Why I? Of Time and Judgment

Of Time and Judgment

A Wise Man's Heart Discerneth
Time and judgment
-Koheleth 8:5

I was buying a dress when a frantic young man rushed in the shop and yelled, "Eichmann is in Tel Aviv!"
"That Nazi? Who wants him here"
"He must be crazy. People'll pull him apart"
don't worry. He's under arrest. They caught him somewhere and they're going to try him We couldn't buy enough papers and we couldn't get enough details, but we knew it was magnificent.
The Jews were going to try their own persecutor! Had it ever happened before? In Spain we sneaked away. In Finland we fled. In Russia we emigrated. Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Germany. Always the same. The Jews, attacked, pull up their stakes, try again and again and again. Sympathy? Yes. Pity? Yes. Help? Sometimes. Justice? Never
If taxation without representation is a crime, what is murder without inculpation?
A man who forced millions to breathe the air of poison had between walking in the free air of liberty?
What kind of a bird can he be? surely worse than a vulture, for vultures feed only on the already dead.
And who was going to do it? Who was going to take this awful bird and put him in a cage?
"Argentina should try him."
"A world court should try him!"
"Anybody but the Jews. And anyway Israel is not 'the Jews'!"
Who is? The Jews of Golder's Green? The Jews of Boro Park? what Jews have the organization? What Jews have a court where a trial can be held, where a judgment can be pronounced and the judgment executed? After 2,000 calendar years, the Jews have a court of their own, a judicial system with an immense recognition of a debt to the innocent hurt Jews, the bruised, mangled choked Jews. uncomfortable spectres in a comfort-seeking world. And this court is in Israel!
Eichmann was discovered and Israel acted quickly and decisively. Kidnapped him from Argentina, a kidnapping with no bid for ransom.
How did they dare?
What would the repercussions be?
What had we let ourselves in for?
We waited. frightened at the magnitude of the venture, but innerly exultant like the mouse who had put the bell on the cat's neck. Was it wise? Nobody knew. But it was right. It was brave. It was even noble!
Eichmann was held in an Israeli jail and we waited.
Argentina made its formal protest. The UN made its feeble deprecation. No one was really interested in defending this unnatural being and everyone was glad that someone else was embroiled.
Nothing much happened in the world.
A lot, however, was happening in Israel. Letters, papers, diaries, lists, ledgers, books, people were being gathered together to form the basis of the Jewish case.
In a way, it seemed ridiculous. What was all this gathering of material for? Everyone knew Eichmann was the master organizer of the evil, second only to Hitler. What was there to prove? Is he Eichmann or isn't he? That was all that had to be proved!
The preparations for the trial took on momentum.
"They're digging up all kinds of stories."
"Oh no! We don't want to relive that whole thing again. How will people react? Why disturb their hard found peace?
"What good will it do?
It won't make the good better and can only provide dangerous ideas for evil men!"
"If only they had dropped Eichmann out of the airplane in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean late at night. Oblivion! Anyhow there is no punishment to fit his crime."
"They're finishing the Beth Haam for Eichmann."
"Couldn't they do it for a better purpose?"
"They're paying 20,000 pounds for a lawyer for Eichmann."
"His victims could surely use it better."
"A tailor came and measured him for a suit."
"Should have been the measurements of Sodom."
"Hundreds of newspapermen from every country are coming to see Eichmann."
"What is this?- a three ringed circus?"
The newspapers began showing his picture in jail, eating, standing, sleeping, sitting.
"Who wants to see him!"
Headlines every day. What he ate. What he didn't eat. What his wife said. What his son thought."
"Who wants to know all that?"
I closed the papers fast. Who cares? If only the trial were over fast. How will all this end?
The glory of the impact completely wore off. Cheap commercialism seemed the inevitable end and Eichmann was turning into a hero.
I couldn't stand it. I refused to allow the radio on in the house the morning the trial opened.
"I won't let that man in my living room. I don't want my home contaminated even with a wavelength. Besides he's enjoying every minute of all this notoriety. I refuse to contribute to it."
And I wasn't the only one. Every one I spoke to started by saying, "I didn't want to listen. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction."
People can get hardened by listening. Once a program of fifty people stirred the world. Six million is an incomprehensible number. It's like the universe, too gigantic for conception.
"Nothing is horrible any more. Every thing falls short of this that was Germany. Let the world weep again about just one man's sorrow. Like Job."
It's gotten too callous!
The best thing would be to forget it all. Let the human soul heal. Let it find new ways of answering the struggle for existence. By forgetting the cruel, we may find the pleasant."
No, we didn't want to listen. We didn't want our own rage and instinct for revenge and brutality awakened. We didn't want to be forced to think of means of torture for Eichmann, which would pay him back and which could never be invented. One meager, poor old man in an exhilaration of victory suggested that Eichmann be tied to a horse's tail and dragged four times around in a circle. A younger man thought that he should be taken through the streets and every one could stick pins in him.
"It's not enough just to hurt him." Insisted another, look what he did to our children. Let his children run every day to school in the rain."
They were slightly comical, these people, with their rather trivial tortures. It was a kind of relief that their imaginations were so little cruel.
We didn't want to be caught in a revelling in self laceration, in a competition in suffering. But we couldn't help it. One sentence overheard on a transistor in the street and you listened for the next.
What an argument? Jurisdiction! Did anyone care about jurisdiction in Dachau?
"Precedent from other cases." What other cases? Has there ever been a "case" like this?
"Biased judges?" Who is not biased against murder, psychotic and depraved degeneration.
We went wild. But the court remained calm. Judicial.
It was the centripetal force that embraced us all and kept emotions within control.
The lawyers question. The witnesses answer. Words. Word after word after word after word. Thousands of words. But never enough to reconstruct the second after second that is time, the heart beat after heart beat that is fear, the endlessness of heartbreak, the hours of despair, the final decisions of the mad rush for freedom in death and the daily necessity of the weary renewal of the will to live/
A judge asked. "Why didn't you rebel? Why didn't you try to escape?"
There was no escape. Marked men. Heads shaved. Clothes reeking. There was no place to escape to, no one to rely on. No house was sure. Every man was an enemy.
Hoping, some stayed alive. Some lived on hope. Starved, degraded, debased, denuded but human because they hoped. Some called it "faith". Either there was hope or there was despair, and despair was death, and death was what the Nazis wanted. Sheer staying alive was the battle. Just living. the rebellion.
"I would rather have died,' said a friend, "than do
the things they demanded."
But all heroes don't carry guns. Some just stay alive.
Suddenly, I realized I was making too much of a fuss about the individual, Eichmann. He is really only incidental. The trial is the ingathering of material of an historic instant. It is producing a true and authentic document without histrionics, without deliberate pathos, without a fabricated eloquence. There is evidence offered to the court and witnesses who testify as to what they had seen. The trial is an instrument for welding together all the bits of memory still stored in living minds. It will be put down for posterity forever, like the bible is forever.
Israel's function in this process is like the function of the stone that the ten commandments were etched out of. Perhaps gold would have been better but stone was there at Sinai at the moment it was needed. It had the strength to take the etching and it had the quality of primordial congruence.
I went up to Jerusalem feeling, at last, that this was no "show", but an event that had started in the beginnings of man, in the first awakening of the feeling of "justice" and "history", an event like a creation, tremendous and not given to every age to see.
I found a hushed and awed atmosphere. The same people who loudly chew gum in the movies were sitting deeply quiet. Hoi poloi had changed into priests of grave dignity.
The trial was exactly the right vehicle for a people whose whole tradition is based on law, whose religion is inseparable from the law that governs it and to whom the law was given
by God, Himself.
It was like Yom Kippur. Holy! Reassuring. In spite of every indignity thrust upon him, the Jew remained in the image of God.
And maybe someday, from this material, someone will write and what he writes will be worthy of being added to the dirge of Lamentations and the Halleluyas that were David's

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