"A Voice Was Heard in Ramah: Growing Up a Child in One of Rachel's Diasporas"
Foreword
I
am a product of genocide. During the
First World War, two young Armenians, Krikor and Satenig
Mouradian, managed to flee their home in modern-day Turkey in order to escape
from what became known now as the Armenian Genocide, one of the first “modern”
genocide of the twentieth century, a century that would go on see several more
such “modern genocides” in Cambodia, Rwanda, and, of course, the one against the Jewish, Romani, and other peoples perpetrated by Nazi Germany.
Krikor
and Satenig fled the Ottoman Empire (as Turkey was known prior to 1918) for
Russia, but Russia being what it was, with the fall of the Czarist monarchy and
the rise of Bolshevism, it was readily apparent that America might be a safer,
more stable final destination. And thus,
fleeing essentially as refugees, Krikor and Satenig made their way across the
entire breadth of Russia, to Vladivostok and the Bering Strait, where they illegally
crossed over the Pacific Oean to Seattle and the lower continental United States, where
they eventually settled in Detroit, Michigan.
Krikor and Satenig went on to have three children, one of whom was my
grandmother, Marianne. Her daughter,
Cheryl, met my father Gordon at the University of Michigan. Had my great-grandparents not had to flee
their ancestral homeland to survive, I would not be here.
I
offer this by way of opening not to be macabre, but to state a reality: my
existence—and the existence, I would imagine, of many “hyphenated” Americans
(ie, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc.)—comes with a profoundly emotional
duality: our cultural identities that we
should be proud of were decimated, and our identities as Americans carry a
particular dimension of tragedy because they came by way of being forcibly
taken here as slaves, deported as unwanted untouchables, or fleeing here as desperate, displaced refugees.
My
words here are a part of my life’s attempt to reconcile the two in experience
and in Scripture.
Part I: Experience
I
was struck most powerfully by Gary’s description of Noemi Ban as someone who
“incarnates a surprising sense of hope, love, joy, and even laughter in the
midst of the horrific memories that she’ll never be able to exorcise.” I cannot say that I would be capable of such
a state of grace myself; indeed, writing some time ago, I said that the very
same circumstances that my great-grandparents lived in may well have caused me
to topple and fall were I in their place.
What
I can say, though, is that a survivor’s memories can be carried in hope, love,
and joy from generation to generation.
My family still has the passports that Krikor and Satenig used to
smuggle passage to the United States. We
have photos of them at the corner store they opened in Detroit as their means
of livelihood. And I was still told
stories of them around the dinner table.
However, the meal around that dinner table was usually American,
not Armenian. And the stories were
always told to me in American English, not in Armenian or its
dialects.
In
other words, even though the future generations of my great-grandparents were
able to be birthed, we were birthed not as native Armenians, but as something
else entirely. Even though my family had
escaped the physical danger of genocide, our culture was still at risk of
drifting away through assimilation. And
that, too, in a way, serves the ends of a genocide’s perpetrators.
I
have come to believe that part of the heinousness of genocide is in how
exponential its consequences are: we know not what the twelve million victims
of the Nazi Holocaust would have done with their remaining years of life, we
cannot tell what their children might have grown up to be, we have no way of
divining how much more humanity would have benefited from their blessed
presence upon God’s creation. In this
way, the world experiences the loss of untold future generations of thinkers,
chemists, engineers, writers, visionaries, and so on.
But
culturally, we experience the loss of those thinkers, chemists, etc., belonging
to a particular culture and social location as well, even if their families do
survive. I am, by citizenship, an American pastor, not an
Armenian pastor, and considering one of the stated goals of the Armenian
Genocide was the eradication of Armenian Christianity, this is something that I
must wrestle with.
For
this reason, I believe very strongly in the importance and mission of genocide
survivors like Noemi who have taken to the speaking circuit to educate others. Eradication of a culture neither begins nor
ends with the attempt at physical extermination or the forced assimilation that
follows. Just as efforts such as pogroms
and discrimination were made in both the Ottoman Empire and Nazi Germany to
eliminate their “undesirable” populations of Armenians and Jews prior to their
respective Holocausts[i],
so too have efforts since been made to denigrate, minimize, or even outright
deny the experiences that peoples have suffered at the hands of their
oppressors.
These
efforts continue to this day, with varying levels of subtlety. Professors with tenure at universities such
as Princeton, Georgetown, and Louisville have made their names in no small part
by denying the veracity of the Armenian Genocide in the face of staggering
academic evidence to the contrary[ii]. The “Armenian lobby” in Washington, D.C. is
at times mentioned in the same breath as the “Jewish lobby,” [iii]
as though, in the offensive stereotype of old, Armenians could, like Jews, pull
the strings of power from behind the scenes like a malevolent puppeteer.
So,
much like Noemi (though on a far more modest and micro scale), I have had to
engage in educational efforts with the people whom I meet to explain to them
exactly who I am and why my family had to make its way to the United States. But unlike Noemi, I cannot truthfully say
that I have always done so as compellingly and effectively as she might
ordinarily have.
And
also unlike Noemi, I take on my educational efforts—such as they are—at least
in part as a cultural stand-in, someone for whom the history of my people is
precisely that: history. It is not
something that I myself lived, nor is it something that I can bring the full
force of my being to today, because who I am by now has been more
influenced by America than by Armenia.
I
am not simply the product of genocide. I
am one of its farther-flung consequences: a descendant of its victims who experiences
a tremendous disconnect from the culture that should have been my heritage by
birthright. A genocide does not only end
the culture of the people it murders—it is also quite capable of instilling a
new culture into a survivor’s descendants.
Part II: Scripture
In
attempting to describe the Biblical dimensions of the experiences of victims of
genocide, I most frequently reach for two distinct passages: the Exodus story
of the Israelites under the rule of Pharaoh, and its New Testament mirror: the
Massacre of the Innocents ordered by Herod the Great in Matthew 2 after the
birth of Jesus (just as the Pharaoh orders the massacre of the Hebrew boys at
the time of Moses’ birth).
The
Exodus story holds tremendous theological value for me not only because of its
fundamental message of liberation for God’s children, but also because of the
status of Moses, whose own name is Egyptian in origin[iv],
despite he himself being Hebrew. Just as
Moses was approached by a God whom he did not fully know on the basis of this
unknown heritage, so too can I empathize with being called by a God with whom I
was at one time unfamiliar and told, in no uncertain terms, to preach the
message of liberation for God’s people.
And part of that liberation has been the understanding and claiming of
my own heritage as a child of genocide—as a child of Rachel.
The
circumstances of Jesus’ birth harkens back to this Mosaic heritage in two
ways—firstly, His descent into—and ascent from—Egypt mirrors the descent and
ascent of the Israelite people that began with Jacob and concluded with Moses
and the Exodus. But secondly, when
Matthew conveys his accounting of the Massacre of the Innocents, he frames it as a parallel of the prophecy found in Jeremiah 31:15, in which the prophet
writes:
The Lord proclaims: a voice is heard in
Ramah, weeping and wailing. It is
Rachel, weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because her
children are no more. (CEB)
Theologically
and historically, the children of Rachel—as conveyed by Jeremiah—are the
Israelites who have had to suffer the destructive conquest and brutal exile
under Babylonian rule. As conveyed by
Matthew, Rachel’s children “stand for Israel, which is seen in its
continuity through all generations and in the solidarity of its lot (exile and
present event).”[v] In other words, Rachel’s children are all
Israelites, past, present, and future…including the diasporas that would be
formed centuries after Jeremiah’s tenure as a prophet.
Politically
and culturally, though, there have now been a great many other diasporas
induced by oppression or outright genocide.
The world now has a patchwork array of ethnic diasporas, not only the Armenian
and Jewish diasporas, but also the more modern diasporas of, say, Chileans and
Cambodians fleeing the brutal regimes of Augusto Pinochet and Pol Pot,
respectively.
Rachel's children--by which I mean victims of such gross human rights abuses--have become increasingly diverse. And while diversity in most circumstances is a commendable thing, when it comes to victims of genocide, we ought to be able to mean it when we see it happen and say “Never again.” Many people said this after the Jewish Holocaust.
But
then Cambodia happened. And then
Rwanda. And then Darfur.
Indeed,
there is not only two ways in which the circumstances of Christ’s birth
parallel His Israelite ancestry—there is at least a third: the perpetrator of
the atrocities that surrounded Him. Herod the Great was the alter ego of the
Pharaoh of the Exodus.
And so, too, then, are the dictators and war criminals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the alter egos of Herod. I can scarcely improve upon this comparison in how the Presbyterian pastor Thomas Long puts it in his commentary on Matthew:
If we have seen Herod’s hatred before in
Pharaoh, we know that we will see it again and again. Pharaoh, Herod, Hitler, Stalin—the chronicles
of human history are full of dictators who believe they can secure their power
through murder and genocide. This text
stands as a confident word that the despots of this world come and go, but that
God’s will outlasts and overrules them all.
This theological conviction can be seen
in terse form in Matthew 2:19: “When Herod died, an angel of the Lord
suddenly appeared…”
Herod is dead, but the Word of the Lord
continues.
Herod is dead, but the messenger of the
Lord is still appearing, speaking, guiding, protecting.
Herod is dead, but the mercy of God is
everlasting.[vi]
A
genocide may attempt to wipe out an entire culture, but those who perpetrate
it, be they kings or strongmen or dictators, will also one day join their
victims among the dead. It is an almost
perverse irony: those who tried to kill off my family’s culture, and in a minor
way succeeded by causing their descendants—myself included—to be raised not as
native Armenians but as something else, a hybrid, a hyphenated creature that is
neither entirely one or the other…those who attempted this ended up meeting the
same violent fate as their victims.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Pol Pot, the Ottoman Empire triumvirate
of Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha: all of them died violently, and
in some cases by self-inflicted violence.
Their
fates are all true-to-form examples of the sobering truth that Christ reveals
to us in Matthew 26:52: “those who use the sword will die by the sword.”
(CEB) Yet in spite of the gravity of this teaching,
we continue to use the sword against one another to this day, often on the
basis of culture or ethnicity or race or origin. We still continue to scheme of ways to
extinguish the ever-elusive boogeyman of the “other,” whoever that may be to
us.
And
so in the midst of this hurt that I carry as part of my birthright, my beacon
(I dare not say incarnation) of hope is this: that God’s redemptive power
transcended death once already in the form of the Resurrected Christ, and that
maybe God can transcend the deaths of genocide’s many victims, Rachel’s untold
children who are no more, in the form of another resurrection one day.
After
all…Herod is dead, but God still remains.
God always remains.
Afterword
I
would like to conclude my remarks by speaking briefly to Gary’s own experience
that he conveys of being “born too late to have any firsthand knowledge of that
dark period, and having received nothing more than a cursory education about
the Holocaust through high school.”
Just
as the education that many of our nation’s children receive in our schools
about the Jewish Holocaust is profoundly lacking, the education our same
children receive about any of the other modern genocides—not only of the
Armenians, but of the Cambodians, Tutsi Rwandans, or even the Darfur Sudanese—border
on nonexistent. Like Gary, my own formal
education on genocide (as opposed to around the family dinner table) had depth
only in my post-secondary education.
This
should not be so.
Part
of the implicit bargain struck by being a member of society and civilization is
an obligation to educate one another as a preventive measure against
injustice. In this singular capacity, we
as a people are failing. While the most
compelling education on genocide may well come from the Noemi Bans of the
world, they ought to not be the exclusive source of comprehensive teaching, if
for no other reason than, as it is written in Ecclesiastes, time and chance
happens to us all. The very youngest
survivors of the Nazi Holocaust will soon be turning seventy. There will come a day, almost certainly in my
lifetime, when we can no longer rely on their in-person conversations and
dialogues to educate ourselves about the very worst things that humanity is
capable of doing, and I wonder how we will go about educating each other
then—or if we simply won’t anymore.
I
have largely composed this response blind: while I have Gary’s paper, of
course, I lack the foreknowledge of exactly what Noemi may share with us, and
how it will impact each of us in—presumably— both unique and universally
profound ways. But I have no doubt that
her words will educate us. The verve and
emotion that first-person accounts are fraught with tends to remain with us as
individuals, of that I am certain. But
less certain is whether such testimonies will remain with us on a systemic
level, on a societal level, on a soul-sized, worldwide level.
To
paraphrase Georges Santayana, we who forget the past are condemned to repeat
it. If we choose not to educate
ourselves about our collective past, we forever run the risk of allowing the
world to create another Adolf Hitler, another Herod the Great, another Pharaoh
of the Exodus.
And
we will forever run the risk of creating untold more Rachels who cannot be
consoled because we have destroyed their children.
Such
a future, I adamantly believe, runs completely contrary to everything about
God’s will for us and for this world, this fearful and wonderful creation, with
which we have been bestowed.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Corbett,
Oregon
February
4, 2014
[i] Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Metropolitan
Books, 2006, 24.
[ii] Richard Hovannisian, Remembrance and
Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, Wayne State University Press, 1999,
224.
[iii] Guy Taylor, “Armenian Genocide: the
Lobbying Behind the Congressional Resolution,” World Politics Review, October
30, 2007.
[iv] Concordance to the New American Bible, Catholic
Book Publishing Corporation, 1970, 461.
[v] Rudolf Schnakenburg, The Gospel of
Matthew, William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2002, 26.
[vi] Thomas G. Long, Matthew, Westminster
John Knox Press, 1997, 22.
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