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April 2, 2006

Yom Hashoah (2006)

Yom Hashoah
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Idea for Tisha B'av/Yom Ha-Shoah (1998)

See my "The Religious Thought of Hasidism", chapters 15 and 17, re: the nature of evil (and exile). Kabbalists were generally dualistic, affirming not only the reality of the good but also that of evil, while Hasidic teachers held to a monistic view, denying the ontological validity of evil and affirming only the good, but in various stages or guises, etc. See the above, chapter 17, selection 5c, from קדושת לוי השלם על איכה, offering the hasidic view. R. Levi Yitzhak points to the famous hymn recited on Tisha B’av, and interperts it to yield the hasidic view. The verse reads, אלי ציון ועריה כמו אשה בציריה—”Wail, O Zion and her cities, as a woman in her birth pangs.” The interpretation: In the course of her delivery, the woman feels great pain, but after the birth of the baby, she is very happy.However, those who are present with her are happy even during her suffering for they know that the pain leads to great joy. So it is with Zion: while her cities are destroyed she feels great grief and pain, but God rejoices because He knows that it will lead to greater happiness; the suffering is only temporary and the ultimate joy will more than compensate for the misery.However, beautiful as the idea and the interpretation are, our generations in this post-Holocaust era find it extremely difficult to derive much consolation from them. For us, evil is hard as nails, and suffering is perhaps more real than joy. The crematoria successfully negated the ontological denial of evil.For us, we point to the rest of the verse mentioined above1: וכבתולה חגורת על בעל נעוריה pw-”and as a maiden girded in sackcloth lamenting for the husband of her youth.” Our historic experience is more this than the first half (according to tne hasidic exegesis)—more like a bride whose love was never consumated because her groom has been killed and she remains a disconsolate widow. There is no compensation , albeit the possibility and even probability remains that she will remarry and find true happines…
Yom Hashoah Three Weeks & Tisha B'Av Reflections on the Shoah

Synagogue Sermon

Did Auschwitz Ever Happen? (1971)

It is a fact of life that, except for those young people who transmuted their awareness of the Shoah (Holocaust) into active protest on behalf of Soviet Jewry, large numbers of the generation of American Jews who were born or grew up after 1948, are “turned off” by the Holocaust. For some of them, the “six million” and all that is implied by it is too imagination-staggering and therefore simply incredible. It is, truth to tell, too heavy a burden to bear, both in the guilt that it induces (and there have been several psychological studies of the guilt feelings by the survivors) and the consequences that it suggests. Hence, there has been an unconscious attempt to reduce the scope of the Holocaust. Of course, no American Jews go as far as the Polish government which, after a centuries-long experience of denying that Jews are human, let alone good Poles, now decides that the martyred Polish Jews died not as Jews but as Polish citizens, for which reasons the memorials to them at the concentration camps in Poland’s territory have no mention of their Jewishness. Rather, what has happened is that in the consciousness of many young Jews, Auschwitz has been diminished to manageable proportions by inflating the rhetoric that deals with other problems of our own times. The Holocaust experience becomes understandable, credible, assimilable, only if some of the evils of our own times are conceived of as being in the same order of wickedness. Thus, if the city provides inferior teachers for Harlem – and that is certainly a bad thing – shrill voices term that evil, “genocide!” If there are those who oppose our government on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, we escalate the criticism and refer to it as – “genocide.” And sometimes some young radicals, in their utter recklessness, refer to the actions of college administrations which decide to discipline unruly protestors as – “genocide!”Thus, Auschwitz was simply another act of genocide in a whole list with which we are acquainted. It …
Parshat Zachor & Purim Yom Hashoah

Synagogue Sermon

The Jewish Naivete: A Purim Story All Year (1976)

"Jewish naivete?" That sounds surprising, even ludicrous. Surely, a people that boast so many successful businessmen, shrewd merchants, pragmatic scientists, and men of affairs cannot be accused of naivete. And yet—the charge is true. It seems that there is a strain of collective naivete that runs through our history like some spoiled gene that had fastened itself on our chromosomes. It expresses itself not merely in idealism—often done to excess—but in an ingenuousness that borders on dangerous ignorance about the nature of man.The trait was already noticeable in the ancient Persian period. The key verse of the Megillah, the Book of Esther, concerning this problem is: "the city of Shushan (that is, its Jewish population) was perplexed." The word "perplexed" is too weak. Perhaps "overwhelmed" is more accurate. Persian Jewry was completely unprepared for the possibility of genocide. In Persia, Jews thought that "it can't happen here." Surely, civilized men and a cultured society cannot suddenly be transformed into beasts. The Jews of Persia were comfortable in their society. They felt at home in the Empire. The Tradition, commenting on the story of the opulent oriental banquet which opens the whole Book of Esther, maintains that the reason the decree of destruction was issued against the Israelites of that generation was because they participated in the banquet of the wicked Ahasuerus. Rabbi Meir Shapiro, of blessed memory, the great founder of the Yeshiva of Lublin, sees in this talmudic dictum more than the mere assertion that the Jews were punished for eating non-kosher. The Rabbis did not say that they ate, but that they benefited from or enjoyed the meal. The Rabbis were pointing to the whole psychological attitude, the total social outlook that characterized the Persian Jews. The latter saw in that banquet of the Emperor to which they were invited not a meal but a symbol, a symbol that they were on par with all others of the 127 provinces of Ahasuerus. They we…
Parshat Zachor & Purim Yom Hashoah