In my late forties, amidst a swirl of life chaos, I studied the Shoah for the third time, this time with a rabbi. I realized during that academic quarter that I had studied the Holocaust twice before. For several winter weeks during my first year at Wellesley, I had holed up in the Psych Department’s library reading studies of the death camp commanders, trying to articulate an explanation of evil for myself. It is not clear to me now why that was a priority for me then. And then in my thirties, I had seen “Schindler’s List” and “Sophie’s Choice” and read Hannah Arendt, again looking for an explanation, immersing myself in the subject for several weeks.

This third time, with the tutelage of the rabbi, I realized what I had been looking for those other times: I had been trying to find my mortal enemy story, the story that would undo me. If I could face that story and not fall apart completely, it seemed to me, then I would be safe forever.

But this third time of immersing myself in that era’s stories taught me that I would never succeed: my enemy story was a shape-shifter. The story that would bring me to the brink of life-threatening grief in my teens was not the same as the enemy story that would take me there at age thirty-five, and different again from what would threaten to undo me at age forty-five. My quest was ill-advised.

Then again, I had in fact survived these three immersions and not yet gone mad, taken my own life or otherwise done myself or others permanent harm.

In fact, studying the Shoah gave me the curiosity to study the Middle Passage, the My Lai massacre, the Long Walk of the Navajos, and a sampling of the thousands of similar events in human history. I faced them as if facing an enemy in combat: would I survive the encounter? And if I did, what would I know about myself then?

And is that the promise of combat?