Speaking the unspeakable

There is a plaque placed as a holocaust memorial in the pavement below a wall of Luther's church in Wittenberg. The text makes reference to the Shem haM' phoras, the ineffable, unspeakable Name of God.

What is that unspeakability about? Certainly we know first this about it: that there is the ineffability which is a humble holding of the gift of the Holy, with deep reverence for its power and mystery, and also with care for the immense danger of its being taken in vain, used as a tool for our pride and sin. This ancient and still-living discipline, whereby the divine Name was not to be spoken, whereby even substitutes for it were to be handled with great care, has stood as sign and reminder against the presumption of our claims to know and understand it all. The Name of God may thus be held unspeakable in an observance of faithful devotion to it.

But then we are reminded this day that there is more that is unspeakable for its enormity, the knowledge that words cannot capture it, wrap it up, do it justice. The enormity of 6 million dead, or of 81 dead, or even one dead, and of each desecration of the holy in the divine image--the memory of Kristallnacht and of Holocaust--is unspeakable grief. And this too is a holiness, that we can grieve, and that we do so in respectful silence, not rushing to cover over tragedy with lovely words.

There is yet another unspeakability before us, that of obscenity. How can we sully our lips to repeat the hateful words, the poisonous speech of the haters and the prophets of violence? How can we stand it, or if we are comfortable with it, why are we not ashamed, to speak what desecrates and slanders the holy? Isn't that exactly what Jesus is angry enough to call unforgivable, the blaspheming of the Holy Spirit?

Yet in these unspeakabilities, we are called not only to silence but also to speech and to words of remembrance. Ineffable is the Name, but we do, both Christians and Jews, call upon God in prayer, caress the holy in words, remember the grief in retelling it, and pray Kaddish or celebrate Eucharist in order to defy evil with words of high doxology.

But also this, you know, that we need to remember and speak with honesty that which is toxic and obscene, about the realities of hatred and violence. Such ugly words and sentiments have not been purged from our scriptures, and they need to remain there, to trouble and warn us, lest we think murderous passions belong only to the alien and the heathen. Still more, what I mean this day for us Christians, and not least for us Lutheran Christians, is that we need to hear and acknowledge the words spoken by our ancestors in the faith, and take responsibility, and grieve, and resolve to begin anew.

One reason the memorial plaque in Wittenberg bears the term Shem haM' phoras is that such is the legend over a stone carving on the church wall above it. It is the medieval image of the Judensau, the Jewish pig, a classic and obscene expression of Christian contempt for Jews and for Judaism. Luther wrote about this carving approvingly: "There is here in Wittenberg, on our parish church, a sow carved in stone, young piglets and Jews lie under it and suck teats. Behind the sow stands a rabbi who lifts the sow's right leg up, and with his left hand pulls the tail over himself, bows and stares with great attentiveness under the tail of the sow into the Talmud, as if he wanted to read and understand something intricate and extraordinary."

There was of course much that was great and wise and humane in Luther, but we have a duty also to remember this, and not to leave it unspoken. Luther's vitriolic diatribes against the Jews are part of the history that leads to Kristallnacht. While the fires of that night of horror still smoldered, a Nazi bishop of the church issued a tract that rejoiced in the appropriateness that November 10 is Luther's birthday: "the synagogues in Germany are aflame.... In this hour the voice must be heard of the man, who, as the German prophet in the sixteenth century, began first out of ignorance as a friend of the Jews, [and] who, driven by his conscience, driven by experience and reality, became the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews." He followed up with citations from Luther's 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, including the recommendations to secular authorities on how to deal with the Jews, words that read like a blueprint for the violence of the preceding two days.

The city of Wittenberg elected not to remove the Judensau from the wall of the church. They did not rush to make the obscenity invisible and unheard. Instead they placed this plaque down below it. The German text declares: God's own name, the slandered Shem HaM' phoras, which the Jews before the Christians kept almost ineffably holy, perished in six million Jews under the sign of a cross.

In those days, indeed down through generations and centuries, we Christians have terribly failed the teaching of our Rabbi, the one who not only told the story of the good Samaritan, of the despised other who becomes the neighbor, the bringer of blessing, but who himself became the outsider who blessed, the other who, when we draw lines of exclusion, repeatedly stands on the other side. The issue is alive still, and contempt of others is often still taught, or left unchallenged, in our communities. After our silent grief and our contrite hope, let us speak of it.