Empathy

I was recently reading the new book by Lawrence Rees on the history of the Holocaust. I had told myself that I would never read another - just how many do you need to read to know just how deep the abyss of human suffering is? Yet the book spoke of tracing the seeds of the Holocaust right back to the very early days of the Nazi's, back to the Munich beer halls and the days when Hitler first discovered his "gift" for oratory. Also that it contained much first hand testimony of some who actually survived.

 I would say the "seeds" go back much much further than that, but I suppose you have to start somewhere. Well, I have read others, histories and personal testimonies. The biography of Elie Weisel, "All Rivers Run to the Sea" was one. Elie Weisel was quite young, a child, when he arrived at Auschwitz.  He had spoken of his younger sister and of his love for her, of her love of the meadows and flowers. 

Elie Weisel

On arrival at Auschwitz, he and his family held each others hands and they walked forward together, "feeling strong", as if nothing whatsoever in the entire world could separate them. Then a quick barking command from a guard sent his mother and sister one way, and his father and himself another. How easy it all was. Parted forever. 

The entrance to Auschwitz

There were illustrations in Lawrence Ree's book and one, of a group of Jewish people being herded out of their homes in the Warsaw ghetto by soldiers pointing guns, caught my mind. One very young lad, his hands held up, with eyes that can only be described as bewildered. Shocking beyond any comprehension. He looked about the age of my grandson. What can anyone say or think or do? 

Any answers of the intellect act only as an anaesthetic. Hatred of the perpetrators is surely pointless (looking at photos of those such as Himmler, Goebbels and Hitler himself, I feel virtually nothing)

Belief, for me, is futile. Saying which, it must be seen that belief is not faith. Belief is of the intellect while faith is the total mind/heart. Belief is a clinging to self, even an attempt at self-justification. Faith is a letting go, allowing Reality itself to "justify" us. All, at least, as I see it.

 "In fact", as Suzuki says, "all intellectual efforts we make to solve the problem of reality are really directed towards the restoration of faith from which the problem started."

 So the answer is in each moment. We need to see other eyes; know them as others yet also as ourselves. 

"A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything" (T. S. Eliot)

Related Quotes:- 

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. 

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

For me, every hour is grace.

(All Elie Weisel)