Etty Hillesum och Zizek

"Far from providing the conclusive dot on the i, the divine act [Jesus dying on the cross] stands rather for the openness of a New Beginning, and it is up to humanity to live up to it, to decide its meaning, to make something of it. It is as in Predestination, which condemns us to frantic activity: the Event is a pure-empty sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning. "The Messiah is here" - this summarizes the terrible risk of Revelation: what "Revelation" means is that God took upon Himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully "existentially engaging Himself" by, as it were, stepping into His own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing Himself to the utter contingency of eistence, Here I am tempted to refer to the Hegelian-Marxian opposition of formal and material subsumption: through the Event (of Christ) we are formally redeemed, subsumed under Redemption, and we have to engage in the difficult work of actualizing it. The true Openness is not that of undecidability, but that of living in the aftermath of the Event, of drawing the consequences - of what? Precisely of the new space opened up by the Event.

What this means, in theological terms, is that it is not we, humans who can rely on the help of God - on the contrary, we must help God. It was Hans Jonas who developed this notion, referring to the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who, in 1942, voluntarily reported to a concentration camp in order to be of help there, and share the fate of her people: "Only this one thing becomes more and more clear to me: that you cannot help us, but that we must help you, and in so doing we ultimately help ourselves ... I demand no account from you; you will later call us to account"

- The puppet and the Dwarf s.136 - 137