I can only assume that whoever chose the theme for HMD this year, For a Better Future, had money on the US election. “Surely,” they must have said to themselves, “Harris will win. Educators and others can talk about the ways in which the world is and can be a better place, just a week after the inauguration.” Or perhaps, since I found myself addressing a school yesterday on this theme, this is more evidence that if history teaches us anything, it’s that historians don’t learn from history.

I realised in preparing the talk that honesty was essential. You can’t pretend that (for example) unprecedented wildfires are just the warm glow of the fire in the college library. They know things are bad; you know things are bad. So admit it. 

As to culpability, if there’s any event that can be safely laid at the door of white European men, it’s the Holocaust. I didn’t expect Elon Musk to so quickly acknowledge the role of the Nazis in his intellectual hinterland (perhaps the Afrikaans veld would be more accurate), but making the Nazi salute twice just hours after the swearing in was nothing if not confirmation that I was right to suggest that insecure men of limited intelligence and even more limited scruples can’t be trusted. Aimé Cesaire would have immediately recognised the “cruelty, mendacity, baseness, and corruption” that have been the hallmarks of his project, and that of his permatanned puppet. 

But, while interesting, the dead weight of European patriarchal intellectual history doesn’t provide a great deal of uplift. Nor, to be frank, does describing the mixture of emotions with which most survivors seem to have greeted liberation: numbness, doubt, and fear of the very future that the theme valorises. Primo Levi’s account of the numb incomprehension of his liberators does, however, resonate with the sense of helplessness that many have felt since November.

“They did not greet us, nor smile; they seemed oppressed, not only by pity but also by a confused restraint which sealed their mouths, and kept their eyes fastened on the funereal scene. It was the same shame which we knew so well, which submerged us after the selections, and every time we had to undergo or witness an outrage: the shame the Germans never knew, the shame which the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse by its existence, because of its having been introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defence.” 

Moreover, even the little bit of good news at the moment, the fragile ceasefire in Israel/Gaza, came very late in the preparations. And I couldn’t bring myself to hold it up as an example, both because it comes after such horror and, superstitiously, I didn’t want to jinx it. 

But as in the Greek myth, after the horrors had emptied out of the box, something remained. Not hope, but its more resilient cousin, faith. 

Why more resilient? Because hope requires something to be grounded in, and accordingly can be disappointed or even crushed. Faith, however, is consciously not knowing and moving forward anyway. I’m always wary of quoting St. Paul (an antisemite as only a former Jew could be) but “The promise of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen” is a very good summary of faith. 

As for the obvious question of what we put our faith in, I closed with one of the most basic and common prayers in Judaism: Shehecheyanu, the prayer for this moment. It translates as follows:

Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the
Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and
brought us to this moment.

The whole talk is here as a download, but I leave you with my closing paragraph: please let it come to pass: 

“I say this prayer with groups in Auschwitz, as a reminder that whatever may have happened in the past, we are here. Whatever the challenges, we shall overcome, given time, given faith. And whatever the future may hold, we will face it together.”

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