To My Muslim Cousins--After Reading Theo Padnos' Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture and Enlightenment

Yes, you are right. 

Your point is valid.

 You say, “How is it that you Christians preach at us, nagging us not to hate and despise the Jews? Did not Christendom hate and despise the Jews?"  And although many of the ‘Aryans,’ the Nazis, also hated the church-going people and Jesus himself,  you say quite wisely, "Were not the Nazis the children of the church-going? Did not their ideas not spring from Christendom?"

You ask "How is it that you inveigh against our antagonism towards Israel and indeed towards the Jews?"

And you say further,  "Did not the Jews want to kill Jesus? One of our prophets whom we love... and your god?" 

And "Are not the Jews unbelievers, kaffir and thus essentially out of harmony with the divine?"

Finally (and here the point of your sword touches the heart)-- "Did you not do far worse than our Al-Nusra or Al Qaeda or ISIS  ever do by killing six million of them in these camps of the Europeans? Who are you to lecture us?”

 My cousin, this is indeed what we did-- and this is indeed, who we are, but let me also say this, our error, our sin, is also your sin. We worship the same God and we both of us misunderstand and reject the same God. 

We were in error in our understanding of faith and you are in error now and this error leads to the hatred of our elder brothers (and sisters too), the Jewish people. You are under the same delusion as we were and to some extent still are. What is this delusion? We think that faith is primarily something that mankind does. Man has faith, or not. And those who do not have faith, or the right kind of faith, must be redeemed or if not, go to Hell. Torture must be used against those who do not believe. This torture does two good things. It shows the difference between faith and non-faith to the people of one’s community and it encourages the non-believers to become true believers or at least submit to the divine harmony. Is this not how Al-Nusra thinks? Is this not the doctrine and policy of HTS and many other militias? Well, this doctrine and policy is quite familiar to us in the West, after all, it was our own.  Have you heard of the Inquisition? No? Well let me tell you, we know from torture. Maybe more than Al-Nusra or ISIS will ever know. Moreover, let it be said, that we “knew” as Al-Nusra “knows” that the unbeliever defiles. He defiles his community, he defiles the land. He is a disease-vector and a risk. This idea was also part of our doctrine and policy. But then something happened. This doctrine and policy grew to be something more than a doctrine and policy. It became an hypnotic trance; Germans and many other nations believed that the best way to save the entire earth was to eliminate the disease-vector from the face of the earth. The name of this disease vector was “Jew.” And we did what we did best: we exterminated. This is something, thank God, that the Middle East does not share, the urge to exterminate. In the West however this is our ancient manner of problem solving.  My cousin, here is what I have to say: we were wrong and our wrong was layers and layers and layers deep. God is like a janitor in a church basement where the sewage has overflowed and hardened. He cleans there with his mop and his scraper. And God, as you know, is not discouraged. He is an amazing janitor indeed. We in the West have layers of the foulest gunk to work through and it is not worked through yet. He works through faith and love. And faith and love? Those are his cleaners, these are his tools and this is who he is. Listen, my cousin, we in the West were completely wrong about faith. We thought that faith was primarily an attribute of man. We were wrong. God is a God of faith  (Deuteronomy 32:4) . He is the one who has faith, emunah in Hebrew. And he “enfaiths” people, people like the prophet Samuel, Shammil in the Koran.  Samuel was "established" or "enfaithed" to be a prophet. (I Samuel 3:19) He was girded about so that he could become a prophet.  And yes, we do have belief but it is a result of God's faith, his enfaithment, his girding of the prophet whom you love, Jesus. The one we know to be God. 

Cousin, you bear the Jewish people a grudge for wanting to crucify Jesus. But though we, both Jews and people of the other nations (Gentiles) meant it for evil, God meant it for good. He sent Jesus. He made Jesus to be a sin offering for many, for Jewish people and for people of the many nations. God so loved the world. He saw a terrible problem and he fixed it through Jesus. He made right what was wrong through this faith, this enfaithment. He justifies through this faith, this enfaithment. Therefore, lay down your burden, lay down your grudge against the Jews and against all unbelievers and even against own selves. What does your grudge have to do with God? Nothing. It's is not of him and it's not from him. Let me repeat, God so loved the world, enough to send his only begotten son. There is one thing you can know about every human being on this earth, from the littlest to the greatest. They are loved by God, so much so that he would give his all and more than his all. Do you see that? So, now, I ask you, what is it that God might have in store for us to do? Knowing this about God, what is the adventure that he sets you on today?-- waiting for you with loving arms with each step that you take, the one who prepares the way, the one who lifts you up as on eagle's wings.

Isaiah 25; Lincoln Kirstein and the Restoration of the Human Figure (2)

 “And he will destroy on this mountain the face of the covering that is wrapped over the people, the web that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the rebuke of his people he shall take away from off all the earth: for the Lord hath spoken it. And it shall be said in that day, ‘Behold, our God, this, we have waited for him, and he will save us, this YHWH, we have waited for him and we will be and rejoice in his salvation.’” (Isaiah 25:7-8)

And so we see in this chapter, literally headed up by the faith of God and his “enfaithment” (see 25:1 Hebrew) that the human form, figure and face is far more important than perhaps us sinners have ever imagined. We see here that the erasure of the human walks hand in hand with Death, death as a force, Death as an entity that has a life force of its own. This entity covers us in a mask, a webbing.  

When Lincoln Kirstein returned from the war, returned from work as as a “Monument Man,” he wrote to his sister of the local Germans: “Hitler was what they wanted, they made him, and everything else is simply eye-wash. The voted openly for him in 1933 and all things being equal they would vote for him tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock.” (from Jennifer Homans book Mr B: George Balanchine and the 20th Century, full footnote forthcoming) When Lincoln returned to New York his desire was to try and restore the human figure. And how could it not be so? The Bible speaks of “sorrows too big for words,” sorrows that are so big that they can’t get out of one’s mouth. What did Lincoln see over there? It was the inhuman. What our soldiers saw when they opened up those camps was a glimpse of what things would be like without the Lord Jesus. When Martin Niemoller came to New York after the war he said this in my father’s hearing: “There is nothing good in all of Western Civilization that does not come from Jesus.” And he was in a position to know. He had been in a concentration camp for eight years. 

    The killing of the Jews was different than all the killings that Stalin and Russians perpetrated. In Siberia if one did not gather so much wood, one did not receive one’s food allotment. The result was death or execution. Prisoners knew that in the main, the situation was not personal. The guards bore no grudge, no special purpose. Things were different in the camps of the Nazis. What was being done there was a special project, it was the project to save the world. It was an effort to save the world and mankind by killing off the virus-carriers, the Jews, the bringers of evil and disease. This project though was but a small step away from suicide. It was a crime against humanity; the killings of the Jews, were simply another way of killing off the human.Were the suicides and murder-suicides after Hitler's defeat really any surprise? (Think of Magda Goebbels killing off her children and her eldest daughter knowing somehow that her mother was up to no good and being very resentful of her mother as she and her siblings went up the stairs to their bedrooms that night) These killings of children and wives and husbands should come as no surprise because the entire project was really a project for murder-suicide. It would never have stopped with the Jews and indeed, it did not. Thus, we begin to understand how it was that when Lincoln Kirstein returned to New York his project was the restoration of the human and the human figure. 

    In 2020, the human race succumbed to yet another attempt at murder-suicide. What is it to impose masks on one’s fellow man but an attempt to distort the human figure, the human face? What is the oppression of masks but an attempt to off humanity and expression of the delusion that humans are disease-vectors that must be punished and then destroyed in order to “save the world”?  Masks and the concentration camps are not the same thing, but as Dr. Mark Changizi points out, they are "in the same section of the library." Perhaps God is reminding us of our situation, namely that we are still in the grip of Death and its delusions. Perhaps as the last survivors of the concentration camps pass away, God, seeing the lack, is reminding us himself. We are no better than the Germans of whom Lincoln wrote.