Transcript Slide 1

CALEV BEN DOR
10th Tevet & The Theological Significance of the Shoah
Theologically, religiously, it seems to be absurd to hold that the extirpation of
Judea, Rhineland, or Southeastern European Jewry was a more acceptable
experience than what transpired between 1939-45. Is the vision of an infinite
God who is Guardian of Israel less shaken by the annihilation of only a million
Jews at the hands of the Romans, or only several hundred thousand each by
crusaders, Cossacks, haidamuks, than by the 6 million dead in German Europe?
And Judaism has survived until 1939, as it shall now, without denying its God
and the covenant with Him. The question to God – Why? – is the same for the
first child struck down in human history and for the last to perish in Auschwitz.
That is the eternal confrontation of all men with God
(David Weiss Halvini: After the Holocaust, Another Covenant?)
The Holocaust is a novum [epoch making event] in human history
which ‘ruptures’ Christian, Jewish and philosophical thought.
(To Mend the World: Foundations of Post Holocaust Thought)
Our hermeneutic situation is radically altered by the Holocaust. An
abyss separates our ‘here and now’ from the ‘then and there’ of
both the Bible and its rabbinic interpreters.
(Fackenheim: The Jewish Bible after the Holocaust: A Re-reading)
Nor do we for a single moment entertain the thought
that what happened to European Jewry in our
generation was divine punishment for sins committed
by them. It was injustice absolute; injustice
countenanced by God....[however] the experience of
God’s 'absence' is not new; each generation had its
Auschwitz problem…The shock of those who perished
or lived through the destruction of the Jewish
commonwealth of antiquity, or the Crusades or the
Chmelnikci period was not much different from the
experience of our generation
(Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust)
It is surely correct that the Holocaust be understood as a
seismic event in Jewish history, structurally unique, a metahistorical absurdum in the midst of a Jewish experience that
had been willing, generously, to over credit the enlightenment
and reasonableness of the emancipated nations among whom
Jews had lived. This cannot be stressed enough…The
Holocaust should become for all of us the critical event of
modern Jewish history – a caesura, a Red Sea of evil which
parted time and space, separating the past of the Jewish
people from its future. But, unlike the Red Sea of Exodus, it
was not the enemies of Israel, but the Jews themselves, who
drowned when the sea closed
(Arthur Cohen, Review Essay of Emil Fackenheim)
Understanding the Shoah within tradition
Free Will / Hester Panim
Punishment for Sin
“because of our sinfulness we have suffered greatly, worse
than Israel has known since it became a people. In former
times, whenever troubles befell Jacob, the matter was
pondered and the reasons sought – which sin had brought
the troubles about…
but in our generation one need not look far for the sin
responsible for our calamity…the heretics have made all
kinds of efforts to violate these oaths, to go up by force and
to seize sovereignty and freedom by themselves, before the
appointed time…they have lured the majority of the Jewish
people into awful heresy…and so it is no wonder that the
Lord has lashed out in anger.
(Joel Teitelbaum, from Aviezer Ravitsky, Messianism, Zionism
and Jewish religious Radicalism)
He who demands justice of God must give up man; he who
asks for God's love and mercy beyond justice must accept
suffering....if at Auschwitz we witnessed 'The Hiding of God's
Face' in the rebirth of the State of Israel and its success we
have seen a smile on the face of God; it is enough."
"Freedom and responsibility are the very essence of man.
Without them man is not human. If there is to be man, he
must be allowed to make his choices for freedom. If he had
such freedom, he will use it. Using it he will often use it
wrongly. He will decide for the wrong alternative. As he does
so, there will be suffering for the innocent."
(Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust)
Suffering God
Now the Jew tormented by his afflictions thinks that he alone suffers, as if all his personal afflictions and those of all Israel do not
affect above, God forbid. Scripture states, however, “in all their troubles he was troubled” (Isaiah 63:9) and the Talmud states:
“When a person suffers, what does the Shekhina say? ‘my head is too heavy for me, my arm is too heavy for me’”. Our sacred
literature tells us that when a Jew is afflicted, God, blessed be He, suffers as it were much more than the person does.
(Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto the Holy Fire)
CALEV BEN DOR
Is Rejecting God a Jewish Idea?
They formed a Bet Din, and conducted the trial completely in
accordance with Halakha. They gathered evidence against God,
building a strong case against the “Holy One Blessed Be He.” The
trial lasted several days, with the judges giving all those who wished
a chance to speak their minds. Witnesses were heard, and painful
personal testimonies were given [Wiesel remarked in amazement
how none of the witnesses even remotely defended God.]
It was time to issue a ruling, and the rabbinic court pronounced a
unanimous verdict: “The Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and
Earth – guilty of crimes against creation, against humanity and
against His own Chosen People of Israel.”
Soon after this painful judgment was pronounced, followed by a
reaction from the people that Wiesel describes as an “infinity of
silence,” the rabbi presiding over the rabbinic court looked up to
the sky, saw that the sun had set, and that the darkness of night was
upon the world. This rabbi, who had just indicted God and
pronounced Him guilty of crimes, looked towards the silenced
crowd and said “Come, my friends, we have a minyan – it is time to
pray Maariv.” The other members of the rabbinic court, together
with the witnesses and the onlookers, all gathered around the rabbi
to join in their evening prayers to God.
(Elie Wiesel, Night)
“if I believed in God as the omnipotent author of the
historical drama and Israel as his chosen people I had to
accept Dean Gruber’s conclusion that it was God’s will that
Hitler committed six million Jews to slaughter. I could not
possibly believe in such a God not could I believe in Israel as
the chosen people after Auschwitz”
The theological account of the Shoah as retribution (because
of our sins) is blasphemous against both man and God.
If indeed such a God holds the destiny of mankind in His
power, His resort to the death camps to bring about his ends
is so obscene that I would rather spend my life in perpetual
revolt rather than render Him even the slightest
homage.....what sin could be so great as to justify such
retribution, the only worthy reaction is a rejection of the
Jewish theological framework...
we stand in a cold, silent unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any
purposeful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz
what else can a Jew say about God?"
(Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz)
The Search for New Language
Primo Levi – Shema
Emil Fackenheim 614th Commandment
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
“Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. Jewish
existence itself is a holy act. To submit to cynicism is to abdicate
responsibility for the world and to deliver the world into the
hands of the Luciferian forces of Nazism…They are commanded
to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are
commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz lest their
memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his
world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest
they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of
Auschwitz. Finally, they are forbidden to despair of the God of
Israel, lest Judaism perish.
Irving Greenberg: Broken (but Voluntary) Covenant
No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would
not be credible in the presence of burning children...
The cruelty and the killing raise the question whether even those
that believe after such an event dare talk about a God who loves and
cares without making a mockery of those who suffered....the
Holocaust offers us only dialectical mores and understandings...our
relationship to God can't not be affected... the Shoah marks the era
where the Siniaic covenant was shattered...Israel is now the senior
partner in the covenant (God is the silent one)...and the covenant is
now voluntary.......If Treblinka makes human hope an illusion, then the
Western Wall asserts that human dreams are more real than force
and facts.