Etty Hillesum
As right-wing populism and totalitarianism seem to retain their attraction for so many people, it is painful to reread the life and writings of the Dutch Jewish thinker Etty Hillesum. Etty Hillesum’s life has been described as living in hell, and yet through her searching for a solid ground of existence she found experiences of the ‘divine presence’ and this discovery she shares in her diaries and letters. It’s been said that Hillesum inspires us to see that glimpse of heaven in our personal experience, so enabling us to hold onto our humanity in any man-made hell and resist it through an attunement to ‘the flow of presence.’
Brought up in a dysfunctional family Hillesum sought healing through a form of therapy, and through reading and analysing her inner world, passing through personal chaos and distress, only to be engulfed by the Nazi genocide sweeping through Europe. She was imprisoned in the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, and from there sent to die in Auschwitz aged twenty-nine.
Her diary records a move from analysis to self-analysis to an inner conversation with God encountered as a transcendent Presence immanent in the very centre of her being. The God she experienced helped her cling to a faith in the goodness of humanity, saying no to violence, and opening her to beauty and hope.
‘I am ready for everything, for anywhere eon this earth, wherever God may send me, and I am ready to bear witness in any situation and unto death that life is beautiful and meaningful and it is not God’s fault that things are as they are at present, but our own. We have been granted every opportunity to enter every paradise, but we still have to learn to handle the opportunities … am filled with a faith in God that has gown so quickly inside me that it frightened me at first but has now become inseparable from me.’
Initially working with Julius Spier, who had trained with Carl Jung, (Spier then moved to an unorthodox therapy practice involving palmistry and wrestling!), and he and Etty Hillesum also became lovers. He encouraged Hillesum to keep a diary. It was by opening herself to her inner world that Hillesum encountered a presence that she symbolized as “God”. She wrote: ‘I hold a silly, naïve, or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for the sake of convenience I call God.’
She also experienced God through his creation and his creatures. Echoing Jung and copying this passage three times, Hillesum wrote:
‘I know people for whom the encounter with the strange power within themselves was such an overwhelming experience that they called it “God”. So experienced, “God” too is a theory in the most literal sense, a way of looking at the world, an image which the limited human mind creates in order to express an unfathomable and ineffable experience. The experience alone is real, not to be disputed; but the image can be soiled or broken to pieces.’
Confronted by the helplessness around her as the genocide increased, Hillesum was equally convinced of God’s helplessness, and decided to help him:
‘I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away … all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others too…. We must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.’