particularly the harrowing scene where a young boy is hanged in the barracks of Auschwitz:
For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“Where is God now?”
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
“Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on the gallows….”
That night the soup tasted of corpses.
The problem is not that we Christians reproduce this passage, written by a Jew, in teaching and preaching - I have used it myself many times, not least on Good Friday; after all, the New Testament itself purloins Isaiah 53 for Christological purposes. No, it is that perhaps we deploy the passage too quickly, or too glibly, that we fail to pause and submit to it in silence, a deafening, dissonant, and guilty silence, acknowledging that not just for Wiesel himself and his fellow Jews but for Christians too the horror of the Holocaust was a faith-shattering experience. Perhaps we gulp down the putrid soup too fast to taste it, to avoid puking, or even push it to one side, to get to the dessert of our finely formulated theologies of the atonement.
As Flora Keshgegian observes, in an essay on Dorothy Soelle’s theology of suffering: “The process of dealing with traumatic suffering requires that the victimised let go of the need to find meaning in relation to it. They also need to accept the absoluteness and irredeemability of the losses. Only then, in the mystery of the human thirst for life, can life be engaged with a measure of hope.” And if so for the victims themselves, a fortiori for grandstand commentators.
And thus Dr. Tolstoy agreed with me that theodicies are not just misguided and inherently futile projects, they are, in a sense, downright evil, as in purportedly explaining horrendous suffering, they explain it away.
Very interestingly, Richard and I both commented on the defensiveness, even the hostility, of a good section of the audience at the lecture. Which, I wonder, kind of confirms my point.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Pam 10.29.10 at 9:31 am
Dealing with traumatic suffering is a journey and sometimes a journey that doesn’t have a neat ending. Israel has non-loving neighbours, but that doesn’t excuse them from being a good neighbour. A very sad situation.
Joseph W 10.29.10 at 9:48 am
Pam, why lump all Jews together? Why say all of them collectively aren’t being a good neighbour, rather than the harder task of acknowledging that each individual has responsibility in his own personal conduct, and in any collective group you will have good and bad?
Also I’m interested in your sentence:
“Israel has non-loving neighbours, but that doesn’t excuse them from being a good neighbour”
Surely if you are claiming that Israel’s neighbours are “non-living”, you could equally substitute the word ‘Israel’ in your sentence for ‘Lebanon’, ‘Saudi Arabia’ or ‘Iran’.
Why not then? Why focus only on Israel as the nation with a unique responsibility to be meek and mild?
Joseph W 10.29.10 at 9:49 am
I think there are some excellent points in Kim’s post which further underline the necessity of continued Jewish-Christian dialogue.
PamBG 10.29.10 at 12:38 pm
Although a different “Pam”, again I ask the question why criticizing the State of Israel gets turned into lumping all Jews together?
If one criticizes the policies of the US is one saying that all Americans are (for example) war mongers? Personally speaking, I know the difference between the actions of the government of a sovereign State and one single individual citizen of that State.
Joseph W 10.29.10 at 1:10 pm
Because this post was not about Israel at all, it was about collective Jewish suffering and individual responses to this. Pam then brought in Israel to the discussion, prompting me to suppose that she sees Jews as one singular entity who have progressed as a unit from national trauma to national terror. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
PamBG 10.29.10 at 4:43 pm
I sincerely hope you’re wrong too and I suspect you are. My guess is that this comment comes from the context of conversations here over the last few months where the assertion of most of the “anti Methodist Church voices” seems to be that any criticism of the State of Israel is inherently racist and antisemitic.
Joseph W 10.29.10 at 4:51 pm
Pam BG, glad you agree.
Pam, can you clarify what you meant? Thankyou.
Richard 10.29.10 at 5:02 pm
I’d read it as PamPG did, reflecting from this post back onto recent ‘debate’. I’m quite sure that Pam didn’t intend the interpretation you’ve put on it, Joseph.
Joseph W 10.29.10 at 5:10 pm
That’s fine then, I’d still just like to know why she saw fit to mention Israel in this instance, and whether the phrase “Dealing with traumatic suffering is a journey and sometimes a journey that doesn’t have a neat ending” was a reference to the development of the state of Israel as a regrettable post-Holocaust event.
I haven’t called Pam racist or antisemitic, and that wasn’t the focus of my comment.
Rather, I want to know whether she sees the Jewish nation as a monolithic bloc, or as a diverse people group comprised of many diverse individuals, each with their own good and bad points.
Richard 10.29.10 at 5:28 pm
Can’t claim to know Pam terribly well, but I’d go with “a diverse people group comprised of many diverse individuals”. Certainly not “the development of the state of Israel as a regrettable post-Holocaust event”.
Joseph W 10.29.10 at 5:31 pm
B-) alrighty then!
Pam 10.29.10 at 10:15 pm
Responding to Joseph W: my statement about Israel was about a people who had been traumatised by the Holocaust. Collectively, Australia was traumatised by the events in Bali a number of years ago. Clearly, some were traumatised more than others i.e. those who lost loved ones. All countries have a responsibility to be ‘good neighbours’, however if a country doesn’t have a ‘good neighbour’ that doesn’t mean standards should be lowered in any particular country. I most certainly didn’t mean ‘the development of the state of Israel as a regrettable post-Holocaust event’, although I do believe the Holocaust touched every Jewish life.