What are we to make of starving people being shot, and trampling on each other in the stampede for food to feed their dying children? In trying to take in the reality of human suffering and our capacity for inhumanity towards others, I refuse to say 'there are no words'.
Yes, there are words! Words are the building blocks of truth. Words are a sign of our humanity. By our words we seek to give meaning, and frame reality by naming what must be named with a combination of courage, compassion and moral maturity.
So yes! There must be words. There must be speech capable of addressing such outrageous events as unfold on our phones, computers and televisions, and doing so not to add to the sum total of hatred, but to defy despair, to cry for peace, to contradict with moral force the cruelties of war. There must be words: to pray, to lament, to negate the urge to violence, and then words to rebuild hope and words to bridge the chasms of our fears with reconciling intent.
Throughout his life, the Jewish philosopher A. J. Heschel carried within him the burden of his people. Some of his most powerful writings and most searing words, are the outflow of his responses to Jewish suffering. His writings, his words, relentlessly express his belief that from the tragedy of his people must come a safer world for children, a commitment to care for the weak, and an accepted responsibility to work for the freedom of the oppressed and the healing of the nations.
Here is Heschel, from an essay collected in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity:
"There is a pressing urgency to the work of justice and compassion. As long as there is a shred of hatred in a human heart, as long as there is a vacuum without compassion, anywhere in the world, there is an emergency.
Why do people rage? People rage and hurt and do not know how to regret, how to repent. The problem is not that people have doubts but rather that people may not even care to doubt.
The charity we may do is terribly diminutive compared with what is required. You and I have prayed, have craved to be able to make gentleness a certainty, and have so often failed. But there are in the world so many eyes streaming with tears, hearts dumb with fears, that to be discouraged would be treason.
We have lost the ability to be shocked. The malignity of our situation is increasing rapidly, the magnitude of evil is spreading furiously, surpassing our ability to be shocked. The human soul is too limited to experience dismay in proportion to what has happened in Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
We do not know what to pray for. Should we not pray for the ability to be shocked at the atrocities committed by man, for our capacity to be dismayed at our inability to be dismayed.
Prayer should be an act of catharsis, of purgation of emotions, as well as a process of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibility. Prayer not verified by conduct is an act of desecration and blasphemy. Do not take a word of prayer in vain. Our deeds must not be a refutation of our prayers.
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods."
(Quotations from 'On Prayer', in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux,1996) pages 260-62.)
When it seems impossible to find words, sometimes we are helped by using words that have already been found to deepen understanding, offer wisdom, guide the conscience, and appeal to those deep springs of moral and spiritual value that prevent our humanity from being resigned to inhumane and dehumanising words, attitudes and actions. Like those words of Heschel.
Please don't say there are no words. There are, if we search our hearts more thoroughly and make space there for those whose tragedy is better acknowledged by our words however stuttering and inadequate, than by a silence that sounds like "resignation to the evils we deplore."
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