"To write poetry after the Holocaust," suggested the French philosopher Theodor Adorno, "is barbaric."  As I continue to reflect on Holocaust Remembrance Day, about which I blogged on Friday, I see ever more fully Adorno's point.  In light of the Holocaust's devaluation of everything human, moral, and real, why should we think we can write anything of emotional value on its other side?  We have every reason to suppose that we can instead do only the opposite, to wallow ever more deeply in the aching shoals of human brokenness, our hope shattered completely, our vision fractured totally.  As T.S. Eliot asked near the beginning of his profoundly insightful Wasteland, itself written in the shadow of the horrors of World War I, "Wo weilest du?" ("Where will you go?").
     Indeed:  where will we go?  Though we are traveling through an ethical nothingness, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once observed, we do so before a vast "somethingness" of nearly unlimited potential.  We travel before God.  This God, however, Kierkegaard went on to say, is not obtainable by ordinary means.  We must make a leap of faith.  Yet this leap is not a leap of irrationality, he adds, but a leap into an "objective uncertainty."
     Objective uncertainty?  It seems an oxymoron.  But it's not.  Kierkegaard's point, were he living during the Holocaust, would be that we will never be able to fully contemplate or grasp the horrors of what our twentieth century eyes have seen.  We will never be able to fully understand why, we will never be able to fully understand the "why" of God during the Holocaust.  Yet we believe that over and beyond the angst and horror, God is there. There is object.  There is something.  There is foundation. There is meaning.
     Is this meaning elusive?  Yes.  Can this meaning be oblique?  Yes.  But it's there.  And in this, and only in this, is our hope.  Otherwise, we are hoping in the very humanness that birthed our angst.