Sanctification of the Name

More from Sam's "Notes From The Underground" 1998-9:

Sanctification of the Name: That Jews were consumed en masse and targeted ultimately as an entire people in the Shoa is enough, on the one hand, to say that they suffered and perished "for the sanctification of the Name." For being Jews. Yet one needn't have been a Jew to know what this is and to go through it; nor did one, merely being Jewish, necessarily have a clue about bearing Witness and demonstrating in the deepest, most barbaric darkness, a conscious relationship with "the Name."

There are so many layers of tragedy to this event, so many dimensions, it is just one more point of observation – and not one made in judgement – to address the specific matter of sanctification of the Name. Indeed, Corrie ten-Boom's sister Bess (google The Hiding Place) went through the entire abomination with the attitude and unwavering state of mind of a Mother Teresa, without once missing a beat. She had suffered all the same hardships – only without the cuttingly familiar historical weight of the singular persecution of Jews, which every Jew carries (whether or not s/he wishes to acknowledge it). But she went into it exactly as her Lord would have her do. She made "something beautiful for God" with every breath, and He beatified her in death – He sanctified her as she'd tireless sanctified His Name.

So perhaps in one sense it is not about Jews or non-Jews, but rather about those who'd had the consciousness and the presence of mind – in short, were prepared – to bear Witness, as opposed to those who went to their doom in ordinary material suffering Yet in a still sharper sense, those Jews who went sanctifying the Name were particularly elevated because they carried the primary burden of being the singularly exterminated race here - notwithstanding those who made the choice to go in solidarity and in faith with them into that darkness.

Thus, those one hundred rabbis (as Simon Wiesenthal tells it) who'd arrived in one load at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau ramp: Mengele forced them to hop and skip and dance in circles, at a mad pace under the crack of his whip. The physical strain, the humiliation, the loathsome, bitter, snarling mockery of this sadist-driven scene! Then Mengele made a bad move: he told them to sing. By making them stop, these exhausted, maltreated men, and ordering them to sing he showed his complete and despicable ignorance of God's ways, and of the Witness to faith. And that was to be his last order. From that point on he was no longer the one in control, they assumed their own destiny with one mind. That must have bitten him hard, considering his personality.

Because these hundred suddenly straightened up, and in one voice and as one spontaneous action of – something even quite beyond mere defiance – of unbending and self-dignified celebrationof what is Living and could never be extinguished, they began to sing Kol Nidre, of all things! That most heart-rending Yom Kippur hymn, born out of the long and bitter experience of the Spanish Inquisition, the institutional forerunner and precedent for Himmler's Gestapo tactics and SS empire!

There they chanted and swayed, probably got through just enough measures of it to make their point. Then in an equally sudden and unified movement, they broke into the Sh'ma Yisrael as they proceeded to march themselves off to the gas chamber, where they knew they were destined anyway – but without awaiting Mengele's further orders (I imagine him seething over that), and they went sanctifying the Name. Now that is style. One might say here that their years of training had paid off when it was most critically needed. They wrote their own glory, and transcended the base horror, everything - much like those early Christians in the Roman arenas going to their deaths singing Psalms. This served toward the liberation of all those who perished in the Shoa and could not have pulled off what they had. This was a great Seva.

As I've shared the 100-rabbis, directly from Wiesenthal, I should add the following directly from his Shoa-counterpart Eli Wiesel: I watched an interview with him many years ago, where the normally very taciturn Wiesel served up two very humorous things, full of the best Jewish irony, only the one of which I can recall here. This was an anecdote from his time at Auschwitz. Nights in the barracks he and several other Jewish scholars like himself secretly engaged in Talmudic discussion and debate, just to keep their sanity and identity intact at the highest level still available. Having approached the question anyway, of who ultimately could be held responsible for the predicament they were in, and whether that might not be God Himeself, one night they put God on trial for the Holocaust, they began a long Talmudic debate and discussion, they pulled out every tract and argument from memory in order to put this unprecedented event and culpability to the test. All legal, all legit. Very Jewish, very Talmudic. This went on for several nights. At the end of everything, they concluded God was guilty for the Shoa, and that was that. Having completed this preceeding, having reached their judicial conclusion together, they then gathered in a corner and performed – as always and all else notwithstanding – their morning prayers. To God, to the Sanctification of the Name.

Redemptive Memory: In the deepest and the longest and the most wretched night, at the hands of the most cynical of all possible sub-human distributors of death and gratuitous terror, there too the light walked and bore Witness. Those Beings who carried the light and gained victory even in laying down their lives for the sake of the Truth, for the sanctificationof the Name – whether as Protestant or Catholic Christians, even JW's, or as traditional Jews, or initiates of Sufism (as with Inayat Khan's daughter, radio-operator behind enemy lines, code-named Madeleine: captured, tortured, executed) - shall be remembered, and this memory shall be cherished unceasingly.

Such Beings in our own time have plainly demonstrated, with their deep candor, their inspired spontaneity, their creative vision and their stubborn patience and courage, just how the early Christian communities could go as they did into the Roman arenas where they met certain and brutal death. Such Beings, to name a few, were: Bess ten-Boom at Ravensbrück, Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Buchenwald, the one hundred old-world rabbis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Noor-an-Nissa ("Madeleine") Inayat Khan at Dachau, where they met each their respective ends. Their faith and their lovingkindness, their conviction to “do the right thing“ in the face of terrible suffering and unspeakable consequences, to place God's pleasure over their own safety, and their discipline to bear Witness right to the end, earns them nothing less than great honor and puja in my heart and constancy in my consciousness and my Practice.

Sanctification of the Name: occurs whenever the mind, the speech, the glance, the breath, the body, are in harmony with the spirit of Union, whether through discipline or through grace. Or through the act of giving oneself in love. Sanctification of the Name is every form of dhikr-allah, every form of mantra consciously repeated, every hymn sung with concentrated poise (read: balance of breath) and celebration of Truth. Sanctification of the Name is every utterance or intonation, every thought and every breath which is absorbed in the glorification of God's prasie.

YaHuVaH, Ha-Shem, Allah, Ram, Sat Nam, just for example: all these are sanctification of the Name, because – and precisely because – they vibrate the experience and attune one to the experience of Union with what-one-is, namely the Self. Furthermore the experience can be and does get transmitted by one to another under the right conditions. With these can the ego be surrendered with certainty, to the destiny of awakening, in love and service toward all sentient Beings, for the sake of the Belvoed. Not any comfy certainty for the ego, that "everything will be OK," as born-again relgious wannebe's would like it, but certainty of uncompromised relation-ship with spirit, and with the Spirit of Guidance (read: guru). Guru of course is first of all, the Principle - “whose Word is the root of all mantras“ (read: sanctificationo f the Name). The utterance of a formed syllable or phrase which vibrates guru is properly sanctification of the Name.

That sanctification of the Name has been considered by some in history to be worth dying for – because it really is worth laying down one's life for. This is the transmission of Truth. As the Sikh Teachings have it, "to die for Truth is to live forever," but of course this means first and above all, to die before death, while still in this life, while still in this body, living consciously as a Human Temple with an Altar for a heart. If Life (the Beloved) requires one to lay down one's mortal life, one has the awareness to recognize and relate to it and follow through with style. As the Sikhs have it, "Sat Nam means: Truth is my identity."

Ha-Shem echad – baruch Ha-Shem.

Here's a story: a Jewish teenager growing up in the US contemplates the Shoa often, frequently pondering all the usual runof questions and suppositions, ad infinitum. Once, having entered his twenties, an entirely new question occurs to him in a moment of extrapolation, challenging him with anothr perspective: what would he do with himself, were he a German of the same age and sensibilities, struggling with the haunting revelation of all that his/her own nation, the entire genertion of his/her parents and grandparents – indeed totally including all these latter personally and directly – had perpatrated upon their own entire Jewish citizenry and Europe's entire Jewish population (as well as those others likewise targeted) – upon defenseless men, women and children?

What would one do with oneself, caryying not the guilt personally but the legacy of one's thoroughly compromised family, one's Waffen-SS grandfather, or SA uncle, one's Wehrmacht father on campaign in the East …? Suppose this young man or woman became well-informed of it all, not merely satisfied with what attention was given this subject in school, and realized that the men and the women by whom s/he had been raised, with whom s/he had identified more or less as roll models, had all been either willing perpetrators, willing accomplices, or simply spinelessly banal, unquestioning receivers of whatever pleasures or privileges and assurances of security they'd derived from being good little Aryan-approved Reichsbürger?

Suppose s/he'd really gotten it, and the horror was more than one's conscience could bear – and that s/he got absolutely nowhere asking, then confronting, family members of that generation – just stonewalling, cold silence, fierce denials, angry warnings to just drop it...? Suppose this person did work out on an emotional level almost as deep as teh trauma of revelation itself, that oen is oneself not to be held accountable for any of what had happened, having been born after The War, - and after the war on the Jews – yet is carryingin one's own own immediate family history the full weight of repressed and denied accountability, such that one would gladly trade families with someone, anyone, somewhere else?

In other words, here is a non-Jewish German version of oneself, thoroughly human, struggling very poignantly with ancestral karma of perhaps the heaviest degree one can imagine: it is just that question of search for conscience, of really encounterng and coming to terms with that – for both post-war generation members, and the Jewish American is uncomfortably aware of this. There is no room for smugness or condescention or contempt, if this shared encounter is to become realized.

The American Jew contemplates this hypothetical German counterpart and imagnies there could be quite a number of them, not the majority thinking all this through of course, but also not so extreme an exception. Maybe one in a thousand, maybe still less. Such a one might contemplate suicide, the American Jew is thinking he certainly would; or such a one might come to hate "everything German" and hate being a German. Such a one might finally give up in exasperation even trying to come to terms with all this or escape the cold trauma, finding no comfort in mentioning it to friends who are not also looking at it for themselves, or in searching out "things Jewish" to try to – to what, salvage or balance or compensate for something?

The American Jew can see himself in this counterpart, can identify his/her need for some kind of leveling contact, his/her desire for the way out. He senses that this counterpart is ready for spiritual amnesty. This means: amnesty from the crimes of one's familial and native predecessors, amnesty from the psychic hold of their criminal record on one's own growth, amnesty from the very spirit of that generation and its legacy of shame. Ready means that one has gained the maturity to discern and avoid the pitfalls of either gross denial, self-pitying projection, or of hanging one's head as the guilty one, the self-hating German who is actually no more conscious or prepared refelectively to go within and bravely pull up roots in search of truth than are the latter two cases. The American Jew considers that this hypothetical German counterpart – however many s/he numbers – is ripefor contact.

It would approach discovering for themselves what compassionate reconcilliation could really mean, as sought out strictly in the interest of achieving and expressing true sanity. After some years the American also becomes "ripe for contact" and winds up moving to Berlin, staying there and eventually settling down and co-raising a family, living an ordinary life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YcOQY-n-EWs