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Yeshivat Har Etzion
Dedicated
by Aaron and Tzipora Ross and family in memory of our grandparents
Shmuel Nachamu ben Shlomo Moshe HaKohen,
Chaya bat Yitzchak Dovid,
and Shimon ben Moshe, whose yahrtzeits are this
week.
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WEEP FOR WHAT AMALEK HAS
DONE UNTO YOU:
LAMENTATION AND MEMORY OF
THE HOLOCAUST
IN
OUR GENERATION
By
Rav
Translated by
“Would that my head be water and my eyes
a fountain of tears, that I could weep day and night for the dead of my people.”
(Yirmiyahu 8:23)
The problem of evil in
the world has occupied us since antiquity; no other theological dilemma has
merited such thorough treatment in the holy writings. Contemporary thinkers are plagued no less
by the same paradox. Indeed, this is undoubtedly one of the most difficult and
agonizing questions that trouble a religious person who observes life and
witnesses the wicked vanquishing the righteous and enjoying success in their
endeavors.
To a great extent, a believing person can
only sense his smallness, his inadequacy in attempting to understand the deepest
mysteries; he can only abandon any attempt to understand how God operates and
comfort himself with the sense of divine closeness and personal attention that
often accompanies man’s suffering. Thus, although Mishlei presents a
simple world — directed at the child who is beginning to encounter the world at
large for the first time — in which a person who commits himself to goodness
dwells safely and free of fear, while the wicked are cut off from the earth,
Iyov immediately follows it as the response of the Tanakh itself,
repudiating the orderly world that is presented to the youth in Mishlei.
Iyov argues the case of the suffering victims whose world has turned
upside down in front of their eyes, who have not merited the tidy, organized
system presented in Mishlei.
In Iyov’s world, wisdom has disappeared
and there is no room for understanding; man must accept the fact that he is not
party to the mechanisms of Divine Providence, and he can do nothing but accept
the Divine will. The conclusion of Iyov is that man cannot hope to
appreciate the workings of Divine Providence in the world, so that the proper
attitude is for a human to place his trust in his Maker as Master of the
Universe. The upshot of this will be an existential relationship between man and
God, not a better understanding of suffering in the world.
All this is true with
respect to the suffering individual. Here, the Tanakh recognizes the
tension between an orderly world in which Divine justice is apparent and a world
in which the ways of His Providence are hidden from our human understanding. The
situation, though, is different when it comes to reward and punishment on the
communal level. The various forms of suffering that afflict society find a clear
and consistent message in the Torah, asserting that all the ills that befall the
community are the result of sin; they are nothing but the punishment for the
sins of the community.
The principle of Divine
beneficence and malevolence in accordance with the loyalty — or lack thereof —
of Am Yisrael to its God is articulated in countless verses, regardless
of where we open the Tanakh. Be it the second paragraph of Keriat
Shema — “And it shall be, if you will listen diligently...” - or the
blessings and curses in Vayikra or Devarim that outline the
principles of God’s Providence, the concept of reward and punishment is central
to their ethos. If we turn to the Prophets, and the major historiographical
passage at the beginning of Shoftim, or follow the course of events as
they are described throughout the prophetic narrative — the principle that
arises from all of these sources is the same: the trials and tribulations of the
nation are perceived as Divine punishment for sin.
Yechezkel, observing from
a distance and reviewing the entire development of Jewish history, from its
beginnings in Egypt to the Destruction of the Temple in his own times, concludes
decisively that the Destruction is the result of rebellion against God, while
Yirmiyahu, sitting in Jerusalem and agonized by the terrible suffering that he
witnesses in the war-torn and starved city, declares: “Do not both evil things
and good come from the mouth of the Most High?” (Eikha 3:38), and
acknowledges God’s justice as he cries out from the depths, “We have sinned and
rebelled; You have not forgiven” (ibid. 3:42). We find no character like Iyov
or Kohelet who challenges this assertion, nor do we find the prophets
indicating that it is better to accept communal suffering as incomprehensible to
human understanding: it is not an unfathomable mystery, but rather well-deserved
retribution that befalls us.
In light of this, the
conclusion must be that there is a difference between the individual and the
collective when it comes to dealing with tragic and traumatic events. The
suffering individual, perplexed by the blows that seem to incessantly fall upon
him, will find support and legitimization in Jewish tradition, as have the
righteous of previous generations, for his anguished and even blunt quarrel with
his Maker. The afflicted soul who questions the bitter fate that has befallen
him is not overstepping his boundaries and is not reproached for it. “You are
right, God, though I contend with You, yet I will rebuke You: why does the path
of the wicked prosper?” (Yirmiyahu 12:1). Yirmiyahu argues with
God, demonstrating to us the way of faith. So long as a person accepts the
fundamental axiom that God is right, and senses himself as a creature arguing
with his Creator, he is entitled to present his claim before the Master of the
Universe. The greatest figures of all generations did not hesitate to argue the
case of the suffering individual and to demand a fair hearing for him, knowing
very well that Iyov was not held accountable for his claims and
complaints while in the throes of his crisis; on the contrary, he is said to
have petitioned God in a proper manner, and it is he who atones for his
companions.
This approach, though, is
not available to us as a community, for the sources are clear in spelling out
what we should regard as the reason for communal, or national, distress. When we
seek to address painful events that befall the community, at moments of shock
and crisis when our faith longs to absolve itself in the powers that lie beyond
our control and to relegate it all to the infinitely mysterious and
unfathomable, the verses starkly confront us. In the midst of our efforts to
deal with our cruel situation and its ramifications, the sources offer us no
refuge; they demand a fair hearing for Divine retribution and justice, and place
the responsibility squarely on our shoulders. The situation is not unfathomable
at all: it is crystal clear, and what it means is that God is visiting our sins
upon us.
Were this the case only with regard to
the events of ancient history, we could comfort ourselves with the knowledge
that the interpretation of those events has been delivered through the medium of
prophecy and rests upon the authority of revelation, but that we cannot and
should not extrapolate concerning our own times. And if this were to be true of
all events after the cessation of prophecy and ruach ha-kodesh, it would most certainly be true of the Holocaust. In
relation to that terrible period, when terror and a profound blackness of evil
and insanity descended upon the world, when unparalleled wickedness and cruelty
occupied darkened souls and brought the world a plague of slaughter and horror,
we feel in the very depths of our being that we can only conclude that mortal
man cannot penetrate the workings of Divine Providence: “For as high as the
heavens are elevated from the earth, so My ways are elevated over your ways, and
My thoughts — from your thoughts” (Yishayahu 55:9).
Regarding the Holocaust,
have we any choice but to stand confounded and grief-stricken in the face of an
event so horrendous as to be inconceivable? This was suffering that one cannot
bear to describe or to hear of; these were actions of such malice and evil that
they are unspeakable. Seemingly, anyone attempting to investigate and explain
the Holocaust using the normal spiritual parameters of history is guilty of
gross insensitivity and indifference, and fails to recognize the hell that it
was. If we are speaking of a different planet with a wholly unique and foreign
set of circumstances, then human understanding cannot hope to grasp and explain;
we can only accept with surrender, and nothing more.
But if we examine this
assumption more closely — and anyone who believes in the Torah has no way to do
this other than by looking at the texts — it appears that this is not the
picture that our sources present. The Tanakh’s view of the unfolding of
history as Divine retribution is not limited to the chronicles of the kingdoms
of Yisrael and Yehuda; rather, the sources address the range of events
and situations that are destined to befall the nation of
First and foremost in
this regard is the song of Ha’azinu. This poetic passage — the heritage
defined by the Torah itself as a testimony that will accompany the nation of
Israel for all generations — reviews the future experiences of the
nation and offers guidance in the ways of the world and the paths of Divine
Providence throughout history. Indeed, were we to summarize the lesson of this
song, we could say that it presents two spiritual motifs as the motivating
forces that move the wheels of history: Divine reward and punishment, on the one
hand, and desecration of God’s Name, on the other. In presenting the course of
history to us, the text emphasizes the danger of sin that comes about in the
wake of economic success, and the punishment that will follow in its wake.
However, were we to
assume that the retribution described in the Torah is not speaking of anguish
and suffering as extreme as the Holocaust; if we did not dare imagine that there
were verses describing such a terrible punishment; if we were convinced that
they could offer us no tools with which to examine the phenomenon that we
experienced in the last generation, the song of Ha’azinu bares its
message with mighty force. The hand trembles as it writes such words and the
heart refuses to believe and accept what one’s own hand has written, but the
mind cannot ignore the significance of the message that stares out at us from
the text:
They provoked Him to
jealousy with foreign gods, and angered Him with abominations.
They sacrificed to
powerless spirits, to gods whom they did not know, to new gods that had recently
appeared, of whom your forefathers were not mindful.
You are unmindful of the
Rock that begot you; you forgot God Who made you.
And when God saw it He
abhorred them out of anger at His sons and His daughters.
And He said, I shall hide
My face from them, I will see what their end will be. For they are a fickle
generation; children with no faith in them.
They have made Me jealous
with a non-god, they have angered Me with their vanities; I shall make them
jealous with a non-nation, and I shall anger them with a vile people.
For a fire is kindled in
My wrath and it will burn to the nether-most Sheol; it shall consume the land
and its produce and set on fire the foundations of the mountains.
I shall heap evils upon
them; I shall spend My arrows on them.
They shall be sucked
empty by starvation and devoured with burning heat, and with bitter destruction.
I shall set the teeth of
beasts upon them with the poison of the creeping things of the dust.
The sword on the outside and the terror
within will destroy both the young man and the virgin, the infant and the old
man.
I said, I shall scatter them to the
corners; I shall cause their memory to cease from mankind. (Devarim
32:16-26)
Let us ask ourselves:
were we to try and describe the events of the previous generation in just a few
sentences, could we formulate them any differently? Do the above verses not
describe most accurately what befell our nation, our brethren, our grandparents?
The ramifications are
far-reaching and brutal, emotionally and religiously, for what they tell us is
that the decrees of 1939-1945 are the result of Jewish sins. Admittedly, these
are not necessarily the sins of the deceased themselves, but there is no
avoiding the conclusion that this punishment was brought about the sins of the
generation, or — more precisely — the results of the sins of the generations. In
other words, the Holocaust should not be regarded as an event so inexplicable
and enigmatic that we can only gaze at it, dumbfounded; rather, it should be
attributed to Divine retribution, to the cycle of sin and punishment so familiar
to us from the various discussions of it in the Torah.
To the extent that this
is indeed the case, there is another conclusion that must be drawn: the
Holocaust should not be regarded as a one-time event that deviates from the
usual boundaries of Jewish history. Rather, it should be placed within the
continuum of Jewish history, with all the suffering that has accumulated
throughout the generations. Indeed, it is said of Rav Yitzhak Hutner
zt”l, that he refused to use the term “the Holocaust” (Shoah),
insisting instead on referring to “the decrees (gezeirot) of
5699-
Nevertheless, such an
approach — despite its apparent grounding in the Torah — is wholly inappropriate
to the situation of our specific generation. This latter point brings us to the
crux of the dilemma. It is certainly possible that historical justice and
spiritual truth concerning those horrific times are aligned with the approach of
Rav Hutner, and that the principles of Divine Providence laid down in
parashat Ha’azinu apply to every historical event that befalls the nation
of Israel — even the most horrendous of them. However, we must distinguish
between objective historical analysis, which reviews the course of events from
the distant and detached perspective of an external observer, seeking to grasp
the historical causality that gave rise to the situation that came about (be it
from a spiritual, political, economic or any other point of view), and the warm,
live contact with the people who personally experienced these events.
Any attempt to compare
the viewpoint of the distant observer, several generations later, who can only
perceive the distress and suffering of previous generations in the most abstract
way, with that of a person who lives amongst the survivors and daily encounters
their scars and suffering in a tangible and unmediated manner, will immediately
reveal the difference in perspective. While the role of a later scholar is to
understand and explain the course of history, to learn and teach the lessons of
the past, the obligation of the contemporary generation is emotional
participation in the sorrow and anguish of a generation enveloped in mourning.
The sense of a common fate, empathy for the survivors, compassion, comfort and
mutual help precede any discussion of causes and reasons, processes and
theories.
Could any mortal with a
feeling heart, living among other flesh-and-blood mortals like himself,
survivors of death camps and ghettos with tattooed arms and scarred emotions,
approach the Holocaust in any manner other than via experience and consolation?
Who but a cold-hearted, barren soul could opt for the path of analysis and
observation? Although it goes without saying that there is room for intellectual
analysis attempting to understand the events and the underlying historical
dynamic, these attempts must be integrated into our emotional and existential
encounter with the recent past, not stand independent of it. Weeping rather than
analysis, consolation rather than observation — these are the appropriate
response of our generation to the Holocaust.
When Iyov’s three
friends heard of all of this evil that had befallen him, they came — each from
his place; Elifaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Tzofar
the Na’amatite, and they met together to come and mourn with him and to comfort
him. And they lifted their eyes from afar, but did not recognize him, and they
lifted their voices and wept, and each rent his coat, and they sprinkled ashes
upon their heads towards heaven. And they sat with him upon the ground for seven
days and seven nights, and none spoke a word to him for they saw that his
suffering was very great. (Iyov 2:11-13)
Initially, when his suffering is great and well-nigh unbearable, the
friends do not discourse with Iyov about the Divine ways of justice or attempt
to solve the problem of theodicy; rather, they sit by his side. The simple human
gesture of understanding and empathy is the support that they offer him as they
mourn with him and comfort him. Only later, when the discussion of God’s justice
becomes an emotional need for Iyov, will it be appropriate to engage in the
attempt to justify the ways of God to man. However, the tragic flaw of Iyov’s
devoted friends is that they are unable to grasp that Iyov’s discourses are the
deeply personal struggle of a suffering soul attempting to understand what has
befallen it and are not intended as a learned philosophical discussion. Their
responses, which address the metaphysical issues but remain oblivious to their
companion’s emotional needs, are highly inappropriate.
Similarly, the prophet Yirmiyahu, who reproved the people and
unflinchingly confronted them as he tried to prevent the oncoming catastrophe of
the Churban, reacted afterwards by devoting all his energies to express
the anguish and the agony of those who experienced the horrible events.
Eikhah is not an analysis of the events and their attendant causes, nor
is it an attempt to understand the ways of Divine Providence in and of
themselves. The entire book is meant to give expression to the experience
of the Destruction and the human perspective that is embodied in the
lamentation, mourning, and acknowledgement of God’s justice. (By
contrast, his contemporary Yechezkel lived in distant
Let us now return to Parashat
Ha’azinu. The stated intent and purpose of Ha’azinu (and the other
similar sections of reproof in the Torah) is not to share the pain of the nation
or to try to console their suffering; rather, its aim is to guide us in the
endeavor of analyzing God’s ways as He directs our history. The song itself
defines this as its goal: “Remember the days of old; comprehend the cycle of the
generations” (Devarim 32:7). This is a remembrance of the “days of old”
in order that we may be able to understand and learn from the “the cycle of the
generations.” Not experience but observation is the perspective of
Ha’azinu, a song that must serve as a testimony for Benei Yisrael.
For this reason, analysis of cause and effect based on a panoramic view of
events “from above” is clearly the proper approach, rather than an expression of
empathy with and consolation for the souls in distress.
However, the situation of our generation is not that of parashat
Ha’azinu; rather, it resembles that of Yirmiyahu. As the prophet of the
Destruction in his time, who lived in the besieged
In our society, your
rabbi, your next-door neighbor, or your colleague at work might be a “brand
plucked from the fire.” The possibility that the man across the street may have
been a refugee who fled his country of birth without family and friends, leaving
behind the world of his childhood in a desperate attempt to escape the murderous
forces of evil, or that the woman seated beside you on a public bus lost her
entire family in the Valley of Death is a situation that we are all familiar
with. Have we not witnessed the chazan on Yom Kippur, a seemingly
successful survivor, who weeps uncontrollably as he attempts to utter Eileh
Ezkerah (the prayer that recounts the martyrdom of the Jewish leadership in
Roman times) or loses his rhythm when he reaches the Kel Maleh Rachamim
memorial passage in Yizkor?
Therefore, our attitude
towards those events must arise from a feeling and emotional heart, sensing the
depth of the pain and suffering, and attuned to the human element. Sensitivity
and empathy, not analysis and scholarship, are of the essence. Who among us has
not heard survivors’ stories, or read hair-raising memoirs written by people
still alive? Each and every one of us still comes into direct contact with the
memory of the Holocaust as a living, raw wound — whether within our own families
or within the public domain. So long as the blood has not stopped boiling, the
time for cool, clear, intellectual discourse has not yet arrived.
Therefore, concerning
our own generation, we cannot and need not regard the Holocaust from the general
historical perspective — whether a history examined
from the point of view of human causality or whether viewed through the
spectacles of Divine Providence. The command to our generation is
articulated in the Kinot: “Weep greatly for the house of
In the summer of
1977, newly elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin paid a visit to the
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the State acted correctly in not accepting the
Rav’s proposal. In our generation, it is indeed fitting that a special day be
set aside as a dedicated day of remembrance for the Holocaust. While the time
may come when it will indeed be appropriate to adopt the Rav’s approach and to
include Yom ha-Shoah within the framework of Tish’a be-Av, as long
as the wound is still fresh and has not yet healed, we cannot integrate
commemoration of the Holocaust with our mourning for the other tragedies of
Jewish history whose memory is more distant and
remote.
The conclusions that arise from this are that we must not include the
Holocaust as yet another event in the chain of Jewish suffering and martyrdom
throughout the generations, as Rav Hutner was wont to do; rather, we must award
it unique attention. Regardless of whether the Holocaust is a unique historical
phenomenon or not, this question should not determine the attitude of our
generation towards this event. Living in such close proximity to the events of
the previous generation, our relationship towards this period must be completely
different from our relationship to the other tragedies of the Jewish people. We
are in direct contact with those who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust,
and in this sense it is certainly unique from our point of view. Thus, even if
Rav Hutner’s position is theoretically correct, it should not affect our
perspective, since it relates only to the general issue of the workings of
Divine Providence in the world, while our own approach must be based on the
existential sense of common fate and empathy.
To summarize, if our coping with the Holocaust is a purely intellectual
and theological issue, the distance of generations does not affect the question
in any way. We face two options:
acknowledgement of God’s justice in light of our sins and iniquities, or
attributing our situation to the ways of Divine Providence that are far above
our comprehension. A literal
understanding of our traditional sources seems to point in the first direction,
so that any attempt to adopt the alternative will be forced to explain the texts
in light of the second approach.
However, it is not
only the purely philosophical issues but also the existential aspect that must
have a significant role in our response. For our purposes, a person who sees
things from a distance of generations and is prepared to acknowledge that the
generations may have sinned, is not the same as a person who is being asked to
claim that his predecessors and neighbors suffered, or are suffering, because of
those sins. Just as distance in time (and place) dulls our sensitivities towards
the pain of others, so does intense closeness sharpen it. So long as we are
still busy comforting the sufferers and sharing their anguish, this proximity
carries the blessing of empathy with it — but it may tempt us to weight the
scales, since we are affected by the suffering and close to the sufferers. This
is not our mission at this time. A person who is close to the events cannot and
should not sit in historical judgment over the generations with whom he lives;
rather, he should sense their pain.
[This is an abridged translation of an
article that originally appeared, in Hebrew, in Torah Mitzion — Collected
Essays in memory of Dr. Moshe Green, z”l (Jerusalem, 2002). The full
translation appeared in Milin Havivin, vol. 2. Our thanks to YCT for permission to
reprint this essay.]