After-words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice

Postscript: An After That Is Yet to Be

postscript An After That Is Yet to Be david patterson and john k. roth Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. —Martin Buber, I and Thou reaching the end of these dialogical encounters, we come to no closure. Indeed, the aim of dialogical encounter is not to have the last word but to summon a latent word, an after-word, that might take the word to deeper levels of meaning by taking human beings to deeper levels of relation . As its title implies, this book is itself made of after-words whose “before” is the Holocaust. And a defining feature of the Holocaust is an assault on the word, a tearing of word from meaning in a tearing of human from human. In the Holocaust Kingdom, words “had meanings totally diªerent from their usual ones,” as Primo Levi has said,1 “meanings” that rendered each person “desperately and ferociously alone.”2 In her memoir , Sara Nomberg-Przytyk writes that the new, twisted meanings of words “provided the best evidence of the devastation that Auschwitz created.”3 And in Star of Ashes, Ka-tzetnik cries out, “Words are no more!”4 What, then, is the devastation that is Auschwitz, where words have been swallowed up in the Kingdom of Night? One answer to this question can be found in the Muselmänner, those whom a radical evil rendered radically silent and infinitely distant from the rest of humanity. They are the camp incarnate, the ones Levi describes as “the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical , of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suªer. One hesitates to call them 249 living: one hesitates to call their death death.”5 Where words are no more, the divine spark that sanctifies the human image is no more, and men are made into non-men. Thus, coming to the end of these reflections, we realize what is at stake in the post-Holocaust struggles with these afterwords : it is the restoration of a sacred likeness to the human image. Therein lies the urgency surrounding the three words that have guided our dialogical encounters: forgiveness, reconciliation, justice. These three words are essential to the restoration of the divine spark to the human being because they are essential to restoring human relation . And fundamental to a mending of human relation is a mending of the relation between word and meaning. Adopting a dialogical method, this book has aspired to approach such a mending by wrestling with these after-words. Numerous levels of tension and contention have emerged in the process: tensions between Jew and Christian, between Christian and Christian, between Jew and Jew. And yet those tensions have emerged precisely because beneath the surface something as meaningful as it is dear is at work. It turns out that in the post-Holocaust era, the mending of relation—between human and human or between word and meaning— lies not in settling matters but rather in a certain strife of the spirit, which is a struggle with the word. For “spirit is word,” as Martin Buber has said. “It is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You.”6 The speaking and responding that comprise this book unfold in the between space that Buber describes as the realm of word and spirit. It has been necessary to open up this between space because, like word and spirit, questions of forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice unfold in a space between human beings. And they involve what Buber describes as an I-Thou relation, that is, a relation of the whole being. Forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice may be subjects of argumentation and reflection, but they cannot be subject to manipulation or exploitation if they are to have meaning. In the post-Holocaust era, however, the embrace between an I and a Thou has assumed the form of a wrestling match. Like the relation between human and human, meaning cannot simply be reattached to the word—it must be wrestled back into the word. To be sure, the exam250 Postscript ple of Jacob at Peniel teaches us that only in such wrestling can we hope to find...