Thread by @Delafina777

So, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a thread on Jewish religious/philosophical responses to the Shoah. (Before I go into that, I'll again note both that Jews are a people, not simply a religion, AND that you can't divest Jewish identity of elements Christians consider "religious.")

On Friday night, my rabbi handed out a printout of this page during the Shabbat evening service, and we spent some time talking about it. I think it's a pretty good--though obviously not comprehensive--rundown.

hartman.org.il/Blogs_View.asp…

And a comment she made stuck with me. She was talking about how much of the dialogue about the liberation of Auschwitz (of which today is the anniversary) focuses on the accounts of soldiers who liberated concentration camps.

Their shock, their horror, their incomprehension.

And unspoken in that was the idea of Auschwitz and other concentration camps as hallowed ground, made sacred by suffering.

I've always been deeply uneasy with the idea of concentration camps as sacred ground, but was unable to articulate why until I read "Constantine's Sword."

In the intro, the author, a Christian, talks about the crosses at Auschwitz, there to honor Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest killed there.

There's another discussion to be had here, one that may never be resolved, about what it means to put a cross at Auschwitz.

Certainly Christians murdered there deserve recognition.

At the same time, the cross has a far longer history as a symbol under which Jews were persecuted and murdered than the swastika, and Hitler was building on millennia of Christian hatred for Jews.

Jewish groups protested the presence of a cross at Auschwitz, and pretty soon Polish Catholics were screaming "Christ-killer!" at Jews who protested, putting up more crosses, and even planting explosive devices there.

Whether it's ok to have a cross at Auschwitz seems to me a problem without a clean answer--whatever the decision, people will be legitimately hurt. I don't know what the "right" answer is, or if there is one. Teiku, I guess.

But the author asks what I think are questions more crucial to answer: do Christian narratives about martyrdom and redemption at Auschwitz "Christianize" the Jewish dead?

The concept of martyrdom, of dying for a *reason*, isn't absent in Judaism, but it doesn't hold the same pride of place as it does in Christianity. Judaism is a life-affirming religion--it would rather see its people live to keep fighting than die for a principle.

If one has no choice, of course, one should die proudly as a Jew with the Shema on one's lips, but that's not the same as seeking out martyrdom.

The victims of the Shoah, of course, didn't have a choice. The Catholic nun born to Jewish parents was Jewish in the Nazis' eyes.

Renouncing one's Jewish identity wouldn't save one. This was racial persecution, not religious persecution.

But the desire to find meaning in the Holocaust has caused a lot of Christians to cast it as a narrative of Jewish martyrdom.

Jewish suffering as punishment for rejecting Jesus seemed declasse, confronted with the horrors of Nazi genocide, so the story changed.

And instead of Jews suffering for rejecting Jesus, the suffering and death of Jews at the Nazis' hands became, for some Christians, a *parallel* to Jesus's suffering and death.

And it became popular to point out that had Jesus lived in Nazi Germany, he would have suffered and died along with his Jewish kindred.

The Jews of Europe, then, in this imagining, are subsumed into Jesus himself, rather than into Christianity, becoming a sacrificial offering.

That is philosophically/ethically troubling, of course--one more way in which Christians will not allow us to exist as *people*, but only as props in the Christian story, to be opposed as enemies of Jesus or to die with him as echoes of him.

But it's also troubling in a much less abstract way: in Christianity, Jesus HAD to suffer and die as part of the divine plan.

If the suffering and death of real, living Jews is merged into that narrative, does it become necessary that *we* suffer and die?

This gets teeth when, in the wake of synagogue shootings and other anti-Jewish violence, we need Christians to help make sure the violence is *stopped,* not to tear up like it's a sad scene in a TV show.

And therein lies an even more troubling question, given the necessity of putting things into a narrative to even understand them--do narrative tropes create a sense of inevitability about real-world events?

And does it all, at some level, become entertainment?

And if we *must* have a narrative, if these events must be fit into one, who has the right to decide into which preset narrative shape they must be placed?

And this tension plays out even in terminology. The term "holocaust" itself refers to a burnt offering. (A sacrifice--possibly a good thing.) The term "Shoah" refers to a catastrophe. Constantine's Sword actually has one of the better explanations I've seen of the difference.

So, anyway, in discussions of the Holocaust, while Jews as characters, and even Jewish voices, might be centered, Jewish *meaning-making*--or refusal to make meaning--about the Shoah is rarely centered.

And so when my rabbi brought up whether Auschwitz is sacred, I sighed internally and braced myself for another paean to suffering as sacred. (I should have known better--that's not who she is, but I'm so used to tropes about how suffering hallowed that ground.)

Her point was very different, however. Has there ever been a greater *concentration of intentional, conscious Jewishness* than at Auschwitz and the other camps? All those prayers, all that defiant assertion of peoplehood, all that refusal to be reduced, reshaped, rewritten?

For her, it wasn't Jewish suffering that hallowed Auschwitz--it was that in a place designed to erase humanity, the victims continued to insist on remaining not just human, but Jewishly human.

In a place where no one behaves like a human being, you must strive to be human!

Hillel, in Pirke Avot 2.6

So, back to the original point, then we talked about spiritual/religious/philosophical Jewish responses to the Holocaust.

Because it's not reflected in our ritual. While we might reference it in liturgy about death, about suffering, the liturgy itself doesn't include it.

Which is strange, if you think about it--the Shoah is, to a large extent, inseparable from 20th and 21st century conceptions of Jewishness, yet our liturgy ignores it.

The article, originally from the Washington Jewish Week, attempts to sum up religious responses by personifying them.

The Theodicist says we can't judge the survivors, and some of them believe the Shoah was divine judgment.

(I see this mostly from Orthodox writers.)

The author notes that the survivors are the only ones who can justify God after the Shoah. The rest of us have no right.

The Atheist says that Auschwitz and God can't coexist. (Famously, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen ruled that, "If there is Auschwitz, there is no God.")

One hears frequently of survivors who go to shul "to pray to the God I don't believe in," which is very Jewish.

David Weiss Halivni, an Orthodox rabbi and Talmud professor, says that the question "Why did the Holocaust occur?" shouldn't be asked, for merely asking it suggests that perhaps the victims aren't innocent, that the murderers had reasons.

The Moral Post-Modernist, represented in the article by Eugene Borowitz, professor, editor of Sh'ma, and Reform Jewish philosopher, says that the Shoah undermines enlightenment, human morality, and modernism...

...leaving the moral human with no choice but to search for an anchor of absolute good outside humanity itself (call it God, if you want).

The Humble Believer is represented by a quote from Yitz Greenberg, one of the leading voices of Modern Orthodoxy, who says, "No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children."

For him, complete faith in any ideology or God is lost forever.

(Ironic here that the Reform Jewish (liberal) thinker here says that the Shoah means we should rekindle faith in God, while the Orthodox thinker says it means we *can't* have faith in God anymore.)

For Greenberg, the takeaway is simply that we can't stand by (we can't have faith that things will turn out all right). We have to oppose evil. Sometimes God slips through into the world in those moments, but we can't settle for that, for what about the rest of the time?

For David Roskies, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative Movement--between Reform and Orthodox), Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day for expressing wrath at God. (Wrath, of course, is still connection.)

For Emil Fackenheim, there's the 614th commandment. Traditionally, Judaism recognizes 613 commandments given in the Torah.

After the Shoah, Fackenheim suggested a single addition: we shall not grant Hitler a posthumous victory.

That is, the Jewish response to the Shoah can't be to abandon Jewish identity, Jewish peoplehood, Jewish uniqueness, otherwise we've done the Nazis' work for them.

The author's grandmother, poignantly and chillingly, says the Shema each night, bargaining with God: she'll forgive God if God keeps her memories away.

And then there's the provocative characterization of Jews as God's savior, represented by a Yiddish poem by Abraham Sutzkever, translated:

Redeem me, destined one —
— Who are you, that your command should be heard?
And grass language answered me: God.
I once lived in your word

One hears echoes of it in Hila Ratzabi's poignant prayer "How to Pray While the World Burns":

"Our God is trapped
In the poisoned grass,
Where the blood of our brothers cries out,
Where the ants heave centuries on their backs..."

"The earth hears your prayer.
There is nowhere for God to hide.
Get down on your knees and let
This precious earth soften for the weight of you."

It is up to humankind, in this view, to revive a God--that is, a sense of wonder, of awe at beauty and not just horror, a belief that anything is sacred--buried in the ashes of Auschwitz, already covered over with grass.

You'll note that very few of these responses are anything as simple as "it was part of a divine plan, and we simply have to accept it."

Few Jews--the people Israel, the people named "God-wrestlers"--I think, are willing to settle for anything that simple.

Bar-On concludes that Jewish faith after the Shoah is "inconsolable, torn, and full of question marks."

That, more than anything, tracks for me.

One of the first things I heard my rabbi say--the moment I knew she was *my* rabbi--was that Judaism is a great practice if you love questions, and not a great one if you need answers. We love questions. We're uncomfortable with single answers to most questions.

And we're at our best when we lean into our traditional comfort with ambiguity, with paradox, with uncertainty. Our tradition is one with sea legs--able to balance on the pitching waves of life. "This and these [mutually exclusive opinions] are BOTH the words of the Eternal."

For me personally, my answer lies among several others. The idea that the Shoah is inexplicable--while individual people's stories need to be told, I find the idea of making the entire thing into a cohesive narrative--especially one with a moral--unethical.

I also agree with Yitz Greenberg (ironic, given my feelings about most of Orthodox Judaism, that here I'm aligned most closely with two Orthodox rabbis) that if there is any moral, it's that we can't trust in God to deal with human evil. It's on us.

But perhaps because I'm part of a Reconstructionist community, the most fully resonant answer for me is the idea of reviving the sacred which lies buried beneath the ashes, finding it in the grass which reaches down and finds it.

There is always the question, in the Torah, of what The Blessing we receive(d) as a people actually IS. I'm with Harold Bloom (not on most things, but on this) that the blessing is "More life!"

For those who embrace Jewish peoplehood, traditions, thought, writings, practice...

...the blessing is more life. Not in length, but in richness.

We know that, like death, pain will find its way into our lives. But like our ancestors, Avraham and Sarah, we keep our doors open, try to keep our lives hospitable to joy.

If being open to joy means we also feel pain and loss and sorrow more deeply, that's life too.

We live deeply, we find ways to keep our senses of awe and wonder and gratitude and connection alive, and above all, we *remember*. We make room for those who came before us.

And we have to keep trying to let them *be* themselves, to keep them alive in our company, not to flatten and pin them into parables, but to let them be people like us.

To choose life, as our texts exhort us to do: to be open to life, to experiencing it in its fullness, to keep alive our people's memories (to make our OWN lives meaningful, rather than trying to force a single meaning from theirs)...

...and above all, to live on as who we are, whatever the world tries to make of us, to refuse to be reduced, removed, or rewritten. And to build a world where others can do that too, in joy and fullness and safety.

That's the only meaning I'm willing to take from all this.