Etty Hillesum on Attentive Listening
[Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943. (Complete and Unabridged; K. Smelik, ed., A. Pomerans, trans.). Eerdmans, 2002.]
O Lover,
In these chaotic days I have found myself exploring as for the first time the bio and writings of Etty Hillesum (1914-1943), the Dutch Jewess who with most of her family died in Auschwitz. Her diaries across eighteen months, enriched by several later letters, testify to a spiritual transformation rarely glimpsed in our times. One facet of Etty’s journey in the valley of the shadow of death was her use of the German hineinhórchen. Viewed by her as untranslatable to Dutch—“to hearken” is usually used in Pomerans’s translation, a richer English approximation might be “to listen into deeply” or “to focus attentively with one’s entire being.”
Etty first utilized hineinhórchen in late August of 1941, a time when her spiritual unfolding was still wobbly. The meaning she would ascribe to the term was not yet fully developed: e.g., she writes of listening to “myself, to others, to the world”; or, reflecting on Rilke, “[A]s if everything welling up from within must be hearkened to more attentively, more attentively and earnestly” (326). On September 17,1942, during medical leave from her social worker-cum-detainee role in the Westerbork transit camp in the Drenthe region, Etty wrote this: ”Truly, my life is one long hearkening unto my self and unto others, unto God. And if I say that I hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me. The most essential and the deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other. God to God” (519, EA). The exploration of her earlier chaotic self was now increasingly opening to the Divine.
O Lover, does not Etty’s hineinhórchen point in a direction in which I am being drawn, albeit clothed in other words? What of her flowering amidst catastrophe most rings true for me?
First, Etty’s term points beyond thoughts, symbols, or constructs. More than thinking or imaging You, her practice of receptive “attentiveness into” (including kneeling) involves her being aware of You, experiencing You, resting in You. It is as if amid the darkness she is not beset with creed, analysis, distraction or denial so much as with another mode, another awareness, another faculty increasingly open to You. This is increasingly an expression of apophatic spirituality in which the principal language is silence, the primary stance receptivity, the central virtue patient waiting. O Lover, in all of this Etty is becoming one of the mentors of my journey, in the words of Juan de la Cruz, “without a road and without anything.”
Then there is the question of the directionality of Etty’s wholistic attentiveness: the aural faculty of her “listening into” primarily faces within. Indeed, that for which she thirsts is encountered in the very depth of herself, what she calls her “soul-landscape.” It is from that innermost point—silent yet interconnecting—that she can first write of You as “the deepest and best in me” (83). At the same time, Etty’s blossoming ministry without undercuts any notion of her within being a self-indulgent privatization and escape. Her rejection of passivity, hating, and hiding speaks for itself. Her reading of Eckhart in the later stages of the Westerbork chapter only strengthens the wedding of the centered and the encompassing in her journey. O Lover, I like Etty long for a deeper awareness of the infused presence of You in the very heart of all that is, this beginning with my innermost. And when that thirst encounters only desiccation, I persist in desiring that it be otherwise. Indeed, sometimes the thirst is only sated by . . . more thirst. In these days I have hope that the thirst itself, sometimes it alone, will nevertheless sustain and, in Your largest picture, slake.
Finally, to me Etty’s hineinhórchen (“to listen attentively into”) hints of the manner of her journey. Mental comment largely throttled, she moves silently, deeply and wholistically beyond the scientific, analytical or the theological. Her manner intimates of You, O Lover, whom the subject/object structure cannot contain. More specifically, the “into” speaks of engagement, immersion, perhaps even implicit union, in Etty’s deep dive into You who are Última, Reality Itself. That she more than eighty years after her death is addressing our own situation so profoundly in this Eastertide witnesses to her journey as yet another embodiment of Your words in the Apocalypse: “Behold, new I am making all things” (ta pánta [21:5]).
