No matter how victorious the German armies were, the Jews did not doubt that ultimately Germany would lose the war. Of course, the survival of the Jewish people depended on Germany’s defeat, and they were sure of the survival of Israel. The best among them saw a reborn people of Israel in the midst of a happy humanity, redeemed from the curse of totalitarianism and the yoke of oppression of all kinds. Thus Yizhak Katzenelson, in one of his poems, looked forward to the vengeance that would be wrought on the perpetrators of the greatest crime in history. He wrote of the earth that in its anger would vomit out the carcasses of the criminals, so that even with their worm-eaten hearts and blinded eyes they might see and feel how
“…nations rise to new life…
behold cities are built in all the earth
flourishing, rejoicing,”
that they might hear, be it even with ears full of rot,
“the voices of a heaven clear and pure again
the voice of the earth, after your end,
smiling again with joy.
Listen!
A song is rising, sounding,
with love and trust
bursting over the fullness of the world.
It has come to life.
Listen!
Listen to the voice from on high!
It is mighty!
It is free!
It exalts!
And in the chorus of the nations
sings the Jew,
the one,
the eternal.”1This is a free translation from some passages of Katzenelson’s poem, Ha’azinu; see Ketavim Aḥaronim 5700–5704, Tel-Aviv, 1956.
A partisan poet did not sing of the immortal Jew, but of “our victory,” the victory of the Jews,
“It comes with freedom and peace.
Peace and freedom in our cry.
So on it will ring,
and fall it will,
the mighty, bloody giant.”2Min haMeẓar Karati, Shirei Getta’ot, Maḥanot haAvdut…, ed. Moshe Prager, Jerusalem, 1954, p. 196.
They all dreamt of a new day, of a better world, of a world of justice and freedom, of new cities and happy people. What would they have said of our world in the last quarter of the 20th century? Certainly the eternal Jew is far from being part of the chorus of happy nations. While one “mighty, bloody giant” has fallen, the age of “mighty bloody giants,” universal and provincial ones, is still upon us. Peace is in continuous jeopardy, and freedom is no longer a cry, but the silent whisper of a few still unspoiled spirits. The triumphant march of Soviet communism has established a totalitarian empire with an unlimited appetite for domination, the nature of which has been brilliantly analyzed by Albert Camus in The Rebel. Comparing fascism with Soviet communism, he rightly maintains that their ends are not to be identified one with the other. Neither fascism nor nazism ever dreamt of liberating all men. They intended to liberate a few by subjugating the rest. Soviet communism, by principle, aims at liberating all men. However, this ultimate liberation of mankind is removed far into a mythological future. For the time being, the end sanctifies the means. All moral values are suspended; individual freedom crushed. However grand the final goal, in the meantime “it is legitimate to identify the means employed by both (i.e. fascism and Soviet communism) with political cynicism which they have drawn from the same source, moral nihilism.” The aim is unity to be achieved at the end of history; until then one’s rule is total. In the totalitarian empire freedom cannot play its legitimate role; it has to wait till history comes to a stop and the universal city has been realized. In a totalitarian regime, be it fascist or communist, the individual cannot be free, “even though man in his collective sense is free.” Thus, when “the empire delivers the entire human species freedom will reign over herds of slaves…” To which Camus adds: “If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream.”
The faith that the totalitarian empire of Soviet communism demands is, according to Camus, identical with faith as defined by the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius: “We should always be prepared so as never to err to believe that what I see as white is black, if the hierarchic Church defines it thus.” Here, the Church has been replaced by the Party and “man takes refuge in the concept of the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar.” Since this is a fitting description of the human condition under totalitarianism, be it fascist or communist, Camus correctly concludes: “That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity.” This is true of all countries with single-party systems, which are flourishing in this age, and Camus sums it all up by saying: “The real passion of the 20th century is servitude.”3The Rebel, pp. 212, 209, 200, 201.
Camus’ generalization about the passion of this century is correct because the West has become passionless. Ever since the Enlightenment and throughout the age of modern science and technology, it has been debunking the transcendental source of all human values. It has reduced all ethics to an uninspiring relativism. Man has been triumphantly enthroned as the measure of all things, only to prove inadequate for the task. Since truth itself is relative and pragmatic, the passionate affirmation of ideals has become pointless. Pleasure has taken the place of passion. To hold what one has is more important than to become what one might be. The general world-wide erosion of values and standards is tragically reflected in the practices of contemporary terrorism or rebellion.
Camus, discussing Russian terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is still able to speak of “fastidious assassins.” When they killed, they did so “after the most scrupulous examination of conscience.” For example, an attempt on the Grand Duke Sergei failed because the man entrusted with the task found that some children were riding with the Grand Duke and he refused to kill the children. His refusal met with the approval of his comrades. Similarly, one of the leaders of the rebels against the Czarist regime opposed an attempt on the life of a Russian admiral riding on the Petersburg-Moscow express because: “If there were the least mistake, the explosion could take place in the carriage and kill strangers.” The same terrorist leader, on a later occasion, indignantly denied having made a child of sixteen take part in an attempted assassination. Later, as he was escaping from a Czarist prison, he decided to shoot any officer who would prevent his flight, but he was ready to kill himself rather than turn his revolver on ordinary soldiers. Another terrorist, before undertaking a bomb attack against the same admiral mentioned earlier, declared that he would not throw the bomb “should Dubassov be accompanied by his wife.” There are no more “fastidious assassins” around today.
It would, however, be a mistake to think that contemporary terrorists, so completely free from such moral compunctions, are a unique species of humanity. They truly reflect the widespread demoralization of human conscience in our days. The relative equanimity with which the most ruthless acts of terrorism against innocent people are countenanced is an indication of the moral eclipse of the age. Far from having recovered from its moral collapse in face of the destruction of European Jewry, mankind has become even more insensitive to demands of universal morality. In the seats of power Machiavellian cynicism holds sway. Even formerly illustrious nations are today ready to sell their national consciences and past glory for an appropriate amount of petrodollars. No wonder that once again the Jewish people find themselves isolated in a world of moral indifference.
On the basis of the experience of the Jew, all this means that the age of genocide is far from being over and that Camus was correct in describing the 20th century as the century of inhumanity. That mighty power blocs, as well as the lunatic fringe, are once again shamelessly pointing a finger at the Jew is one of the most revealing symptoms of the inhuman character of the times. It is in this kind of a world that the Jewish people have to maintain themselves, a world in a state of moral and spiritual exhaustion, perilously balancing on the brink of a threatening thermonuclear Armageddon.
The Hebrew poet Abraham Shlonski, in his poem Neder (Vow), warns the Jew against forgetting, lest on the morning after the “night of wrath” he continue as before and learn nothing this time either.4Quoted in Sefer Milḥamot haGetta’ot, ed. Isaac Zuckerman, Tel-Aviv, 1954, p. 701. He probably meant that the lesson to learn was to liquidate the Galut (Diaspora), to go to Israel, to build the country, the state, and the people. And, if need be, to fight and die fighting. What happened can happen again. Should it happen and should you be caught in the degrading weakness of the Galut because you had not chosen to live in an independent Jewish state, do not blame the silence of God or the brutality of man. Blame yourself. This, of course, is correct in a limited sense. But since we see today that even a state, if it is a Jewish state, may be as homeless in “the wilderness of the nations” as the Jew used to be in his various exiles, the advice to liquidate the Galut may also lead to the possibility of another Massada stand. This would be a valid and necessary point to bear in mind, but by itself it far from exhausts the responsibility that faces the Jewish people in the world today.
We have been struggling with the burden of the nightmarish destruction of European Jewry, but it is doubtful that we have, thus far, paid sufficient attention to the question of what is required of us now. Before anything else, since there is little doubt that we were not ready either for the monstrous inhumanity with which Germany overwhelmed us, nor for the cold indifference with which the rest of mankind countenanced that crime, we must come to an understanding of the reasons for our unpreparedness. These reasons are manifold. Firstly, there existed a certain Jewish naivete concerning the depths to which human brutality was capable of sinking. Most Jews simply could not believe that any nation on earth could methodically plan and carry out the murder of an entire people. Certainly, they could not believe that such a crime could be perpetrated in the 20th century. We know from numerous reports that conditions in the concentration camps were so brutal and demonic that, even after being there a few days, many people could not believe that what was happening to them and what was going on around them was real. Bruno Bettelheim, as we have seen, maintains that the Jews could have known what was awaiting them and should have run. But, he claims, they did not want to know because in typical ghetto thinking, they did not want to act.5See his article, “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking,” in Midstream, Spring, 1962. Bettelheim, in common with tens of thousands of Jews who were not bound by the “ghetto way of thinking,” did, of course, know, because they had before them “the modern examples of the mass extermination of internal minorities” and escaped in time. But the truth is that those who escaped had the means of escaping. The majority of those assimilated German Jews, who were able to leave Germany in time and who made use of the opportunity, left not because they knew what was awaiting the Jewish people in Europe, but because their whole world, based on emancipation and assimilation to Germany and German Volkstum, had collapsed. In Hitler’s Germany they lost their Germanized identity. But the so-called ghetto Jew never derived his identity and dignity of human status from anything outside Judaism, Jewish history and civilization, and Jewish peoplehood. In fact, the tens of thousands of emancipated German Jews who were trapped in Germany, and the hundreds of thousands of other Westernized Jews who were caught in Western Europe and perished in the gas chambers, certainly preserved no more dignity to the end than did the ghetto Jews. If Bettelheim says that he was able to escape because he knew that the “Final Solution” was being prepared for European Jewry, one has to believe him. As a Jew completely free of ghetto thinking, he had fully assimilated German culture and civilization and was thus in a good position to judge the capabilities of the Teutonic psyche. The overwhelming majority of the Jewish people, however, “suffered,” because of its Jewishness, from naive innocence regarding the limits of human degradation.
This naivete was only one factor. We must also take into account the long tradition of pacifist teaching which is an essential aspect of Judaism. Notwithstanding the fact that, especially in antiquity, the Jews fought many wars and engaged in many desperate rebellions, this tradition of anti-militarism and anti-violence reaches back into the earliest times of Jewish history. It was originally based on faith in God. A man of faith relies on God, not on physical strength or weapons of war and violence. In fact, a continuous debunking of martial prowess and virtues may be traced in the Bible. For example, one of the oldest Jewish prayers is the thanksgiving prayer of Hannah, in which she exclaimed:
“The bows of the mighty men are broken,
And they that stumbled are girded with strength…
He will keep the feet of His holy ones,
But the wicked shall be put to silence in darkness,
For not by strength shall man prevail.”6Samuel 2:4–9.
The wicked seek to prevail by physical might. But there is a divine strategy in history that will not allow them ultimately to triumph. In the end, it will be those who stumbled because they were unable to withstand the violent force which assailed them who will be girded by a strength of a different order and will be saved. Similarly, when David meets Goliath he says to him:
“Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a javelin; but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou has taunted…that all this assembly may know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear…”7Ibid., 17:45–47.
It is always God on whom one relies, as the Psalmist also puts it:
“For I trust not in my bow,
Neither can my sword save me.
But thou hast saved us from our adversaries,
And hast put them to shame that hate us.”8Psalms 44:7–8.
When the prophet Hosea announces God’s promise, he is instructed to speak in His name as follows: “But I will have compassion upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the Lord their God, and will not save them by bow nor by sword, nor by battle, nor by horses, nor by horsemen.”9Hosea 1:7. Help is promised, but not through conventional instruments of war or violence. This tradition has, of course, found its classical formulation in “the word of God” to Zerubbabel, as conveyed by the prophet Zechariah: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”10Zechariah 4:6.
The rabbis in the Talmud developed these teachings further, in their unique midrashic-homiletical style, through the “interpretation” of appropriate passages in the Bible. As Jacob was addressing his children before his death, he said of two of them: “Simeon and Levi are brethren; weapons of violence their kinship.”11Genesis 49:5. This, of course, is plain enough. The old father was referring to his two sons who destroyed the city of Shechem because their sister had been violated there. However, according to the Midrash, what Jacob really said to his children was this: “These weapons (with which you slaughtered the inhabitants of Shechem) are stolen in your hands. Whom do they fit? Your kin Esau, the one who sold the right of the firstborn,” playing on the phonetic similarity of the Hebrew word for “kin” and the word for “to sell.”12Bereishit Rabbah 98:5. Referring to other biblical verses, the rabbis demonstrate that “the voice” is the tool of Jacob, while the “hand” is that of Esau.13Mekhilta, Beshallaḥ 3. The “voice” — prayer, ideas, persuasion — is the strength of Jacob, his instrument of defense. This thought is finally formulated in the following categorical manner: “There is no efficacious prayer in which there is not something of the seed of Jacob and there is no victorious war in which there is not something present of the seed of Esau.”14T.B. Gittin 57b.
After the exodus, as the children of Israel were approaching the Red Sea and, looking back, beheld Pharaoh and his army marching after them, the Bible says: “And they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out unto the Lord.”15Exodus 14:10. “Cried out unto the Lord” means, of course, that they prayed to God. This provides the rabbis with an occasion to comment: “As soon as they saw the Egyptians pursuing them, they engaged in the craft of their fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” They then bring proof texts which demonstrate that, when in danger, the patriarchs, too, turned to God in prayer.16Mekhilta, ibid. Thus prayer is the handicraft of the children of Israel.
All this, of course, is idealization. Things do not work that neatly in history. The significance of these “explanations” lies in the expression they give to the Jew’s self-understanding through the ages. Violence is not for him; it is not his umanut, his craft. He is by nature not a warrior, nor a man of violence, but a man of prayer, a man of the Voice.
Although this tradition of non-violence could easily be supported by numerous other biblical passages, it is not uniform, and there are not a few places in the Bible where the art of war and martial courage are extolled. It is, however, important to note that as the biblical teaching is carried over into the talmudic and midrashic literature, it is essentially its nonviolent trend which is embraced and maintained. The passages which contradict it are “reinterpreted” by the rabbis. We are usually told that the battles were not really fought by soldiers, men of arms, but were, instead, the battles of scholars, who fought with each other in the batei midrash, the study halls, in the mighty discussions of Torah interpretation, and the “martial courage” involved was the prowess with which they defended their positions in the great talmudic debates. For instance, the Psalmist says:
“Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O mighty one,
Thy glory and thy majesty.”17Psalms 45:4.
The rabbis declared: the gibbor here, the mighty one, is the hero in the mastery of the knowledge of the Torah.18T.B. Shabbat 63a. And the “sword,” we assume, is the sharpness of his intellect, the ingenuity with which he is able to prove the correctness of his teaching against all comers. In this alone they could see the “glory” and the “majesty” of a Jew. Naive? Certainly not. The teachers of the Talmud knew well that “the plain meaning of a biblical verse must never be given up.”19Ibid.; see also T.B. Yevamot 11b, 24a. But while they had unparalleled immediate recall of the entire text of the Bible, they were not “Bible scholars” in the sense that we understand the term. They were teachers of Judaism. When they taught a biblical text in which the term gibbor, hero, occurred, their main concern was neither with the etymology of the word nor with its historic meaning, but with the association that the concept ought to call forth in the consciousness of the living Jew. For any person, the meaning of such a word as “hero” will be determined by the culture in the midst of which it is uttered. Within Judaism, based on the Torah, the hero was the great master who dedicated his life to the teaching and transmission of the Torah from generation to generation. And who can say today that it was not ultimately this hero to whom the Jewish people owe their survival! This may not have been the historic meaning of the word, but it was its Jewish meaning in the time of the Talmud. That is what we desire a hero to be, they taught, and in the light of the teaching they “reinterpreted” the plain meaning of the text.
What is significant here is that though the “reinterpretation” was a new meaning imposed upon a much older text, it was nothing new in the comprehensive context of Judaism. This “reinterpretation” occurs in the following discussion. According to the laws of Sabbath observance, a Jew is not permitted to carry any object in a public thoroughfare or to move it from a private area (reshut haYaḥid) to a public one (reshut haRabim). On the other hand, one may “carry” an object that is worn as a personal ornament. Now, would it be permissible for a man to go out on the Sabbath with a sword, a bow, a lance, or a spear? The majority opinion is that this is forbidden. But Rabbi Eliezer said: “It is permissible, for they are ornaments of a man.” The rabbis then give their reason for disagreeing with Rabbi Eliezer: “These objects are no ornaments of man, but his shame, for has not already Isaiah prophesied that in the days of the Messiah, ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks.’ ”20Isaiah 2:4. Of course, it is true the Messiah has not yet come and that these instruments of war are a bitter necessity. However, the messianic ideal guides one to the appreciation of the fact that this very pre-messianic necessity is itself man’s shame. To this, then, Rabbi Eliezer responds with the words of the Psalmist quoted above, that the sword of the hero is his “glory” and “majesty.” His colleagues are not impressed. The hero? He is the great teacher of the Torah. This is obvious; who else could be meant? The sword? It has, of course, only symbolical meaning. In actual fact, Rabbi Eliezer is, of course, correct with regard to the specific text. The rabbis know that. And, indeed, during the discussion they quote the principle that the plain meaning of a biblical verse is not to be given up. Still, the opinion of the rabbis is accepted as valid, as the halakhically binding interpretation. The specific text must submit to the “reinterpretation” demanded by the comprehensive ideology of Judaism. The plain meaning of the specific text stands; however, our concern here is not with text, but with Judaism, not with “Bible scholarship,” but with the life of the Jew. Because for the Jew who lives Judaism, the “meaning” of the text is revealed ever anew as he reads it in the living spirit of the totality of the Torah. Thus the reinterpretation becomes quite natural and it is indeed the true statement.
The task of reinterpretation is pursued consistently. When Jacob blesses Joseph’s children, he gives them “…a portion above thy brethren,” which he says that he took out of the hand of the Amorite “with my sword and with my bow.”21Genesis 48:22. As the rabbis see it, Jacob could not have meant this literally, for the Psalmist declared, “I trust not in my bow, neither can my sword save me”. The “sword” must mean a prayer and the “bow,” a plea, since there happens to be a rather close similarity in the spelling of the two Hebrew words for “my bow” and “my intercession.”22T.B. Bava Batra 123a.
David’s eulogy for Saul and Jonathan provides another opportunity for reinterpretation. It concludes with the words: “How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!”23II Samuel I:27. The word for “mighty” is the plural of gibbor, the same word used by the Psalmist in calling upon the hero to put on his sword, his “glory” and “majesty.” Just as the rabbis maintained in that context that the mighty one is one mighty in knowledge and the ways of the Torah, so must the meaning be here. True enough, Saul and Jonathan were warriors. But surely King David, the father of the Messiah, would not praise them merely for their martial qualities? In truth, they were ẓaddikim, righteous, saintly Jews. That David laments their death in terms of loss of the instruments of war only proves that the ẓaddikim are our weapons.24Yalkut Shimoni, ibid. While the rabbis had great respect for the authority of the biblical text, they were not greatly interested in the historic personalities of a Saul or a Jonathan. Who they were was not very important. What did matter was to teach the Jew what a Jewish ruler is supposed to be like. There was no intellectual dishonesty involved in this “interpretation.” The plain meaning of the words was sustained, but their message had to be read in the light of the totality of the teachings of the Torah, which rejected the idea that martial heroism was anything to be pursued, much less to be admired.
The totality of the Torah taught the rabbis to interpret the concept of might and of the mighty one in their own way. “Who is mighty? Who is a gibbor?” they asked and answered: “He who controls his impulses, for it is said: ‘He who is slow to anger is better than a strong man; he who rules his spirit is better than one who conquers a city.’”25Proverbs 16:32. The rabbinic passage is from Avot 4:1. They went on to expound: “Is this mightiness? He sees his fellowman at the edge of a pit and pushes him into the pit or he sees him at the top of a roof and pushes him down. Is this heroism?! But when is a man a gibbor? When his fellowman is about to fall and he holds on to him that he does not fall or when his fellowman has fallen into the pit and he brings him up.”26Midrash Tehillim 52:3. The mighty one is not the conquering hero, but one who helps and saves. Heroism in the eyes of the rabbis of the Talmud is not a martial virtue, but a civic one.
This systematic debunking of the military hero, which was the accepted Jewish teaching through the centuries, unquestionably had its effect on the attitude of the Jew when facing violence. It must be pointed out that Judaism does not teach an absolute commitment to non-violence; there was a healthy realization that there are situations in life when one must fight back. And so the rabbis taught: “If one comes to kill you, anticipate him by killing him.”27T.B. Sanhedrin 72a. To do so is not a matter of military virtue. There is no such thing as military virtue, there is only the sad and bitter necessity of self-defense. If it is a matter of life and death, fight back! In practice, however, such qualifications or limitations on the basic teaching of pacifism were overshadowed by the substance of the teaching itself. More often than not the Jew did not fight back. (This is in no way meant to imply agreement with the crude and vulgar criticism that “they went like sheep to the slaughter.”28See my Faith After the Holocaust, New York, 1973, pp. 27–36.) Because of that he was considered a coward. That cowardice is not a national Jewish characteristic has finally been demonstrated by the rise of the state of Israel. Israel was not built with cowardice. By saying this, one does not think, first of all, of Israel’s victorious wars, but of the sweat and blood with which the children of the ghetto built the land from its ruins. The truth is that for the last two millenia just to be a Jew required more courage and dedication then has ever been demanded of any other people on earth to such a degree and for such a length of time. Certain circles in Israel today deny this, claiming that since the destruction of the former Jewish state in 69 C.E. there has been no Jewish history. Whatever happened to the Jews since then was imposed upon them by others. There was Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, and Spanish history during this period, but no Jewish history. Only now that a fragment of the old people has returned to Israel is history being made again. This history is not really a continuation, but a new beginning, just as the people is a new people.29See especially HaDerashah by Ḥayyim Hazaz, in Avanim Roteḥot, Tel-Aviv, 1965, pp. 227–44.
In a very similar manner did Bettelheim judge the ghetto Jew. Having said that the Jews could have known what was in store for them, he makes the statement that they did not want to know because they did not want to act. To this he adds the following remarkable insight into the nature of the ghetto Jew:
“One made oneself insensitive to debasement by the oppressor so that one might be allowed to survive. Because, in the ghetto world, the oppressor usually relented in the end, and since the Jew’s self-debasement destroyed him as an autonomous human being, he was permitted to survive, even to thrive materially.”30From his article, “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking,” in Midstream, Spring, 1962.
Judgments depend on values and values on the realm of moral and spiritual discourse in which a person lives. From the point of view of the Israeli who maintains that he is not a Jew, but an Israeli who is completely alienated from Judaism, it is understandable that he cannot see Jewish history in the two millenia of Galut. Similarly, Bettelheim, too, makes good sense in the context of his values. His style and formulation adequately reflect the contempt of the fully assimilated German Jew for the Ostjüde (East European Jew). In fact, what he says and the way he says it is so genuinely Germanic that it could have been written by a Nazi. (Only that the Nazi would not have limited this characterization to the Ostjüde, he would have applied it to all Jews, including the professor.) Judaism is, of course, neither Teutonic nor “Israeli.” It all depends on what one means by “history,” by “action,” by “debasement,” “self-debasement,” and “autonomy.” Let us look at these concepts and see how they appear within the ethico-religious discourse of Judaism.
If history means power, domination, control over external condition, national independence in the political sense, then the Jews had no history in the Galut. If action means kicking an oppressor, hitting back or rebelling, the Jew often did not act. If the concept of debasement of the oppressed is to be defined by the oppressor, then the ghetto Jew was insensitive to debasement and was eagerly practicing self-debasement. If autonomy means control over one’s external situation, then the ghetto Jew lives without it. If these are our values, then it is true that in the Galut we were hardly a nation, but were rather a physically weak, luckless, and decadent people, without any control over our destiny. But the authentic Jew, on the basis of his own values, sees the matter very differently. He would describe his situation in the Galut somewhat like this:
“It is not true that I had no control over my destiny. On the contrary, I chose my destiny. There was forever confrontation. Had I wanted it, I could always have escaped the suffering of exile — as indeed many have — by surrendering to the dominant majority, to its culture, its religion. The arms of the churches were stretched out toward me, inviting me into their bosom. But I made a stand. I remained true to myself and refused. I remained captain of my soul. True, I have paid a terrible price for this stand. But no one forced me to do it. I chose it myself again and again. Is this passivity, inaction? Nonsense! It is the most intense form of activity. With a gun in your hand, with a country of your own, with a government behind you, it is comparatively easy. But without all that and defying all that, to choose your own way requires strength and dedication.
Were we a people in the Galut? In spite of our dispersion, and except for non-essential regional and communal variations, there existed a uniform way of life in all the lands of our exiles; there was a comprehensive world-view that the various communities recognized as their own; there was a general commitment to one faith and there was faith in the future of the Jewish people. We lived by a scale of values accepted as Jewish and there was — on the whole — voluntary submission to it. There were organized Jewish communities with rules and regulations that were able to guide the day-to-day life of the people without police authority, essentially by the strength of a self-imposed internal discipline unique in the history of the nations. During the ‘Dark’ and ‘Middle Ages’ right up to the 19th century we Jews were the only people that possessed a highly developed general educational system for all social strata and for all age groups. All over the world Jewish communities developed institutions for the care of the sick and the poor centuries before other nations had even dreamt of them. Between the Jews scattered in various exiles all over the world there was greater unity than between the members of any other nation on this globe. Jews maintained their identity, their way of life, in the face of all odds — and they were not a ‘nation’?! Different from the others, yes! A unique nation! But one people, and even more so than any other that we encountered in the course of our many wanderings.
How did we do it? All through our history we were a people that derived its national identity from its commitment to the transcendental dimension of the covenant with God. Saadia Gaon stated it with great simplicity, saying: ‘Our people is a people only by the formative strength of the Torah.’ That alone gave us the ability to remain a people independent of, and in spite of, the material and political conditions of our existence. Recalling Aḥad Ha’am’s familiar formulation regarding the assimilationist Jews of the Emancipation period as living ‘in bondage in the midst of freedom,’ one is inclined to say of the Jewish people of the Galut that they lived in freedom in the midst of their political slavery. In a sense we were a more independent people than the nations among whom we happened to have been dispersed.”
This, of course, is not like Assyrian or Babylonian or Roman history. But history it is, made by Jews. It is not action like that of the Spanish conquistadors or of the crusaders, but action it is, though on a rather different level of human values and human dignity than theirs. As to autonomy, of course it is not the self-serving autonomy of domination, but the autonomy of the human spirit that in loyalty to its own truth has the power to disregard external conditions and remains unimpressed by all the might of the oppressor.
As we saw in the previous chapters, the authentic Jew often acted with autonomous independence in the ghettos and the death camps. Every time he put on tefillin in secret, organized communal prayers, or took part in any of the multitude of activities we have described, he actually took his life into his hands. It has rightly been observed that under Nazi rule there was no such thing as passive resistance as distinct from active resistance.31Quoted by Schindler, pp. 217–8. Any kind of disobedience to the rules was treated with equal ruthlessness. Jews who were caught in any form of religious observance were dealt with as saboteurs, no differently from those partisans who blew up munition depots. With a measure of fearlessness unequalled in history, these Jews were guarding the divine image in which man was created. Yet, when it came to physical resistance to the oppressor, they were often unequal to the task. Was this out of cowardice? If so, it would be in mysterious contrast to the mightiness of the spirit with which they have made their stand against all comers all through history. Once again we have reached a point in our discussion that cannot be resolved without reference to the realm of values which determines the meaning of concepts like cowardice and bravery.
The prototype of the hero in Western civilization is Ajax. According to Homer in the Iliad, when the advance of the Greeks was halted by mist and darkness, Ajax prayed alone to Zeus that he send light for the battle to continue, even if light should bring defeat and death. Centuries later, Longimus in his On the Sublime commented: “That is the true attitude of an Ajax. He does not pray for life for such a petition would have ill beseemed a hero.”32This reference to Longimus we owe to Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 164. The hero does not pray for life, nor does he fear death, because the battle itself is the cause; it comprehends all the glory of a man. Bravery here is paralleled by degradation of the value of life. Heroism in Western civilization found its expression mainly in war and bloodshed, and has its ultimate hidden roots in contempt for life. Another manifestation of this, perhaps, subconscious contempt for life may be seen in the duel that until recently was the only means by which a “gentleman” was able to retrieve his honor following an insult. The Jew who finds his values in Judaism is not impressed by Ajax, nor by the host of heroes who have followed in his footsteps. He prays to God unashamedly for life. From his point of view, duelling because of an insult is sheer barbarism. Halakhically, the victorious partner in a duel is a murderer, but not even the loser is free from the guilt of having placed his life in jeopardy, not to mention the fact that he, too, was attempting to kill another human being. As we saw earlier, the very purpose of the Torah is that man should live by God’s commandments and not die by them. The Bible commands the Jew “and thou shalt choose life.”33Deuteronomy 30:19. Not only is he forbidden to commit suicide or even to mutilate or violate his body, he may not even curse himself.34T.B. Bava Kama 90b; Shevu’ot 36a. Life is precious as God’s creation. Though man has been entrusted with it, it is not his private property. Man does not own life; but he is responsible for it, even for the life of an adversary.
Let some midrashic explanations illustrate the point. In such explanations, a text is used in varied interpretations as a means to convey an idea which is valid independently of the text and which is to be expressed and emphasized because of its validity. The encounter between Jacob and Esau is an ever-recurring theme. The Bible says that when Jacob was told that his brother was coming to meet him “and four hundred men were with him,” that “Jacob was sore afraid and he was distressed.” Since it is a principle of rabbinical exegesis that there is no superfluous word in the Bible, the question arises as to what is the difference between Jacob’s “fear” and his “distress.” The answer is that they are certainly not identical. Jacob was afraid that he might kill and he was distressed by the thought that he might get killed.35Bereishit Rabbah, Vayishlaḥ 76:2. The same idea is applied to the analysis of another classical biblical encounter between two enemies, Saul and David. The Psalmist prayed:
“O Lord my God, in Thee have I taken refuge;
Save me from all them that pursue me,
and deliver me.”36Psalms 7:2.
The rabbis related these words to David’s long struggle with Saul and asked whether there is any difference between being “saved” and being “delivered.” Is David not asking for the same favor using two different words, one of which is superfluous? The answer is identical to the one given in the case of the encounter between Jacob and Esau. David prayed to be saved so that he would not fall into Saul’s hands, and delivered so that Saul would not fall into his. The rabbis’ interpretation underlines the tragic quality of such a confrontation. When an act of violence becomes an inescapable necessity, the question of who is right and who is wrong is not the decisive consideration. In such a situation, no matter what the outcome may be, it cannot be good. If one loses, it is bad, but if one wins, it is bad too. From this conclusion, the lesson must be learnt that when an act of violence does become a tragic necessity, it must not be carried out in a spirit of violence. It should not be done either with vengeance or with hatred, but with the realization that even the victory that one must seek as an act of self-defense is a moral defeat.37It is to this insight that Golda Meir, as Prime Minister of Israel, gave contemporary expression when, turning to the Arabs, she said: “We can forgive you that you killed our sons; we cannot forgive you that you made us kill your sons.”
In fact, this respect for life as God’s creation also refers to animals. It is forbidden to impose suffering on an animal and before a Jew sits down to his own meal, he must feed his animals.38T.B. Gittin 72a. Hunting as a sport, for pleasure, is forbidden by Jewish law.39See, for example, She’elot uTeshuvot Nodah biYehudah, II, 10. Plant life, too, must be respected. When Jews go to war, the Bible forbids them to apply a “scorched earth” strategy:
“When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down.”40Deuteronomy 20:19.
Whatever the implications of such a law might be in modern warfare, the validity of the principle as such stands. According to the Talmud, one may not cut down fruitbearing trees; one may not uproot even one’s own plantings in one’s own property.41T.B. Makkot 22a; Bava Kama 20b. The rabbis said that when a man cuts down a fruitbearing tree, “its voice travels from one end of the world to the other, but the voice is not heard,” a statement which they made in similar terms concerning the death of a human being.42Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer 34 and T.B. Yoma 20b.
For centuries, Jews have been conditioned by these teachings about the sanctity of life. No wonder then that the violent reaction to an attack, even in self-defense, does not come easily to the Jew. What would have been more natural for this people, singled out by the Germans for destruction, than to think of vengeance against them and to call for it. Yet even such an obvious concept as vengeance is given its specifically Jewish meaning. When Shlomo Zlichovsky died on the gallows with Shema Yisra’el on his lips, one of the others who was hanged together with him called to the Jews who were forced to witness the murders: “Jews! Avenge our blood!” One young Jew who was present asked himself: “How and with what to take revenge? What is the purpose of vengeance? And what is real and ultimate revenge? Do we Jews have the possibility or the power to do it?” Standing facing the ten gallows on that eve of the festival of Shavu’ot, in spite of his youth, he understood the logical link between the two calls: “Hear, O Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Eternal is One,” and “Jews! Avenge our blood!” And he wrote of that day:
“This, indeed, is the greatest and surest vengeance. Above all, the Germans intended to kill the Jewish soul, to defile it…This is the reason why they chose the eve of Shavu’ot, the season of the giving of the Torah by God to Israel — on that day to terrorize the Jews and to destroy their emunah. But Shlomo Zlichovsky proved to them in the presence of all these oppressed Jews…that the German hangmen have no power whatever over the Jewish soul and that they are unable to uproot the trust from our hearts. This is the true vengeance; the Jewish vengeance.
“And I, too, then took revenge on the enemy. The next day, after the hangings, I joined a secret minyan that assembled in our house for the festival service. We received the holy Torah with joy and fervor and sang the Akdamut to the tune of Shlomo Zlichovsky that was vibrating within us. As if nothing had happened.”43Prager, I, p. 139.
Another young boy in hiding in Belgium at about the same time, wrote in his Hebrew diary:
“My brothers! Do not misunderstand me. As I speak to you about vengeance I want you to pay attention to its positive side. Our revenge for our present suffering and for all our sufferings during these two millenia of Galut will be the restoration of our land; its settlement by its people; the return of our beloved people to its inheritance. This will be the greatest revenge that is in our hand to achieve. For this we ask first of all the help of our God, of the God of Israel, who has protected us from extinction during our entire exile. He is sure to help us and to guide us anew to the land of our inheritance, to our holy land, the land of Israel.”44HaNa’ar Moshe: Yomano shel Moshe Flinker, Jerusalem, 1958, p. 110.
Both of these Jewish boys sensed the secret of Jewish eternity. Unspoiled by the violence and bloodshed that surrounded them, they knew instinctively that the confrontation between Judaism and a world that, generation after generation, was producing its major and minor Hamans, Torquemadas, and Hitlers, whose main preoccupation was to save humanity from the Jews, was not to be resolved by the sword. Their words were a latter-day formulation of the prophetic truth: “Not by might, nor by physical strength, but by My spirit saith the Eternal.”45Zechariah 4:6. The boy in the ghetto acted within the limitations of his ghetto existence; the boy in hiding in Belgium was looking to the future with its new demands on the Jew. Their interpretations of the meaning of vengeance would, of course, be taken as cowardice in the Ajax tradition of Western courage. So be it. The Jew does not envy either Ajax or Siegfried for his glory. The Jewish concepts of honor and dignity have their roots in a different dimension of values. The Hamans and their henchmen were never able to humiliate the Jew. By the way they treated him, they degraded themselves and violated the sanctity of all life.
It is, however, quite obvious that the Jewish people can no longer continue as before. The God of history Himself has acknowledged this fundamental truth of the problematics of Jewish existence by guiding the Jews back to the land of their fathers, in His own mysterious way. In the light of our latest experience of what man is capable of doing to his fellow, and in view of the present international cynicism and general erosion of human conscience, and the supreme modern technological efficiency of mass murder, we must not lose sight of the ever-present possibility of another disaster similar to the one that overtook the Jewish people during the Second World War.
Never again may we be caught unprepared. Before anything else, this ought to mean the return of Jews from all over the world to the land of Israel in their masses. But beyond that we need a critical review of the past Jewish attitude in the face of persecution. Not that the ideals and values were wrong. The fault lay in the fact that for centuries Jews neglected to pay adequate attention to the advice of those fundamentally nonviolent teachers who said: “If one comes to kill you, anticipate him and kill him first.” This statement is not meant to be a call to arms; nor does it require sinking to the level of the Ajax tradition. It suggests that the inadequate response to aggression is morally wrong. Evil has got to be resisted and it is morally wrong not to resist it. For every time evil succeeds because all possible resistance was not offered, its power increases and resistance at a later moment becomes more and more difficult.
It is, moreover, morally wrong to tolerate evil not only when it is done to others, but also when it is done to oneself for there is such a thing as the guilt of the victim. In these respects we have failed. Of course, once most Jews were in a concentration camp, physical resistance, in the main, was left only to the desperate struggle of the ghetto fighters. But it is clear that only a long series of failure to resist leads to the concentration camp. And resistance does not only mean to kill, which would be necessary only in the most extreme situations. One wonders what would have happened if, all over Europe, the Jews would simply have refused to move from their homes into the ghettos, if entire armies would have been required to move them by force and, if they were murdered in their homes, with rivers of Jewish blood defiling the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, and Vilna, the Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukranians themselves would have had to clean their own thoroughfares and parks of the corpses of murdered Jews? Of course, scattered all over Europe without a political organization, and without any sort of unified leadership, the Jews were incapable of such a concerted strategy of resistance. Indeed, in their situation, such a uniform strategy was an impossibility, and it remains so for a people scattered over the globe and divided by their citizenship in numerous countries.
Yet a strategy is needed; not a political strategy, but a moral one, based on the principle that to tolerate evil against oneself, in however mild a form, makes one an accomplice to the act. It is a man’s moral obligation to refuse to obey the commands of injustice. And where resistance, appropriate to the attack, is not possible, he must resist with radical non-cooperation, however expedient cooperation may appear to be at the moment. No practical advantage may be used as an excuse for an immoral act. Moreover, it is the nature of the struggle in which the Jewish people is involved with the moral and spiritual inadequacy of the ages that makes all practical accommodation with the forces of persecution impractical in the end. To yield in any way is demoralizing, and makes one share in the guilt of the oppressor.
We were unprepared. Not because of cowardice, but because we did not see clearly the moral implication of self-defense; we never fully understood how wrong it was to tolerate evil when it was directed towards ourselves. We were insufficiently prepared to reconcile the Jewish teachings of anti-militarism and respect for all life with the resistance to evil demanded by the circumstances.
Now we must have learned this; now we must know. The moral obligation of withstanding evil, even when directed against oneself, must be incorporated into the value system of Judaism. Of course, the teachings of pacifism and the respect for all life as God’s creation may not be given up. On the contrary! It is their effective realization in behavior and action that demand resistance to evil, injustice, and oppression on all levels of the confrontation. It is true. The fate of the ultimate issue that Judaism represents in human history will not be decided by the sword, by physical might and power, but by the Divine Spirit. Till then we must learn to resist. It is our duty in the presence of God.