Sermon at the Hampstead Synagogue
by Rabbi Dr. Michael Harris
Yom HaShoah Shabbat, Shabbat Shemini 5770
April 10, 2010
Reflections for Yom HaShoah
Tomorrow is Yom HaShoah, 27 Nissan – many Shuls across the British
Jewish community are marking it today with Yom HaShoah Shabbat. We said a
special memorial prayer earlier and I‘d like to devote my remarks today
to reflecting on Yom HaShoah.
I’d like to briefly address three very large and important topics.
Perforce I can’t do any of them justice, but I hope to provide food for
thought. I) How can we respond to the Shoah from the perspective of
Jewish faith? II) The issue of antisemitism in the light of the Shoah
III) What place should the Shoah have in contemporary Jewish
consciousness?
How can we respond to the Shoah from the perspective of Jewish
faith?
It took some time after the Holocaust – almost twenty years - for
theological responses to emerge. Energies were needed for helping
survivors, for creating refuge in Israel; the horror was overwhelming,
it was hard to fashion meaning; and there was the difficulty of speaking
authoritatively and without adding insult to the unimaginable injury of
the victims. Initially the response of world Jewry to the Shoah was
encapsulated by two famous and resonant words in our Sidra. After the
tragic death of his two sons Nadav and Avihu – “vayidom Aharon”.
Aaron was silent in the face of disaster. There were no adequate words.
But he heroically continued his mission as High Priest. That was the
initial response of Jewry as a whole after the Shoah – theological
silence about the Holocaust, but an almost superhuman determination to
continue the Jewish journey. In subsequent decades theological
responses emerged. I’m not sure that ultimately any convincing
theological response to Shoah is possible, but it’s worth mentioning two
important ones that were suggested by significant 20th century Jewish
thinkers.
Emil Fackenheim argued that the enormity of the Shoah means the
inadequacy of all the classical explanations of suffering and evil. None
of the responses given in Jewish tradition to previous disasters could
work for the Holocaust. Yet Fackhenheim insisted that we must accept
that G-d was present at Auschwitz. We do not and cannot understand what
He was doing there or why He allowed it, but He was there.
Following Martin Buber, Fackenheim says that G-d reveals Himself in
history through personal encounters with Jews and the Jewish people.
Revelation, understood as the encounter of G-d and man, happens
everywhere and at all times – even Auschwitz is revelation. The command
that Fackenheim hears from Auschwitz is: “Jews are forbidden to hand
Hitler posthumous victories”. This is Fackenheim’s famous 614th
commandment. After the Shoah, Jews are under a sacred obligation to
survive; Jewish existence itself is a holy act. To become cynical about
the world and humanityis to abdicate responsibility for the world and to
deliver it into the evil hands of Nazism. Jews are “forbidden to despair
of the G-d of Israel, lest Judaism perish”. Since Hitler’s goal was to
eradicate Jews and Judaism, for the Jew to despair of the G-d of Israel
because of Hitler’s actions would ironically be to do Hitler’s work and
help in the accomplishment of his goal. This isn’t just a natural will
for survival, it has transcendental significance– Jews are commanded to
resist annihilation.
But G-d is not only a commanding G-d, He is also, as we marked at
Pesach, a G-d of deliverance, the G-d of the Exodus. Fackenheim therefore
argues that the continued existence of the Jewish people, and especially
the establishment of the State of Israel, allows us to speak of hope and
the possibility of redemption. For Fackenheim, the state of Israel
is living testimony to G-d’s continued presence in history.
A second Jewish theological response to the Shoah was offered by
Eliezer Berkovits. Martyrdom and suffering are unfortunately not
new phenomena in Judaism, and Berkovits explores biblical and rabbinic
tradition to see if anything can be mined from them in responding to the
Shoah.
Berkovits urges that in Jewish historical terms the Shoah is unique in
the magnitude of its horror, but not in the problem it poses
for religious faith. The Shoah for Berkovits raises the same ancient
question as previous horrors: how could an omnipotent and morally perfect
G-d let it happen? The theological dilemma, he argues, is the same
whether one Jew or 6 million are slaughtered.
Berkovits draws on the Torah’s notion of hester panim, the idea
that sometimes G-d inexplicably turns His face away from human beings.
Berkovits argues that this is necessary in order for the human being to
be a moral creature, since by “absenting Himself” from history, G-d
allows space for the human freedom which is necessary for moral
behaviour. For human beings to be moral creatures, G-d has to respect
human decisions and as it were be bound by them, to refrain from reacting
immediately to evil deeds. Freedom is always open to abuse and so evil
happens. This is what philosophers call the “free will defence” to the
problem of evil.
Berkovits goes on to argue that the Shoah is not the only or even
ultimate Jewish experience. As well as Auschwitz, Berkovits stresses
that contemporary Jews have witnessed the establishment of the State of
Israel and the ingathering of the exiles. For Berkovits, the rebirth of
the State of Israel is contemporary revelation, the voice of G-d speaking
from history. If Auschwitz and previous persecutions signified
G-d’s Hidden Face, the rebirth of the State of Israel means that “we have
seen a smile on the face of G-d”.
Those are, in brief, two of the best-known Jewish theological
responses to the Holocaust and they illustrate how Jewish philosophers
have tried to grapple with the problems the Shoah raises for
Jewish faith. But the Shoah also raises more concrete issues, which
brings me to the second topic for this morning:
the question of
anti-semitism in the light of the Shoah.
I’ve mentioned before that there is a striking parallel between the
persecution of the Jews leading to the Shoah and the Egyptian experience
we’ve just recalled at Pesach.
Nahmanides pointed out in the thirteenth century that Pharaoh was a
bit worried about public opinion. His predecessor had invited the Jews to
Egypt. Also the Israelites were numerous and strong, and all-out attack
on the Jews would be dangerous. So Pharaoh proceeds in stages. First he
imposes a tax on the Israelites – a tax not of money but of labour. Next,
he secretly orders the midwives to kill the male children on the
birthstools without their mothers knowing – the mothers would be told it
had been a still birth. Then, he entices his people to throw every
male child into the river, but at their own risk – if the Israelite
parents could prove that this had been done to their child, the Egyptian
who had done it would be punished. This was not an official royal edict:
the Torah says that Pharaoh commanded “all his people” rather than “his
princes and servants” who would usually disseminate a royal command. The
government gave no explicit orders to the people but rather looked away
while the Egyptian masses “spontaneously” vented their frustration on the
immigrants. Finally, the situation became openly murderous – the
Egyptians would search Jewish homes and forcibly take Jewish children.
One cannot help being reminded of the staged assault on the Jewish
people three and a half millennia later in Nazi Germany:
- Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany in January 1933.
- Anti-Jewish riots take place in Berlin on 9 March 1933.
- Later that year, all Jewish shops in Berlin are boycotted; books by
Jewish authors are publicly burned and Berlin hospitals are declared
“free” of Jewish doctors.
- In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws come into force.
- In November 1938 Kristallnacht takes place. Only after that the
systematic murder of the Jews begins.
Antisemitism is doomed to ultimate failure. As we recited in the
Haggadah: shebechol dorvador omdim aleinu lechaloteinu veHakadosh Baruch Hu matzileinu miyadam. But it can do huge damage on the way to its
eventual defeat. What we learn from Shoah and Egypt and all of Jewish
history is to remain ever vigilant, because from apparently small
beginnings frightening consequences can G-d forbid ensue. Of course we
should not be paranoid, overreacting to every perceived manifestation of
anti-Jewish bias. At the same time, we know from our history
that anti-Semitism possesses a sinister internal dynamic. It tends to
develop perniciously, snowballing from modest beginnings to monstrous
proportions.
The final issue I want to address, very briefly, is:
the place of
the Shoah incontemporary Jewish consciousness.
Here there is a
difficult balance to be struck. It is hardly necessary to say that
remembering the Shoah is essential, indeed all the more essential as time
goes on and an increasing number of those who survived the Shoah are
sadly no longer with us. Yet we must never allow the Shoah or
any persecution to define the nature of Judaism. Professor Deborah
Lipstadt reminded us of this after the Irving trial. Jewish identity, she
said, must be defined by the joy of our faith, not by the suffering of
the Holocaust. How true. When a sympathetic non-Jew looks at our people,
we must make sure that he or she is able to say not only “that’s the
people who have endured such terrible suffering” but also, and primarily,
what the Torah says our behaviour should prompt non-Jews to say when
they look at us: umi goy gadol asher lo chukim umishpatim tzadikim
kechol hatortah hazot. What righteous laws that people lives by.
Yes,
we were victims of terrible persecution and we must never forget it. But
our main task as Jews is to exemplify to the world the values of justice
and compassion. And when it comes to the education of children,
while we must give them a sound knowledge of our sadly bloodstained
history, we dare not let them get the impression that that is the essence
of Judaism. More important than them visiting the darkness of Auschwitz
is that they bask in the light of our reborn State of Israel. We need to
bequeath to them a Jewish vision of depth, beauty and above all joy – in
the words of Psalm 100, ivdu et Hashem besimcha. And then one
day, please G-d, though they will faithfully pass on the history of our
suffering to their own children, they will convey to them first and
foremost the simcha of our Jewish heritage, and they will teach
them that despite everything, am yisrael chai, the Jewish people
and its faith live.
For further reading
Emil Fackhenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York, 1970)
Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (New York, 1973)
© 2010 Hampstead Synagogue