As I write it’s breezy outside. Spring beckons. Baseball’s opening day is around the corner. I read of female comedians, mask mandates relaxed, the Taliban banning the cultivation of poppy, second home ownership — breezy indeed. Utter destruction in Ukraine. Russian atrocities there. Bodies decapitated, carbonized, mass-buried; corpses booby-trapped with mines.
Adjacencies: it’s so nice and breezy out, it’s so unspeakable.
Is this how the Holocaust happened? Mass murder in one part of the world and lovely weather in another part. Not a fair comparison in this sense: during WW II, life was hardly pleasant on the home front, and surely not in the military. Sons and brothers were fighting and dying for freedom. Still, I recall one American Holocaust survivor telling me how she suffered an unknowing bludgeoning into silence when she tried to speak of her experiences in the concentration camps. “Oh, we had to suffer, too,” her new American neighbor told her. “We couldn’t get sugar from the grocery for three years.”
Adjacencies: life on the up, life in horror. I cannot square them. I am infinitely grateful to find myself in the bubble of the breeze, even if I, too, cannot always find everything I want in the grocery. I am ripped apart by this brutality: intentional, lethal, ugly, unbearable. Adjacencies.
I am cutting Zelensky slack for his invocation of the Holocaust in his speech to the Knesset, but for a very different reason than others. They say, “the man and his country are in extremis. Let’s not pick apart his false analogies.” Are they false?
It has been easy to point out that in Russia’s massive attack on civilians and soldiers alike, the Ukrainians had their own armaments. The Jews during the Holocaust did not. The Ukrainians were supplied with additional arms when theirs ran out. The Jews never had any. The Ukrainians had diplomatic support. The Jews did not. The Ukrainians had countries to flee to. The Jews had nowhere to flee. Of course, the war in Ukraine is not a Holocaust.
Yet, I find the critique of Zelensky repugnant. Masses are being killed, tortured, or, lacking that, totally upended; pregnant women with no place to give birth, children with no place to seek shelter, hospitals not off limits for bombing. Does it matter whether we call this a Holocaust or not? Of course it matters. Words matter. Realities matter. History matters.
Just this: I cut Zelensky slack because the whole point of designating certain brutality as a “genocide” ought not to be to get the classification right. Nor even to lay the basis for war crime trials after the war is over. No, the basis must be to prevent genocide.
On this, Zelensky speaks truth. “Don’t let this become the next genocide.” That’s how I hear his words. And he has it exactly right. The point of a genocide designation is not acacemic; it is to prevent the ultimate horror. That’s why I cut Zelensky slack, even if his analogies are historically inaccurate. The world is not attending a college seminar in history here; the world is watching a war in which one side would inflict a genocide if it could. That is what justifies the invocation of the Holocaust. We are watching the unspeakable unfold, poisoning the lovely breezes outside.
I ran across this quote by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik: “When a paranoiac, who lives in fear of some imaginary monster-fiend, is given an opportunity to fix the blame upon a certain person or group, then all human inhibitions and moral controls are abandoned. The paranoid person has, in such a situation, one dominant irresistible urge — to destroy, because safety can be attained only thorough destruction.”
Does Putin fit the classic definition of “a paranoiac?” It matters to me no more than whether Zelensky’s situation merits, strictly speaking, the term Holocaust. The rabbi captures the reality: destruction. The irresistible urge — to destroy. That is Putin right now.
That is why, besides the only thing I can do, which is to pray and to urge in these pages a stronger US policy on Ukraine, I foreshorten all the lovely beauties around me. I cannot bear the adjacencies. They vivisect my mental state, my soul.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
