Roy Cameron July 4, 2016 at 12:51 pm | #
It’s all about staring into the face of the Medusa. Got the phrase from Dr Adriana Mazzarella, a Jungian psychiatrist who also happened to be Italian and Jewish. I helped her prepare her English for her seminars in the US for her book, Looking for Beatrice, a Jungian interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy…and, yes, she lived through WWII.
Medusa represents that horror of life that simply turns your entire will to life to stone…something inanimate. I think what is happening here concerning the Holocaust is just that: looking at the Holocaust destroys faith in human nature and in the God that is supposed to have designed us.
If you follow the idea of a Covenant with God quite literally, then you have to ask yourself what good it did to have the Covenant. If God’s means in the world are so terrible, you have to doubt either the existence of God or accept his means-and-ends POV as something apparently unjustified…calling into question every aspect of one’s faith.
Another point of central importance would be the Holocaust’s apparent singularity. Its singularity derives mostly from our capacity to document it. 6 million Ukrainians were killed off by the Bolsheviks without anywhere near the documentation level, given that Russia was essentially a Third-Wold backwater without a great industrial base, and, as a result, the “singularity” of the Holocaust derives from the fact that similar events barely exist in human consciousness.
I also add that, as the Khmer Rouge conducted their Holocaust, I wondered why the phrase “Never Again” did not spur the world into action to prevent such a crime against humanity. Instead, I felt relief that Vietnamese communists, our enemy, rode to the rescue, albeit late.
I also have to agree with anyone who thinks that Wiesel takes it way too far getting into the “sacralizing” and “mystification” of the event. The motives of those who do evil can be understood and fought against. As I said, this happens to anyone who "stares into the Medusa" too long.
Last, but not least: the range of the comments here and their tone..impressive.
