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Judaism has its silences, Elie Wiesel once said, but we do not speak about them. After the Holocaust, the Shoah, there was one of the great silences of Jewish history. A third of world Jewry had gone up in flames. Entire worlds – the bustling Jewish townships of Eastern Europe, the talmudic academies, the courts of the Jewish mystics, the Yiddish-speaking masses, the urbane Jews of Germany, the Jews of Poland who had lived among their gentile neighbours for eight hundred years, the legendary synagogues and houses of study – all were erased. A guard at Auschwitz, testifying at the Nuremburg trial, explained that at the height of the genocide, when the camp was turning ten thousand Jews a day into ashes, children were thrown into the furnaces alive. When the destruction was over, a pillar of cloud marked the place where Europe’s Jews had once been; and there was a silence that consumed all words.
More had died in the final solution than Jews. It was as if the image of God that is man had died also. We know in retrospect that Jews – both victims and survivors – simply could not believe what was happening.
Since the Enlightenment they had come to have faith that a new order was in the making, in which the age-old teachings of contempt for the chosen-or-rejected people were at an end, and in their place would come a rational utopia. It is hard in retrospect to imagine that sense of almost religious wonder which German Jews felt for the country of Goethe, Beethoven and Immanuel Kant. That Christian anti-Judaism might mutate into the monster of racial antisemitism, that a Vatican might watch as the covenantal people went to its crucifixion, that chamber music might be played over the cries of burning children, that the rational utopia might be Judenrein: these, for the enlightened Jews of Europe, were the ultimately unthinkable thoughts. Since the early nineteenth century, humanity had seemed to many Jews a safer bet than God; and it was that faith that was murdered in the camps. Where was man at Auschwitz?
But where, too, was God? That He was present seemed a blasphemy; that He was absent, even more so. How could He have been there, punishing the righteous and the children for sins, their own or someone else’s? But how could He not have been there, when, from the valley of the shadow of death, they called out to Him?
Jewish faith sees God in history. But here was a definitive, almost terminal moment, in Jewish history, and where was God’s hand and His outstretched arm? It seemed as if the Shoah must have, and could not have, religious meaning.
Wiesel has written of that time: “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.” But to whom could one speak of these things so much larger than man, if not to God? It was a crisis of faith without precedent in the annals of belief. If God existed, how was Auschwitz possible? But if God did not exist, how was humanity after Auschwitz credible?
There is a line of theological reasoning which argues that a single moment of innocent suffering is as inexplicable as attempted genocide. The death of one child is as much a crisis for religious belief as the Shoah.
That is true. But it is to miss one essential of Jewish belief. There is theology, but beyond that there is covenant, the bond between God and a singular people. Even the most terrifying curse in the Bible ends with the verse, “Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking my covenant with them.” The faith of Israel is peculiarly tied to the people of Israel, to its existence as God’s witness. If there were no Christians, Christianity might still be true. If there were no Jews, Judaism would be false. The survival of the Jewish people is the promise on which the entire covenant rests.
Jews had faced inquisitions and pogroms before. They had even, in the book of Esther, recorded Haman’s decision “to destroy, kill and annihilate all Jews – young and old, women and children – on a single day.” But redemption had always come, or if not redemption, refuge. In the Holocaust, perhaps for the first time, Jews came face to face with the possibility of extinction. The covenant, the one Jewish certainty, was within sight of being broken. Not only the present and future, but the Jewish past too would have died.
And so, for twenty years after the Shoah, there was an almost total theological silence. The questions were too painful to ask. It was as if, like Lot’s wife, turning back to look on the destruction would turn one to stone.
There were, in those years, a few attempts to break the silence. But they only served to show how broken the traditional categories were. The late Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, leader of the Hassidic community of Satmar and himself a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, invoked biblical theology and declared the Holocaust a punishment for sins. The Jewish people had, according to the Talmud, taken an oath to wait patiently in exile, but secular Zionism had broken this promise by forcing the course of Jewish history, and bringing a premature ingathering to the holy land. The Shoah was a punishment for Zionism.
An Israeli thinker, Menachem Hartom, pursued the same logic to its opposite conclusion. Throughout its history, he argued, the Jewish people had regarded exile as punishment, as not-being-at-home. That is, until the Emancipation. Then, for the first time, Jews argued that Europe was where they belonged. Some abandoned the hope for a return to Israel, others deferred it to a metaphysical end of days. For the first time Jews ceased to be Zionists. And for this they suffered a devastating retribution. Germany, the country more than any other that Jews had worshipped, became the avenger. The Shoah was a punishment for anti-Zionism.
This kind of argument led everywhere and nowhere. An American Jewish theologian, Richard Rubinstein, drew the radical conclusion. If there is a God of history, he argued, we must see the Shoah as a punishment for sin. But there is no sin that could warrant the deaths of a million children. There can be no vindication of the ways of Providence. Therefore there is no God of history. An ancient heresy had been proved true. There is no justice and no judge.
Rubinstein became a kind of religious atheist. But ironically, only a hair’s-breadth away, was a position found in classic Jewish thought. And it was now taken up by such leading Orthodox thinkers as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and Eliezer Berkovits.
In the Bible there are references to hester panim, the hiding of the face of God. There are moments, perhaps eras, in which God withdraws from history. The rabbinic literature contained an extraordinary statement, which by a slight textual emendation, turned the phrase “Who is like You, God, among the mighty?” into “Who is like You among the silent?” God, as it were, holds Himself back in self-imposed restraint, allowing men freedom, including the freedom to do evil. God was neither present nor absent at Auschwitz: He was hidden. The line of thought was barely comforting, for it argued an exile of God from the human domain that was little short of complete eclipse.
But it was in 1967, in the weeks surrounding Israel’s Six-Day War, that an extraordinary transformation took place in Jewish sensibilities. It seemed, in the anxious days before the war, as if a second holocaust was in the making. And the memory of the first, so suppressed for two decades, broke through with terrible force, in the form of an imperative: Never again.
Israel’s sudden victory released a flood of messianic emotion. For some it seemed as if God had finally re-entered history after His long exile. And when the mood subsided a deeper sense began to form – that the State of Israel was a powerful affirmation of life, a determination never again to suffer the role of victim. Virtues which had long been at the heart of Judaism in exile – martyrdom, passivity, trust – had been overthrown. They now seemed, in retrospect, to be unwitting accomplices to genocide. A quite new Holocaust theology began to emerge.
Its most articulate theoretician was Emile Fackenheim, who argued that the Holocaust was not to be understood, but responded to. His boldest move was to claim that the Shoah had created a new commandment – and he meant the word in its religious sense. Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler a posthumous victory. Because Hitler made it a crime simply to exist as a Jew, simply to exist as a Jew became an act of defiance against the force of evil. Choosing to have children after the Shoah was itself a monumental act of faith. The old dichotomy between religious and secular had now lost its meaning. For even the most secular Jew who chose to remain Jewish in the face of a possible future holocaust was making a religious act of commitment. Jewish survival became a, perhaps even the, religious imperative.
Fackenheim spoke to a new Jewish consciousness. There was a sense, shared by many, that secular activity had been charged with religious meaning. Israel’s victory, her determination to survive, the intense involvement of Jews everywhere in her fate, all combined to place Jewish peoplehood and survival at the centre of the religious drama. God may have hidden His face. But the Jewish people had disclosed a new one of its own. God may have withdrawn from history. Israel, at least, had re-entered it.
The American theologian, Irving Greenberg spoke of a new era in which the covenant had been voluntarily renewed, but in which man, not God, had become the senior partner. Never before had survival per se carried such religious weight.
But there was to be a further twist in the dialectic. In the twenty years since Fackenheim’s commandment to survive, it has become clear that not all sectors of the Jewish world have heeded its call. In the Diaspora, Jewish birth-rates fell to below replacement levels. The momentum of assimilation has accelerated. Frustrating Hitler has proved to be no base for Jewish survival.
One group of Jews, though, has obeyed Fackenheim’s command to the letter. They have had children in great numbers. They have rebuilt their lost worlds. They have proved themselves the virtuosi of survival. The irony is that they are a group who would deny the entire basis of Fackenheim’s thought. They are the ultra-religious, for whom piety, not peoplehood, is the dominant value, and to whom secular survival is not Jewish survival at all.
This was the one group whose responses to the Holocaust lay unconsidered, and only slowly has the written testimony come to light. It makes remarkable reading. For we now know that there were Jews in the concentration camps who lived in the nightmare kingdom as if it were just another day, patiently confronting the never-before-imagined questions and finding answers.
May a father purchase his son’s escape from the ovens, knowing that the quotas will be met and another child will die in his place? May a Jew in the Kovno ghetto recite the morning benediction, “Blessed are you, O Lord, Who has not made me a slave?” May one pronounce the blessing over martyrdom over a death from which there is no escape? What blessing does one make before being turned to ashes? The rabbis searched the sources and gave their rulings, and some of their writings have survived.
Over one who uninterruptedly studies God’s word, said the rabbis, even the angel of death can win no victory. How true this was of the pious Jews of Auschwitz and Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen, discovering as they did that in the face of ultimate evil, the word of God was not silent. It had an awe-inspiring resonance. God did not die at Auschwitz, they said. He wept tears for His people as they blessed His name at the gates of death. Their bodies were given as burnt offerings and their lives as a sanctification of God’s name. “The fire which destroys our bodies,” said Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman before he was killed, “is the fire which will restore the Jewish people.” And so it was. The Jews of faith, who were able to sanctify death in the Holocaust, turned out to be the most determined to sanctify life after the Holocaust.
So, once the silence was broken, Jewish responses to the Shoah have been many and conflicting. But one above all deserves mention, all the more remarkable for having been written fifteen hundred years before the event.
The Talmud contains an enigmatic passage, which says that when the Israelites stood at Mount Sinai they were reluctant to accept the covenant. They did so only because God threatened to let the mountain fall on their heads. For centuries they kept the faith only because they were coerced. When, then, did they finally accept it voluntarily? The Talmud answers: in the days of Ahasuerus, when Haman threatened to kill all Jews.
Only now, in retrospect, does the meaning of the passage become clear. The threat of genocide created a new dimension of covenant: the covenant of a shared fate. Every Jew, after Auschwitz, knows that in some sense he is a survivor, an accidental remnant, and he shares that knowledge with every member of his people. As the covenant of faith seemed to be breaking, the covenant of fate has risen to take its place.
And the stubborn people has shown its obstinacy again. Faced with destruction, it has chosen survival. Lo amut ki echyeh, says the Psalm: “I will not die, but I will live.” And in this response there is a kind of courage which rises beyond theology’s reach.
One writer about the Shoah records that he met a rabbi who had been through the camps and who, miraculously, seemed unscarred. He could still laugh. “How,” he asked him, “could you see what you saw and still have faith? Did you have no questions?” The rabbi replied, “Of course I had questions. But I said to myself, if you ever ask those questions, they are such good questions that God will send you a personal invitation to heaven to give you the answers. And I preferred to be here on earth with the questions than up in heaven with the answers.”
As with the rabbi, so with the Jewish people. Without answers, it has reaffirmed its covenant with history. The people Israel lives and still bears witness to the living God.
