Essential reading for the times

I think I may need to post a trigger warning here. My feeling is that this piece, from Edith Eger's book The Choice, is one of the most beautiful, challenging, and relevant pieces of writing I've read recently. I think its time is absolutely now to be heard. But it's not easy reading.

Edith Eger (1927-2026) was a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor. A Hungarian, American psychologist and beautiful spirited being.

Her books The Gift and The Choice are well worth a read in full. I shared this passage with several wonderful groups of people recently, in classrooms and in a circle that I'm a part of. I feel that its time is absolutely now to be heard.

Edith writes (starts pg 298 The Choice):

'Do I have what it takes to make a difference? Can I pass on my strength instead of my loss? My love instead of my hatred?

I've been tested before. A fourteen year-old boy who had participated in a car theft was sent to me by a judge. The boy wore brown boots, a brown shirt. He leaned his elbow on my desk. He said, "It's time for America to be white again. I'm going to kill all the Jews, all the niggers, all the Mexicans, all the chinks."

I thought I would be sick. I struggled not to run from the room. What is the meaning of this? I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, say Who do you think you're talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber. I would have been justified. And maybe it was my job to set him straight, maybe that's why God had sent him my way. To nip his hate in the bud. I could feel the rush of righteousness. It felt good to be angry. Better angry than afraid.

But then I heard a voice within. Find the bigot in you, the voice said. Find the bigot in you.

I tried to silence that voice. I listed my many objections to the very notion that I could be a bigot. I came to America penniless. I used the 'colored' bathroom in solidarity with my fellow African American factory workers. I marched with Dr Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation. But the voice insisted: Find the bigot in you. Find the part in you that is judging, assigning labels, diminishing another's humanity, making others less than who they are.

The boy continued to rant about the blights to America's purity. My whole being trembled with unease, and I struggled with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, make him accountable for his hate - without being accountable for my own. This boy didn't kill my parents. Witholding my love wouldn't conquer his prejudice.

I prayed for the ability to meet him with love. I summoned evevry image I had of unconditional love. I thought of Corrie ten Boom, one of the Righteous Gentiles. She and her family resisted Hitler by hiding hundreds of Jews in their home, and she ended up in a concentration camp herself. Her sister perished there - she died in Corrie's arms. Corrie was released due to a clerical error one day before all of the inmates of Revensbrück were executed. And a few years after the war, she met one of the most vicious guards at her camp, one of the men who were responsible for her sister's death. She could have spit on hi, wished him death, cursed his name. But she prayed for the strength to forgive him, and she took his hands in her own. She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard, she felt the purest and most profound love. I tried to find that embrace, that compassion in my own heart. To fill my eyes with that quality of kindness. I wondered if it was possible, that this racist boy had been sent to me so I could learn about unconditional love. What opportunity did I have in this moment? What choice chould I make right then that could move me in the direction of love?

I had an opportunity to love this young person, just for him, for his singular being and shared humanity. The opportunity to welcome him to say anything, feel any feeling, without the fear of being judged. I remembered a German family that was stationed for a while at Fort Bliss, how the girl would climb into my lap and call me Oma - Grandma - and this little benedication from a child felt like the answer to the fantasy I'd had as I passed through German towns with Magda and the other inmates, as the children spat at us, when I dreamed of a day when German children would know they didn't have to hate me. And in my own lifetime, that day came to pass. I thought of a statistic I read, that most of the members of white supremacist groups in America lost one of their parents before they were ten years old. These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.

And so I gathered myself up and I looked at this young man as lovingly as I could. I said three words: "Tell me more."

I didn't say much more than that during his first visit. I listed, I empathized. He was so much like me after the war. We had both lost our parents - his to neglect and abandonment and mine to death. We both thought of ourselves as damaged goods. In letting go of my judgement, in letting go of my desire for him to be or believe anything different, by seeing his vulnerability and his yearning for belonging and love, in allowing myself to get past my own fear and anger in order to accept and love him, I was able to give him something his brown shirt and brown boots couldn't - an authentic image of his own worth. When he left my office that day, he didn't know a thing about my history. But he had seen an alternative to hate and prejudice, he was no longer talking about killing, he had shown me his soft smile. And I had taken responsibility that I not perpetuate hostility and blame, that I now bow to hate and say, You are too much for me.

Now, on the eve of my return to prison, I remind myself that each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for - our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom - is up to us.'

The Choice
Edith Eger
Published by Penguin Random House 2017