Dissonance

Today I read these two texts in close succession. The first comes from Eyewitness Auschwitz by Filip Müller, a memoir by a Slovak Jew who survived three years in Auschwitz by working to dispose of the bodies of his fellow Jews in the gas chambers and crematoriums. Describing a fellow inmate who managed to find a prayer book and phylacteries among the dead, he writes:

Fischl appeared to be the most satisfied among us. The Lord Adonai had hearkened to him: now he owned a prayer-book in Hebrew and a set of Tephillim. Early next morning he went through the ritual of putting on the phylacteries – this time there was no need for him to mime the action – before saying his morning prayers. He prayed so fervently and humbly that God – if He existed – must surely have heard his voice; for it rose from a place where men and women, who like himself believed in the Eternal One and who adored the Almighty Lord, were daily slaughtered like cattle. And this foreman who was forced to help the SS murderers take his fellow Jews to their doom, this strong man who, at first glance, seemed ready for anything, never once in his innermost soul renounced the faith of his fathers. At this moment he must have been alone among Jews all over the world to praise God’s name in a place where that name was desecrated in the vilest possible manner. To me Fischl seemed a creature from another world, a world solely ruled and embodied by a God whom I sought in vain to comprehend in Auschwitz (35).

The second text came from Psalm 146

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God…who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

I was struck by the dissonance of these two passages: one promises God’s divine oversight and justice, while the other details a historical event in which God’s justice was utterly absent.  Neither history nor theology provide me with an easy answer to this dissonance, and it seems to me right now that silence and/or burdened prayer of the psalm are the only proper responses.

Discipline

“I believe that the closer we come to correct discipline, the less concerned we are with ends, and with questions of futurity in general. Correct discipline brings us into alignment with natural process, which has no explicit or deliberate concern for the future. We do not eat, for instance, because we want to live until tomorrow, but because we are hungry today and it satisfies us to eat. Similarly, a good farmer plants, not because of the abstractions of demand or market or his financial condition, but because it is planting time and the ground is ready – that is, he plants in response to his discipline and to his place. And the real teacher does not teach with reference to the prospective job market or some program or plan for the society’s future; he teaches because he has something to teach and because he has students. A poet could not write a poem in order to earn a place in literary history. His place in literary history is another subject, and as such a distraction. He writes because he has a poem to write, he knows how, the work pleases him, and he has forgotten all else. ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.’”

-Wendell Berry, Discipline and Hope