Irving Greenberg

THEOLOGY AFTER THE SHOAH: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE CORE PARADIGM

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE CORE PARADIGM

Holocaust theologies are generally classified on a grid of conceptual response. Some focus on interpretations growing out of particular movements/denominations’ positions, such as haredi, orthodox, liberal, and so on. Others emphasize specific attitudes toward God: from Rubenstein, “God is dead”; to Wiesel, God is “imprisoned”; to Green- berg, “moment faiths” in which God is alternately present and not present; to Fackenheim, God is still commanding, but we protest to God at God’s absence and failures; to Berkovits, God is hiding God’s face but is still in charge of history; to Dessler, God is punishing us for our sins.1 Sometimes the classification is presented (or developed) in more sweeping categories such as Braiterman’s, namely, the theodicy or antitheodicy approaches.2 Others have focused on the controversy over whether the Holo- caust is unique or but the latest example of a tragedy in Jewish history which challenges faith and evokes response. These are all legitimate representations, and they guide us through the now dense thicket of thinkers and thought written in response to the Shoah. Despite Rubenstein’s initial complaint that mainstream Jewish theology evaded encounters with the Holocaust because thinkers could not deal with its shattering impact, an important body of religious thought has built up, offering an impressive range of treatments of the religious implications of the Holocaust.3 Most theological responses are predicated on the ongoing ade- quacy of religious categories; they illustrate the ability to incorporate the Holocaust into classic paradigms of meaning. Typically the thinker starts from a personal theological position and, applying established categories, treats the Holocaust within these approaches in a serious manner. Frequently—and, certainly, in the better philosophers— there is a notable change and deepening of thinking in response to the power of the event. Thus Berkovits, a deeply rooted Orthodox thinker, nevertheless demolishes the classic, inherited theology of

doi:10.1093/mj/kjl001 © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 214 Irving Greenberg mipnei chataeinu, tragedy as punishment for sins.4 Fackenheim, an exis- tentialist theist whose ahistorical faith was (in his mind) beyond the contingencies of history, was jolted into a return into history—for the sake of his people and his faith—with all the risks and vulnerabilities of such exposure.5 The argument of this article is that the next necessary step is to go beyond specific responses to the Shoah toward accepting the Holo- caust as a touchstone of theology, which leads to the transformation of the core paradigm—that gauge of coherence that we apply to judge specific positions. When the Holocaust is recognized as a touchstone, then the test of the validity of theologies is not just the criteria of intel- lectual and moral coherence but whether the position is credible in the presence of the Holocaust or in light of the implications of the event. (For example, the ideas that religion should be predicated on the essential goodness of human nature or that sickness and suffering are providentially inflicted on people because they sin are beliefs whose validity would be more difficult to uphold in light of the impli- cations of the Shoah.) But at the same time, the encounter with the event leads to a transformation of the categories that themselves are used to judge and to incorporate religious responses. This more radical (root) response is a recognition of the massive weight of this event and the fact that it shattered many fundamental assumptions of established worldviews in Judaism and modern culture during the course of its unfolding. Let it be added that this emphasis on the Holocaust as transformational event should not be identified as a variant position within the controversy over the uniqueness or nonu- niqueness of the Holocaust.6 On that question, my position is that in its scope, in the total nature of Nazi goals, biological and spiritual, the Holocaust is unique. (However, in its uniqueness, the Shoah can still be placed, analyzed, and applied on a continuum of comparisons to other genocides in the twentieth century and in the past.)7 But whether the Holocaust is suf- ficiently unique to be a cultural rupture/caesura or not (and indeed, even if it is only a larger tragedy within a devastating series of such events in Jewish and general history), it should become a catalyst for reshaping religious and metaphysical understanding no less than earlier major tragedies such as the churban of the Second Temple.8 For example, although the Rabbis profoundly emphasized conti- nuity and received tradition, insisting that the inherited Written Torah and the Oral (interpretive) Torah were jointly and simulta- neously given at Sinai, they transformed the traditional religious cate- gories under the impact of the catastrophic event.9 They insisted that after the churban, prophecy was no longer possible. Thus, they could dismiss (or if you will, overrule) a heavenly voice that sought to intervene Theology after the Shoah 215 in their deliberations as to what God wanted of them in a matter of purity and ritual.10 The underlying assumption was that the churban was a signifier of a fundamental change in the divine–human econ- omy. To borrow later language, in allowing the catastrophe, the Divine had exercised tzimtzum; it followed that humans were now called to more equal, assertive, and authoritative roles in the cove- nant. This shift not only ruled out prophecy and turned rabbinic mandates into divine commandments; but according to at least one view, the new condition constituted a renegotiation of the covenant of Israel itself.11 By comparison, there are thinkers who insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust but still apply the inherited categories to explicating the theological conundrum of the Holocaust.12

ESTABLISHING BROKENNESS AND LIMITS

The primary impact of the Shoah on the core paradigm of truth and coherence is evident when one recognizes the need to acknowledge the brokenness of all religious worldviews and value systems. Internal- izing the implications of the Holocaust inexorably leads to the recog- nition of the essential fragmented nature of the familiar explanatory models and the inescapable limits of normative religious/ethical cate- gories. The one thing that we know for sure is that a satisfactory or even a full resolution of the tormenting questions raised by the Shoah (in any direction) is wrong; it can only be achieved by not taking some aspect of this surd sufficiently seriously.13 This insight motivated my (partial) rejection of Richard Rubenstein’s post-Auschwitz cry, “God is dead,” despite its compelling nature. That resolution of the torments of faith could not be right because “after the Holocaust, there should be no final solutions, not even theological ones.”14 The argument for brokenness can be grouped in three clusters of deductions from the phenomenology of the Shoah. First, the Holocaust tested and shattered the adequacy of the dominant Jewish weltanscha- uungs of the prewar period. Large numbers of Jews were attracted to modern Western culture and, in particular, liberalism and other movements on the political and cultural Left, with their magnetic promise of redemption of the world and the perfection of human living conditions. Most of the various groupings of Jewry only vied for the title of most faithful in spirit to modernity; ultimately, they struggled, each in their own way, with how best to live in accord with “the approach of the realization of Israel’s great messianic hope for the establishment of the Kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.”15 This shared conviction has been shattered by the increasing recognition that the Holocaust was an outcome of modernity (albeit 216 Irving Greenberg not a necessary outcome). Far from being some expression of atavism, an uprising of the suppressed Teutonic Gods, the Holocaust was uniquely made possible by the Nazi utilization of some of the out- standing and essential features of modern culture and society. One need only point to the indispensable function of technology in trans- porting and destroying such large masses of people. Then there is the work of Hilberg, Browning, Uwe Adam, and others on the central role of bureaucracy in organizing the process, including defining and legally exposing the victims, billing, arranging, manning the delivery systems, and so on.16 In all these activities, the bureaucratic process made the destruction more comprehensive as well as sustained it. The functionaries saw themselves (to use Himmler’s words) “to have remained decent fellows”; that is, “apart from exceptions caused by human weakness,” they had carried out the destruction in a bureau- cratic spirit—properly, impersonally, “legally,” without the personal anger and release of hatred that characterized medieval persecu- tions.17 (These phenomena, ironically enough, had set limits to past pogroms.)18 One might also point to the moral habits of value-free science and technology and to the distinctively modern, persuasive power of oceanic utopian ideologies that justified and muted the mass murder. Nor should one overlook that glory of modernity, the cate- gory and mind habit of universalism, which in the case of the Shoah allowed for and validated the principle of no exceptions.19 In retrospect, the persuasive power of modernity’s most glorious ideas provided a cover for evil behavior, which blinded even the vic- tims as to what was being done to them. Consider Elie Wiesel, stand- ing in the shadow of the flames of the child-burning pits of Auschwitz, denying what his eyes were telling him with the outburst, “We are living in the twentieth century, after all; Jews are not burned anymore”; “The Middle Ages are behind us, aren’t they, Father, far behind us?”20 (Of course, they were. In medieval times, only limited numbers were burned.) Call to mind as well Alexander Donat’s comment as to why the Warsaw Ghetto did not revolt initially: “East European Jews had looked to Berlin as the symbol of law, order and [modern] culture. . . . We fell victim to our [modern] faith in mankind, our belief that humanity had set limits to the degradation and persecution of one’s fellow man.”21 The Shoah equally shatters the classic traditional paradigm of rab- binic Orthodoxy, that faith that instructed its followers to wait patiently for salvation from a miraculous Messiah and which dismissed Zionism as an impious storming of the gates of redemption.22 That faith assured its communicants that political and military power was goyische nachas and that God would protect them from all evil.23 That faith, which threw its weight against armed resistance in the Warsaw Theology after the Shoah 217

Ghetto in 1942 on the grounds that God had always protected Israel and that the age of miracles was not over, quite simply proved utterly inadequate in the face of the unfolding catastrophe.24 Of course, there are those who argue that the third, albeit minor- ity viewpoint, the Zionist vision, was proven adequate in the Holo- caust. This is, after all, the argument of Issachar Teichtal’s Aym Habanim Sameycha.25 The Zionist paradigm was validated in part, but, in the larger frame, the superiority and distancing feelings engen- dered by Zionist rigidity led to severe policy miscalculations and poor priorities. Add the inability to rescue or even to take in adequate num- bers of refugees and one may judge that the Shoah wounds (breaks) the Zionist position with the dagger of “too little, too late.”26 Second, the Shoah was made possible by the lack of limits, for example, by unbroken, self-assessed adequate—nay, triumphant— categories and modes of behavior. The cultural logic was clear. If the beginnings of the technological revolution had brought such bounty, then the full realization could only bring an overflowing of blessing until humanity’s “lips would wear out from saying, ‘Enough!’” The fact that technology had outstripped the moral growth needed to con- trol its use positively actually made the extraordinary dimensions of the genocide possible. Bureaucracy—without significant check in the destruction process and without limits that inner or externally asserted values might have applied—successfully carried out the mass murder, whereas personal- ized murders and particular outbursts of hatred would have flagged. Other good modern qualities were perverted by their exponential extension. Only utopian ideology without limit in its promises and claims could have willed such a policy and then driven such a radically evil project through the human revulsion and over the natural obstacles that would have blocked it.27 And it is the utopian-scale accomplish- ments of modernity and its spirit that anything and everything are possible that provide the penumbra of credibility for utopian ideologies. The Holocaust program and its machinery were the outcome of a Gleichschaltung policy that brought all elements of society—political and economic, institutional and cultural—together in a singly focused way behind some core authority/value system. This emphasis on orga- nization is not meant to ignore the documented actual inefficiency of this process and the residual distribution of powers and interests in the Third Reich.28 The bottom line is that there remained in Germany no cluster of political, moral, or religious power that was independent enough or strong enough to stop this monstrous policy.29 Compare the studies by R. J. Rummel of the Haiku Institute of Peace, Hawaii, and the National Center for Policy Analysis (University of Texas, Dallas) of the ten leading mass murders of the twentieth century. What all the 218 Irving Greenberg massacres have in common is that no democracy carried out even a single one of them.30 In a democracy, the power—moral, political, mil- itary, and so on—is so diffused that it is impossible to gain sufficient consensus to carry out such a drastic policy. Let me put this in classic theological terms. In establishing authority without limits and issuing absolute commands that governed the war against the Jews, Nazism crossed the line and became idolatry (avodah zarah). Idolatry is a being/force/faith/system/weltanschauung that is, in its condition, partial or fragmentary; in some cases in its partial state it is a source of good, but in its idolatrous form it assumes the guise of being whole and unlimited—thereby, it becomes unlimitedly evil. The Jewish tradition claims that the truly Infinite God is the true Source of Life who gives life and loves it. But the pseudo-Infinite (God) is not merely wrong or evil; avodah zarah is synonymous with death. Perhaps this can be explained as follows: life that is infinite and the individual human who is of infinite value (to save one life equals saving a whole world) can only be sustained by a truly Infinite, if you will, an infi- nitely Infinite Source. When the fragment—even a good one— expands within a certain space and assumes authority without limit, it cannot sustain the infinity, variety, and uniqueness of life. Threatened to be unmasked as limited by its inability to sustain the infinity of life, the pseudo-Infinite resorts to obliterating life within its sphere.31 There is another way to articulate the logic and danger of idolatry. When humans claim to be God (Absolute), they can only be infinitely more than other humans (the ratio of God to the human) by reducing the other humans to zero.32 Thus we learn from the Shoah that all human-implicated Absolutes must be reduced, made partial, in order to make them sources of life and not death. (One way of doing this is to “break” them.) Third, the key to resistance to the Shoah lay in the ability to set limits. The Nazis exploited the human desire to stay alive and thereby involved Jews in the process of destruction, as, for example, in setting up the Sonderkommandos.33 When asked at the Eichmann trial what enabled the young Jews to decide to form the Jewish Fighting Organi- zation in Vilna, Abba Kovner gave a twofold reply. Their youth and lack of experience enabled them to be ignorant of the past wisdom that accommodation and suffering patiently are the best policies for survival. (Those policies only worked when, as in the past, the oppres- sor had limited hostile designs on the Jews.) The moment of liberation to fight came, Kovner said, when they realized that all the Jews were going to die.34 Having renounced hope of living—thus no longer intimidated by the threat that they or their families would be killed for resisting—they could set a limit on the Nazi treatment to which they would submit. Viktor Frankl gave a parallel explanation for the capacity Theology after the Shoah 219 to spiritually resist. Those who could vitally link to a reality, that is, a world of values beyond the camp (it mattered less whether it was through a religious belief or a secular vision), or those who could con- nect to an inner space that blocked out the camp’s iron rules of death and its all encompassing powers—these people were better able to resist internalizing the camp’s values and judgments.35 Righteous Gentiles speak of their ability to connect to Jews or to just know that the killing process was wrong; these attitudes and insights enabled them to see the limits of the Nazi New Order and the wrongfulness of what was being done all around them.36 By contrast, the SS was taught to be unconditionally obedient and absolutely loyal to the group and to forego allowing individual conscience to demur.37 In the Einsatzgruppen trials, Otto Ohlendorf was the one leader who forthrightly confessed his murderous behavior. In his final state- ment, he comes closest to openly admitting and explaining the deeper moral judgment in his decision to carry out the Fürhrer’s order to kill all Jews. His attraction to Nazism stemmed from “the end of the Chris- tian idea as a binding goal for humanity in its social systems and of the individual turning to the beyond, to life in God.” The effect was that “man lacked absolute and uniform values in his life. . . . [T]he invio- late metaphysical relatedness of politics was lost.” There were no longer “uniform values which might have been the constant objective of society or the state.” Modern values such as “autonomy, wealth, social position” gripped him but clashed with his religious and national norms. In Nazism, he saw the promise to replace the chang- ing rule of group interests by “an order which was based on the con- ception of totality in relation to every individual irrespective of his social status.”38 Thus, in Ohlendorf’s view, Nazism would supply the basis of a new world order in which individuals would be given both their economic interests and their national concerns in a way that would restore wholeness, that is, reinstill a sense of meaning and over- ride the divisive, conflicting modern forms of self-serving and group interests (pp. 385, 388). For this goal, he would do anything— enabling him to see the children he killed not as defenseless children but as “a [future] danger no smaller than that of the parents” (p. 356). This group (the Jews), after all, was the last barrier to the total redemption of humanity (including the overcoming of the selfish indi- vidualism and materialist class strife of modern culture). Thus redemption without limit “justified” and emotionally enabled murder without limit. It follows, therefore, that those who seek to prevent any- thing resembling a future Holocaust must work on every front for lim- its on ideas, values, and forces that claim to be absolute. (Let me add that despite the parallel, I do not equate the difficulties that the vic- tims—who were overwhelmed by overpowering forces—had in trying 220 Irving Greenberg to set limits with those of the people in the ranks of the perpetrators or the bystanders.) These are the moral and historical reasons why the Holocaust points to the brokenness of our inherited conceptual and ideological categories. This insight independently recapitulates a classic Jewish paradigm, namely, historical catastrophes of great magnitude are interpreted by Lurianic Kabbalah as a sign that there is a disastrous break in the cosmic structures. Thus, brokenness (shvirat hakelim) is at the heart of Creation. While the human’s task is tikkun—to heal and correct this brokenness—the first step is to acknowledge its presence.39 In asserting the limits and partial nature of our received categories and truths, we are bringing them into harmony with the cosmic forces as they are now constituted, according to Lurianic Kabbalah. This articulation is in itself an act of identifying with the Divine, which moves us away from idolatrous behaviors. This insight as to the limita- tions of paradigms paves the way to articulating even true beliefs and values in modalities more modest and more respectful of others in their claims. In turn, setting limits on truth claims and ethical norms reduces the chance that good values will “run away” for the sake of good and lead to evil.

THE LIMITS OF BROKENNESS

The concept of brokenness must be properly understood. What is broken is not destroyed, but it is not whole and is no longer (if it ever was) fully encompassing. One can compare this state to that of Patriarch Jacob after his struggle with the angel. He is left wounded and limping, but he is still Jacob. Indeed, he has been ennobled and become Israel in the very process that has injured him.40 The broken system recognizes that it is partial; perhaps it sees itself as a diminished fragment from a larger whole and, for that rea- son, necessarily incomplete. The brokenness may stem from flaws in the system/truth/paradigm; recognition of failings is an important source of modesty and openness to others.41 The brokenness may also reflect a whole that has been wounded or damaged by reality. In such a case, the break/wound is a tribute to the high standards or the deep commitment to human reality of the wounded one. Thus, the wound is a mark of nobility, even though it may reflect a weakness and vul- nerability to a hard blow from refractory reality. The concrete application of the recognition that all categories of meaning are severely challenged after the Shoah is wide-ranging. Henceforth, it is less a matter of deciding whether the theist response or the atheist response is right; rather, whatever one’s position, one is Theology after the Shoah 221 ethically bound to admit its limitations. The specific position is only credible some of the time or with some of the people. Therefore, the experienced truth of theism does not utterly refute the polar position of atheism; the other is on the same spectrum of response to life’s con- dition and perhaps is even incorporated partially within one’s own position. One can apply this insight to a wide range of religious, meta- physical, and even political concepts or values. Once the complacency of perceiving one’s own truth as whole (i.e., absolutely adequate) is broken, then one can recognize that the opposing view may be on the very same continuum of response and that one position shades into the other. Under these circumstances, one willingly self-limits in rec- ognition of the other. The alternate response is perceived not as the enemy but as the complementary position, or as the corrective move- ment, or as the challenge that tests and purifies one’s own position.42 The recognition that one’s own system is partial and flawed triggers the capacity to self-criticize in order to deal with these flaws. Having yielded the claims of absolute perfection, one is released to admit errors and correct them. One is even free to be ashamed of one’s own errors and sins and to admire the strengths and values of others. There is less fear of erring by learning from the other (or of being labeled as the other) when the other is on the same continuum. In an earlier paper, I once argued that none of the denominations had the insight to anticipate, to prevent, or to deal in some superior way with the ongoing Shoah, let alone to respond adequately after- ward. The question was asked: If so, in light of the Shoah, should one be Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform? My reply was: After the Holo- caust, it is not so important whether you are Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform (let me add, or secular) as long as you are ashamed of it.43 That “shame” is the sign of brokenness, of flaw. This shock of recogni- tion should not be confused with rejection or distancing because one must love a system at its best enough to notice its shortcomings. One must respect a weltanschauung enough to be ashamed of it, and one must be committed enough to stay with it and be motivated to work to correct its faults. Thus, the sense of limitations operates to prevent outbreaks of any potential evil even as moral humility helps move the system toward its own tikkun. The most prevalent and effective method of preventing pathological absolutism from rearing its head is to create the conditions of pluralism. Worldwide, after the Shoah, a broad spectrum of movements has drawn on this insight. The presence of multiple political and eco- nomic mechanisms prevents totalitarian concentrations of force. Wider distribution of the levers of power begins to offer potential vic- tims some assurances against their victimization.44 The determination to end the monopoly of force in the hand of oppressors drives the 222 Irving Greenberg widespread phenomenon of liberation movements, which are initiated by hitherto powerless groups throughout the world. Because power takes many forms, the breaking up of cultural hegemony and of ethi- cal centralization is also desperately needed.45 Moral decentralization is insurance against the creation of scapegoats or even of outsiders so isolated that they can be easily victimized. Similarly, one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism is the challenge to universalized claims or to unitary classic canons.46 Postmodern philosophical emphases on plural voices and the denial that any norm or classic can speak across all lines of group and cultural diversity should be understood as acts of breaking up absolute claims. Particularization is often dismissed as an attempt at the balkanization of national and international heritages or as a politically correct search for diversity in sources. A more charitable reading would see the deeper issue. The insistence that all narratives are grounded in specific groups (and that their authority is conditioned by that factor) is an attempt to set needed limits on valid truths. No matter how distin- guished or powerful systems/narratives/truths are, they must be taught their limitations and their brokenness. Only in this way can one create a cultural situation where gleichschaltung is never again possible. Of course, there are dangers of relativism and loss of values implicit in resistance to unifying visions and master narratives. But even such relativism should be seen as a product of the counterreac- tion to the inherited concentration of cultural power. The past exces- sive absolutization of inherited truth systems has, in the short term, generated overreactions, namely, relativistic responses. These new generalizations—that there are no absolute truths, that no statements can transcend group interests and power sponsorship—must be chal- lenged, lest new (negative claims) absolutes be substituted for past (positive claims) absolutes. But the real goal is to achieve a new balance in which multiple systems/truths can coexist (and even conflict) without invading or destroying other valid truths. The alternative to absolutism is not relativism but pluralism, for example, limits and checks on truths, not the denial of truth. Perhaps the deepest insight growing out of the systematic application of the principle of brokenness is the recognition that all humanly possessed truths—even in divinely revealed systems—are perforce limited. One must spell out in every case the range of a truth’s validity, the context of a system’s credibility, the limits of all claims. The drive to reach objective truth and to establish the existence of absolute values is not surrendered; it is only given its just limits and thereby protected against potential excesses. In articulating any system, one acknowl- edges its fragmentariness by stipulating its flaws. This recognition also leads to respect for other systems that may offer corrections—or at Theology after the Shoah 223 least checks—to one’s own weaknesses. The other systems or truths also may fill in needed truths or process in areas where one’s own system does not function. There is a deeper paradox in this analysis. The discovery of broken- ness and the affirmation of inadequacy are important steps toward health in any system. The group/faith/culture/system that feels fully adequate does not know its own limitations. Therefore, any such entity carries the seeds of totalitarianism and idolatry and is a potential threat to others. In the world today, a major force without a sense of limitation is the jihadist spectrum of Islam. Its various wings consider their version of Muslim faith to be the perfect and final religious word of God. This absolute claim validates their view that nonbelievers are infidels (kaffirs)—whose lives may be taken without moral compunction. They refuse to acknowledge any flaws in Islam or any plausible claims in, let alone grant equal rights to, the cultures, interests, and faith members with whom they are in conflict. As a consequence, they justify and increasingly turn to suicide bombings targeted at innocent civilians. They spin conspiracy theories and demonize the West and the Jews; use terror tactics, kidnapping, and beheadings; and offer the glorification of the young people who carry out these crimes as martyrs while dismiss- ing the significance of this life. In the classic words of Al-Qaeda spokes- man Suleiman Abu Gheith, one can discern the choice of death over life for the sake of a wrongly absolutized system, which is the hallmark of idolatry. Explaining that the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 will be contin- ued and replicated, Abu Gheith said: “America must know that the storm of airplanes will not stop, and there are thousands of young peo- ple who look forward to death like Americans look forward to living.”47 By contrast, the group/faith/culture/system that recognizes its inadequacy thereby becomes more adequate to function constructively in human society. It becomes more likely to make room for the dignity and values of others. (Note that if, in this process, any entity totally self-abnegates or yields all truth/validity claims, such an overreaction tempts others to make absolute claims. This type of abdication of claims is destructive.) In the clash and coexistence of serious—even absolute—but limited claims, the balance of culture is found. This polycentered competition in the free marketplace of ideas, truths, and systems is pluralism in action; such a cultural political condition offers the best promise of assuring “never again.”

MAKING WHOLE WITH BROKENNESS

The discussion of brokenness should not be left at too abstract a level. There are concrete cases where brokenness has been applied to religious 224 Irving Greenberg thought in a way that truly exemplifies the Shoah as a touchstone of theology. One of the most remarkable religious developments of our time is such a case: the re-visioning of the relationship of Christianity and Judaism. A poisonous, millennia-long history of hatred and deg- radation had been built on the premise that Judaism as a religion was finished and that Christianity had replaced it in the divine and human economy. Yet, within fifty years after the Holocaust, in some of the main Western Christian churches (where the impact of the Shoah was felt most powerfully) this tradition has been seriously challenged, if not yet completely reversed.48 The heritage of hatred and suppression was grounded in a master narrative (and a masterly, gripping one at that) of Judaism being superseded by Christianity; God intervened to establish Christianity’s decisive truth by miraculously and uniquely resurrecting Jesus Christ.49 This account was completed with a devastating portrait of the Jewish people as spiritually blind, hateful, and legalistic, so arrogant and disobedient that they killed Christ, that is, innocent God incar- nate. The story was incorporated in the core Holy Scriptures of Chris- tianity. Furthermore, this narrative was supplemented by centuries of ingenious and elaborate midrash on text and history, which height- ened the colors of Jewish evil and deepened the contrasting Christian good. It added up to a magisterium of a Teaching of Contempt tradi- tion that was stamped with the authority of the greatest Church fathers.50 This heritage was further extended by centuries of Christian persecution and degradation of Jews, highlighted by tales of Jewish demonic behavior (blood libels, assaults on the host, killing children who were later declared to be saints). The history was punctuated by violence—crusades, the Inquisition, expulsions, and pogroms. The Jewish counterpoint was rage and a generalized contempt for the per- secutor. This attitude was backed by a broad Jewish consensus that as a religion, Christianity was not only false Torah but a form of idolatry, with many if not all of its practitioners instinctively regarded as being less than human beings and certainly not seen as menschen.51 In America, this fortress of mutual hatred was largely disassem- bled in one generation. (In Europe, this was done less so, and else- where, much less so.) Still, overall, the impact of the Shoah on Christianity was transforming in many ways. Three factors stand out. Out of horror at the monstrous evil of the Holocaust came the recog- nition that the Gospel of Love is a primary source of hatred against Jews; this newly perceived truth broke Christianity’s claims of perfec- tion. Furthermore, although Christianity had not applied its degrad- ing concepts of Judaism to the end of planning or justifying a total genocide of the Jews, it had set Jewry up to become the very target of such a plan by the Nazis.52 The fact that the Shoah took place in Theology after the Shoah 225

Europe, which had been Christianized for a millennium and a half, suggests that as a civilizing, ethical force, Christianity was a failure.53 Those Christians most profoundly challenged by the Shoah quickly identified Christian supersessionism as the key motivating force for the rest of the degradation; they then repudiated that claim. Furthermore, among Christians who seriously confronted the Holocaust, self-criticism inexorably led to the affirmation of the Jewishness of Jesus and the desire to recover distinctive Jewish values (such as this- worldly justice) and to use them to illuminate or improve Christianity. This process admittedly has gone on in fits and starts and appears in different degrees in different church groups. Yet one can generalize: the deeper the encounter with the Holocaust, the greater the sense of Christian brokenness. The result of this teshuvah is seen in an incredible series of church statements yielding imperialist claims, affirming Judaism’s validity, and accepting moral guilt for past failures.54 Again, this process is far from complete. There is still resistance to various admissions as exemplified in the 1998 Vatican encyclical “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah.” Within fundamentalist Protestant circles there are those who cannot yet accept the fact that pure Christianity carries such Philoc- tetean moral stigmata in its body of faith. Some Protestant evangelicals or fundamentalists who have resisted these developments argue that the Holocaust and the history of degradation of the Jews are an incubus of Catholic Christianity and that the evil images were spread before Protes- tantism ever existed. Thus they betray their blindness to Luther’s hatred and the ongoing hateful effect of the Passion narratives on their own believers and others.55 The deeper issue is that many evangelicals can- not imagine how they can accept the pluralism of salvation implicit in these insights without betraying the authority claims of their Lord and Redeemer—which only dramatizes how unbroken they feel in their faith. One is tempted to say that they have not pondered deeply enough on the excruciating experience of the Crucifixion—or of the Shoah. The danger in denying brokenness is becoming implicated in evil. John XXIII felt guilty and wounded by the Holocaust; he set in motion a fundamental Catholic rethinking vis-à-vis Jews (and the world as well). His successor Paul VI identified with Pius XII in the Shoah and was tempted thereby into watering down the “Declaration on the Jews,” refused to recognize Israel’s de jure political existence, and ended up maintaining silence in the face of the threat of genocide in 1967.56 Sometimes the split is in the person himself. John Paul II, wounded by the Shoah, acknowledged Judaism as a continuing valid religion.57 John Paul II, insisting on the wholeness of Pius XII and of the Eternal Church qua church, equivocates and resists responsibility for the failures of both in “We Remember.”58 226 Irving Greenberg

Nor should one overlook the challenges to Judaism. Because Jews feel no guilt for the Holocaust, they have not spent much time medi- tating on Judaism’s delegitimation of Christianity.59 Yet the tradition contains hostile and degrading images of Christians and Christianity; luckily in the past, Jews were too weak to act on them. Of course many liberal Jews simply set aside these texts and images as they modernize Judaism. Still, because there is little sense of brokenness among liberal or traditional Jews (for different reasons), there has been very little work on challenging these denials of Gentile humanity. There has been even less pressure on Judaism to articulate a positive vision of Christianity as the independent, dignified religion of a billion people. In Diaspora, the religious costs of this complacent “wholeness” lie pri- marily in a turning inward and some apathy toward the fate and faiths of others. As a result, there are many missed opportunities to empha- size and act on the stores of love and universal responsibility within Judaism. The lack of broadening weakens Jewry’s capacity to handle freedom, and choice, and full acceptance, thus leading to greater assimilation. Nevertheless, the minority status and immersion in dem- ocratic culture (diaspora Jewry may be defined as kehillot hagedurot bedarchei hatarbuyot—communities bounded within the paths of the cultures) prevent acting on these darker traditions and impulses.60 However, in Israel where Jews do have power and can do damage to others, many of these texts circulate in Orthodox circles that are conflicted over the relationship of democracy and Torah. Sadly, in those groups there is little critical sense to check these sources and even less understanding of Judaism’s brokenness, which can lead to self-critique and affirmation of the other. Thus we see these texts emerge periodically to justify the claim that Gentile life is worth less than the life of Jews and to validate violence against alleged missionar- ies or to preach the right to expel or even kill Arabs as the reincarna- tion of Amalek.61 Some circles in this radical religious Right have absolutized the obligation not to return any part of the sacred Land of Israel to non-Jews, that is, the Palestinians. Any compromise of land for peace would constitute disobedience to God’s command. This was also translated into the judgment that a prime minister who endan- gered Jewish land (and allegedly Jewish lives) by making a “false” peace with Arabs was in the halachic category of a rodef (pursuer)— one who is actively seeking the death of another innocent person. Under Jewish law, any bystander has the obligation to save the potential victim and has the right to kill the pursuer, if needed, to save the intended victim’s life. By this totalizing, uncritical thinking, the circles around Yitchak Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, paved the way for the murderer to act, feeling justified by an absolute mandate and by the denial of any authority to the alternate view of peace and governance.62 Theology after the Shoah 227

More reputable, mainstream Orthodox rabbis failed to check and con- demn these views because they felt little sense of the problematics in the absolute claims of halacha or the flaws in the system when upheld uncritically. The moral purification of Jewish religion and its immuni- zation to becoming a vehicle for hatred and murder are heavily dependent on establishing its brokenness. Let this article conclude with a reflection on some earlier work of mine now re-visioned in light of the Holocaust as an epistemological force that transforms our understanding of our core metaphors. In the 1970s I wrote that “faith is living life in the presence of the Redeemer, even when the world is unredeemed.” Then, stunned, indeed shattered, by the encounter with the Shoah, I confessed that after Auschwitz, the best one could muster is “moment faiths”— “moments when Redeemer [God] and vision of redemption are present, interspersed with times when the flames and smoke of burn- ing children blot out faith.”63 I was trapped between the irresistible force of the persistence of the memory of Exodus and the contact with Israel, the redemption event of our time, and the immovable object of Auschwitz, which cut me off from God and hope. Because I refused to repudiate either truth, I lived with moment faiths. In my mind, I could not wait until some new understanding, some new redemption, could overcome this dichotomy and restore the whole of faith. I longed for the day when we would get back to God and experience steady-state faith and truth again. In retrospect, that conception of the nature of truth and of faith is wrong; that understanding lacks the insight of the Holocaust taken at full blast, that is, it does not incorporate the paradigm of brokenness. All truths are moment truths.64 They will remain that way until the coming of the Messiah, that is, as long as the world is flawed and frag- mented. Longing for wholeness and certainty is understandable. At this point, however, insistence on certainty represents nostalgia for restoration to a pre-expulsion, pre-Shoah Eden where life without limits and harmony without conflict existed. We are told that the path back to Eden is barred by the blade of an ever-turning fiery sword. Is it too poetic-after-Auschwitz to see in this image a hint of being thrust into a world, illuminated by the flames of the Shoah, in which all existence and all claims must be viewed with clear-eyed, sober realism, exposed in all their limits? In the flawed, finite, wounded world that we inhabit, error and limit are incorporated in the essence of the truth. Recognition of this concept is the key to respecting other people; constructive channeling of this insight can prevent the destructive floods that flowed forth from past absolutisms. The only way to wholeness is to heal the world and to work to take the poison out of absolutism without eroding all 228 Irving Greenberg values and truth in the process. Post-Shoah, the yearning for perfect- ing finitude, properly harnessed, can fuel the drive for tikkun olam (mending the world), politically and economically as well as religiously and philosophically. In the interim, we must tend to our modest gar- dens of truth and learn to understand faith and conviction in a new light. So the statement “All truths are moment truths” is both a sub- stantive and a methodological dictum. At the least, in the aftermath of the Shoah, all truth claims are suspect and need to be reexamined, especially if they carry the potential to harm others. At the most, this principle leads us to de-absolutize and reduce all our truth claims. In the course of becoming more modest, cultures will become more com- petent, and many past dichotomies will become future continuums. A case in point, to have faith is not to have certitude of the whole truth. The truth of God’s existence incorporates the experience of God’s absence/nonexistence some part of the time and in some part of the soul. It could be that for the devout or the religiously gifted the truth of God’s existence is known to them 90 percent of the time; for others it will be 50 percent of the time; for others, maybe less. But even for the true believer there will be moments—a child hanging on the gallows, a wicked ruler triumphant, a cancer unchecked—when there is no sign of God to be seen. This is the deepest truth behind messianism—that only when the world is perfect will the true God’s existence be true 100 percent of the time to 100 percent of the people. This is what Isaiah means when he says that “[only] when they will do no harm nor any destruction in my entire holy mountain [the earth], then the land will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (11.9). Every truth and every teaching must be speci- fied—over what range of the spectrum of the truth is it valid, over what range of time and people does it apply? Otherwise, if applied out of its time, or scope, or audience, the truth will be false. Every partial truth pushed far enough beyond its partial scope (e.g., absolutized) will become false; eventually, if it is unchecked, it will turn evil and deadly. Indeed, I came to see that many of the classic texts in the tradition that are morally objectionable or evil in application are not simply false. Quite often, they are moment truths, but the evil lay in applying them outside of their moment. This understanding of specific condi- tions that validate and limit truth opens the way to denature evil with- out having to deny its (moment) truth. The total denial of (partially true) evil texts often convinces those who hold them dear that the deniers do not understand that element of truth that has convinced the believers—so they continue to uphold those texts as totally true. I offer the example of the single most terrible text in rabbinic tradi- tion, which I came to see differently in light of the Shoah: “The best of Theology after the Shoah 229

Gentiles, one should kill.”65 Taken literally, authoritatively, this pas- sage is a license for the mass murder of innocents, and I could not countenance it.66 However, over the years, I came to grips with the behavior of the SS guards and functionaries at Auschwitz, especially as revealed at the Auschwitz trials. Auschwitz is the place where human life was so deval- ued as to condemn people to be murdered en masse and extinguished at whim. The prisoners were dehumanized from start to finish. The incoming prisoners (those temporarily spared from the gas chambers) were shaved (“If you can call it shaving. Our hair was torn out”) and sent to the tattooing station: “There it was made clear to us that we were not human beings but only numbers.”67 In this environment, the SS doctors and guards did their selection duty and received their extra liquor ration as their due recompense (p. 56). In this atmosphere, one of the SS doctors, Professor Kremer, participated in a “special action” selection, and, as noted in the sen- tence next to that report in his diary, he then had an excellent lunch of tomato soup, cold chicken, red cabbage, and “marvelous vanilla ice cream.” In essence, the only limit on murder and sadism was the inner capacity of the functionary to feel sorry or emotionally unable to act further. Consider then the case of SS Medical Officer Scherge (p. 79). He was assigned to Block 21, where prisoners were killed by a phenol injection. Scherge declared that he objected to the treatment of pris- oners, to the point that he was arrested on October 7, 1942, and locked in the prison bunker for about two months (although he was never interrogated or beaten). Scherge claimed that the arrest order came from Berlin and was due to his “favoritism toward enemies and suspicion of having been in contact with prisoners” (p. 78). After his release, Scherge reported that he was ill for a few months. Upon recovery, he was sent back to the prison hospital and was ordered again to inject children with the lethal phenol (p. 79). At his trial, Scherge denied doing the injections. However, according to the testi- mony of numerous prisoners, at least 119 children were murdered with phenol injections in the closing days of February 1943. Force was used to get them into the executioner’s chair, and Scherge himself gave them the lethal injection into their hearts. The witnesses reported that the situation was so horrible that the “medic” (i.e., Scherge) ran away in depression. The next day his colleague, Hantl, a codefendant, murdered the remaining eighty children (p. 79). “You broke down and couldn’t go on?” the judge asked (p. 79). Here, then, is one definition of the best—most humane—medical orderly at Auschwitz. He broke down and ran away after injecting some forty children to death. 230 Irving Greenberg

As a former prisoner, Dr. Ella Lingens testified at the trial: “There were few sadists [among the SS]. . . . The others were per- fectly normal men who knew the difference between right and wrong” (p. 91). She explained that interspersed with their murder- ous behavior were occasional acts of unexpected softness and clem- ency: “I know of almost no SS man who could not claim to have saved someone’s life” (p. 95). Thus, witness Maryla Rosenthal testified that she had seen a defendant, Gestapo officer Wilhelm Boger, strike and trample prison- ers during interrogations and beat people to death until they no longer looked human (p. 106). Another prisoner, Dunja Wasserstrom, described Boger’s behavior on a day in November 1944. Boger saw a little Jewish boy brought to Auschwitz, holding an apple in his hand and, apparently, “enjoying himself. . . . Boger went over to the boy, grabbed his legs, and smashed his head against the wall. Then he calmly picked up the apple. . . . About an hour later I was called to Boger to interpret in an interrogation and I saw him eating the child’s apple” (p. 133). Nevertheless, Rosenthal testified that Boger treated her “humanely.” He gave her food and even saved her life when a female capo denounced her (p. 106). This brings us to arguably the best Nazi functionary in Auschwitz. Of all the defendants, only one, Dr. Franz Lucas, had been “ostracized by his comrades” for his respectful behavior toward the prisoners. “He was the only doctor who treated us humanely,” testified the prisoner witnesses. He was the only one who addressed prisoners by their proper titles; he had actually stolen from the SS pharmacy for the prisoners, bought food with his own money, and shared rations. He was the only defendant who “had helped people from beginning to end; and not only did he not pose as a ‘savior’—very much in contrast to most of the other defendants—he consistently refused to recognize the witnesses who testified in his favor and to remember the incidents recounted by them” (pp. xxv). A woman deported from Hungary came late in the trial to testify against Lucas. She had arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944, ignorant of the rule at Auschwitz at that time that all mothers with children were gassed upon arrival. To the day of her testimony all she under- stood was that Lucas had snatched her baby and condemned it to death. She testified angrily: “I held a baby in my arms. They said that mothers could stay with their children, and, therefore, my mother gave me the baby and dressed me so as to make me look older. . . . When Doctor Lucas saw me, he probably realized that the baby was not mine. He took it from me and threw it to my mother” (p. xxx). The woman had never forgiven Lucas for condemning her baby, but the court (judge) immediately knew the truth: “Did you Theology after the Shoah 231 perhaps have the courage to save the witness?” (p. xxx). In response to this question, Lucas was silent. Ever since I came across such accounts, and whenever I have reread the trial record, a truth emerges from my gut that is knotted and twisted in pain; the truth rises swiftly, chilling my heart and freez- ing my blood, and then forces itself and bursts outward from my lips: “The best SS functionary in Auschwitz—the one who had pity— deserves to die! Must die!” We must understand the moment of truth. The guards at Auschwitz in 1944 were less than 1 percent, less than 1/10,000th of 1 percent, of the Gentiles of the world. And we must stand on total guard lest the truth (that one should kill them) be applied 1 percent or 5 percent of the time—in which case it is a license for murder and an idolatrous, evil teaching. If this moment truth is applied one iota out of its time, or place, or people, then every decent person must be alert to disobey it; its authority must be utterly destroyed. Such texts’ truths must be viewed like a cancer cell. Growth is the essence of life. But growth out of control—out of its time or place—becomes cancer. If even one cell escapes being destroyed, then it is a carrier of death for the whole body. This principle is true for so many truths. “Never again” is one of the profoundest truths to come out of the encounter with the Holo- caust. But applied by Meir Kahane, one-sidedly—without awareness of the “brokenness” of the Jews and the Jewish tradition—it became a prescription for continuing the Holocaust, in spirit and values, by inflicting violence and proposing to inflict expulsion and even death on innocent civilians, Arabs, and others.68 It will take generations to develop the language and rating sys- tem of all truths so they can be presented correctly in their moment(s) of truth. This same precision will help us identify the limits of each truth and each religious (or political or cultural) sys- tem. This calibration will help each group make room for the truth of the other. Out of self-criticism and self-limitation will come the affirmation of the other and even a concept of partnership with the other to cover all the time, and people, and places that need to be covered. Out of such recognitions will come exchanges in which the best of each worldview can be learned and incorporated into the other. Out of this process of the dissolution of excess claims will emerge the integrity of values held in the presence of clashing cul- tures and faiths. This articulation is the secret of pluralism, which is neither relativism nor the denial of values. Pluralism is the living together of absolute truths/faiths/systems that have come to know and accept their own limitations, thus making room for the dignity and truth of the other. This broken truth is the 232 Irving Greenberg future of truth in a broken world. Rav Nachman of Bratzlav once wrote that there is no heart so whole as a broken heart. After the Shoah, the world will come to know that there is no truth so whole as a broken truth.69 INSTITUTE FOR JEWISH LIVING

NOTES

I wish to thank Yechiel Septimus for extensive research on the footnotes; Professor Alvin Rosenfeld for a most helpful reading of a draft of this article, which significantly shaped the outcome; Professors Avi Sagi and Zvi Zohar who gave guidance and help in assessing the history of commentary on the text δρϖ οηηυδχα χυψ and Rachel Levine and Lisa Eisner for their assistance. 1. Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 2d ed. (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 247– 265; Elie Wiesel, The Town beyond the Wall (New York, 1964), p. 10. See also Michael Berenbaum, The Vision of the Void (Middletown, Conn., 1979), espe- cially pp. 9–51; Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? (ed.) Eva Fleischner (New York, 1974), p. 27; Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (Northvale, N.J., 1997), pp. 88–89; Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York, 1973), pp. 94–113; and Eliyahu Dessler, Strive for Truth (Michtav Me-Eliyahu), Vol. 1, trans. and annotated by Aryeh Carmel (New York, 1978), p. 205. For a similar but differently organized spectrum of comparison, see Dan Cohen-Sherbok, Holocaust Theology (London, 1989). 2. Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz (Princeton, 1998), especially pp. 19–34. 3. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, p. xx; Richard Rubenstein, “The State of Jewish Belief,” Commentary (August 1966), p. 134. See also the exchange between Richard Rubenstein and Irving Greenberg, “Homeland and Holo- caust: Issues in the Jewish Religious Situation,” in The Religious Situation: 1968, (ed.) Donald R. Cutler (Boston, 1968), pp. 39–64, 91–102. It may be argued that in contrast to Holocaust studies and commemoration, the field of theol- ogy has received declining attention in the past fifteen years. Holocaust theol- ogy has come under attack as being death centered or as being an ersatz substitute for observance and learning. An attempt has been made to dismiss the Holocaust and history and to turn to spirituality as the appropriate or credible focus for theology. I believe that these developments are a reprise of the incomprehension and blindness to the unprecedented and shattering nature of the Shoah that marked many bystanders’ responses during as well as after the event. However, this is a matter for another article. (This is not to deny that there were important responses during and after the ongoing Holo- caust. See, for example, Gershon Greenberg’s listings in Shearith HaPleitah VeHaShoah: Rshimat Ma’amorim U’Sefarim Al Hashkafot B’Inyanei HaEmunah HaYehudit Le’achar Shoat Yehuday Europa [1944–1949] [Ramat Gan, 1994]; Theology after the Shoah 233

HaTzibbur KaDati BaYishuv B’Eretz Yitsael Bitekufat HaShoah: Reshimat Persumim al Hashkafot B’Inyahei HaEmunah Hayehudit VeHaShoah [1938–1948] [Ramat Gan, 1997]; and HaEmunah HaYehudit VeHaShoah BeMachshavah HaYehudit Hadatit B’Artzot HaBrit BeShanim 1938–1948 [Ramat Gan, 1999]). 4. Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, p. 94. 5. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History, pp. 8–14; Emil Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust,” Commentary (August 1968), pp. 30–36. 6. Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1. (New York, 1994), pp. 27–68. See also A. Roy Eckardt, “Is the Holocaust Unique?” World- view (September 1974), pp. 21–35; Alice Eckardt and A. Roy Eckardt, “The Holocaust and the Enigma of Uniqueness: A Philosophical Effort at Practical Clarification,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 450 (July 1989), pp. 168ff; and Alan S. Rosenbaum, (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, 1996). 7. On various approaches to uniqueness, the opposition to the concept, and the ramifications of the debate, see Gavriel Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (spring 1999), pp. 28–61. 8. Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum (New York, 1981), pp. 27–58; Irving Greenberg, “The Third Great Cycle of Jewish History” and “Voluntary Cove- nant,” in Perspectives: A CLAL Thesis, published by CLAL—the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (New York, 1984), especially pp. 8–9, 33–37. 9. Greenberg, “The Third Great Cycle of Jewish History,” pp. 4–7. Jacob Neusner has offered his own interpretation of the transformational impact of the destruction of the Second Temple in a decades-long, awesomely prolific series of studies. See now his recent series adumbrating the rabbinic theologi- cal hermeneutic of the biblical heritage in light of the catastrophe: The Halakhah of the Oral Torah: A Religious Commentary, 24 vols., Scholars Press of South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism (Atlanta, 1997–1999). See also Jacob Neusner, The Theology of Oral Torah. Revealing the Justice of God (Montreal, 1998). Neusner has summarized this work in his monograph Jewish Law: From Moses to the Mishnah, Hiram College Lectures in Religion (n.p., n.d. [1999]). An earlier precritical treatment is found in E. E. Urbach’s discussion of the Written and Oral Law in The Sages, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 286–314. 10. Babylonian Talmud Baba Batra 12a; Babylonian Talmud Baba Metzia 59b. 11. On rabbinic mandates, see Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 23a; on rebal- ancing the covenant, see Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 88a. See the treatment in Greenberg, “Voluntary Covenant,” pp. 29–33. 12. Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York, 1970), especially pp. 69–79. 13. Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York, 1989), pp. 200, 309– 310; Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” p. 22. 14. Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” p. 26. 15. The “Pittsburgh Platform” of 1885, principle 5, reprinted in Textual Sources for the Study of Judaism, edited and translated by Philip S. Alexander (Chicago, 1984), p. 137. 234 Irving Greenberg

16. On the deportations, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol. 2 (New York, 1985), pp. 393–407; Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 125–144; and Uwe Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972). 17. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer, SS, speech at a meeting of SS major generals, Posen, October 4, 1943, Document 1919 PS, in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. 4 (Washington, D.C., 1946), p. 563. 18. Cp. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 12–27. 19. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, especially pp. 61–66; Jacob Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York, 1968), especially pp. 20ff; Jacob Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston, 1952); and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1950). 20. Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Times (New York, 1968), p. 176. 21. Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom (New York, 1978), p. 103. 22. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York, 1976), pp. 407–409; Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago, 1996), pp. 22–24, 40–78. 23. “Yishuv Eretz Yisrael,” in Yoel Moshe Teitelbaum, Va-Yo’el Moshe (Jerusalem, 1978), sec. 149, quoted in Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, p. 45 (see also p. 47). For Haredim in politics, see Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism, pp. 163–164. 24. “I believe in God and in miracles. God will not allow his people, Israel, to be destroyed. We must wait and the miracle will happen”—these are the words of Zisha Friedman, the spokesman for Agudat Israel, spoken at the meeting of the Warsaw Jewish underground at the onset of the Nazi deporta- tion and extermination program in July 1942, as reported by Hirsch Berlinski in his “Zikhronot,” pp. 9–10, quoted in Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943 (Brighton, 1982), p. 229. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, The Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Stephen Cappellari (Boston, 1988), p. 27. See also Hillel Zeidman, Yoman Ghetto Varsha (New York, 1957), pp. 68–71. For a particularly tragic account of the disintegration of that faith under the crushing pressure of the Holocaust, see Mendel Piekarz, Yahadut Polin Bayn Shtay Hamilchamot U’Vigezerot Tash-Tasha (“Hashoah”) (Jerusalem, 1990), especially pp. 412–416, 424–434. 25. Issachar Solomon Teichtal, Aym Habanim Sameycha (Jerusalem, 1983). See Piekarz’s treatment in Yahadut Polin Bayn Shtay Hamilchamot U’Vigezerot Tash-Tasha (“Hashoah”), pp. 416–423. 26. For Zionist rescue policies, see Dina Porat, The Blue and Yellow Stars of David (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), especially pp. 239–263. See also Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, trans. Haim Watzman (New York, 1993), especially pts. 1–2. 27. Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide (New York, 1979), pp. 18–30; Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, pp. 5ff, especially p. 10. 28. Detlev J. K. Peukart, Inside Nazi Germany, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, 1987), pp. 81–85. 29. Henry Feingold, Bearing Witness (Syracuse, 1995), pp. 253–276. See also Henry Feingold, “Roosevelt and the Holocaust,” Judaism (summer 1969), Theology after the Shoah 235 pp. 259–276; and The Politics of Rescue (New Brunswick, 1970), especially pp. 126–166, 208–247. 30. R. J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Non-violence (New Brunswick, 1997). 31.The Nazi creation of a world of death, of a Kingdom of Night, is captured powerfully in such fundamental Holocaust narratives as Primo Levi, If This Is a Man [Survival in Auschwitz] (New York, 1959); and Elie Wiesel, Night (New York, 1959). 32. On what this reduction to zero meant in the Shoah, see the chapter on the excremental vision in Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York, 1980). 33. Rebecca Camhi Fromer, The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando (Tuscaloo, Ala., 1993), especially pp. 43–49. See also Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 117–150. 34. For Kovner’s testimony, see Session 27 in The Trial of Adolph Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, Vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1992), especially p. 466. 35. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, 1965), pp. 64–79. 36. David Gushee, The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 91–117; Samuel Oliner and Pearl Oliner, The Altruistic Personality (New York, 1988), especially pp. 113–141; and Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness (New York, 1986), especially pp. 113–193. 37. On the SS “virtue” of loyalty and obedience, see Himmler’s speech at Posen, in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, pp. 566–567. Otto Ohlendorf testified that he was able to carry out his orders despite his conscience because “it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry out orders given by the leaders of the state” (in Trials of War Criminals, Vol. 4 [Nuremberg, November 14, 1945–October 1, 1946], p. 354). 38. Ohlendorf’s final statement, in Trials of War Criminals, pp. 384–385, 388. The following Ohlendorf quotes are from this publication, and page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text. 39. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), pp. 265–278. 40. See Genesis 32:21–32. 41. One should point also to Primo Levi’s concept of “impurity” being an indispensable and inescapable aspect of human systems and of life itself. By contrast, says Levi, Nazism sought “purity” and used the category to isolate (and then eliminate) the Jews as “impure.” Purity may be translated as the claim of being absolute and 100 percent, whereas impurity is the inconsistent, the different, the limitation (brokenness) of the principle. Levi starts toward this generalization: “I am Jewish. . . . I am the impurity that makes the zinc react. I am the grain of salt or mustard. Impurity, certainly.” He states, “Dis- sension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed. Fascism does not want them, forbids them . . . it wants everybody to be the same” (The Periodic Table [New York, 1984], p. 34). On this, see Jonathan Wilson, “Primo Levi’s Hybrid Texts,” Judaism, Vol. 48 (Winter 1999), pp. 67–72. 42. See my ongoing exploration of these themes in a series of essays on pluralism: Irving Greenberg, “From Pluralism to Partnership,” in “Unity 236 Irving Greenberg without Uniformity: The Challenge of Pluralism,” ed. Ruth Weyl, Proceedings from the Martin Buber House, No. 26 (spring 1998), pp. 68–81; “Covenantal Pluralism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (summer 1997), pp. 425–436, especially pp. 432, 434–435; “Judaism and Christianity: Their Respective Roles in the Strategy of Redemption,” in Visions of the Other, (ed.), Eugene J. Fisher (New York, 1994), pp. 7–27, especially pp. 21, 24–27; and Yitzhak Rabin and the Ethic of Jewish Power (New York, 1995), especially pp. 8–9, 18, 25–34. The first three of the above essays and some further explorations in religious pluralism have been collected in Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia, 2004). 43. Joseph Telushkin, “Foreword,” in Irving Greenberg and Shalom Freedman, Living in the Image of God (Northvale, N.J., 1998), p. xix. 44. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York, 1983), pp. 281–311. See also Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 163–166. 45. See, for example, Jean Grimshaw, Philosophy and Feminist Thinking (Minneapolis, 1986), especially the chapter entitled “The Idea of a Female Ethic,” pp. 187–226. For a parallel source, see Eleanor H. Kulendall, “Toward an Ethic of Nurturance: Luce Irigaray on Mothering and Power,” in Mother- ing: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, N.J., 1983), pp. 187– 226. See also “Cultural Feminism” in Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory (New York, 1993), pp. 65–90. 46. See selections from Jacques Derrida, “Spurs: Nietzche’s Styles,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1991), pp. 372–375. See also Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (New York, 1988). 47. Al-Qaeda, statement, issued October 9, 2001, posted on PBS’s Online NewsHour, (www.pbs.org/newshour/topic/terrorism/2001.html). 48. On new understandings of the Jewish–Christian relationship, see Paul van Buren’s three-volume work, A Theology of the Jewish Christian Reality (San Francisco, 1980); A. Roy Eckardt and Alice Eckardt, Long Night’s Journey into Day (Detroit, 1982), pp. 82–110; A. Roy Eckardt, Elder and Young Brothers (New York, 1967); A. Roy Eckardt, Your People, My People (New York, 1974); Mary C. Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self- Understanding (New York, 2000); Philip Cunningham, A Story of Shalom: The Calling of Christians and Jews by a Covenanting God (New York, 2001); and Catholic–Jewish Relations: Documents from the Holy See (London, 1999). 49. Eckardt and Eckardt, Long Night’s Journey into Day, pp. 136–143. 50. Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt (New York, 1964), pp. 32–35; Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1979), pp. 117–182. 51. For a rabbinic view that Christians are even worse than idolaters, see Lawrence H. Schiffman, “At the Crossroads,” in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York, 1991), p. 448. Jacob Katz points out that “Mendelsohn’s use of the word Mensch to denote the common humanity of Jew and Christian illustrated the new relationship which Ratio- nalism could be expected to establish between the followers of the respective faiths” (Exclusiveness and Tolerance [New York, 1961], p. 170). Theology after the Shoah 237

52. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, pp. 183–225; John T. Pawlikowski, “The Shoah: Continuing Theological Challenge for Christianity,” in The Holocaust Now, (ed.) Steven Jacobs (East Rockaway, N.Y., 1997), pp. 141–168. 53. Pawlikowski, “The Shoah”; Darrell J. Fasching, Narrative Theology after Auschwitz (Minneapolis, 1992), especially pp. 59–66; Gregory Baum, “Rethinking the Church’s Mission,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (New York, 1974), pp. 113–128. 54. For official Church documents on Catholic–Jewish relations with com- mentary and a fifty-page annotated bibliography of the dialogue, see Eugene Fisher and Leon Klenicki, (eds.), In Our Time: The Flowering of Jewish Catholic Dialogue (Mahwah, N.J., 1990). 55. Vernon Grounds, “The Delicate Diplomacy of Jewish–Christian Dia- logue,” Christianity Today (April 24, 1981), p. 12. See the discussion of this in Yechiel Eckstein, What Christians Should Know about Jews and Judaism (Waco, 1984), pp. 272–274. See the repudiation of this apologetic persistence in evil by the extraordinary statement of the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, April 18, 1995; and Ari Goldman, “Lutherans on Luther,” New York Times (April 23, 1994), p. 31. It is striking that studies of American anti- semitism from the 1950s and 1960s show that antisemitism persisted in higher percentages in groups where fundamentalism and conservative (e.g., unbro- ken) evangelical views were most entrenched. See especially Charles Glock and Rodney Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (New York, 1966); and various references in Charles Stember et al., Jews in the Mind of America (New York, 1966). See also a review of the University of California Five Year Study of Anti- Semitism in the United States in Gertrude J. Selznick and Stephen Steinberg, The Tenacity of Prejudice (New York, 1969), especially chap. 7, pp. 107–134. 56. Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” pp. 21, 47. 57. See the Pope’s statements in Eugene Fisher, “Pope John Paul II’s Pilgrimage of Reconciliation,” in Jewish Christian Encounters over the Centuries, (eds.) Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer (New York, 1994), pp. 407–411. 58. “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” in Perspective on We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (New York, 1998), pp. 27–36. For the equivocation in John Paul II’s view of the Holocaust and his support of Pius XII, see Robert G. Weisbord and Wallace P. Sillanpoa, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, 1992), pp. 194–198. 59. In an article Amos Funkenstein warns against the belief that “Judaism is immune from such abuses [as contempt for others]. . . . Discrimination and degradation could be clothed in terms of both religions.” Funkenstein points to the source of this tendency in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all three “claim to possess the full, authentic, absolute revealed truths exclusively” (“Theological Responses to the Holocaust,” in Perceptions of Jewish History [Berkeley, 1993], pp. 325–327). 60. This is, of course, an ironic play on the Meiri’s famous conferral of dig- nified status on Christians and Muslims on the grounds that they are civilized and to be treated well (e.g., not like idolaters) because they are umot hagedurot bedarchei hadatot—nations bounded (contained) within the paths of religions. See Jacob Katz’s treatment of this concept in Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish–Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York, 1983). 238 Irving Greenberg

61. See, for example, the reference to Rabbi Israel Hess, “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah,” p. 128, in Ehud Sprinzak, “The Politics, Insti- tutions and Culture of Gush Emunim,” in Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective, (ed.) Laurence J. Silberstein (New York, 1993), pp. 117–147. 62. Ehud Sprinzak, “The Politics, Institutions and Culture of Gush Emunim.” 63. Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” p. 27. 64. The term moment truths does not mean all truths are true for only one brief moment. The moment of a particular truth or system/faith/culture may extend for years, centuries, or millennia in duration. All I am asserting is that the truth is limited by its innate nature and external factors; in a broken world, we can be confident that, sooner or later, there will be an hour, a place, or a group where this assertion/insight/faith will not hold true. The truth’s moment may be a second or a millennium; it may encompass large numbers of people over a short time span; it may apply to a limited number of people over an extended time period; it may be valid in specific settings only. A truth may be absolute, but it will turn out to be so only some of the time, for some of the people, within certain limits. Moreover, moment truths’ truth may come and go—and return. Truths/faiths may also modify their claims, their inner construction, their equilibrium points, and become true again or extend their truth to this or other groups, under current or other conditions. Permanence is achieved by constant reaffirmation, by inspiring people in future genera- tions, by new insights to heal internal flaws and sicknesses, by redefinitions to deal with ever-changing audiences and sitz im lebens. To put it another way, truth is always a compound—a relationship among objective factuality, conceptual correctness, and the teacher/speaker, audi- ence, location, and circumstance under which discourse and communication take place. Even a pure, objective fact—this article is being written on Wednesday afternoon, at 4 p.m.—is a “moment truth” because (a) time will pass as I write; (b) it is true only in the eastern United States where I sit (at this very moment in East Asia, it is Thursday); and so on. If this is true for rela- tively simple facts, it is, a fortiori, so for complex conceptual and other truths. Newtonian physics turned out to account for observed data over 99 percent of conditions, but the deviations unaccounted for evoked a different framework of meaning and interpretation (truth), namely, Einsteinian physics. Historically, there has been greater resistance to applying these models to religious truths because of the absolute claims made by religions and for fear that all values and morality will dissolve in the process of historical change. This assertion of absolute and unchanging nature does not stand up to the paradigm of brokenness that is seared into our consciousness by our encoun- ter with the Shoah. The absolutist claims do not do justice to the dynamic rela- tionship of the components of truth or to the interaction between the Divine and the human. Nor do they reflect God’s continuous renewal of Creation and of covenant. I would argue that the Divine is eternal and revelation is eternal. But contrary to the claims of timeless truth, to the extent that revela- tion and Torah enter into human culture and discourse and into this broken world, they become moment (e.g., bounded) truths. Typically, they end up broken (if they do not start this way), incorporating wounded, and even evil, elements that must be confronted and corrected. The moment character of a Theology after the Shoah 239 truth may be a blessing, in that it enables a correction in the next moment (whether that interval comes sooner or later). 65. Pesikta Zutarta on Exodus 14:7. See Mekhilta and Rashi on the same verse for a parallel text; Jerusalem Talmud Kiddushin 66B, chap. 4, halacha, 14 (piska 3), in the critical edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, (ed.) Jacob Zussman (Jerusalem, 1999). See also Babylonian Talmud Massechet Soferim, chap. 15. 66. Let it be noted that I read this text literally when I first encountered it. The potential horror in the text haunted me for many years. My fears that it could be used in evil ways intensified as I came to reflect on the power and validity of other religions and on the issues of pluralism. In preparing this article I read the textual sources and usage of this phase in history. This included a search of major databases of Talmudic and rabbinic literature and the Bar-Ilan shaalot u’tshuvot (raffinic response) project. Then I discovered that, contrary to my fears, the overwhelming, indeed, surprisingly, the unani- mous, reading of the text is in its narrowest, nonmonstrous understanding. This pattern starts in the original Talmud Yerushalmi text, which links to the original Massechet Soferim text (see Jerusalem Talmud, Massechet Kiddusin 66B [col. 1186]), where the language used is hakasher shebagoyim harog (the most legitimate Gentile should be killed). The immediate context supplied is bshat milchamah harog—“in a time of war” (e.g., when you face a soldier coming at you to kill you, you may kill first). From the medieval sources of Tosafot in the Babylonian Talmud Avodah Zarah 26B (b’dh; v’ain moridin) to Mahzor Vitry, Siman 527 d.h., chap. 15, and the Tosafot HaRosh on Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 82A, which state self-evidently and exclusively that the laws apply to sh’at mil- chamah (a time of war), to Yosef Karo in the Beit Yosef Yoreh Deah sec. 158, para. 1, to the modern posek Menashe Klein in Sha’a lot U’teshuvot Meshaneh Halachot, Vol. 16, Simon 134, the statement is firmly placed in the context of war only. On all this, see the treatment in the impressive Ph.D. thesis of Yehezkel Cohen, “Hayachas El Hanachri Bahalachah U’Vemetziut Bitekoofat Hatannaim” [The Attitude toward Gentile in Halacha and in Reality in the Tannaitic Age] (Hebrew University, 1975). This thesis is particularly impressive because it is free of apologetics. See also the comprehensive and extended references found in the Encyclopedia Talmudic, Vol. 5, s.v. “Goy,” especially nn76–99. 67. Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt (New York, 1966), p. 88. The following quotes are from this publication, and page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text. 68. Meir Kahane, Never Again! A Project for Survival (Los Angeles, 1971); They Must Go (New York, 1981); and Israel: Revolution or Referendum (Secaucus, N.J., 1990). On the ideology of Meir Kahane, see Aviezer Ravitzky, “The Roots of Kahanism: Consciousness and Political Reality,” Jerusalem Quarterly, Vol. 39 (1986), 90–108. 69. Greenberg, “Voluntary Covenant,” p. 43n60.