A mystic's disposition toward Atrocity: Etty Hillesum (1941-1943)

The following quotes are taking from a collection of the journals and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish mystic who recorded her life in depth, in the months leading up to her deportation to a transit camp, then to a death camp where she was murdered by the Nazis. 

Her writings reveal how she viewed her fate; the fate of Jews collectively; her ideas of love and hate, and most importantly, how she prepared herself mentally and spiritually for the ordeal she knew was to come. I take her writings as a guide in today's parallel universe of global chaos, the rise of fascism, and extreme barbarity. Her body may have been killed, but her voice wasn't stilled; her spirit not defeated. 

"More arrests, more terror, concentration camps, the arbitrary dragging off of fathers, sisters, brothers.  We seek the meaning of life, wondering whether any meaning can be left.  But that is something each one of us much settle with himself and with God.  And perhaps life has its own meaning, even if it takes a lifetime to find it. I for one have ceased to cling to life and to things; I have the feeling that everything is accidental, that one must break one's inner bonds with people and stand aside for all else.  Everything seems so menacing and ominous, and always that feeling of total impotence."

"We are but hollow vessels, washed through by history...Everything is chance, or nothing is chance.  If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second."

"He said that love of mankind is greater than love of one man. For when you love one person you" are merely loving yourself." 

"There is a really deep well inside me.  And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then He must be dug out again.  I imagine that there are people who pray with their eyes turned heavenward. They seek God outside themselves. And there are those who bow their head and bury it in their hands. I think that these seek God inside." 

"A desire to kneel sometimes pulses through my body, or rather it is as if my body had been meant and made for the act of kneeling. Sometimes, in moments of deep gratitude, kneeling down becomes an overwhelming urge...It has become a gesture embedded in my body, needing to be expressed from time to time...When I write these things down, I still feel a little ashamed, as if I were writing about the most intimate of intimate matters. Much more bashful than if I had to write about my love life. But is there indeed anything as intimate as man's relationship to God?"

"And the suffering, the ocean of human suffering, and the hatred and all the fighting?  Yesterday I suddenly thought:  there will always be suffering, and whether one suffers from this or from that really doesn't make much difference. It is the same with love. One should be less and less concerned with the love object and more and more with love itself, if it is to be real love."

"In years to come, children will be taught about ghettos and yellow stars and terror at school and it will make their hair stand on end." 

"Something in me is growing, and every time I look inside, something fresh has appeared and all I have to do is to accept it, to take it upon myself, to bear it forward, and to let it flourish."

"The threat grows ever greater, and terror increases from day to day.  I draw prayer round me like a dark protective wall, withdraw inside it as one might into a convent cell and then step outside again, calmer and stronger and more collected again. I can imagine times to come when I shall stay on my knees for days on end waiting until the protective walls are strong enough to prevent my going to pieces altogether, my being lost and utterly devastated." 

"Humiliation always involves two.  The one who does the humiliating, and the one who allows himself to be humiliated.  If the second is missing, that is, if the passive party is immune to humiliation, then the humiliation vanishes into thin air." 

"And the English radio has reported that 700,000 Jews perished last year alone, in Germany and the occupied territories. And even if we stay alive, we shall carry the wounds with us throughout our lives. And yet I don't' think life is meaningless. And God is not accountable to us for the senseless harm we cause one another. We are accountable to Him!  I have already died a thousand deaths in a thousand concentrations camps.   I know about everything and am no longer appalled by the latest reports.  In one way or another I know it all. And yet I find life beautiful and meaningful. From minute to minute."

"....and I sometimes bow my head under the great burden that weighs down on me, but even as I bow my head I also feel the need, almost mechanically, to fold my hands.  And so I can sit for hours and I know everything and bear everything and grow stronger in the bearing of it, and at the same time feel sure that life is beautiful and worth living and meaningful.  Despite everything...I know that this too is part of life, and somewhere there is something inside me that will never desert me again." 

"Yes, we carry everything within us, God and Heaven and Hell and Earth and Life and Death and all of history.  The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us.  And we have to take everything that comes: the bad with the good...But we must know what motives inspire our struggle, and we must begin with ourselves, every day anew."