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
