shoah

I’ve just finished my first week back at school, trying to figure out how to fit too many classes into a very tight schedule. Mostly, though, it’s what a friend’s mom would call a happy problem. The joy of a quarter system is this feeling three times a year that you get to start over, totally and completely. Like New Years. Every quarter you think–this quarter, I will do my reading on time; I will read the newspaper instead of watching TV; I will go to the gym more than once; I will be a more balanced and enlightened human being. And the fact that I seem to go into every quarter with a similar list of Self-Improvement Projects could be depressing, but it’s also a little reassuring. This process of self-evaluation and re-balancing should be a continual process.

So my big projects for this quarter? Eliminating the products of suffering from my life (no new boots…) and starting to confront the entirety of Judaism. Part of the AA program, the tenth step, is to take a fearless personal inventory and admit when we are wrong.  I’m nowhere near the tenth step (I still don’t have a sponsor) but in my journey with Judaism, I think it’s time I made a searching and fearless personal inventory, and settled down with some of the more unpleasant aspects of Jewish history and belief. Attitudes towards non-Jews. The Holocaust. Antisemitism today. The place of women in Jewish history, especially in the Torah.

Over the break, I read Sophie’s Choice. And I’m still reeling. I wish I had read this book in high school; I wish I had read this book in every class I’ve taken on American history. William Styron achieves a stunning level of brutal honesty that pulls at every part of your insides. I think, for me, it’s up there with To Kill A Mockingbird, in terms of the scope of themes, how Styron and Lee are capable of taking on both weighty moral themes, but also deeply human themes, without feeling didactic.

So I’m taking a Holocaust class. I’ve taken classes on religious violence, on violence specifically against the Jews, before–a class on pogroms, a class on genocide, a class on Polish-Jewish relations, a class on holy wars throughout history. And all of them have skirted around the Holocaust, too big to allow room in the ten weeks of a term for all of the other tragedies. So I thought it was time I took a class just on the Holocaust. My neighbor across the hall is also in the class, a sweet Conservative Jew. Already, I am excited for conversations I hope we will have. I know, that if, or when, I stand before the Bet Din, they will ask why I want to join a people so plagued by suffering, a people who have been party to some of the worst of humanity. And right now, I don’t have an answer.

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