Orthodox Jews have generally taken a detached and unalarmed view toward the successive fads and fashions in contemporary apikorsut. But when such movements are sponsored by theologians, and are widely discussed in the daily press and in weekly news magazines, it is important to understand them and evaluate them in the light of the sacred sources of the Jewish tradition. A number of Christian theologians, climaxing a development that has been some years in the making in their circles, have put forth their ideas in a manner as shocking as it is honest, and as scandalous as it is forthright. Instead of clothing their atheism in artificial, long-winded, technical terminology, they have accepted the slogan first coined by a German philosopher of the last century: “God is dead.” The very blasphemousness of this impression explains why it makes such good copy for the pseudo-sophisticated weeklies, and tempts young professors of theology to break out of the stifling atmosphere of the ivory towers and into a breathtaking sensationalism. These theologians have made so much noise with their smart slogan that nowadays one expects to look for news of theology not in the Religion section of the press, but in the Obituary columns.Their criticism of the “old-fashioned religion"—especially if we seek to apply it to Judaism—is crude cari-cature, almost vulgar in its insinua-tions. They have set up a straw man and now knock it down. No intelli-gent Jew ever thought of G-d as a man with a long white beard who lives in a castle beyond the sun. No half-sophisticated human being who believed in G-d ever imagined Him as orbiting the globe in a space ship, somewhere out there.Any imputation of such primitive concepts to religious folk of ages past is merely a species of intellectual dishonesty.believe they are saying three things.First, they are preaching atheism, pure and simple. Second, they areasserting a form of deism. Tiiat is, they reject the idea of divine person-ality. They believ…

Last year we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the liberation, marking the end of World War II. This means that a whole new generation has grown into adulthood not having known of the Holocaust from first-hand experience. For them, it is part of history. It is for this generation, and for all future generations, that the teaching of the Holocaust assumes special significance and presents new problems. "History" does have a tendency to tilt backwards into obsolescence and dissolve into irrelevance, and its most poignant lessons thus become lost to us.Yet, in a way, I wonder if it is not too soon to relegate the Holocaust to the past. I question if we have the right to consider the Holocaust as "history."In some subtle ways, the Holocaust seems to be open-ended, and hence not over yet. Many of the consequences of that single traumatic event in Jewish history are still being played out, and it is likely that the history of the next 20 or 50 years will have to be interpreted as reactions, even if long delayed, to the Holocaust. One may legitimately interpret the data of contemporary Jewish events as a radically different form of Holocaust, but Holocaust nonetheless. The rate of intermarriage and wholesale assimilation, despite the minor eddies and counter-currents in the direction of more intensive Jewish practice, are a gloomy indication of the truth of what I am saying. Moreover, we have not paid sufficient attention to "ZPG" (Zero Population Growth), a situation which is making the number of Jews in the world ever smaller relative to world population in general. While the rest of the world has been increasing, Jews have been decreasing. In effect, we are now confronted with the problem of a "preventive Holocaust," by which I mean, not the murder of Jews already alive, but the prevention of Jews from being born. It is less cruel to individuals, of course, but is equally destructive of the Jewish people as a whole.More directly, we cannot yet relax in considering a r…

It is very difficult for me to speak on this topic. I will not share personal experiences of the Holocaust, for I have none – I was a youngster in Brooklyn when the Shoah occurred. Nor do I speak as a historian, philosopher, or literary expert. Rather, I offer private reflections – meditations, an inner dialogue – with you as courteous outsiders overhearing a strange man talking to himself. I confess to deep ambivalence, even after all these years. Having accepted the invitation to speak at this Holocaust remembrance gathering, I ask: should I speak at all? Can I? May I? Am I here under false pretenses? These doubts apply only to those like me, who were not there. Those who were need not share my hesitations. There is a palpable curtain – no, a wall – that separates those who were seared by the flames and survived from those who merely wept. For those who did not experience the Holocaust firsthand, perhaps it is best to keep silent. Ecclesiastes teaches: there is a time to keep silent and a time to speak. With regard to the Holocaust, I feel both impulses. There are good reasons for silence. First, words – no matter how eloquent – trivialize that which defies description. The Holocaust is the obverse of divinity, a satanic revelation, an apocalyptic unveiling of radical evil. When Moses saw the burning bush, he hid his face. So too should we, before the flames of Auschwitz. To gaze, describe, conceptualize, bewail – all these limit, and thus diminish. The Talmud teaches that in praising God, we must say only what tradition ordains, lest we insult the Infinite by our feeble excess. So too with wrath: speech fails; silence honors. Second, silence is the most profound form of mourning. Job’s friends sat with him for seven days and said nothing, for his grief was too great. If silence is the right response to one Job, what shall we say of six million? Third, there is a personal reason. Like Lot, who was told not to look back at Sodom, I feel unworthy to gaze upon the v…

To the extent that history has any meaning for Judaism; to the extent that experience is relevant to thought; to the extent that no orientation to the future is imaginable without drawing upon the past - to that extent is knowledge of and reflection upon the Holocaust indispensable to the enterprise of Jewish education. There can be no understanding of Jewish character, of Jewish destiny, of the Jew's place in the world, and of the current unfolding of the Jewish drama, without study of the grisly and still incredible events of the World War II period. Moreover, there is also a simple and practical urgency to informing the next generations about what happened to the last one.A Holocaust that happened once can happen again. Once breached, the walls of human restraint remain weakened. The demons know their way ... All the more reason for sending our children into the world forewarned and forearmed - and teach them the Holocaust. It is with this in mind that I address myself to the question of teaching the Holocaust - not as an historian and not as a philosopher, but as an educator. We must determine how best to go about transmitting to new generations of Jews what happened to our people that almost made it impossible for Jews ever to survive on this planet.No effort must be spared in keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive for both Jew and non-Jew. Schools which omit the Holocaust from their curricula are guilty of an unforgivable act of moral blindness. Students are receptive to the study of the Holocaust because they know that in it they are testing the limits of human depravity. And yet very few of our Jewish schools, to my knowledge, do anything at all to teach the Holocaust.The most illustrious exception is Flatbush Yeshiva in New York, where the high school department has established a separate Holocaust Documentation Center. Programs are available to others as they are being developed at the school.I am told that the Principals' Council of Torah U'mesorah is…

The context of this literary creation is one of the most frightful in all of history, one of despair and defiance, defeat and triumph. The time is April, 1943, in the midst of World War II. The scene is Warsaw, in one of the few houses that remained standing as the Jewish ghetto was about to go up in flames as the Nazi Wehrmacht brought in heavy artillery to put down the rebellion by a handful of impoverished, starving, diseased, poorly armed but determined Jewish survivors. The document purports to be that of Yossel Rakover, a Polish Hasidic Jew, who pens this incredible testament as he faces certain death.All of this is, of course, a "story" by Zvi Kolitz, an Israeli Jew of distinguished Lithuanian ancestry, who lives in New York and is a journalist, producer, essayist, thinker, and a teacher at Yeshiva University. His relation to his creation is itself an interesting story. So powerful is the verisimilitude of his account that it was taken as a bona fide document salvaged from the ruins of the ghetto, and the work assumed a life of its own. It was written by Kolitz in English and published in 1947, and translated into Yiddish seven years later by an anonymous translator who presented it as an original text discovered in the rubble of the ghetto. This Yiddish version, which contained a number of additions to the original text by the translator who took considerable liberties with it, was then published in French translation in 1955; it is this version which was read by the distinguished Franco-Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas and which occasioned his essay reprinted in this volume. A Hebrew version appeared in Israel in 1965. All the translations fail to mention the author, Zvi Kolitz.Indeed, as the Kabbalah taught, "everything depends upon luck, even the Scroll of the Torah in the Ark" (Zohar III, 134a). Zvi Kolitz' ploy, speaking through the pseudonymous Yossel Rakover, almost succeeded in obliterating his own authorship but, ultimately, his "luck" smiled u…

The questions concerning compensation for the atrocities of the Holocaust – specifically the enormous monetary damage suffered by the victims, survivors, and the Jewish community as a whole – are of historic significance not only practically but morally. In elaborating an approach to them, I have in mind the moral self-confidence of us on the Jewish side – rather than an attempt to persuade the governments on the other side. I will endeavor to formulate a specific Jewish view in order to develop what I hope will be an authentic Jewish response to the issues before us – one based upon the classics of the Jewish tradition. In other words, I will let the sources speak for themselves, even if such conclusions will not meet with unanimous approval – and even if I will have hoped for different results.Some caveats: comparisons to historic approaches and situations described and prescribed in classical texts often lend themselves to overstating similarities and undervaluing differences. Moreover, we cannot always expect the halakhic sources to be applied directly and without some attempt at interpretation to unprecedented situations. In such cases, we must read out (not into) the halakhic sources the basic principles and values that motivated the detailed laws which the tradition bequeathed to us. However, if handled sensitively and honestly, such extrapolations have much to teach us, and we ignore them at our own peril. I will try to exercise such sensitivity. If I fail, it will not bebecause of want of trying.There are two major issues that I will deal with—the responsibility of governments that seized Jewish property during the Holocaust, and priorities for the proper distribution of the recovered funds to the victims and their survivors. I shall do so on the basis of Biblical teachings and, more particularly, on the basis of Halakha, i.e., the Oral Lawwhich explicated and supplements the Written Law or Scripture. .The Jewish tradition distinguishes between law (דיני …

Of all the works of Elie Wiesel, the one which might most appropriately be called "theological" is The Town Beyond the Wall (TBW). It recapitulates, and anticipates, some of the most significant themes with which the author is concerned in many other works, both fiction and nonfiction. In TBW Wiesel uses the medium of fiction to confront some of the most crucial and overarching philosophical issues: suffering, evil, rationality, madness, silence, indifference, meaningfulness. TBW, therefore, requires not only literary criticism — though that too — but philosophical analysis based upon the sources of the Jewish tradition, which, after all, are the vitalizing wells of Wiesel’s own life and thought. Indeed, the real significance of TBW (or, for that matter, much of Wiesel's other works) is best decoded with a deep knowledge of classical Jewish literature. Wiesel, in this book, reminds me of Kohellet, Ecclesiastes. He picks up a theme, fondles it, examines it from several aspects, and either puts it aside for more attention later or rejects it. TBW is not simply a philosophical work in fiction form; it is a series of profound meditations, a modem version of a tale by the Hasidic storyteller, Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav: intriguing as the story is in its own right, its true message lies beneath the surface. Like a Biblical verse, a section of a Talmudic Agada, or a Midrash, it must be read on two levels, or what the Jewish tradition calls peshat (the plain meaning) and derash (the symbolic meaning). First, a brief outline of the plot. Michael, the protagonist, is born and lives, during his earliest youth, in a little Hungarian town, Szerencsevaros. After the war, which shatters his life along with that of his family and townspeople, he finds himself in Paris, penniless and haunted by the ghosts of the past. He finally meets and forms a fast friendship with Pedro, an unusual, hearty and insightful man. Pedro is part of a smuggling ring. Since Michael s burning ambition is t…