The Holocaust in Jewish Theology*This paper is a revised draft of a lecture delivered under the auspices of the Yad Vashem Committee on 26 November 1986. I have, as far as possible, left the original form intact, hence the frequent signs of an oral presentation.
The Holocaust is a mystery wrapped in silence. For almost twenty years afterwards, little was said, still less written about it. Like many others of the post-Holocaust generation, I was reluctant to presume on so unfathomable a subject. The questions insist on being asked: How could one dare to speak? And how could one dare not to speak? The conflict itself is part of the continuing presence of the Holocaust, so it is here that I begin.
First, I and others of my generation are too far away from that time. Which of us who were born after the Holocaust, which of us who did not lose family in the Holocaust, can speak about the Holocaust? The book of Lamentations speaks about the destruction of Jerusalem with the authority of an eyewitness: Ani ha-gever ra’ah oni: “I am the man who has seen affliction.”1Lamentations 3:1. The books written, the films made about the destruction of European Jewry speak to us precisely in the measure that they are edut: testimony or witness. And the task of the post-Holocaust generation has been not to speak but to listen and record.
We are too far away to speak. But secondly, in an important sense we are also too close. Just as we now ask questions about the Holocaust, so tradition tells us that we would ask questions about the exodus from Egypt and the events that preceded it. The Haggadah speaks of four questions asked by four children, the rasha, tam, she’eno yodea lish’ol and chakham, the wicked, the simple, the inarticulate and the wise. If we examine the Bible, we find that three of the four questions – those of the wicked, the simple and the inarticulate – appear clustered together in the book of Exodus,2Exodus 12:26, 13:8, 13:14. set at the time of the event itself. The fourth question – that of the chakham, the wise son – does not appear until the book of Deuteronomy,3Deuteronomy 6:20. at a point in time forty years later. We will not go far wrong if we say that the biblical timescale applies to the Holocaust too: we should expect it to take forty years even to find the right question, let alone expect an answer.
Third: just as we resist looking too long at the sun for fear of being blinded, we resist from looking too long at the blinding darkness of Auschwitz for fear of being driven to despair. Consider. After the destruction of the first Temple, the author of Lamentations was driven to say: Haya hashem ke-oyev, “God has become like an enemy.” Bila Yisrael: “He has swallowed up Israel.”4Lamentations 2:5. After the destruction of the second Temple, the Talmud states that din hu she-nigzor al atzmenu shelo le’ekhol basar velo lishtot yayin: “by rights we should decree that no Jew should ever again eat meat or drink wine,”5Baba Batra 60b. There should never again be Jewish rejoicing. Indeed we never forget those tragedies; we ruled that even in the midst of celebration there should be a zekher le-churban, a pause to weep for the destruction.6Sotah 49a, Baba Batra 60b; Mishneh Torah (Maimonides) Taaniyot 5:12–15; Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayyim ch. 560. What then would it be like fully to integrate into our lives a zekher le-shoah, a weeping for the Holocaust? Would it not overwhelm us?
The Talmud itself envisages just such a possibility. It gives the following parable of what Jewish history would eventually be like. It is like a man who was travelling on a road and met a wolf and escaped. And he would then tell people of his deliverance from the wolf. But then he met a lion and escaped. And he would then speak of his deliverance from the lion. But then he met a snake and escaped. And so he forgot the wolf and the lion and would speak only of the snake. So with Israel. Tzarot achronot meshakhot et ha-rishonot: “the later sufferings eclipse all the earlier ones.”7Berakhot 13a.
The revelation of evil contained within the Holocaust is blinding indeed. Elie Wiesel has insisted that we call it a revelation, a demonic counterpart of Sinai.8I owe the reference to Wiesel to Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History, New York: Schocken Books, 1978, 53. Which of us can look at it for long? If turning to look on the destruction of the wicked turned Lot’s wife into stone, how much more so looking upon the destruction of the innocent and righteous?
These then are the three reasons why I and many others, confronted by the Holocaust, respond as did the Israelites at Sinai: Vayar ha-am vayanu’u vaya’amdu merachok: “they saw and trembled and stayed at a distance.”9Exodus 20:15. This feeling will govern what I have to say, but cannot altogether inhibit it. Because theology must perform the dual task, of respecting such sentiment on the one hand and wrestling with it on the other.
To respect it is to admit that we are not yet in sight of the time when the Holocaust is intelligible within the classic terms of Jewish history. We are not yet ready to say where it belongs in the drama between God and His people. We will shortly encounter theologies which deny this, which say that it is perfectly clear what the Holocaust means. About such theories I will argue that they are not just premature, but false.
But theology must wrestle with these feelings, and for a simple reason. The Bible is full of commands to remember: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.”10Deuteronomy 5:15; 15:15; 16:12; 24:18; 24:22. “Remember what Amalek did to you.”11Deuteronomy 25:17. “Beware lest you forget.”12Deuteronomy 6:12; 8:11. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in his recent study of Jewish history and Jewish memory, has written that “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.”13Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle and Washington: University of Washington Press, 1982, 9. “Memory,” he says, is “crucial to its faith and ultimately to its very existence.”14Ibid. The word zakhor in its various forms occurs in the Bible no less than 169 times. And the command to remember is directed to Israel specifically of episodes which we had every reason to wish to forget.
Nor are they acts of memory alone in any simple sense. They are also acts of reliving and acts of redemption. We remember the exodus by reliving the exodus, as if we ourselves had been among those to leave.15M. Pesachim 10:5. We redeem our slavery in Egypt by never allowing ourselves to be the victims or perpetrators of another enslavement.16On the role of the exodus in providing reasons for the commandments in the Bible itself, see David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishnah and Gemara, Cambridge MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1986, 9–17. All these are commands which apply with equal force to the Holocaust as well. Not least because this is what was asked of us by the victims themselves.
There is a moment in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah in which one survivor talks of watching his friends go to their deaths in the ovens. They refused to obey the order to undress, and they stood and sang first the Czech national anthem and then the Hatikva. He, who was not scheduled to die, ran in to join them, knowing for certain that having seen what he had seen he could not continue to live. But they thrust him out, telling him: You must live and bear witness to our suffering.
To live and bear witness to their suffering, to live and give meaning to their suffering is a command by which all post-Holocaust Jews stand bound. For we fail in our covenantal duty to the past if we allow the Holocaust to be forgotten. And we fail in our covenantal duty to the future if we allow the Holocaust so to haunt the Jewish condition that Hitler’s ghost meets us at every turn. How we map a path between these unacceptable alternatives is the task of theology. To this I now turn.
I
One thinker at least was in no doubt as to the meaning of the Holocaust. It is important to confront him seriously and not immediately to dismiss his proposition as an outrage. For it belongs to a central tradition.
One of the great moments of Jewish theological self-definition came in the years leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.E. Throughout the precarious history related in the books of Kings, disaster had often threatened but had always somehow been averted. For the first time, now, no miracle happens. No escape takes place. The kingdom and the Temple are destroyed and the people taken into exile. It could have been interpreted as the defeat of a people and its God. But the prophet Jeremiah took the opposite alternative: it was the defeat of a people by its God.17For a provocative treatment of this aspect of Jewish spirituality, see Dan Jacobson, The Story of the Stories, London: Secker and Warburg, 1982. It was, in short, a Divine punishment. The Babylonians, though they were the enemies of God, were unwittingly the instruments of God, agents of His retribution. As Jeremiah himself put it: “And when your people say, ‘Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?’ you shall say to them, ‘As you have forsaken me and served strange gods in your land, so you shall serve strangers in a land that is not yours.’”18Jeremiah 5:19.
This is the biblical response to catastrophe: to see it in terms of Divine action and Providence, Divine justice and punishment. It should not surprise us therefore to discover that someone saw the Holocaust in just these terms. It was a punishment. The Jewish people had sinned. God was present at Auschwitz, and the Third Reich was the instrument of his anger. This was the thesis propounded and argued with prophetic fervour by the late Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmarer Rebbe.19The thesis is propounded in two books: Joel Teitelbaum, Vayo’el Mosheh, New York: Jerusalem Publishing Co., 1959; Al ha-Ge’ulah ve’al ha-Temurah, New York: Jerusalem Publishing Co., 1967. What was the sin that merited the destruction of one third of the Jewish people? The sin was: Zionism.
Only one sin could have been punished measure for measure by the near destruction of diaspora Jewry, and that was the premature attempt by Jewry itself to put an end to diaspora, to exile. The Jewish people had, according to the Talmud, taken an oath not to rebel against the nations of the world in their dispersion. They had promised not to hasten the end by an attempt to regain possession of the land of Israel. So long as they lived submissively and passively in exile, the nations too were bound by an oath not to oppress Israel excessively.20Ketubot 111a, according to which there were three oaths: “One, that Israel shall not go up (to the land of Israel all together as if surrounded) by a wall; the second, that whereby the Holy One, blessed be He, adjured Israel that they shall not rebel against the nations of the world; and the third is that whereby the Holy One, blessed be He, adjured the idolaters that they shall not oppress Israel too much.”
The Zionist movement, according to the Satmarer, was a rebellion of unprecedented dimensions against God. First it was worse than idolatry. It was an avowedly secular movement which denied Providence and believed that politics and the exercise of power could achieve what the will of God had evidently not yet decreed. Secondly, it was a contagion, luring into its ranks even religious Jews like those of Mizrachi. Thirdly and most importantly, it broke the very terms of Jewish existence in the diaspora, the tacit agreement between Jews and their host cultures, whereby Jews might negotiate or pray their way to safety but would never become activist, politically organised, or organise public protests. Zionism was the work of Satan. The Jewish people had been tempted and succumbed. And judgement was duly visited upon them.
I should add at this point that the Satmarer Rebbe, though he was an extremist, was also a scholar and intellect of great distinction. Nor was he speaking from a position of comfort: he was himself rescued from Bergen Belsen. And this very disturbing line of argument becomes more disturbing still if I add another voice. Rabbi Teitelbaum’s views represent the ideology of Neturei Karta, the ultra-Orthodox opponents of the State of Israel. But in 1977, a member of Agudat Yisrael, not an opponent of the state, offered an explanation of the Holocaust. He was the late Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, one of the most revered yeshivah leaders in America. His argument went as follows.21I am indebted, for this presentation, to Lawrence Kaplan, “Rabbi Isaac Hutner’s ‘Daat Torah Perspective’ on the Holocaust: A Critical Perspective.” Tradition 18:3 (Fall 1980), 235–248.
We are wrong to think of the Holocaust as solely the product of Christian Europe. A major part in the decision to annihilate European Jewry was played by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The Final Solution was agreed on in January 1942, a mere two months after the Mufti’s arrival in Berlin for talks with von Ribbentrop and Hitler. The Mufti himself was not an avowed enemy of the Jews until pressure began to be applied for the creation of a Jewish state. Hence Zionism brought about for the first time a collaboration between the Christian West and the Moslem East to destroy the Jewish people. Zionism was the cause of the Holocaust. It is reported that this view now prevails in mainstream yeshivah circles in America.
No comment on these views is necessary, because there is another conclusion about the Holocaust to be drawn from exactly the same premise, namely that when tragedy strikes the Jewish people it is always a Divine punishment for sin. In 1962 an Orthodox rabbi in Israel, Menachem Immanuel Hartom, asked just this question.22Menachem Immanuel Hartom, “Hirhurim al ha-Shoah,” Deot 18 (Winter 5720/1961), 28–31. What sin could have been so grave? What sin could have evoked, measure for measure, the annihilation of European Jewry?
His answer is this. The quintessence of biblical Judaism is that the worst punishment that can befall the Jewish people is Galut, exile. Throughout the long second exile Jews believed just that: that they were in exile, that this was dislocation, a not-being-at-home; and they longed for a return to their land. Until the Emancipation. Then, with the end of the ghetto and the granting of civil equality, for the first time Jews argued that this was where they belonged, in an emancipated Europe. Assimilated Jews, Reform Jews, even Orthodox Jews, found positive meaning in German, Austrian or French identity. Some abandoned the hope for a return to Israel altogether. Others deferred it to a metaphysical end-of-days. They became Germans of the Jewish persuasion. For the first time in history Jews ceased to be Zionists.
And for this they were punished. The retribution was precise. Having wished to make their permanent home in a strange land they were shown that there is no home for Jews in any land but their own. And the country that sought to make the world Judenrein was none other than Germany, the country above all others that had been worshipped by its Jews as the epitome of civilisation, the cultural utopia.
This view is shared by most secular Zionists. A.B. Yehoshua, for example, calls the Holocaust the final decisive proof of the failure of diaspora existence.23A.B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right, translated by Arnold Schwartz, New York: Doubleday, 1981, 12. But Rabbi Hartom is not a secular Zionist. He is a religious Jew seeking an explanation of the Holocaust in terms of Divine Providence. And his case is stronger than he himself makes it, because – though he does not mention it24Since this lecture was delivered a new book has appeared which takes Ezekiel’s text as its title: Bernard Maza, With Fury Poured Out: A Torah Perspective on the Holocaust, Hoboken: Ktav, 1986. Maza’s thesis is that the Holocaust was the work of Providence. Torah-true communities were on the wane, suffering from the impact of emancipation, secularisation and Zionism. The Holocaust has driven Jews back to their millennial vocation, the study of Torah. “Decades have passed since the Holocaust, and effects of the Holocaust have come into view. We have seen the resurgence of Torah in the east and in the west since the Holocaust. We know that by sacrificing their lives they made it come to be. It may therefore be that it was the will of Hashem that they gave their lives so that the Torah and the Jewish people who live by it shall live (226).” This is a teleological restatement of the Holocaust-as-punishment thesis, and is open to the objections raised against such views by Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III, 24. – there is a precise biblical prooftext in the twentieth chapter of the book of Ezekiel.
The prophet says: “You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world.…’ But what you have in mind will never happen. As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I will rule over you with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with fury poured out. I will bring you from the nations and gather you from the countries where you have been scattered – with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with fury poured out.”25Ezekiel 20: 32–34. Ezekiel predicts a time when the desire for assimilation will overtake the Jewish people and the return to Zion will be forgotten. At that time there will be a day of judgement, and the Jewish people will be turned into Zionists against their will.
So there is clear and decisive proof for Rabbi Teitelbaum that the Holocaust was a punishment for Zionism. And there is clear and decisive proof for Rabbi Hartom that the Holocaust was a punishment for anti-Zionism.
But I have to do more than show that this line of thought leads to contradiction. For there was a third group who saw the Holocaust in terms of Providence and Divine punishment. We must have the honesty to see clearly where this form of theology leads.
In 1948, a mere three years after the Shoah, a German Evangelical Conference met at Darmstadt. It proclaimed that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was the work of God. It issued a call to Jews to cease their rejection and ongoing crucifixion of Jesus.26I owe this reference to Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, New York: Ktav, 1977, 13, note 10. Genocide was the punishment for deicide.
Again I make no comment, except to say this. The idea that Jews were killed for their obstinacy in not becoming Christians was not restricted to Christians who were active collaborators with or passive accomplices of the Nazis. It is to be found even among Christians who were opponents of Hitler. Perhaps the greatest Christian theologian of this century, Karl Barth, himself an opponent of the Nazi regime, wrote during the Holocaust that the Jews were serving as witnesses of the sheer stark judgement of God. “This,” he wrote, “is how Israel punishes itself for its sectarian self-assertion.”27Karl Barth, “The Judgement and the Mercy of God” in F.E. Talmage (ed.), Disputation and Dialogue, New York: Ktav, 1975, 43. See also Richard L. Rubenstein, “The Dean and the Chosen People” in his After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, Bobbs- Merrill, 1966, 47–58. One Christian theologian to have reflected deeply on the implications of the Holocaust for Christianity is A. Roy Eckardt. See his Elder and Younger Brothers, New York: Scribner’s, 1967; Long Night’s Journey Into Day (with Alice L. Eckardt), Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982; Jews and Christians: The Contemporary Meeting, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
One might well conclude that the attempt to find Divine meaning in the Shoah leads only to madness. This was precisely the conclusion drawn by the most radical of Jewish theologians, Richard Rubinstein, in his book After Auschwitz.28Richard L. Rubinstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966, especially pages 61–81. His argument is this. Believing in the Jewish God of history entails that we see the Holocaust as an act of God and an act of punishment for sin. But no sin could be sufficient to justify the inhuman evil of the Holocaust. No tzidduk ha-din, no “vindication of the ways of providence,” is sufficient to explain the death of the righteous and the innocent, the million and half children slaughtered. Therefore there is no God of history. Traditional Jewish belief has been shattered. Quoting the rabbinic phrase for heresy, he concludes: leit din v’leit dayan:29Leviticus Rabbah, 28:1. The statement is attributed to Cain in Targum Jonathan to Genesis 4:8. “There is no justice and there is no judge.”
I have to add that Rubinstein is both a theologian and a rabbi, although a rabbi of a kind unfamiliar in British Jewry. He is a Reconstructionist and believes that the only kind of Judaism possible after the Holocaust is a secular, even pagan one, which recognises God in nature but not in history. History is meaningless, and in his words, “Omnipotent nothingness is Lord of all creation.”30The final words of his contribution to the symposium, “The State of Jewish Belief,” Commentary. August 1966, 132–135. See also his The Religious Imagination: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology, Bobbs-Merrill, 1968, especially 171–183. Alasdair MacIntyre has distinguished two kinds of atheism. One is “speculative atheism which is concerned to deny that over and above the universe there is something else, an invisible intelligent being who exists apart from the world and rules over it.” The other, in the tradition of Feuerbach and Marx, goes further and claims that “Religion is misunderstood if it is construed simply as a set of intellectual errors; it is rather the case that in a profoundly misleading form deep insights, hopes, and fears are being expressed.… Religion needs to be translated into nonreligious terms and not simply rejected” (Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age, London: Duckworth, 1971, 12–13). Rubinstein is an atheist in the second sense.
II
What do these four approaches have in common? They assumed that a theology of the Holocaust must consist in understanding the Holocaust from the point of view of Providence. The Jewish view of history, and the Christian view of Jewish history, are that great tragedies are always acts of God, and therefore acts of justice, and therefore acts of punishment. So an anti-Zionist rabbi sees the Shoah as punishment for Zionism, and a Zionist rabbi sees it as punishment for anti-Zionism. A Christian theologian sees it as punishment for the Jewish rejection of Christianity. And Rubinstein concludes that a God who would punish in such a way cannot exist.
We could dismiss all four as simply cancelling each other out. Or we could say that when they claim to be talking about the Holocaust they are really only talking about themselves. We could say, as most of us would, that though we have the faith that somehow, despite the concentration camps, there is Divine justice, we will never be able to understand it: Ki lo machshevotai machshevotechem, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor My ways your ways, saith the Lord.”31Isaiah 55:8.
We have, though, to go further than this. It is a striking fact that though the prophets evince an intense interest in the revelation of Divine purpose in the specificities of Jewish history, the rabbis do not.32Yerushalmi notes that it is “remarkable that after the close of the biblical canon the Jews virtually stopped writing history.… It is as though, abruptly, the impulse to historiography had ceased.… More sobering and important is the fact that the history of the talmudic period itself cannot be elicited from its own vast literature” (Zakhor, 16–18). Jacob Neusner has similarly argued that “The Mishnah’s framers’ deepest yearning is not for historical change but for ahistorical stasis” (Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 27) and “The Talmud contains virtually no reference to the most important events of the age in which it took shape and reached closure” (Our Sages, God and Israel, New York: Rossel Books, 1984, xix). One significant moment is captured in the displacement of the historical account of the events surrounding the festival of Chanukkah and the exclusion from the canon of the books of Maccabees in favour of the supernatural narrative of the oil that burned for eight days, Shabbat 21b. That the process is incomplete, however, can be seen in the fact that the military victory is retained in the liturgy in the Al ha-Nissim prayer, Singer’s Prayer Book, 53–54. In contrast to the apocalyptic literature that flourished from 200 B.C.E. to 100 C.E. the Mishnah is remarkable for its “utter silence” on the “tremendous issues of suffering and atonement, catastrophe and apocalypse.”33Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 37. History is no longer the primary locus of the Divine act. To some of the sages the Divine Presence had retreated to heaven. “When (the Temple) was burned, the Holy One, blessed be He, said: I no longer have a seat upon earth. I shall remove my Shekhinah from there and ascend to My first habitation.”34Lamentations Rabbah, Proem 24. See also Rosh Hashanah 31a. To others, the Divine Presence was itself in exile: “Wherever Israel went into exile, the Shekhinah, as it were, was exiled with them.”35Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Massekhta de-Pisha, xii. See E.E. Urbach, The Sages, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975, 37–65. But the lucid presence of God in history which is of the essence of the prophetic literature is at an end, to be recovered only in the Messianic future.
A new emphasis enters the rabbinic response to national tragedy There are indeed places where the rabbis speak of the Roman destruction of the Temple in the classic terminology of sin and punishment.36Yoma 9b, Shabbat 119b, Baba Metzia 30b. But in a daring stroke they see God as weeping over the fate of his people. He suffers with them. He mourns as they do.37See, e.g., Berakhot 3a, and many examples in Lamentations Rabbah. The concept of kiddush ha-Shem (sanctification of the Divine name) is developed to embrace the death, as well as the life, of the righteous. Alongside martyrdom, never allowing it peace as a sufficient explanation, is the countervailing force of the reiterated question: “Is this the Torah and is this its reward?”38Berakhot 61b, Menachot 29b. Job-like arguments with the ways of Providence are revived and audaciously placed in the mouths of the patriarchs, Moses, even the angels.39See, for a striking example, Lamentations Rabbah, Proem 24. The aggadic literature contains reflections saved only from blasphemy by their searing pathos: “Were it not explicitly stated in Scripture it would be impossible to say so, but…the Holy One, blessed be He. lamented, saying Woe to the King who succeeded in his youth but failed in His old age.”40Ibid. To be sure, these motifs are present in the Bible,41That Divine pathos is at the heart of prophetic consciousness is the argument of A.J. Heschel, The Prophets, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962. The argument with God over the ways of Providence is to be found in several key passages. See, e.g., Genesis 18: 17–32, Exodus 5:22, 32:12, 32:32, Jeremiah 12:1, Habakkuk 1:1–4. but now they begin to dominate.
Why the sudden change? The answer was given in different ways by Judah Halevi,42See, e.g., Kuzari, 11, 14, 29–44, V, 22–23. Maimonides43See, e.g., M.T. Ta’aniyot 1:1–3, Guide for the Perplexed, II, 36. and Nachmanides,44See, e.g., Commentary to Leviticus 18:25. And see, on the general subject, Y. Baer, Galut, New York: Schocken Books, 1947. but they converge on a common, if understated, conclusion. Divine Providence governs the affairs of Israel when the Jewish people exist as a sovereign people in the land of Israel. Then there is reward and punishment and prophecy. But exile, diaspora, Galut precisely means being removed from the mercy of God and placed at the mercy of the nations. It means the withdrawal of Providence, what the Bible calls hester panim, the “hiding of the face” of God; what Maimonides calls, being left to chance.45See, e.g., Deuteronomy 31:18, Isaiah 8:17, 64:6, Ezekiel 39:23-24. Maimonides, M.T. Ta’aniyot 1:3, Guide for the Perplexed, III, 36.
Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344) instructs us to distinguish between tragedies, like the destruction of Sodom, which are the work of Providence, and tragedies, like the defeat of the Israelites at Jericho, which are the result of the withdrawal of Providence.46See Perush Ralbag to Joshua 7:1. See also Commentary of Abarbanel ad loc.: “There is a distinction between punishment which comes about by (a Divine) action and punishment which comes about through removal of providence. When God punishes by direct action, He does not punish the person who has not sinned on account of him who has.… Not so the punishment which comes about by chance as a result of God’s withdrawing His providence. For this befalls the community in its entirety in that, because there are sinners amongst them, God hides His face from them all.… All of them become exposed to the workings of chance and accident, so that occasionally the person who has not sinned is also smitten when he is exposed to danger, and the sinner, who may not have been there, escapes unharmed.” The difference may be slight, but it is all the difference in the world. If God destroys, then He destroys the guilty. If God withdraws, and then man destroys, the innocent suffer as well.47This is also the sense of the talmudic statement (Baba Kamma 60a) that “Once permission has been granted to the Destroyer, he does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked.”
In rabbinic times and throughout the middle ages there were great catastrophes of which Jews were the victims. There were the Hadrianic persecutions, the murder of Jews in the Crusades, the blood libels, the Inquisition, the pogroms. All of them were faithfully recorded in Jewish memory, written down and recited in kinot, elegies which we say to this day. In each case the rabbis and poets tried to find religious meaning in tragedy. But rarely if ever did they find that meaning in terms of sin and punishment.48See Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 31–52; David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, Harvard University Press, 1984, 15–52. Yerushalmi writes: “The catastrophe (at Mainz) simply could not be explained by the stock notion of punishment for sin, for the Ashkenazic communities of the Rhineland were holy communities, as their own response to the crisis had demonstrated” (Zakhor, 38). Hence the invocation of the binding of Isaac as the dominant explanatory image for Jewish suffering in the Middle Ages. Already the opinion had been voiced in the early rabbinic literature that reward and punishment were reserved for the world to come and that “There is no reward for the precepts in this world.”49Kiddushin 39b, Chullin 142a. And see Urbach, 436–444. The poets of catastrophe during the Crusades related their sufferings to the binding of Isaac,50See Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial, New York: Behrman House 1979, for a detailed study of the development of the interpretation of the binding of Isaac as an image for Jewish suffering during the Crusades. to the tragedy of Job,51See, e.g., the kinah “I said: Look away from me,” composed by Kalonymous b. Judah of Mayence, dedicated to the victims of the second Crusade (Abraham Rosenfeld, The Authorised Kinot for the Ninth of Av, London, 1965, 140). This invokes Job’s famous affirmation, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in Him” (Job 13:15). to the suffering servant of Isaiah:52This is invoked by Judah ha-Levi, Kuzari, II, 34-41: “Israel amidst the nations is like the heart amidst the organs of the body.” all the cases in the Bible where suffering is not related to sin.53There is frequent reference in the kinot to the sinlessness of the victims. “My thoughts are dismayed, shuddering and distraughtness take hold of me; (because) of one single (good deed) did Scripture find for King Abijah hope and expectation.… (Yet) those who were perfect in all their deeds submitted themselves to slaughter out of fear of the (enemy’s) army: to them even burial was not granted” (Kinah by Kalonymous b. Judah, Rosenfeld, 141). Rosenfeld himself continues the tradition in the kinah he composed for the victims of the Holocaust: “Distinguished scholars sit on the ground in stunned silence. ‘What, Oh what, was their guilt?’ they ask, And why was the decree issued without mercy?” (Rosenfeld, 173).
Several centuries later, in the wake of the Spanish expulsion, Solomon Ibn Verga asks: “Tell me the reason for the fall of the Jews since ancient times…for behold, I have found their fall to be neither in a natural way, nor due to divine punishment. For we have seen and heard of many nations that have transgressed and sinned more than they and were not punished.”54Solomon Ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, cited in Yerushalmi, 55. Galut means exile from history in the prophetic sense of the intimate reciprocity of deed and fate. It means risk, exposure, and a faithful waiting.
Understood in this way, the Holocaust does not tell us about God but about man. It tells us not about Divine justice but about human injustice. And this is not radical theology but the whole weight of Jewish tradition in relation to Galut.55That we should see the Holocaust in terms of the “hiding of the face” of God has been argued by Rav Soloveitchik, and recently by Norman Lamm. See Abraham Besdin, Reflections of the Rav, Jerusalem: Jerusalem Department for Torah Education and Culture, W.Z.O., 1979, 37: “The Holocaust…was Hester Panim. We cannot explain the Holocaust but we can, at least, classify it theologically.… The unbounded horrors represented the tohu va-vohu anarchy of the pre-yetzirah state. This is how the world appears when God’s moderating surveillance is suspended.” See also, Norman Lamm, The Face of God: Thoughts on the Holocaust, Address published by Yeshivah University, New York 1986. Rabbi Teitelbaum and Rabbi Hartom are wrong in what they assert. Richard Rubinstein is wrong in what he rejects. Significantly wrong. For they have mistaken the nature of the Jewish tradition and blasphemed against the memory of the dead. God forbid that we should add to their death the sin of saying that it was justified.56Irving Greenberg argues that this would be to “inflict on them the only indignity left,” “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” 25. The classic statement against “criticising the Jewish congregation” is to be found in Maimonides’ Epistle on Martyrdom, translated in A. Halkin and D. Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985, 15–34. See also Pesachim 87a-b. And God forbid that we should follow Rubinstein and add to the death of six million Jews the death of the Jewish God.
III
So where do we turn? Two thinkers, Emil Fackenheim57Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem, New York: Schocken, 1978; and see his later To Mend the World, New York: Schocken, 1982. and Irving Greenberg,58Greenberg’s major statement is to be found in “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, New York: Ktav, 1977, 7–55. Other elaborations are to be found in Voluntary Covenant and The Third Great Cycle of Jewish History (New York: National Jewish Resource Center), and On the Holocaust (New York: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership). suggest a wholly different approach. For them, the meaning of the Holocaust is to be found not in understanding why it happened, but in grasping the implications of the fact that it happened. The Holocaust has, they argue, radically changed the meaning of the Jewish existence. It was a unique event in Jewish history and in human history. Any approach to the very nature of faith must now be different.
Let us consider Fackenheim’s argument in three stages.59The argument here is primarily based on “The People Israel Lives,” in The Jewish Return into History, New York: Schocken 1978, 43–57. The first is that the Holocaust has no precedent in the history of human evil. Other great evils have been committed in the course of war or for self-interest. But the Nazi programme of genocide actually hindered the war effort. Troop trains were diverted from the Russian front in order to transport Jews to Auschwitz. There have been other persecutions, of Jews and non-Jews, killed because of their faith. But the Jews of the concentration camps were killed not because of their faith but because of the faith of their great-grandparents, whether the victims themselves held the same faith or another faith or no faith. There have been other murders, but never before an attempt to implicate the victims themselves in the murders. Fackenheim reminds us that the Nazis issued work permits in the camps to separate useless from useful Jews: the former to be killed immediately, the latter to be killed eventually but led to think that they would be spared. But customarily when they issued permits to an able-bodied man they issued not one but two: one for himself, the other to be given at his own discretion to his able-bodied mother, father, wife or one child. The Nazis forced their victims into making the choice. Fackenheim says: I search the whole history of human depravity for comparisons. In vain. The Holocaust was unique. It was not just evil. It was evil for evil’s sake.
His second point. Jewish life after the Holocaust is qualitatively different from Jewish life before the Holocaust. We now know that our very decision to remain Jewish may put not only our lives in danger – for that was often true in the past – but it may put in danger the lives of our grandchildren as yet unborn. Every Jew, he says, now faces an unprecedented dilemma. Dare we morally raise Jewish children, exposing our offspring to a possible second Auschwitz decades or centuries hence? And dare we religiously not raise Jewish children? For if we do not, then we grant Hitler a posthumous victory.
The dilemma leads him to his famous formulation. The Holocaust has added a 614th command to Jewish life. After Auschwitz we are commanded to carry on being Jewish, for if we do not, then we complete Hitler’s work. We become accomplices in the disappearance of Jews from the world.
This, he argues, has changed the nature of the Jewish world. Before the Holocaust there were religious Jews and secular Jews. Now, even the most secular of Jews is a religious Jew, because in merely choosing to be Jewish at all he is obeying the 614th commandment.60A point made consistently by Greenberg too. He speaks of three eras in Jewish history: the biblical, in which God was the dominant partner of the covenant, the Rabbinic, in which man assumed a more equal role, and the post-Holocaust condition in which man is the dominant partner. This is the significance of the secular state of Israel as the response to the Holocaust: “The revelation of Israel is a call to secularity; the religious enterprise must focus on the mundane” (The Third Great Cycle, 17). Putting it another way: precisely because Hitler made it a crime simply to exist as a Jew, simply existing as a Jew becomes an act of religious defiance against the force of evil.
This is an important line of thought, because Fackenheim is trying to rescue something positive from the Holocaust. After all, Jews have gone on living and having children. Above all, they created the state of Israel, driven by the imperative never again to be vulnerable to another Holocaust. And Fackenheim is certainly the most eloquent of Jewish theologians to have confronted the Shoah.
But in the end, as several critics have pointed out, his argument is crucially flawed.61See Michael Wyschogrod’s criticism of Fackenheim’s earlier work in “Faith and the Holocaust,” Judaism 20:3 (Summer 1971), 286–294, and his critique of Greenberg in “Auschwitz: Beginning of a new Era? Reflections on the Holocaust,” Tradition 16:5 (Fall 1977), 63–78; Eugene Borowitz, Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, New York: Behrman House, 1983, 201–206; Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, New York University Press, 1985, 205–247. There is no 614th commandment. The Holocaust did not make Jewish survival a mitzvah unless it was already a mitzvah. In the Holocaust, for example, gypsies too were singled out, but that did not make it a command to be a gypsy. We can imagine a hypothetical Hitler who decreed a Final Solution against homosexuals, but that would not of itself sanctify homosexuality.62See Wyschogrod, “Faith and the Holocaust,” 288–289. Jewish survival has religious significance after the Holocaust only because it had significance before the Holocaust.
In fact, just as many Jews have reacted to the Holocaust by remaining Jewish, others have reacted by ceasing to be Jewish. The Holocaust proved that it was dangerous to be a Jew. But it also proved that it was dangerous to assimilate, and yet that has not stopped Jewish assimilation. Above all Fackenheim has erred in building a Jewish theology on the very foundations of the Holocaust. That way, madness lies. There is no way of building Jewish existence on a command to spite Hitler. That is giving too much to Hitler and too little to God. The people Israel did not survive Egypt to spite Pharaoh, nor did it survive Purim so as not to hand Haman a posthumous victory. Fackenheim errs in saying the Holocaust gives new meaning to Jewish life. This surely is wrong. We are Jews today despite the Holocaust, not because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not changed the meaning of Jewish life: and that is the miracle.
IV
Which brings us to the final thinker I want to consider, and the one who, to my mind, most accurately embodies an authentic Jewish response; namely, Eliezer Berkovits.63Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, New York: Ktav, 1973. See also his With God in Hell, New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1979. Berkovits disputes the central argument of Fackenheim, that the Holocaust is unique. It may indeed be unique from some perspectives, but not in a way that is relevant to faith.
The problem of tzaddik ve-ra lo, the “righteous who suffers,” is one as old as Abraham. Hashofet kol ha’aretz lo ya’aseh mishpat: “Shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?”64Genesis 18:25. The answer given by tradition applies to the Holocaust too. God, in giving man the freedom to choose to be good, at the same time necessarily gives him the freedom to be evil. God teaches us what goodness is. But He does not intervene to force us to be good or to prevent us from being wicked. This is the extraordinary Jewish conception of the power of God. God is powerful not through His interventions in history but through His self-restraint.
Berkovits quotes the extraordinary interpretation of the verse “Who is a Mighty One like You, O Lord?” (Psalms 89:9), given by the Tannaitic teacher Abba Hanan. “Who is like you, mighty in self-restraint? You heard the blasphemy and the insults of that wicked man (Titus), but You kept silent!” In the school of R. Ishmael the verse “Who is like You, O Lord, along the mighty (elint)” (Exodus, 15:11) was amended to read, “Who is like You, O Lord, among the silent ones (illenum)” – since He sees the suffering of His children and remains mute.65Mekhilta 42b; Gittin 56b. Faith after the Holocaust, 94. The central religious paradox is that God leaves the arena of history to human freedom, and therein lies His greatness.
So when human beings perpetrate evil it is human beings who are to blame, not God. But then the crucial question arises. Where do we witness God in history? Berkovits answers: God reveals His presence in the survival of Israel. Not in His deeds, but in His children.66Faith after the Holocaust, 109-127. There is no other witness that God is present in history but the history of the Jewish people.
Hence the demonic character of the Nazi project. The Final Solution, says Berkovits, was an attempt to destroy the only witnesses to the God of history. The ingathering of exiles after the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel, revealed God’s presence at the very moment when we might have despaired of it altogether. The rebirth of the state came at a moment in history when nothing else could have saved Jews from extinction through hopelessness. The miracle that testifies that God exists is that the people of Israel exist. Though they walked through the valley of the shadow of death, am yisrael chai, the people Israel lives.
The only meaning to be extracted from the Holocaust is that man is capable of limitless evil. The religious meaning of six million deaths is no more and no less than that they, as other Jews had done before them, died al kiddush ha-Shem, for the sanctification of God’s name, suffering, as Isaiah saw the servants of God would always suffer, until the world finds it in its heart not to afflict the children of God. We find meaning not in the Holocaust but in the fact that the Jewish people survived the Holocaust. The existence of the state of Israel does not explain the Shoah, but it gives us faith despite the Shoah.
That is perhaps as near as we will come to a theology of the Holocaust. It helps to explain why Orthodox Judaism has been reluctant to create a new fast for Yom ha-Shoah,67See, for example, Sir Immanuel Jakobovits, “More from the Chief Rabbi’s Correspondence Files.” L’Eylah, Spring 5745 (1985), 32–33. and why thinking about the Holocaust has played a less prominent part in Orthodox circles than elsewhere. Not because Orthodoxy has felt it less acutely than others: on the contrary, no other group lost so much as the worlds of the yeshivah and the Chassidim. Rather it was because the traditional Jewish response has been not to sanctify suffering but instead to rebuild what was broken. Indeed it was the ultra-Orthodox groups in particular who have tacitly insisted that the one command to come from Auschwitz was: Let there be more Jewish children. Who is to say that this was not the deepest response of all?
One writer about the Holocaust records that he met a rabbi who had been through the camps, and who, miraculously, seemed unscarred. He could still laugh. “How,” he asked him, “could you see what you saw and still have faith? Did you have no questions?” The rabbi replied: “Of course I had questions. But I said to myself: If you ever ask those questions, they are such good questions that the Almighty will send you a personal invitation to heaven to give you the answers. And I preferred to be here on earth with the questions than up in heaven with the answers.” This too is a kind of theology.
V
We have not reached the end of thinking about the Holocaust, and in a sense we have hardly begun. The proof is that the most compelling writing about the Holocaust today is done not by rabbis, philosophers or theologians, but by novelists like Elie Wiesel. A novel is a vehicle for unresolved tension and ambiguity, and is evidence that a problem still disturbs and bewilders us.68See Yerushalmi’s perceptive comments on the contemporary divorce of Jewish history from Jewish memory in Zakhor, 81–103.
Manifestly, we have not yet learned how to integrate the Holocaust into Jewish consciousness as we once integrated the exodus or the destruction of the Temples. The reason is clear. The Holocaust does not point anywhere but everywhere.69See A.B. Yehoshua, Between Right and Right, New York: Schocken, 1–21. And see D.J. Silver, “Choose Life,” Judaism 35:4 (Fall 1986) 458–466: “The Holocaust cannot and does not provide the kind of vitalizing and informing myth around which American Jews could marshal their energies and construct a vital culture. Martyrs command respect, but a community’s sense of sacred purpose must be woven of something more substantial than tears.” We have considered just a few examples. For some it confirms their faith, for others its confirms their lack of faith. For some it has proved that it is impossible to escape from Jewish identity, for others it has made it all the more urgent to do so. For some it has made it imperative to live in Israel, for others it has made it imperative that Jews be scattered everywhere, that a remnant shall always remain. The reason is not to be sought in the Holocaust itself but in something that preceded and still survives it. Namely, that since the Emancipation, there is no such thing as a common Jewish consciousness for any Jewish experience to be integrated into. Each of us relates to the Holocaust in our own way; but there is no longer a collective way, as there was when Tisha b’Av was instituted. We are no less fragmented after Auschwitz than we were before it.
This, it seems to me, is the central issue to be addressed. Rav Soloveitchik has spoken of the two covenants which bind Jews to one another and to God. There is the brit goral and the brit ye’ud, the covenant of a shared history and the covenant of a shared destiny.70The distinction is made in the essay Kol Dodi Dofek, in J. D. Soloveitchik, Divrei Hagut ve-Ha’arakhah, Jerusalem: Department for Torah Education and Culture, W.Z.O., 1981, 7–55. The Holocaust has immeasurably deepened the brit goral, the covenant of shared history. The sentence of death was over each of us in some way that we can understand, whether we are secular or religious, Zionist or diasporist. What has not been deepened is the brit ye’ud, the covenant of shared destiny, of a common future.
In a remarkable passage the Talmud says that though the Torah was accepted at Sinai, it was only fully accepted on Purim.71Shabbat 88a. It was on Purim that the Jewish people had stood under the decree directed “to destroy, massacre and exterminate all the Jews, young and old, children and women, on a single day,”72Esther 3:13. the first warrant for genocide. It was only after Purim, says the Talmud, that kiyemu ve-kiblu ha-yehudim, that the covenant made at Sinai was fully entered into. The covenant of shared history was turned into a covenant of shared destiny.
In our day this has not yet happened. Yet the Holocaust still asks this question of us: if Jews were condemned to die together, shall we not struggle to find a way to live together? To find a way of bringing the fragmented, splintered, shrinking Jewish world into a common future is the monumental task facing rabbis and theologians today. On their success will hinge the answer to the question: Was the Holocaust a tragedy or a turning point for the Jewish people?