Many of the staff at Schweibenalp Center of Unity are
from Germany. One of the German staff who we became friendly with,
Yvonne, was planning a three-day trip back to her hometown and very
kindly invited us to join her. Honestly, I had an initial moment of
resistance to going. We hadn't planned on leaving Switzerland. Maybe
it was the idea of an unexpected expense. But the resistance didn't
last long. Yvonne pointed out that she is from a town between two
major tourist destinations: the cities of Karlsruhe and Heidelberg.
This would be a great chance to see these cities and experience
another Western European country. And we had heard so much about
Germany from the people at Schweibenalp. More than that, we really
enjoy Yvonne's company and didn't want to pass up a chance at getting
to know her better. So one evening, Miral and Yvonne and I (and a guy
we were giving a ride to Basel) hit the road for Germany.
Or maybe my moment of resistance to
going to Germany had something to do with the aversion to Germany
commonly felt by American Jews. If it was, it wasn't conscious. But
like most American Jews, I was raised, from a very early age, with
the Holocaust seared into my consciousness. By first grade, I was
regularly attending Hebrew School assemblies in which we were showed
extremely graphic footage of Nazi concentration camps – Jewish
people being rounded up, being starved, being
gassed, being shot, being buried, being burned. We were given talks
by Holocaust survivors. We participated in annual Holocaust Memorial
Days – in fact, a friend and I led a service at our Temple one year
when I was around ten or eleven. We were repeatedly told to “Never
Forget” or risk a future Holocaust. And we were told to support the
State of Israel so that Jews worldwide would have a safe refuge if
another Holocaust was about to happen. So, I was not very old when
the Holocaust became a deeply essential element of my identity as a
Jew – when I became a child of the Holocaust. It's ironic, in a
way; no one in my family that we know of was killed by the Nazis.
Both sides of my family had come to the US fifty years earlier to
escape an earlier Jewish genocide – the Eastern European pogroms in
which Christians massacred hundreds of thousands of Jews. Still, I
didn't grow up feeling like a child of the pogroms. Like most
American Jews my age, I am a child of the Holocaust.
Maybe
because the Holocaust was a part of such an early stage of my
consciousness, I feel like I have spent my entire life working out my
feelings it. During early periods of my life, the Holocaust provided
me a strong sensitivity to human rights issues everywhere, it was a
shared experience that united me with other Jews, and it fueled a
resolve to carry on the tradition of my ancestors “so that Hitler
did not succeed.” This feeling probably reached its peak when I
attended a march of Jewish high school and college students (“The
March of the Living”) on the grounds of Aushwitz/Birkenau after a
week of touring several Polish concentration camps. I toured the
Birkenau barracks, gas chambers, and ovens . And I heard a stirring
speech by Elie Weisel (Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor) amidst
a bevy of Israeli flags planted in soil saturated with Jewish blood.
As I exited Birkenau, walking down the same railroad tracks that had
carried at least a million Jews to their deaths, I swore to myself of
my dedication to the Jewish people and to leading a Jewish household
so that no one who died at these camps will have died in vain.
But
as time went, the dark consequences of the “Never Forget the
Holocaust” legacy became more apparent to me. I became saddened at
all of the beautiful and deeply spiritual parts of Judaism that were
never taught to me as a kid because so much time was spent
remembering the suffering of the Holocaust. I realized how much
personal damage is done when people become so focused on themselves
as victims. Feeling that you are a member in a group of people that
the world is out to exterminate, as we were told, breeds fear, anger,
and obsessive self-protection. And that personal damage is translated
into collective worldviews and policies. I realized how the “preserve
Israel at any cost” mentality of most Israeli and American Jews is
linked to the desperate desire to never be so victimized again. And I
became more and more sad as I realized that the current sufferings of
the decades old Israeli-Arab conflict – the violence and thousands
of deaths on both sides - is at least in large part, an outcome of
the fear, anger, and obsessive self-protection of the Jewish people.
The irony of this nation of victims now engaging in so much
oppression and persecution horrifies me. As I grew more vehemently
opposed to Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories, I also grew to
believe that Jews needed to finally grow beyond the Holocaust.
This
perspective probably reached its peak when I read The
Jew in the Lotus,
a great book documenting meetings between Jewish leaders and the
Dalai Lama. In it, the author (Rodger Kamentz, a Jew) compares the
Jewish reaction to the Holocaust of anger and fear to the Tibetan
reaction to Chinese persecution. This reaction included the beauty of
imprisoned monks who felt and expressed deep compassion for their
Chinese captors. It also included the view that the painful suffering
involved in the violent invasion of their country, murders of its
peoples, and attempted destruction of their culture was part of a
larger good in that it forced the Tibetans to abandon their isolation
and engage the rest of the world, where teachings like those of
Buddhism are so needed. For many years, I felt strongly that modern
Judaism and I as a modern Jew, needed to end the intense focus on the
Holocaust, at risk of this focus being the real source of our final
demise. I began to avoid reminders of the Holocaust in order to learn
more about the deep spirituality of Judaism. And I spoke to Jewish
friends about this new relationship with the Holocaust whenever there
wa a good chance.
Then
a few years ago, Miral and I were in Boston for a friend's child's
Christening. After the ceremony in the suburbs, we went out to eat in
the city. Leaving the restaurant, we walked the streets and happened
to walk into a large street memorial to the Holocaust. We walked
through it together – and for one of the first times in our
relationship, I talked with Miral about the role of the Holocaust in
my life and in the lives of many modern Jews. And as she was shocked
and sickened by the stories relayed in the memorial, I told her of
many other stories that have become a part of my being over the
years. And for the first time in a very long time, I found myself
crying at the agonizing insanity of what was done to six million of
my people. Through all of the work I had done in my head to think
about how the Holocaust had affected Jews and the world of my
generation, I may have begun to disconnect from a heart that still
ached and broke when I felt what was done to us Jews and the
world in the Holocaust.
And,
so, after all of these years, I find myself accepting that both
perspectives are true and that a Middle Way is the right way into the
future. That in some paradoxical way we Jews must never forget what
other people did to us in the Holocaust so that we can try to
prevent its repetition to us and to other peoples – while we also
move on from the intense focus on the Holocaust and identifying with
that victimization to, instead, reconnect with the deep beauty of our
unique way of connecting with and honoring the Ultimate Divine Ground
of the Universe. This truth has lived with me since that day in
Boston.
And with a ll of that I still, consciously, wasn't thinking about the Holocaust or Nazis at all
when we crossed the border from Switzerland into Germany in Yvonne's
car. And we had a great time over the course of the three days –
meeting Yvonne's friend Barbara who hosted us with incredible
generosity and graciousness; eating tons of German Bretzels; sampling
a bit of German beer; eating a meal of the most amazing fresh white
asparagus (“spargle”) I have ever had; exploring some classically
gorgeous Western European cities, and having great conversations
about life's journeys with Yvonne. Thanks to Yvonne, we had a great
time in Germany.
But what will stay with me most was
meeting a couple Yvonne is friends with and their young daughter. We
brought over some really inexpensive and really delicious German
bakery items to share over coffee. At one point, Jork (the husband)
explained that the city of Bruchsel, where we were, was a major
national railroad hub during World War II and was completely
destroyed by Allied bombing. He noted, for example, that the castle
we planned to walk to later that day is a replica of the original.
“There are a few buildings left here from before the war; otherwise
it has all been rebuilt.” He began to talk of the struggle of
Germans to recover from the war, explaining that open discussion of
what happened almost never occurs, leaving wounds that fester from
generation to generation. When Miral asked, he confirmed that the
silence is out of shame.
Jork spoke of his extreme frustration
that he feels so passionately anti-war, but that as a man from the
country who began the most horrible war we know, his opinion on this
is easily dismissed by others. He explained, for example, that if he
were to speak out against Israeli-instigated wars in the Middle east
he'd immediately be labeled a Nazi. I confirmed that I think there is
a big difference between being anti-Israeli government and
anti-Semitic, but that the distinction is often inappropriately
blurred by Jews. Then he explained that his grandfather was an SS
soldier in the Nazi army. He became very soft as he spoke about his
hard emotional work in men's groups to heal from his own family's
refusal to discuss this.
I noticed a moment of surprise arise in
me that in his discussion of the victims of World War II he was
focused on the Germans, with no mention of Holocaust victims. But
then I realized how powerfully and poignantly he was describing his
struggle. He seemed truly haunted. I appreciated how real that pain
is for him and I became sad, strongly feeling our strange bond in the
legacy of this horror. And I felt deep respect for his hard journey.
As he spoke, it amazed me that in my own long, long journey of
finding my way with the legacy of the Holocaust, I can think of only
one other time that I really considered the effect of the war on
German children and youth – when I was at Aushwitz and was told
that German high school students often volunteer to help maintain the
camp to preserve the memory of what happened to work through their
own feelings about the role of their people in it.
As he continued to discuss the
difficult consequences of German refusal to acknowledge what happened
-- I mentioned that I am Jewish. When I mentioned my heritage, he
stopped cold with a facial expression that was hard to describe –
part shock, but also a sense of joy to know he had been talking with
a Jew so openly and had not even realized it. I told him a little bit
about my own life-long struggle with what happened in Nazi Germany.
He began to cry. And then he and I hugged. A Jew and a German –
descendents of the persecutor and the persecuted. He thanked me for
the moment, which he said was a step of unexpected healing for him. I
sensed it as an important moment in my own, too. We lamented that
there has never been a Truth and Reconciliation effort between Jews
and Germans, like the ones that have brought healing in South Africa,
Ireland, and other places. And then we stopped talking. The moment of
our own truth and reconciliation was enough. My meeting with Jork
felt to me like the reason the universe had directed me to Germany. I
told him that as we sadi good-bye. He agreed.
