Kabbalah · 1914–1943
Etty Hillesum
Jewish mysticism · a living faith in hell · An Interrupted Life · diaries 1941–1943
A voice from the very darkness of the twentieth century: how to keep the light and the love where all is perishing.
The essence of the teaching: Freedom cannot be taken from without – it is lost from within, by adapting to evil. The true mending of the world begins by uprooting that same darkness in oneself. By accepting death, you come into the fullness of life.
Transmission
Etty wrote her diaries in Holland, in the years when the ring of the camps was closing all around, and she perished at Auschwitz at twenty-nine. Yet her words are not despair but light. The trouble is not outside, she came to see, but in the way people adapt to evil; and the world must be mended starting from one's own heart – uprooting in oneself the very hatred one condemns in others. Give your grief all the room it needs, carry it honestly – then it will not breed fresh grief. By shutting death out of life, we live only halfway; by letting it in, we live fully. And in the very midst of hell she wrote: I have died a thousand times already – and still I find life beautiful. Wishing to own nothing anymore, I suddenly own everything.
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