A while ago a man delivered the most stunning speech I ever heard. It was not taped and it was not delivered from a text, so there is no record of it, except in the stunned hearts of the fifty people who heard it. I have thought about his talk pretty much every day since, and I want to try to re-create it here, so that you will think about it every day, too. Perhaps then something will happen.
The man who delivered the talk is a devout Buddhist. Twice in recent years he traveled from his home in America to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi death camps in Poland. In these dark scars on the earth two million people were roasted because they were Jewish. People from all over the world now go to these camps to pray.
The man and his companions stayed in those dark scars for a week at a time, wandering through the camps, weeping, sitting for long hours in prayer, walking silent through the silent museums. Some of his companions were so oppressed by the spoor of evil that they could not rise from their beds.
One night at Auschwitz, he said, we were all gathered together in one room, more than a hundred of us, when a rabbi with us reached out with both hands and grasped the hands of the people standing next to him. Slowly most of the people in the room began to hold hands, and then they began to sway a little, and then some began to gently dance, and then, he said, there rose up in that room such a powerful joy that we were stunned and speechless and confused. Nearly every person in that room felt that sweeping joy, he said, but not everyone; several people ran out, horrified that there was dancing and joy here at the very lair of evil.
What happened that night? he asked. How could there be dancing at Auschwitz?
I do not know, he said. Help me find an answer.
When we came down from the trees sixty million years ago, he said, we were naked and slow and weak, and to survive we evolved superb brains and great ferocity and an endless thirst for killing, and that is why we kill everything, including each other. We are capable of unspeakable evil, every one of us. The Nazis are in us. No one can be at Auschwitz and not feel evil twitching in himself. It is the place where arguments end.
But, he said, what if our moral evolution sped up now as fast as our physical and intellectual evolution has? What if this is happening to many of us already? What if this evolution sometimes feels like reasonless joy? What might our world become if this is so?*
* The speaker was Peter Matthiessen, who told me the same story as I was driving him up the Blackfoot River to fly fish. The “rabbi” is Tetsugen Bernard Glassman, a Zen Buddhist roshi and Peter’s friend. To experience joy at Auschwitz and Birkenau, Peter told me, was no laughing matter. He tried to write of it for years but couldn’t find a way to do so without alienating Jewish friends. He finally solved the riddle, fearlessly, fatally, by contracting terminal cancer and spending his last months fictionalizing the experiences in his last book, the novel In Paradise. Peter was gracious to Jewish friends in describing the joy: he makes his protagonist’s account ambiguous. Did the joy really happen? Even if it did, might it have been some kind of desperate group hallucination? But when Peter described his experiences on our way up the Blackfoot, there was no ambiguity. Two times, he said, turning “his extraordinary mountainside of a face” toward me so his eyes could say I mean this, Peter and the majority of two groups of people, after a horrendous week, were assailed by a sustained joy that moved those who didn’t flee to join hands and gently dance, though only the joy itself knew why.