Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

5. The Sifrei Kodesh and the Holocaust

5 The Sifrei Kodesh and the Holocaust For the crime of teaching Torah, the Romans wrapped Rabbi Chananiah ben Teradyon in the Holy Scrolls to burn him at the stake. His daughter Beruriah wept for her father and for the Torah that would burn with him. “Weep not for the Torah, my child,” said the sage. “For the Torah is fire. And fire cannot burn fire.” —Talmud Bavli, Avodah Zarah 18a “The ultimate mystery of the Holocaust,” Elie Wiesel has said, “is that whatever happened took place in the soul.”1 The Holocaust was essentially an assault on the holiness of the soul, and the holiness of the soul derives from Torah. To be sure, Jewish tradition teaches that the soul is made of Torah, as we have noted. Therefore, Nazis burned Torah scrolls wherever they went. And among the Torah scrolls consigned to the flames were the “scrolls” of the Six Million. Perhaps this is why Emil Fackenheim insists, “A direct encounter with the naked biblical text, once admitted as a theoretical possibility, becomes for contemporary Jewish thought an existential necessity.”2 Without the biblical text— without the sifrei kodesh—Jewish thought cannot exist. The engagement with the sifrei kodesh has become necessary for Jewish thought inasmuch as it must address the life of the Jewish soul that came under assault in the Shoah and is now slipping away. 116 Over the years that I knew Fackenheim, he used to relate to me a story about the Jews who would rush into a burning synagogue in order to save the scrolls of the Holy Torah that the Nazis had consigned to the flames. “The Nazis maintained that the Jews were rats,” he said. “But rats do not run into burning buildings to save Torah scrolls.” We, too, must retrieve the scrolls and the holy books—the sifrei kodesh—from the flames of the Shoah. For in order to fathom the event as part of sacred history, we must pass through the fire of Torah, broadly understood: that is, through the sifrei kodesh—Torah, Bible, Mishnah, Gemara, Midrash, Kabbalah, and the writings of the great sages. It is not the Jewish thinker who brings these texts to the Holocaust; rather, the Holocaust brings these texts to the Jewish thinker, with unprecedented intensity. And we must bear these texts into our response to the Shoah, if it is to be a Jewish response. Indeed, without the sifrei kodesh, what is left to determine the meaning of the Jew? In What Is Judaism? Fackenheim recalls an image from his childhood. It is a painting of “Jews fleeing from a pogrom. . . . The fleeing Jews in the picture are bearded old men, terrified, but not so much as to leave behind what is most precious to them. In the view of antisemites these Jews would doubtless be clutching bags of gold. In fact each of them carries a Torah scroll.”3 In the post-Holocaust era, we take philosophical flight from Auschwitz to Jerusalem. As Jews, however, we must take care not to leave behind what is most precious, what is the very stuª of our soul: the Torah made of black fire on white fire, as it is written (Tanchuma Bereshit 1; Devarim Rabbah 3:12; Shir Hashirim Rabbah 5:11:6; Zohar II, 226b). Just as Torah is made of fire, so does the soul originate “in fire, being an emanation from the Divine Throne” (Zohar II, 211b). Therefore , says the Midrash, when the Angel of Death tried to frighten Jacob by making fire shoot up from the ground, the Patriarch cried, “Do you think you can frighten me with fire? Why, I am made of that stuª!” (Bereshit Rabbah 77:2). If we are made of the fire of Torah, then we must fetch that fire from the ashes of Auschwitz; that is where we turn in this time of crisis for post-Holocaust Jewish thought: to the holy Torah, broadly construed as the sifrei kodesh, or “holy books,” for if we leave that behind, we may have escaped—but the Nazis will have taken our souls. 117 The Sifrei Kodesh and the Holocaust Recall the words of Franz Rosenzweig: the Jewish people “did not originate from the womb of nature that bears nations, but—and this is unheard of !—was led forth ‘a nation from the midst of another nation’ (Deuteronomy 4:34). . . . And only he who...