I wonder whether the Pope — in his talks with this and that side — was able to comprehend the extent to which their long struggle has made them eerily similar to each other. Both have the same, almost hysterical sensitivity to what other people say and think about them. There’s the same manic-depressive excitability, the same need for any former enemy to love them, really love them. They share a potent self-destructive instinct, a compulsion to trip oneself up, and a bitter gravity that is nearly devoid of faith in any promise or hope.
Precisely because the Pope took care not to enter the political minefield, he was able to pronounce some important truths that have almost been forgotten after years of conflict. He spoke of the simple human suffering of millions of refugees, of the pointlessness and inexplicability of this ongoing misery. He reminded those people that their plight does not make them less deserving. With a few simple words he restored to them the honor that the “situation” has stolen from them.
And, in passing, he also spoke of the responsibility that all the leaders in the Middle East have for this suffering. I believe that this wholesale indictment was intentional. It’s not just Israel’s leaders who bear responsibility for the refugees’ misery. The leaders of the Arab world do as well. The wealthy Arab countries could long ago have alleviated the refugees’ day-to-day distress to some extent, but they preferred to preserve their misery and to cement their suffering in the ugly setting of the refugee camps.
In the Pope’s visit to the Deheisheh refugee camp, there was, however, something more important. In conversations I’ve had with Palestinians, I’ve often heard them say that they are now paying the price of the persecutions that the Jews suffered from the Christians. “We,” say the Palestinians, “are the victims of victims.” They often say that the fears that history has instilled into the Jewish soul have made it impossible for Israel to ever feel fully secure. The result, say the Palestinians, is that there will never be true peace.
I reminded them in these conversations that the Arab world has never shown any genuine goodwill toward the tiny Jewish refugee state, and that Israel is not exactly surrounded by the Salvation Army. Even today, I point out, you can still hear Arab radio stations broadcasting calls for the destruction of the “Zionist entity.”
But there can be no doubt that the Jewish people’s tragic past — a past for which the Church is largely responsible — has created some of the convoluted psychological complexities that make it very difficult for Israel to act today with more courage and largesse, with greater confidence in the Arabs.
From this point of view, the fates of the three religions, and of the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Catholic Church, are tangled up in a tortuous and tragic knot. When I saw the Pope in the narrow streets of Deheisheh, when I saw him bless the children, the fourth generation of misery, I felt how right this visit was, this visit into the wound; how important was this direct contact with plain human suffering. Redemption will not come, of course, from this short visit, but as an Israeli, I also see recognition of the Catholic Church’s obligation to try to loosen, carefully and delicately, the noose that is strangling millions of Israelis and Palestinians.
Day Three: Yad Vashem
Today, after the ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, even the most out-and-out cynics must realize how the Pope’s visit to Israel touches the foundations of our identity, our most primal emotions.
In their planning of the visit, the parties seem to have thought mostly about abstract symbols, the big images. Yet now, during the visit itself, symbols and human beings are melding time and again; abstract ideas are mixing with tears and wounds and human fragility.
So it was when the Pope spoke of the suffering of the Jews, and so it was when he met with people from his hometown in Poland, with the woman that he himself bore on his back out of the ghetto, to whom he gave a slice of bread and whom he saved from death. And so it was when he stood, head bowed, and communed with the memory of the victims.
Allow me to tell a brief story, a private one. A very dear member of my family, a survivor of the Treblinka death camp, arrived at my wedding with a bandage on her forearm. She was covering her tattooed number so as not to mar the celebration with a memento of the Holocaust. I remember how I was unable to take my eyes off that bandage. I understood then, very sharply, how much all of us here in Israel are always walking on a surface as thin as that bandage, under which lies a void that threatens, every moment, to drag down our daily lives, our illusion of routine.
I was reminded of that feeling again yesterday, when, at the ceremony, they read a letter that a Jewish woman named Jennia wrote to the woman who hid her son, Michael. The mother asked that he not forget to wear his pajamas at night, and pleaded that he eat well, to strengthen him for what awaited him. At the end, the reader concluded by saying that Jennia and her son had perished in Auschwitz. I felt then — perhaps not only I — all at once, that the thin bandage that separates our “here” in Israel from the “there” of the Holocaust had suddenly been ripped off.
True, the Pope did not ask for the Jewish people’s forgiveness, and did not apologize for the Church’s deeds during the Holocaust. Perhaps he refrained from doing so for internal Church political reasons, but to my mind it was just as well.
Think of the outcome had he apologized. Hundreds of millions of Christian believers would have felt that the Pope had absolved them forever of any personal obligation to face up to the Holocaust.
I don’t belong to those who believe that the Holocaust was a specifically Jewish event. As I see it, all civilized, fair-minded persons must ask themselves serious questions about the Holocaust and what permitted it to take place.
These are not Jewish questions. They are universal questions about the relations between human beings, about attitudes to the foreign, the different, and the weak. They are questions about the human soul that can so easily be made to stop speaking as “I” and to begin roaring about “we.” They are questions about attitudes to force, about the way a person can preserve his humanity in the face of an arbitrary power that seeks to obliterate him, and about the greatest courage of all — the courage to do a kindness to the oppressed, when it is so easy to collaborate with evil.
It is good that the Pope did not ask for forgiveness. No one can ask for forgiveness for the Holocaust in the name of others, and no person may forgive in the name of the victims. The Pope’s presence in Yad Vashem, within the most profound dimension of Jewish suffering, like the deeds of human kindness that he, as a human being, performed during the war, are more eloquent than any official declaration.
It is impossible to sum up what happened in the Holocaust in one sentence, or in one gesture, as important as that gesture might be. What happened there will remain forever mute, like a mouth wide open to scream. Something of that cry is present in the silent, missing line at the end of the poem by Dan Pagis, “Scrawled in Pencil in a Sealed Boxcar”:
Here in this transport
I Am Eve
With my son Abel
If you see my oldest son
Cain son of Adam
Tell him that I
Day Four: Service at the Mount of the Beatitudes