Shemot: a theological perspective on the Holocaust and Anti-semitism

The chapter of Judaism Reclaimed that relates to parashat Shemot develops an approach to an extremely sensitive area of Jewish theology: the attempt to place anti-semitic hatred and violence – and the devastation of the Holocaust – in a theological context.

Much ink has been spilled by Rabbis and scholars far greater than I on this difficult topic. In the Modern Orthodox world, Rabbis Eliezer Berkovits and Jonathan Sacks have attempted to shift the focus from God to mankind. Since God’s plan for the world requires the unfettered functioning of human free will, the argument goes, His modus operandi involves the provision of moral and spiritual guidance rather than micro-managing human affairs. Accordingly, the real question that should be asked is not “where was God during the Holocaust”, rather “where was man”? While I find this approach attractive, and adopt it more generally in my chapters concerning providence and free will (see recent post on parashat Vayeshev), it does not seem sufficient when dealing with a tragedy of such magnitude inflicted upon the entire Jewish nation. Nor does it strike me as consistent with the Torah’s attitude to significant national events. Other Rabbis have adopted a perhaps more traditional approach which sees the Holocaust as heavenly punishment for sins. This understanding is also open to fundamental questions: as many such as Primo Levi have pointed out, an assessment of victims and survivors does not appear to reveal any obvious punishment-for-sin pattern.

Judaism Reclaimed seeks to place the Holocaust, as well as the broader phenomenon of antisemitism, in a biblical context starting with the first episode of brutal national enslavement and suffering for 210 years in Egypt. Our search for a theological explanation for this bitter servitude takes us back to the brit bein habetarim. This covenant, when the enslavement was first disclosed by God, links the suffering to the concept of a “chosen nation” and the role which God intended it to fulfil. In the conversation that takes place at the time of the covenant, Avraham asks God, “Bemah eida?”: “How can I know that my descendants will be worthy of inheriting the land? That they will fulfil the daunting task of standing apart from the other nations of the world as a leading light?” God responds that Avraham’s descendants will be enslaved in a strange land. The clear implication is that this suffering holds the key to their ability to succeed as the chosen nation.

We note historical precedents for the notion that collective suffering can forge a cast-iron collective identity, and cite Rav Soloveitchik’s suggestion, in Kol Dodi Dofek, that the Jews’ experiences in the ‘’crucible’’ of Egypt formed an intense unity (or Fate Covenant) and separation from other nations. This role of the Egyptian servitude in establishing an independent Jewish identity is underscored both by the Torah’s account (which repeatedly emphasises how the plagues will distinguish Jew from Egyptian) and copious Midrashic commentary as to both the extent of this separation, and as to how it was in the merit of Jewish identity (represented by the retention of names, clothing and language) that the Jews were redeemed. This theme is followed through to the symbolism of the carefully orchestrated commandments relating to the redemption, as the emerging nation approached the daunting challenge of succeeding as a lone island of monotheism surrounded by a raging sea of paganism.

In his Beit HaLevi, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik draws upon some of these ideas as part of his analysis of antisemitism, a seemingly illogical phenomenon which has accompanied Jews around the world throughout the centuries. Initially, he is startled by a verse from Tehillimwhich includes Egyptian oppression among the acts of kindness that God performed for the Jewish People. He then notes midrashim that connect the start of the oppression to the Jews’ attempts to conceal their Jewish identity. His great-grandson and namesake, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, elaborates on a similar theme, that a history of persecution and martyrdom has had the effect of hardening attitudes toward any form of assimilation which could challenge the distinct identity and values of the Jewish People.

According to this approach, the key to understanding both the suffering in Egypt and continued antisemitism through the ages is to view them not as a punishment but rather as God’s tool to ensure that His promise to Avraham at the brit bein habetarim would be observed. It is only as a result of unabated antisemitism, particularly severe at times of heightened assimilation, that the Jews have survived as the chosen nation, retaining the ability to carry out their holy and extremely challenging mission. This idea is given full expression in Radak’s commentary to a passage in Yechezkel in which the prophet describes God’s refusal to countenance Jewish attempts to assimilate among the nations:

But when they disobey My commands, I will strengthen the nations against them… Israel, whom I took out from the house of slavery to be my treasured nation etc., and to them a God, My eyes will be constantly on them for good and bad, as it states in the prophecy of Amos: “Only you have I known from all of the families of the world, therefore I will be attentive to all of your sins.” And if you wish to depart from My worship, I will not grant permission for this. Even though you will be many years in exile, you will never cease to be a nation before me…and with force I will reign over you, and will purify you…

Rav Meir Simchah of Dvinsk, in his Meshech Chochmah, makes a similar connection between antisemitism and the preservation of Jewish identity. Writing in the 1920s, he concludes with an ominous warning: that the assimilation of European Jewry and attitudes such as “Berlin is the new Jerusalem” would necessarily lead to a “storm” against the Jews that would serve to preserve Jewish national identity. This dark prediction was based upon his answer to the fundamental question of where God was during the brutal Egyptian servitude. The response, it would appear, is located within God’s covenant to Avraham at the brit bein habetarim.

I would like to make it clear that this post is not intended to trivialise or belittle the indescribable suffering of the Holocaust, accounts of which are prone to reduce me to a flood of tears. Nor am I fully comfortable and at peace with the conclusion that it reaches. My agenda here is merely to share my exploration of biblical and rabbinic texts for a perspective on the devastation of the Holocaust which I find theologically convincing.

First posted on Facebook 15 January 2020, here.

Never Again or Nothing New Under the Sun? Humanity's humbling reality

"Who would have thought that this kind of thing could happen in the twenty-first century?"

“How can there be a brutal military invasion targeting civilians in 2022?”

My social media over the past month has been regularly punctuated by expressions of disbelief over the horrific events in Ukraine. The sort of events that many wanted to believe belonged to a bygone era. A less civilised past.

Students of history will be aware, however, that we are far from the first generation to imagine that we had put devastating wars behind us. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which was considered to have paved the way to universal peace; the 1814 Congress of Vienna which many hoped could create a new post-Napoleonic order which would end war in Europe. The League of Nations, set up in the aftermath of the “war to end all wars”, succeeded only in causing complacency and opposition to re-arming in the face of the subsequent Nazi threat. “Never Again” was adopted as a slogan following WWII and the Holocaust, while the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was acclaimed as “the end of history”.

Sadly, a recurring pattern throughout human history is shock and horror at the depths of cruelty and depravity to which fellow human beings can once again sink. Disbelief that people and societies, who were imagined to be civil and sophisticated, could still perpetrate and support acts of depraved brutality. How then are we to relate to the sudden reappearance of such evil which has invaded the comfort zone of our “post-war” Western world?

One very powerful message I took from Out Of The Depths, the memoirs of former Chief Rabbi of Israel and Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, is his sharp criticism of those who sought to portray Hitler and other Nazis as having been somehow crazy or inhuman. As if the Second World War came from some other planet – committed by aliens. He wrote that unless we internalise the fact that human nature can lead people down the route of evil, we will not recognise the warning signs and fail to stop it from happening again. Responding to one of the witnesses from the Eichmann trial, Rabbi Lau wrote:

“If Auschwitz were indeed another planet, it would be easier to accept the Holocaust. But in truth, the disaster of Auschwitz is that it happened on the very same planet where we had lived before, where we live now, and where we will continue to live. Those who carried out the cruel murders of the innocent were ordinary people, who returned home from their murderous acts to water the flowers in their manicured gardens. They tended the flowers lovingly and carefully so they would blossom, just after they had torn infants to pieces and shattered the skulls of men and women. Just after shoving thousands of people into the gas chambers to their deaths, they came home to play with dolls together with their little girls, and listen to classical music, eyes closed, engrossed in the uplifting spirituality of Bach and Beethoven…Those were people just like you and me, and that’s the whole problem. When you transfer all those horrors to another planet, you minimise the issue. You are saying that something like the Holocaust can never happen to us again. In my humble opinion, you are wrong…”

It is a natural human reaction to be so horrified by cruel atrocities that we want to entirely disassociate from those who carry them out. By considering such people to be completely different we no longer feel threatened by our potential to become like them. They are not viewed as the “regular people” that we perceive ourselves and our societies to be. Rabbi Lau – supported by the terrible lessons of history – teaches us that this is naive and can be highly dangerous.

Rabbi Lau’s warning parallels a criticism made by Rabbi S. R. Hirsch of the tendency in many quarters to depict leading religious figures as ever-righteous superhumans who are never subject to temptation – and certainly always distant from sin. As I discuss in Judaism Reclaimed, this approach leads to a disconnect. By implying that great people were naturally pre-ordained for greatness their followers are deprived of potentially potent role models who can inspire others to battle and overcome challenges.

Instead, as Rambam teaches in Hilchot Teshuvah (5:2), “each person bears the potential to be righteous like Moses our teacher or wicked like Jeroboam”. Rather than disassociate ourselves from powerful role models for the good or imagine that perpetrators of evil belong to a class of other-worldly demons, we must be aware of our innate ability – the very thing that makes us human – to follow either of these paths.

Ultimately it will not be well-meaning peace accords or institutions such as the Treaty of Westphalia, Congress of Vienna, League of Nations or United Nations which will alter the course of humanity. In Moreh Nevuchim (3:11), Rambam maintains that only way to truly change human society is to cure the underlying ills which drive people and nations into war:

For through awareness of the truth, enmity and hatred are removed and the inflicting of harm by people on one another is abolished. It [Tanach] holds out this promise, saying “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb…”. Then it gives the reason for this, saying that the cause of the abolition of these enmities, these discords and these tyrannies, will be humanity’s knowledge of God…

The primary and perhaps exclusive causes of warfare and misery are obsession with and competition over material possessions, power and pride. Only once humanity is taught or becomes aware of this folly and reaches for a higher, more refined goal, its energies and capabilities will be channelled towards achieving universal happiness, and people will “beat their swords into ploughshares…”.

First posted on 20 March 2022, here.

Shoah survivors and humanity's eternal challenge

For Yom HaShoah (Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day) this year I have decided to share some passages from the memoirs of Holocaust survivors that I find particularly profound and inspiring. The unique perspectives and reflections of those who have personally witnessed the greatest atrocity inflicted by one set of humans upon another can often highlight or reinforce moral and religious lessons for the rest of us.

The first extract is taken from Man’s Search For Meaning, the Holocaust memoirs of Viktor E. Frankl:

“Even among the guards there were some who took pity on us. I shall only mention the commander of the camp from which I was liberated. It was found after the liberation…that this man had paid no small sum of money from his own pocket in order to purchase medicines for his prisoners from the nearest market town…It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing.

Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of the camp’s influences and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible…

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two – the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere and penetrate into all groups of society.”

The overpowering insight of Frankl – words that only a survivor could dare to record – is a far-reaching restatement of Rambam’s statement in chapter 5 of Hilchot Teshuvah regarding the absolute free will granted to all individuals. “This matter is a great foundation and a pillar of the Torah… Were God to decree on any person to be righteous or wicked, or were there to be a matter that pulled a person’s heart…toward one of these paths…how could God command us through the prophets…and of what utility would be the entire Torah…and with what justice could God punish the wicked and reward the righteous?” A chapter of Judaism Reclaimed probes the tension between human free will on the one hand and Divine Providence on the other, citing Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ response to the ever-present question of “Where was God during the Holocaust?”. God, writes Rabbi Sacks, generally does not impose His will but rather guides humans as to how to use theirs.

Frankl’s insistence that we view the monstrous perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary humans who abused their Divine gift of free will is underscored by another passage, this time from Out Of The Depths, the memoirs of the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. Rabbi Lau is recording his own passionate response to one of the witnesses from the Eichmann trial:

“If Auschwitz were indeed another planet, it would be easier to accept the Holocaust. But in truth, the disaster of Auschwitz is that it happened on the very same planet where we had lived before, where we live now, and where we will continue to live. Those who carried out the cruel murders of the innocent where ordinary people, who returned home from their murderous acts to water the flowers in their manicured gardens. They tended the flowers lovingly and carefully so they would blossom, just after they had torn infants to pieces and shattered the skulls of men and women. Just after shoving thousands of people into the gas chambers to their deaths, they came home to play with dolls together with their little girls, and listen to classical music, eyes closed, engrossed in the uplifting spirituality of Bach and Beethoven…Those were people just like you and me, and that’s the whole problem. When you transfer all those horrors to another planet, you minimise the issue. You are saying that something like the Holocaust can never happen to us again. In my humble opinion, you are wrong…”

There is an unsettling tendency in some quarters to depict heroes and religious leaders as ever-righteous superhumans who are never subject to temptation – and certainly always distant from sin. As we discuss in Judaism Reclaimed, such an approach not only robs their followers of potentially potent role models who can inspire others to battle and overcome challenges, it also undermines the fundamental principle of absolute free by implying that these leaders were naturally pre-ordained for greatness. Even more damaging and destructive, it emerges from Rabbi Lau’s continuation, is the implication that evil is committed by a team of inhuman monsters, inherently differentiated from the rest of mankind. Not only does this notion challenge Judaism’s core teaching of human free will and autonomy, it also prevents us from taking seriously the deadly potential of genocidal threats, relying on the false premise that “the world would never let that happen”.

First posted on Facebook 20 April 2020, here.

Humans, demons and the depths of depravity

The indescribably brutal terrorist atrocities inflicted on Israeli communities a week ago are the sort of unfathomable events which leave many of us lost for words, despairing of humanity and the depths to which it is capable of plummeting.

Can people ever sink to such depths of depravity that they effectively lose their humanity? Or worse?

Such questions prompted me to recall a passage that I wrote in Judaism Reclaimed.

In yesterday’s parashah, the Torah describes Adam’s son Shet as being in the image of Adam — a term which Rambam (Moreh 1:7) links to the earlier description of Adam as having been created "betzelem Elokim" (in the image of God). Rambam then cites a Gemara which states that, from the moment of his sin until the birth of Shet, Adam bore offspring which were not in his image but rather were "ruchot" or demons.

Tzelem Elokim — the element of humanity that can be said to be Godly — is identified with the intellect. It is through this uniquely human intelligence that people can make moral judgments to distinguish right from wrong, subdue their negative impulses and thereby direct their sophisticated intellectual capabilities so as to benefit the world around them.

In Rambam’s understanding, those who fail in their human calling to use their intellect to refine and control the animalistic aspects of their personality are considered behema betzurat adam (an animal in human form) rather than betzelem Elokim. Membership of this unesteemed group therefore can cause people to forfeit their human privileges such as divine providence and a share in the World to Come.

Far worse than this, however, are those who take this divine gift to humanity of a powerful intellect and use it to subdue and terrorise others. As history repeatedly demonstrates, the greatest misery and hardship experienced by mankind is caused by people who have used their intellect to devise ways of furthering human suffering. These are the sorts of “demons” that, in Rambam’s understanding of the Gemara, were said to have been sired by Adam prior to Shet. It can be presumed that Rambam would offer a similar interpretation of Talmudic accounts of demons who dwell in uninhabited areas, damage unguarded buildings, and attack those who travel unaccompanied at night.

Humans who have fallen to such depths might be viewed as even worse than animals who typically only catch and kill prey out of necessity.

Notwithstanding all this, Rabbi Yisrael Lau – Holocaust survivor and former Chief Rabbi of Israel – warns strongly against the inclination to regard these evil and brutal acts as the work of some kind of “inhuman monsters from another world. In his Out Of The Depths memoir, Rabbi Lau records his own passionate response to one of the witnesses from the Eichmann trial:

“If Auschwitz were indeed another planet, it would be easier to accept the Holocaust. But in truth, the disaster of Auschwitz is that it happened on the very same planet where we had lived before, where we live now, and where we will continue to live. Those who carried out the cruel murders of the innocent where ordinary people, who returned home from their murderous acts to water the flowers in their manicured gardens. They tended the flowers lovingly and carefully so they would blossom, just after they had torn infants to pieces and shattered the skulls of men and women.

Just after shoving thousands of people into the gas chambers to their deaths, they came home to play with dolls together with their little girls, and listen to classical music, eyes closed, engrossed in the uplifting spirituality of Bach and Beethoven…Those were people just like you and me, and that’s the whole problem. When you transfer all those horrors to another planet, you minimise the issue. You are saying that something like the Holocaust can never happen to us again. In my humble opinion, you are wrong…”

In responding to such an outrage – as we must – with full force, we must retain a clear and unrelenting distinction between our use of military power and that of our enemies. Despite the best efforts of foreign media and anti-Semitic critics abroad to blur the boundaries.

On the one hand we have those who idealise the power of the sword and turn it into a national ideology. Describing the traits that typify Amalek, Rabbi S. R. Hirsch writes that it bore a spirit which:

“chooses the sword as its lot, seeks renown in laurels of blood, and strives to realise the ambition of “Let us make for ourselves a name” with which Nimrod began world history. This ambition is realised by destroying the welfare of nations and the happiness of men.

This seeking renown by the force of arms is the first and last enemy of human happiness and Divine Kingship on earth…Amalek’s glory-seeking sword knows no rest as long as one free man’s heart keeps beating and pays no homage to it; as long as one modest abode and happy home remains standing whose residents do not tremble before its might.”

We must remember that our messianic utopia is not a bloodletting of our enemies – it is being privileged to live in a world peace – among nations – in such security that weapons will no longer be necessitated. While we must be uncompromising in responding to such attacks in order to wipe out the evil in our midst, we long for an era in which our swords can be beaten into ploughshares…

The Jewish use of military power, on the other hand is that of a necessary evil. A war to root out evil or defend ourselves against enemies is a great mitzva. But we truly years for a time when the world embraces the truths and teachings of God so that “no nation will lift up sword against nation” and allowing us therefore to beat our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hook.

Until then we continue to pray for the protection of our soldiers in battle, the full healing of our wounded and the return of our captured brethren.

First posted on Facebook 15 October 2023, here.