On Owning and Being Owned - A Sunday Read

Sometimes you just can’t escape.  This was one of the essential lessons I learned today while sitting with some kind folks at the Yom Hashoah Holocaust Memorial service.  Smiles faded, voices silenced, as a baptism of tragic thought descended on the gatherers.  Most people attempt to move on from painful history.  Not these troubled souls … for the simple reason that they can’t.  For those Jewish people born well after one of the greatest horrors of history, they have learned to accept that its story is embedded within their own collective DNA.I recall a lengthy discussion held with Rabbi Joel Wittstein, who passed away recently and whose life will reverently be held in the collective memory of the London Jewish community.  He increasingly asked about the situation in Sudan, often likening it to genocide, and was delighted that our NGO had been recognized by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for our work in that troubled land.  Almost inexorably, our discussion was drawn towards the Holocaust itself.  “It’s not as though Africa hasn’t suffered its own,” he stated sagely.This was difficult territory for me, owing to the sensitivity all Jewish people feel towards the event, and I said so. He responded:

The Jewish people around the world do not own the Holocaust; we are rather owned by it and it will never be removed from our memory."

There it was: not owning but being owned.  And Wittstein was right, for there were more that perished in the Holocaust than just Jews.  Gypsies, Slavs, political prisoners, homosexuals, other ethnic minorities – all these met a gruesome fate during those fateful years.  And he was also correct in stating that other holocausts have been suffered in other nations.The difference for the good people I sat with today was that in an advanced, civilized society in the middle years of the last century, six million of their brothers and sisters perished in a compressed and radically clinical extermination process that forever etched itself in the collective memory of the Jewish people.  It didn’t occur in some far-flung place across the globe that was both primitive and poorly developed, but rather in the heart of Europe.  Like it or not – and many Jews haven’t – they are a people owned by the most brutal taskmaster imaginable – modern slaves to a drastic event.Yet as I looked around the Jewish Community Centre today, it occurred to me that they were present of their own volition, willing slaves to their own traumatic history.  This is what makes them such a powerful force in human existence.  While others flee such remembrance, they don’t so much embrace it as they wrestle with it, while at the same time refusing to let go.  They are much like the scriptural Jacob wrestling all night with an angel in hopes of finding some kind of blessing and deliverance.  Jacob’s struggle ended with that blessing, but only with a permanent limp as a reminder of what he had been through.Modern life craves independence, from institutions or anything that’s likely to discipline their enjoyment of freedom or pursuit of happiness.  Not these survivors.  They are a people apart, not merely because of what they faced but how they have willingly folded that reality in with their collective actions, history, and living.  I endeavoured to draw it into my own thoughts and emotions today, and for a time I became more human.  But it was when I left that I realized mine was but a temporary state.  They were leaving carrying the deep imprint along with them – a tabernacle of trauma carried throughout their wilderness journeys.  They can no longer separate from it than they can separate from themselves.  They stand unique in our midst and humanize our national character as a result.  They limp still, but they are people of God and their gait reminds them of that blessed truth.