'to the testimony'||'to the love'|| 'to the pain||

The Levite and the Holocaust

Each one of us is lovingly, uniquely crafted by God to hold the radiant gift of love and serve it up;  William Blake said: We are put in the world for but a little while to learn to bear the beams of love.

In 1938, with the outbreak of violence that would come to be known as Kristallnacht, American Orthodox rabbi Menachem HaKohen Risikoff wrote about the central role he saw for Priests and Levites in terms of Jewish and world responses, in worship, liturgy, and teshuva, repentance. In הכהנים והלוים HaKohanim vHaLeviim(1940), The Priests and the Levites, he stressed that members of these groups exist in the realm between history (below) and redemption (above), and must act in a unique way to help move others to prayer and action, and help bring an end to suffering. He wrote, "Today, we also are living through a time of flood, Not of water, but of a bright fire, which burns and turns Jewish life into ruin. We are now drowning in a flood of blood...Through the Kohanim and Levi'im help will come to all Israel."^[10]     [Wikipedia: Holocaust Theology]

A picture in my mind comes suddenly from the movie Escape from Sobibor, the Nazi death camp.  Once the shooting began the prisoners ran towards the front gate.  As some of them began to fall dead, running men would suddenly stop and rocking back in forth would begin chanting the Kadesh for their dead.  They too would suddenly drop.  I have never forgotten that image of priesthood.

"Where is God? Where is He?"

Filled with spirit of prayer and thrilled with passion,
Hailed a God more merciful than Time.

Ah, less mighty, less than Time prevailing,
Shrunk, expelled, make nothing at his nod,
Less than clouds across the sea-line sailing,
Lies he, stricken by his master's rod.
"Where is man?" the cloister murmurs wailing;
Back the mute shrine thunders — "Where is God?"     ~Swineburne

And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows..." That night the soup tasted of corpses.~Elie Wiesel, Memoirs

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Wiesel's witness as survivor is twofold. There is a witness he must bear, certainly, to the non-Jew, the "executioner." But, as well, he must witness to the Jew, the "victim." In each case the testimony pricks the conscience.

Mainly, my position in the Jewish community is really the position of a witness from within and a defender from without. This goes, of course, along with my ideas about the duties and the privileges of a storyteller — of a writer. From the inside, from within the community, I am critical. If Jews are criticized or attacked from the outside, then I try to defend them. What I try to do (it's very hard) is to reconcile the two attitudes: not to be too strong, too sharp, too critical when I am inside and not to be a liar on the outside.

… When evils of such magnitude are occurring, no one is completely innocent — and Wiesel has taken it upon himself to witness in such a way that our guilt can never sink into unconscious forgetfulness.

But Wiesel is more than a bearer of testimony. He is an artist — a storyteller, a writer. True to his Hasidic roots, he believes in the power of the tale… are "not novels but pages of testimony"… the "spiritual archivist of the”….family…for very profound reasons.

…Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.

God made man because he loves stories.

(150) "What would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on places and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death."   

In the Kabbalah, there is the story of shvirat hakelim, "the breaking of the vessels.”

The writer must write as witness.

We are witnesses in the cruelest and strongest sense of the word. And we cannot stop. We must speak. This is what I am trying to do in my writing. I don't believe the aim of literature is to entertain, to distract, to amuse. It used to be. I don't believe in it anymore.

When asked what it means to be a writer today, Wiesel has consistently said that it means to correct injustices, to alleviate suffering, to create hope. Precisely for this reason, the witness/storyteller/writer's work is disheartening. It so rarely accomplishes what it must accomplish.

Wiesel's role as witness so thoroughly governs his role as writer that he must continue to write whether his testimony meets with any response or not.

One must write out of one's own experience, out of one's own identity. One must cater to no one; one must remain truthful. If one is read, it's good; if one is not read, it's too bad. But that should not influence the writer. [23]

And, most important, the witness' work as writer demands that he write as a moral man. The literary artist can no longer be excused if he writes one way and lives another. Life and story must blend in ethical harmony. The writer is bound in a moral commitment by the very tale he tells. The making and reading of literature is no frivolous business.

True writers want to tell the story simply because they believe they can do something with it — their lives are not fruitless and are not spent in vain. True listeners want to listen to stories to enrich their own lives and to understand them.

Actually, I believe that today literature has changed its purpose and its dimension. Once upon a time it was possible to write l'art pour l'art, art for art's sake. People were looking only for beauty. Now we know that beauty without an ethical dimension cannot exist. We have seen what they did with culture in Germany during the war; what they called culture did not have any ethical purpose or motivation. I believe in the ethical thrust, in the ethical function, in the human adventure in science or in culture or in writing. [24]

The witness begins with his testimony.   ~Elie Wiesel, Memoirs

Poetry: A Privileged Means

In Dickinson, poetry becomes a privileged means for telling the truth about trauma and, therefore, for integrating traumatic experience into the self. Or to put it in the words of Wallace Stevens, poetry is "a violence from within that protects us from violence from without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."^xi

“It happens that over time, even the most beautiful bowl, even the most finely tuned satellite dish get mucky. We get coated, as it were, with our own personal history, fears and beliefs, especially negative ones.  Our personal stories, our opinions about things, our staunch positions, also serve to coat over the message we are here to transmit.  All of this is totally normal, but, ultimately our personal overlay can occlude our purpose, and then, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said, we become messengers who have forgotten  their message. ”

  It is the extensive sympathy of the human heart…

To Prove Him With Hard Questions…

And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart. --I Kings 10.1-3

"To prove him with hard questions" : answerability in Hopkins' writings.(Gerard Manley Hopkins)(Critical Essay)   ~Lesley Higgins, Victorian Poetry

     Some interrogatives are forensic, designed to elicit afresh a pre-confirmed truth; others function as "a forestall of the thing" someone else will ask.4 Some effect a dialectical process that leads to further insight; others betray a "fretty" doubt, abjectly seeking an "answering voice"[5] that never replies… A critic such as Robert Lowell could consider the interrogative habit as a substantial part of Hopkins' "dramatic" writing; Rachel Salmon could cite its contribution to the "eccentricity, even the rambunctiousness, of Hopkins's language."[7] I would suggest that question s reconfirm in his writings the materiality of language, drawing "attention to its physical features"[8] and reminding us that meaning is made through the graphic dimensions of the text (a visual / cognitive experience) and its physical I sensuous dimensions, both oral and aural. Questions are acts of summoning and, in Hopkins' terms, bidding: "I mean the art or virtue of saying everything right to or at the hearer, interesting him, holding him in the attitude of correspondent or addressed or at least concerned, making it everywhere an act of intercourse-and of discarding everything that does not bid, does not tell."[9] The letter to Robert Bridges just quoted refers to bidding as "such a fugitive thing" (Letters I, p. 160).

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence…W.H. Auden, Under Sirius

Sacred Grounding

When we decide to read a poem (it is an act of the will), it is like entering sacred ground where the Holy can happen. When we read poetry, we create our own oratory of the heart and mind where both the poet and the reader engage in holy dialogue.'  ~ Robert Waldron's essay on Jessica Powers

In the final analysis, spirituality contains two essential ingredients, relationship and revelation. Spirituality is about God's decision to establish a relationship with humankind through creation, covenant and, for us as Christians, through the paschal mystery - the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit we are all called to holiness and to intimacy with God and union among ourselves. To understand the nature of friendship, its intimacy, duties and commitment is to understand the essence of spirituality.
This article first appeared as "The Spirituality of Jessica Powers, " by Rev. Robert Morneau, D.D., Spiritual Life, Vol 36, No 3, Fall 1990, pp. 150-161.

Melchizedek

The name Melchizedek means King of Righteousness. Genesis 14:18; ‘Melchizedek, King of Salem (Jerusalem) brought out bread and wine…

  A year ago a small picture of a French country table caught my eye at the thrift store.  It is a picture that I have received as a gift from God; and, as such, I have continued to study its meanings.  To finally understand ‘the wine seal’ on the wall is a relief.  The ‘gifts’ of ‘bread and wine’ were ‘given’ from the ‘beginning’ of God choosing to be in ‘covenant’.  It brings to mind a song I once heard: “God and man at table have sat down…” is all I remember.  The discovery of the picture and now learning more about the gifts from Melchizedek have solidified my understanding about the gift of ‘haecceitas’ of don Scotus and Hopkins.  They were both ‘priests after the order of Melchizedek.’