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7 Conclusion: The Ethics of Teaching (after) Auschwitz The Holocaust challenges the claims ofall the standards that compete for modern [people's} loyalties. Nor does itgive simple clear answers or definitive solutions . To claim that it does is not to take burning children seriously. Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire" We want to start this chapter by asking a simple question: what do we hope to accomplish when we teach, or write about, the Shoah? In the years since 1945 we've heard a lot of answers: so that we never forget; so that something like this could never happen again; so we remember those who perished; so that we can heal or redeem the damage done to the world through anti-Semitism or racial hatred or any number of other symptoms of genocide. We'd like to suggest that although these answers, and others like them-answers that focus our attention on the events of the Holocaust and the broad ethical consequences of it-are compelling and useful, they are nevertheless impossible . They're impossible for two important and connected reasons. The first is that what we have come to understand as knowledge and learning don't so much provide access to an event as they occlude access to it; by allowing us to believe that the event-or any object of knowledge for that matter-can be retrieved, such imperatives elide the symbolization of an event with its occurrence. The second is that the objects through which we do have access to the event-testimony, documentary evidence , museums and memorials, poetry and fIction-are representations of a traumatic, sublime object that is resistant to such attempts to create 157 158 Between Witness and Testimony knowledge. Taken together, both points circle around the same kernel of impossibility, the same occlusion of supposed knowledge and event. And this impossible and traumatic kernel forces us to reconsider what we mean by "learning" about the Holocaust. Take the fifty-year-old response to the question, why teach or write about the Shoah: to remember, to memorialize the dead so that what they suffered will never happen again. We see this imperative enacted concretely at Yad Vashem in Israel. The historical museum itself contextualizes the Holocaust and the events immediately before and after in terms of a redemption through community. The museum not only covers the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of the final Solution, but also addresses the ghetto and camp communities as well as the resistance movement. The last quarter of the museum ties these communities to those that attempted to immigrate to Eretz Israel. And as we exit the historical museum, we are confronted with the translated words of Baal Shem Tov: "Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption." The museum fulfills these words by defining redemption as the end of exile and the formation of a state. Throughout the museum we move through a narrative history of the Holocaust that both rests in and points towards the state itself. Yad Vashem presents redemption as the building of community. This circularity of being situated in while pointing towards is the same impossible kernel occluded in all attempts to universalize remembrance . For knowledge in the face of trauma is the very beginnings of community. Universal constructions, however, may not redeem the dead since they do not address the particularities of trauma itselt~ the individual lives and experiences of those who suffered. Nor are they universal outside of any particular history or system of knowledge. If we think of the history of the Holocaust as a singular set of events that involves not just our capacity to write those events but to have some sense of the lives that were caught up, one by one, in those events, then history itself both demands explanations of particular traumas and complicates the possibility of such explanations. History constructs community or community constructs history by occluding the particular trauma of an event. And those within the community, those who have knowledge, know what they know. This implies a certain barrier to seeing based on an identification with knowledge. Within a community, one must overcome knowledge of oneself, of the community in order to bear witness. Otherwise, one identifies with a given testimony. On the other hand, those who are not within such a community carry the burden of a complete lack of context, of not knowing what's at stake in a given representation, of not being put...

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