H7: Responses to Holocaust

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Was the Holocaust a punishment from God? If so, for which
sins was it a punishment? Many conflicting answers have
been suggested:

SECULARISATION: "Jews are being punished for their sins!"
said Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, one of the greatest leaders of pre-war East European Jewry. Jews had abandoned their holy destiny in the wake of the Enlightenment and had become secular. The suffering of the Jews was a call from God to return to the Torah. True to his beliefs, when Rabbi Wasserman was killed by the Nazis, he said to those who were to be shot with him: "The fire which will burn our bodies will be the fire that restores the Jewish people." So the Holocaust was a punishment for rejecting Judaism.

AGAINST CHRISTIANITY: Soon after the war, a German Evangelical Conference proclaimed that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was the work of God. It was the denial of Jesus that had lead to genocide. So the Holocaust was a punishment for rejecting Christianity.

ZIONISM: Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, leader of the Chassidic community of Satmar and himself a survivor of Bergen Belsen, declared that the Holocaust was a punishment for Jewish political activism. The Jewish people were meant to wait patiently in exile until God redeemed them. But secular Zionism had forced the course of Jewish history and caused a premature return to Israel. So the Holocaust was a punishment for Zionism.

ANTI-ZIONISM: Menachem Hartom, an Israeli thinker, has argued the opposite. Judaism has always regarded exile from Israel as a punishment in itself. But after emancipation Jews began to welcome it. Some abandoned Israel as their true homeland and others preferred to wait for divine help than to act. For the first time in history, Jews ceased to be Zionists. Germany, the country that Jews had grown to worship, became the avenger. So the Holocaust was a punishment for anti-Zionism.

All these approaches are inherently problematic and have been dramatically refuted by Chief Rabbi Sacks: More than a million children were gassed, burned, shot, tortured or buried alive... God forbid that we should add to their death the sin of saying that it was justified.

A broken covenant?

If the Holocaust was not a punishment, could it be a break in the covenant with God? This approach too has different supporters:

DISCONTINUITY: The philosopher, Emil Fackenheim has argued that the unique horror of the Holocaust means that the whole nature of Jewish existence has changed. The death of six million Jews was a fatal rupture in Jewish history and thus in the covenant with God. Jews in the post-Holocaust era are under a sacred obligation to survive. After the death camps, Jewish existence itself is a holy act. Now there is a new law, the 614th commandment: We are commanded to be Jewish, for if we do not, then we complete Hitler's work.

VOLUNTARY: Irving Greenberg goes further. After Auschwitz we can no longer believe in God with the simplicity we once did. The terms of the covenant have changed. Morally speaking, Heaven can no longer have any claims on the Jewish people. Jews are no longer bound by the covenant. It has become a voluntary covenant.

GODLESS HISTORY: The American theologian, Richard Rubinstein draws the ultimate conclusion of this approach. If there is a God of history then the Holocaust must be a punishment for sin. But there is no sin that could justify such inhuman evil. Therefore, Rubinstein argues, there is no God of history so there can be no covenant. God may have created us, but now He's left us to our own devices.

These three views are fraught with problems because they all point to a failing of the covenant to handle the drama of history. Each one can be criticised:

- Keeping the covenant to spite Hitler is too negative a basis for Judaism. It gives too much to Hitler and too little to God.

- An optional covenant is not a covenant at all. A relationship is only real if both sides feel compelled by it.

- You can't just deny the God of history because you don't like the way He does things. Surely God is not bound by Man's limited understanding.

In summary, these views claim that the Holocaust is a redefiner of Judaism, that it gives new meaning to Jewish life. Again, Chief Rabbi Sacks, explains why this cannot be: We are Jews today despite the Holocaust, not because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not changed the meaning of Jewish life... that is the miracle!

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