Trustworthiness. Ne'emanut, in transliterated Hebrew. No greater gift can be shared. Nothing can be as easily neglected, lost. In some form or other, we seek it most of our lives. It’s the seed of connection, you see: relationship, ease, significance, devotion, love—that Life living between persons willing to hold onto themselves while simultaneously surrendering-in-relation. Unexpectedly, I became aware that ne'emanut had arrived and in a most natural, but suspect, but faithful place: in a belly-laugh, amongst spiritual friends, in the face/memory of radical evil.
Several clarifications before I even try to articulate what I’m learning here. First, like poetry, laughter demurs from any analysis, any critical discourse for understanding. One never comes to understand laughter that way, so it’s foolish to begin there. What follows here is not really about the laughter anyway. It’s much more about what made (makes) the laughter possible, potentially even a harbinger of something holy worth learning, teaching, in today’s challenges. Second, there’s a lot of my own writing now about spiritual friendship and its contours, demands, delights. This is not so much about that either, if only because it infuses everything that is to come but I obviously have lots of words for spiritual friendship. In contrast, I have no words for what I’m receiving here. The distinctive third piece, the one that demonstrates hope’s urgency and gambling’s foolishness, is the threefold belly-laugh with one commonality: the face of Hitler, the unspeakable realities of the Holocaust, the Shoah. Public and civic norms portray such laughter as either insanity’s hold or evil’s victory. One must be either insane to laugh in the face of genocide or so co-opted by evil that human can no longer apply as an accurate adjective.
But this writing wonders aloud about a third option, a middle way, yet to be imagined or articulate. What if ne'emanut is so powerful, so holy, that it creates a previously unimaginable path in which laughter shared in the face of radical evil speaks a life stronger than death? What if trustworthiness grown across irreconcilable difference teaches a way of being fragile but faithful to Life in evil’s hold such that Life ultimately wins? Would that possibility be worth braving society’s gasp of horror to explore laughter in the face of evil?
A safe place to open the possibility comes in the YouTube clip in which a survivor of Hitler’s systemic genocidal machine danced with his family at the gates of Auschwitz, then other death camps. You see an older man with his children, his grandchildren, clearly visiting the museum of remembrance and never again. Instead of the somber attention to this most unspeakable place of death, however, you see them jauntily taunting the specters of death with survival. Not only survival, but thriving—a family, a life, a sense of joie de vivre and laughter. The YouTube audience uproar followed close on the heels of early viewings, of course. To dance on the graves of the millions who had died in the gas chambers? Someone viewing from the outside could easily interpret this survivor and his family’s behaviors in that way. And that is unspeakable, inhuman, to be decried with righteous moral outrage. But what if the interpretation is taunting genocide’s spectre with facts and symbols of one’s survival, one’s life lived fully despite the inevitable and permanent scars of the death camps on one’s psyche and flesh? Which would those prefer for whom Auschwitz became a grave? There is no way of knowing. Both interpretations are true. Both interpretations have their lessons for us as one human community sharing space on one Earth.
The setting and origin for my own explorations here are much more mundane, not nearly as theatrical. A colloquium of scholars exploring Jewish-Christian dialogue in contexts of greater religious pluralism. Repeated welcomes into a Modern Orthodox community of shared observance. Several tables of fellowship and food shared, with eventually all of them Orthodox-supervised kosher. But ultimately, an unintentional felt-contrast (therefore) between the academic study of dialogue and the unruly life of holy relationship across difference. There are some places human beings can go in relationship that are impossible in prose, in study. These places need witness, perhaps more than study.
[to be continued…perhaps J]
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