I can't believe a Rabbi wrote this
Apr. 20th, 2015 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonia"The higher truth is that our experiences are absolutely fitting for each of us." I thought the Holocaust would prevent any Jew from letting that pass their lips, much less committing it to writing in a "spiritual" book.
I find it personally, viscerally offensive. I can't live in a world where I chose or deserved, at any level, the terrible things that were done to me. Not as part of the Holocaust, but perhaps as a sort of backwash from it, since I was raised by people directly affected by it.
How could a Rabbi say that, one old enough that he might have been alive during the Holocaust? In a chapter about compassion and empathy, no less. Look someone in the eye and say that, someone with a number tattooed on them. Look at a photo of skeletal people rescued from a death camp and say that. Look at someone raped as a child and say that.
I was just writing with my aunt about her aunts and uncles, and she wrote, this one and this one and that one were assassinated in the Holocaust. (In Spanish.) They couldn't possibly have deserved that. Nor did my aunt deserve to grow up without extended family around her.
I find it personally, viscerally offensive. I can't live in a world where I chose or deserved, at any level, the terrible things that were done to me. Not as part of the Holocaust, but perhaps as a sort of backwash from it, since I was raised by people directly affected by it.
How could a Rabbi say that, one old enough that he might have been alive during the Holocaust? In a chapter about compassion and empathy, no less. Look someone in the eye and say that, someone with a number tattooed on them. Look at a photo of skeletal people rescued from a death camp and say that. Look at someone raped as a child and say that.
I was just writing with my aunt about her aunts and uncles, and she wrote, this one and this one and that one were assassinated in the Holocaust. (In Spanish.) They couldn't possibly have deserved that. Nor did my aunt deserve to grow up without extended family around her.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-21 12:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-22 12:55 am (UTC)What doesn't make sense to me (and maybe I'm just not spiritually advanced enough, who knows), is believing that being treated horribly is fitting, and finding that somehow helpful.
For me, if I deserved how horribly I've been treated, the immediate corollary would be that I should kill myself. So I consciously choose not to believe that.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-22 11:51 am (UTC)I think there's something in there, but it's not caught up in concepts of things being right, good or just, but only that that's what really happened, and so that any other concept you have about what should have happened is something other than what really happened. (And this makes a lot of sense in terms of a Chan worldview, and in terms of declining to torture yourself with the world you wish had been rather than the one that is.) But... a) there's no pretending this is a good thing, and anyone who starts with the best of all possible worlds crap is failing at compassion* b) it's much more along the lines of "so you have these lemons, so you might as well make lemonaid, or else what the fuck else are you going to do with these lemons?" I kind of think this is something different?
(I am not in any way denying the existence of asshole Buddhists. There are a lot of asshole Buddhists. Like, seriously.)
* Though I am reminded of: "An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears this is true."
no subject
Date: 2015-04-22 11:14 pm (UTC)