Lisa Chase is retired and lives in Putney, where she is a member of the town's Equity and Inclusion Advisory Committee. For more information about International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, Jan. 27, visit bit.ly/799-holocaust.
PUTNEY-We take this moment to observe an event in history and to commemorate it: to commit it to memory. I want to talk about the Holocaust - the systematic murder of millions of people, mostly Jews, in terms of two words: the word holocaust and the word happen. As in: The Holocaust happened.
The word holocaust conjures images of wind and fire. Looking into the origins of the word, we see that wind is generated by fire. A thing is consumed by a raging all-consuming fire that creates its own wind. Inferno would be another word, another image.
Historically, the word holocaust is associated with religion, an offering, a sacrifice totally consumed by fire. The word, the image, is active, alive, powerful, violent. And it has been linked for all eternity now with the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany in the 20th century.
The Holocaust happened.
It is easy to be affected by the word holocaust. It horrifies. We feel the pain of fire, hate is fire, we fear it, we flinch.
The word happened is intransitive and has nothing to say about causation or results. It is oddly opaque.
The word happened gets us off the hook. It happened. It's over. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. It must never happen again. We won't let it happen again. Never again.
Those two words - holocaust and happen - don't go well together. Let's look at the cognitive dissonance.
The activity of all-consuming violence is impossible to look away from. Something that happened, on the other hand, is a closed book, a locked closet, a shut door.
Something that happened begs the question: How did it happen? The really compelling significance hidden in the unassuming word, or concept, of the word happen is the element of time, the imperceptible lead-up to the phenomenon of a happening. Something, an event, gets completely swallowed up, but without violence, in its happening-ness.
Suddenly, we see that holocaust and happening are inversions of each other. They both totalize, and consume, in such different ways. Everyone is involved: both everyone who is dead, and everyone who was present - somewhere - while the other-everyone died, while something happened to them.
The observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, then, must not be just about those that died. This observance is about us, now, alive, and accountable to the present. This is about us, each one of us, alone, distinct, and together.
* * *
What must we do? What must we learn? What is to be done? This is the challenge of being human and living in the knowledge of good and evil.
There is no hiding. There is nowhere to hide. Look it in the face, walk with it, understand that it can never be banished, can never be consigned to history, can never be subsumed in the word happened.
It was then and it is now and there is no peace to be made with it.
Keep the door open, read the book, feel the fire. This is our job, now and forever, even while we live in joy.
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