"Can you hear their last wills crying?"
Erev Shabbes, I’m sitting at my computer reading e-mail while in the background Shlomo Carlebach is singing. “The whole world is waiting to sing the song of shabbes.” Shlomo sings, “Behind prison bars we sang the song of Shabbes/in Concentration Camps we sang the song of Shabbes”. Then he sings, “I saw six million dying” and pauses for a minor eternity before being able to continue “we sang the song of Shabbes.”
Meanwhile, I’m reading an email from the Department of Defense: “Spc. Eric M. Finniginam, 26, of Colonia, Federated States of Micronesia, died May 1 at Forward Operating Base Blessing, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit using indirect fire.”
Forward Operating Base Blessing.
(Thanks to Nachman Umani, of course.)
Gevalt! The eternal space between “the six million” and “we sang the song of Shabbos” is where all post-Holocaust theology resides. And it is Shlomo’s ability to recover and continue with the same words uttered before the Holocaust, now broken and ruptured, forever changed and forever the same, that shows how all post-Holocaust theology fails.