I have a story to tell.
On August 9th in 1995, I was born.
On August 9th, 2019, I sat with my dear friend Emma in Reza's coffeeshop of Dayton's Oregon district, right around the corner from where 9 people were shot to death less than a week before.
On August 9th, 1942, a woman named Edith Stein died in an Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chamber.
It seems unlikely that these parallel dates are a meaningless coincidence. It turns out that Stein is exactly the role model I need for the kind of life I want to live and the time in history I have to live it in.
Edith was born in Germany in 1891 to a devout Jewish family whom she loved dearly, but she declared herself an atheist in her early teens. She was open minded, inquisitive, and ambitious, and cared deeply about truth and morality.
Edith pursued an education in philosophy, specifically a developing branch called phenomenology (she actually studied under the founder of this discipline, Edmund Husserl, and was his personal assistant for over a year). Phenomenology, to the best of my understanding, is a school of thought that is interested in consciousness and the human experience that stems from it--so, with understanding the world as we the people perceive it.
(I'm currently interested in phenomenology and its more modern counterpart, cognitive science, for some of the same attributes that I think drew Edith to it. Phenomenology, in my opinion, is where the rubber of abstract thought hits the road of reality and lived experience. It seeks to understand humanity without imposing unrealistic ideals upon it.)
Edith, not one to let let idealism and abstraction blind her to her duty of living a good life, took this philosophical lens and ran with it. She decided to get a doctorate degree and chose "Empathy" as the subject for her thesis.
When World War I broke out, she put her empathy into action, put her studies on pause, and did some nursing work in an infectious diseases hospital. This in no way held her back; she finished her thesis and was awarded her doctorate "summa cum laude" in 1916.
Despite her high achievements and her ambitious series of applications, she was unable to secure a university-level position because she was a woman. She studied independently while enduring the grueling application process. During these studies she read the spiritual writings of the female Carmelite mystic Teresa of Avila and was so inspired that in 1922 she was baptized a Catholic, and merged her newfound religious conviction with her already strong network of moral beliefs.
She became a teacher at a women's college, continued to write, and delivered many lectures. Some of her most well-known work is on the subject of women and their essential role in society and in the church. Stein argues that women want to "comprehend not merely with the intellect but with the heart", that their presence in a variety of spheres of the working world and of governing systems is necessary because they have a natural gift for treating problems in an interpersonal, holistic, and empathetic manner instead of being diverted by extremes, abstractions, and impersonal, objective trajectories of thought. (Sound familiar? It's phenomenology, but feminized!)
Edith is very clear that this does not mean men cannot be empathetic or that women cannot think abstractly, but rather that what she sees as men and women's *overall* (there are exceptions of course) natural tendencies to these differences can in fact provide mutual enrichment when men and women interact and treat one another as equals.
I found out yesterday that a unifying trait of many of the perpetrators of mass shootings in recent times (who are almost unilaterally men) is their disdain and disrespect for women. Many of them have histories of sexual aggression or domestic violence. Perhaps it is this quality of women, this insistence upon a holistic and empathetic and nuanced view of the world and the people that live in it, that they abhor.
It is my belief that hatred springs naturally from extremism. Whenever someone becomes immersed so deeply in a belief or an ideal that it dominates their entire worldview, they are bound to see anything or anyone that deviates from that central belief as a threat. Misogyny, racism, religious fundamentalism- these are all extremes of belief. And these extremes of belief are responsible for the overwhelming majority of hate crimes and wars and other violences throughout human history.
Edith embodied everything that threatens extremists. She was ethnically Jewish. She was educated. She was an educator, and promoted critical thinking and the liberal arts, which are essential to the understanding of the cultural diversities that the Nazi nationalists worked so hard to wipe out. (An essential step in building an empire is robbing those outside the dominant group of their cultural heritage.) She was a woman, and a kind and thoughtful one. She was Catholic not out of a desire for superiority and self-righteousness and defense against other-ness, but out of a desire for relationship with God, service to others, and pursuit of moral truth.
Edith lost her job as a teacher because she didn't have an "Aryan certificate." She joined a Carmelite convent of nuns in part from a desire to serve God but also as a safety measure--nuns don't go out in public much. She still had to wear a Star of David on her nun's habit (robe).
She didn't take well to hiding; that wasn't her style. She continued her academic activism. Her fellow Carmelites encouraged her in a new writing project, a personal narrative about growing up in an ordinary Jewish family, meant to show that Jews were no less human than any other German citizens.
She also wrote a letter to the pope, hoping to compel him to speak out against the Nazi agenda. Here's some of what she said:
"For weeks we have seen deeds perpetrated in Germany which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor. For years the leaders of National Socialism have been preaching hatred of the Jews.... But the responsibility must fall, after all, on those who brought them to this point and it also falls on those who keep silent in the face of such happenings.
Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself 'Christian'. For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ's name. Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? Isn't the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the most blessed Virgin and the apostles? Is not all this diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, still prayed for his persecutors? And isn't this a black mark on the record of this Holy Year which was intended to be a year of peace and reconciliation? We all, who are faithful children of the Church and who see the conditions in Germany with open eyes, fear the worst for the prestige of the Church, if the silence continues any longer."
There she is, folks. Sharp as a tack, ahead of her time, and not afraid to call out the Holy Father of Rome himself.
I read this and almost immediately realized I could copy and paste some of this and apply it to current events:
For months we have seen deeds perpetrated at the border which mock any sense of justice and humanity, not to mention love of neighbor...
Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself 'Christian'...Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the media open heresy? Isn't the effort to destroy immigrant lives an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, of the Holy Family who themselves fled their country Israel to Egypt to escape violence? ...We all, who are faithful children of the Church and who see the conditions in the United States with open eyes, fear the worst for the already tarnished prestige of the Church, as well as for the safety of the people, the children of God, if the silence continues any longer.
Parallel.
As the anti-Semitism in Germany grew worse, Edith's fellow Carmelites sent her and her sister out of the country in 1939 to a convent in Holland, hoping to protect them. Edith wasn't convinced they could outrun the Nazis for long. She was right. Nazi power and ideology spread to the Netherlands, and the Catholic bishops there publicly denounced it. In retribution, a manhunt for Jewish converts to Catholicism began and Edith and her sister were arrested and deported to a concentration camp.
Edith spent her time at Auschwitz caring for the other frightened inmates, especially the children, until her execution.
This year, on the anniversary of her death and my birth, I was trying to celebrate my life even though I had a lot on my mind, even though I felt overwhelmed by the muddle of politics and policies and pain. I was still reeling in the wake of the shootings in my hometown and in El Paso, Texas, and the news of ICE raids leaving school children without parents to come home to.
There was room for both comfort and concern as Emma and I drank tea and coffee. We talked about compassion. We talked about religion at its best and at its worst, about our hopes for faith as radical love and social justice and our fears for faith as a hiding place and a band-aid and (God-forbid) as a weapon of oppression. We talked about our own lives- the kinds of careers we want to have, her in psychology and me in literature, both of us in the business of opening and healing minds. We talked about the kinds of families we want to raise, ones that live out of empathy rather than extremism. We wondered what more we could do.
I'm not sure I have any answers to that yet, but I thought it was important to let you all know that smart and strong-hearted women like Edith have been working on it for years, and that smart and strong-hearted women like Emma and like me are working on it still. I hope we become the kind of people Edith Stein would be proud of.
Peace be with you.
~Sarah
