Shoah: Enough Already?

I was not prepared for the intensity of the response. At the church where I serve I suggested that folks might want to watch Shoah, the longish film on the Holocaust being televised that week. One layman summed up the general response: “Come on, Pastor, enough already.” Enough what? Enough morbid dwelling on the unspeakable. That was one answer. Another parishioner explained that she would not watch a nine-hour film on the Gulag Archipelago either, or on the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia. Especially if—as she said was the case with the Holocaust—“I’ve seen it a thousand times before.” A third party answered more bluntly: “Enough of their trying to rub our noses in it.”

Ah, so it comes down to “them” and “us” after all. It would be easy enough to condemn such attitudes as anti-Semitic and wish for the power to sentence those who think that way to expiate their sins by watching the entirety of Shoah for nine days running. It would be easy, as it would also be simplistic and unjust. The truth is that the healthy human psyche has a limited capacity for the unrelieved contemplation of the horrible. A further truth is that many Christians have been put on guard by polemical abuses of the Holocaust story. The healthy human psyche has an even more limited capacity for being lacerated by untruths and half-truths.

RJ

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Richard John Neuhaus

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I was not prepared for the intensity of the response. At the church where I serve I suggested that folks might want to watch Shoah, the longish film on the Holocaust being televised that week. One layman summed up the general response: “Come on, Pastor, enough already.” Enough what? Enough morbid dwelling on the unspeakable. That was one answer. Another parishioner explained that she would not watch a nine-hour film on the Gulag Archipelago either, or on the Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia. Especially if—as she said was the case with the Holocaust—“I’ve seen it a thousand times before.” A third party answered more bluntly: “Enough of their trying to rub our noses in it.”

Ah, so it comes down to “them” and “us” after all. It would be easy enough to condemn such attitudes as anti-Semitic and wish for the power to sentence those who think that way to expiate their sins by watching the entirety of Shoah for nine days running. It would be easy, as it would also be simplistic and unjust. The truth is that the healthy human psyche has a limited capacity for the unrelieved contemplation of the horrible. A further truth is that many Christians have been put on guard by polemical abuses of the Holocaust story. The healthy human psyche has an even more limited capacity for being lacerated by untruths and half-truths.