Friday, March 20

And Yet—A Meditation on the Holocaust

Reflection from Nancy Sehested

In the play The Trial of God by Holocaust writer Elie Wiesel, survivors put God on trial after a pogrom that killed almost all the Jewish people in the town. God is charged with cruelty and indifference. The defense argued that it was humans who were the killers, not God. Yet God was found guilty of crimes against creation and humanity. And then they prayed.

Wiesel wrote: I belong to a traumatized generation that often felt abandoned by God and betrayed by humanity. And yet, I believe that one must not estrange oneself from either God or people. 

And yet. Those two words were Wiesel’s favorite ones. Perhaps the words can be lodged at the back of our throats, ready to follow our anguished lament about the human evil of the killing of six million Jewish men, women and children. 

Etty Hillesum was killed at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-nine. In her diary she chronicled her journey to keep her soul alive in the midst of the terrors. Here is one of her “and yet” prayers: Dear God, these are anxious times…I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters; that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. 

With these witnesses we pray our laments and our hopes with the Psalmist:

Why, my soul, are you cast down? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for yet will I praise God, my Redeemer. Psalm 42:11 

---Nancy Hastings Sehested