dwelling in despair

"We don't have to dwell in despair," she said. "We get one life, that we know of, and do we want to dwell in despair, or do we want to laugh and create and love and carry on?"

I'm sorry. I don't speak this language. And I'm not sure I can learn it either.

It's not what I was taught at all.

I was taught that we do have to dwell in despair. That the problem is that people don't take the despair seriously enough. That if we don't immerse in it, no one will remember it. And then where would we be? According to this argument, articulated best by Mrs Tzaddik (not the tzaddik himself, who would never have put it this way) — according to this argument, it all boils down to two words, and you can guess what they are:

1) Holocaust
2) Responsibility
3) Holocaust

Actually, there's also:

4) Inquisition, Spanish

which is tied to the

5) Reconquista and the
6) Expulsion and
7) Holocaust ...

Ah, you see what happens? The words start just rolling off the tongue, and there's this snowball effect — the despair doesn't diminish. No. It accumulates. The more you think, the more there is of it.

The tzaddik put it differently. Of course he would.

There are fragments of lives cut short out there — fragments that have been dispersed throughout the globe. And it is our job to bring those fragments back. Piece them together. And send them off to where they need to be. This is, after all, what the Shekhinah is after as well, is it not?

He wasn't about keeping all those shards themselves. No. He knew that someone out there wanted them back. This is the kind of Collector that he was.

Collect the fragments.
Piece the bits together.
Discover their history.
Find their rightful place.
Return them.

All those bits of junk! Every bit of junk — that was his task. Piece by piece, putting the world aright.

So, yeah, it was dwelling in despair. He'd piece the fragments together. And she'd drive home the despair.

"Lest we forget!" she would say. "Lest the world forget." All the wrongdoings of planet earth were hers to remember, remind others — and teach them to change their ways. And that if each person did his part ... But it begins with immersing in despair.

It wasn't personal, really. Or maybe it's all personal.

Dwelling in despair was just something that had to be done. And so they did it, and did it right. They created a Dwelling of Despair. A museum to bring all the bits and pieces together. Not a Holocaust Museum. No, not that at all. For the Holocaust itself is only another set of fragments — but there's so much more than that.

So. I was raised in such a way that the point was not to laugh and love and carry on. The point was to collect the fragments and help put them back together. And ship them back wherever it was that they belong.

Think of it like working at the Post Office. There's always more. And your work is never done. Not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

a kaddish for eichmann

Has anyone ever said kaddish for Eichmann? I had this argument tonight. Rh insisted that someone somewhere has mourned him. But that's not what I meant. I did not mean just a Mourner's Prayer. I meant a real live authentic kaddish. Maybe even with a minyan. And my thought was no. That it was very likely that no one on earth has ever said a kaddish for Eichmann.

Rh thought I was insane. That I was underestimating the power of forgiveness.

Forgiveness? This is Eichmann we're talking about.

Maybe Hanna Arendt came the closest. Not that she forgave. Not that she said kaddish. But in a sense she excused him. Said he operated 'unthinkingly' with no consideration of the effects for those targeted by his bureaucratic assignment. It was she, after all, who coined the term 'banality of evil' in reference to Eichmann.

I mean, think about Adolf Eichmann.

He was a mechanic at heart. A mechanic and a manager. Not a philospher. Not even a polemicist. He was good on order. As in 'following orders.' And, as he said in his trial, it wasn't just about following orders, but about following the law. So give him a break.

I was supposed to be at that trial.

It was late June, early July, 1961. Jerusalem. I was 13 at the time. Great Bat Mitzvah present, don't you think? Tickets to the Eichmann Trial? My parents were attending. Kids did not attend — but my mom worked like hell to get me those 2-day tickets. Only problem was that I was sicker than I'd ever been in my life, and had ended up curled up in a tight little ball for days, while they attended the trial. Jerusalem, it turns out, always makes me sick to my stomach.

And you might think it downright child abuse to want to take a kid to hear the proceedings of a trial on crimes against humanity. Genocide. But for her it was about being a witness to history. And witnessing firsthand the confrontation between the survivors of the Holocaust and the monster finally on trial.

I remember that I hadn't thought anything of attending. I took it for granted that I would go. After all, I'd been raised on the Holocaust. Grew up with the scars of bullet holes through the arms of my friends' moms. Saw the numbers tattooed on older people's arms. Saw photographs. Heard stories told firsthand. Heard the screams of parents during sleepover nights. Saw the yellow stars that had been preserved. Saw the Torah scrolls used as canvasses for crappy Nazi oil paintings of pastoral scenes. Mengele stories. I was raised on Kafka's Trial. Durrenmatt's Quarry — and after The Quarry nothing at all is scary.

I was supposed to be at that trial. But instead I had to make do with transcripts of the trial. Which you can find at the Nizkor Project website put out by the State of Israel's Ministry of Justice. The site includes the text of the Wannsee Protocols from January, 1942. Now that's something to read.

Imagine all of them sitting around the conference table at Wannsee. Sipping their tea, lunching on fancy china. Surrounded by the pristine snowy, wooded estate. Such beauty! All the while trying to figure out what to do with the Jews. Looking for the 'Final Solution.'

Eichmann's job was to find a way to get the Jews out of 'every sphere of life' of the German people. Out of 'every living space' of the German people.

He saw it as a transport issue.

At Wannsee they had lists. The number of Jews in every country targeted for expulsion. The final count, including Russia, was 11 million people.

A real headache for Eichmann.

The first idea was to ship 'em to Palestine. In 1939, Eichmann had been made head of the Office for Jewish Emigration, and had a number of Zionist contacts. Unfortunately, he was having trouble getting a visa to go to British Palestine to figure it out. The idea was to tax the Jews in Europe to pay the costs of deportation. By 1941 he was told essentially to forget all this emigration stuff; the Jews were to be exterminated. At Wannsee, a year later, it was determined definitively that the notion of 'accelerated emigration' was just too damned slow. Genocide was just a whole lot more efficient.

Lists were made up to work out bloodlines. What about those who are half Jewish? A quarter? Those married to Germans? Those who had little Jewish blood but 'looked' Jewish? Every category had to be documented.

And transport still had to be arranged — though now it would be to death camps. And Eichmann was in charge of all those trains that would carry them all to the gas chambers.

No wonder I was sick those days in Jerusalem.

But shouldn't we think about the early Eichmann? The Eichmann whose transport problem was British Palestine. Think about maybe a Michael Chabon novel of alternate histories. An Eichmann responsible single-handedly for the creation of a Jewish Homeland. It was, after all, all the same to him. Transport is transport. He had, after all, even met with an agent of the Haganah to talk transport. Think of the might-have-beens if only the British had given him that damned visa. Can we say a kaddish for that Eichmann?

Consider, just consider for a moment all the other unthinking banal bureaucrats of the world who get their kaddish.

and everybody hates the jews

The biggest words I ever learned as a kid I learned from Tom Lehrer. Starting around 6th grade I think. Have no idea where I heard his songs — it's not like he was on the radio or anything. But when I discovered that I liked his lyrics a whole lot better than anything emerging in rock-n-roll, (and that my favorite songs on the radio were things like 'Runnin' Bear' and 'Woverton Mountain' and Marty Robbins ballads, I knew too, that I just wasn't a regular kid.

Here's some of the vocab I first became aware of through his songs:

virility — clearly had something to do with something I would never have (or care about).

fertility — the opposite of virility.

sterility — A great word! These words just all sounded so terrific together.

futility — this was the only word in the batch that I was already familiar with.

liability — = kids, apparently.

senility — which rhymed with 'lose your ability' as I recall.

elements — all of them. And that's pretty much the last I ever heard of them.

cyanide — this was the only one I ended up learning a lot about, later. Apricot pits, for example, have enough cyanide in them that they've long been used for camel birth control (a pit being inserted into the cervix to block and kill off the swimmers...).

solicit — which still sounds pretty dumb.

masochism — which still sounds pretty familiar.

tango — which still sounds pretty incomprehensible.

plagiarize — little did I know that of all his terms, this is the one I'd become the most familiar with.

genuflect — turned out to be davvening.

transubstantiation — still very unclear.

vatican — right. I had never heard of the Vatican.


You get the idea...

But the main thing that I got from Tom Lehrer was that refrain that he punched up that echoed in my brain from the first time that I heard it until now:

— and-everybody-hates-the-jews —

And what do you do with that? It just hit to the core, and I didn't understand it, and yet the evidence seemed in that he was right... And then there was the Six Day War, and Occupied Territory, and not returning that territory, and Lebanon, and Syria, and Gaza (at the moment) — and the policies of the State of Israel being equated with just plain being Jewish. I mean, even apart from the Holocaust and Inquisition that I'd been raised on.

And Tom Lehrer had said it out loud, clear, concise and simple.

And recently, there was a Facebook stream I was following, that came to exactly the same point: Kill all the Jews, and everything will be just fine after that. Blunt and clear.

Not, "I disagree with Israeli occupation..."

Not, "We must build a Palestinian State..."

No, just "Kill the Jews."

On Facebook.

And what do you do with that? It just hit to the core (again), and I don't understand it (again). And yet it appears to be one of those 'eternal truths' that I was raised with, raised to expect, raised to prepare for (somehow). But Tom Lehrer didn't provide a template for what to do about it, did he?

I picture my dad playing Anu anu ha-Palmach on the record player and us marching around the dining room table, a little army of two.

And what do you do with that?

Go upstairs and sing along with Tom Lehrer. National Brotherhood Week. But the bloody song always ends the same.