Recently, a high school student contacted me. He was writing a newspaper article on the phenomenon of "Holocaust denial," and wanted to hear my thoughts on the subject. He provided me with a few questions to choose from, and I picked one. In the end he only used a couple of sentences from my response. Here is my complete answer:
What leads people to become Holocaust deniers? One answer: It is obviously a form of antisemitism. But that simply begs the question: What leads people to be antisemitic? To me, this question leads straight down into the dark, mysterious underside of the human mind. What is it about the human mind that makes it capable of irrationality, hatred, violence?
I think that we tend to forget how young human consciousness is in terms of “geologic” time. Civilization is merely a thin veneer, and scratching the surface may be enough to uncover a fearful, potentially vicious animal response to perceived threat.
Having been trained both as a psychologist and more recently as a rabbi, I tend to think about societal problems in terms of the psychological realm. What was it in this person’s life that led to this warping of their soul? What experiences of cruelty, what absence of loving attention, what bitter life experiences, led them to be the sort of person who is motivated by hatred and fear? What unconscious projections lead to the portrayal of Jews as the reviled Other? (And right now in this country, we see it happening against Muslims too, and also in the fearful projections in both directions of the political “right” versus “left.”) Yet how is it that some people are able to respond more resiliently to painful life experiences and develop instead into caring and compassionate lovers of truth? These are deep mysteries.
What leads people to become Holocaust deniers? One answer: It is obviously a form of antisemitism. But that simply begs the question: What leads people to be antisemitic? To me, this question leads straight down into the dark, mysterious underside of the human mind. What is it about the human mind that makes it capable of irrationality, hatred, violence?
I think that we tend to forget how young human consciousness is in terms of “geologic” time. Civilization is merely a thin veneer, and scratching the surface may be enough to uncover a fearful, potentially vicious animal response to perceived threat.
Having been trained both as a psychologist and more recently as a rabbi, I tend to think about societal problems in terms of the psychological realm. What was it in this person’s life that led to this warping of their soul? What experiences of cruelty, what absence of loving attention, what bitter life experiences, led them to be the sort of person who is motivated by hatred and fear? What unconscious projections lead to the portrayal of Jews as the reviled Other? (And right now in this country, we see it happening against Muslims too, and also in the fearful projections in both directions of the political “right” versus “left.”) Yet how is it that some people are able to respond more resiliently to painful life experiences and develop instead into caring and compassionate lovers of truth? These are deep mysteries.