The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology

Chapter 6. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Thought about the Holocaust since World War II The Radicalized Aspect

Chapter 6 Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Thought about the Holocaust since World War II The Radicalized Aspect Gershon Greenberg An element of theological absolutism has emerged within ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought since World War II. The anti-Zionism of the wartime period has been radicalized to the point of alleging an association between secular Zionism and Nazism. Religious Zionism has moved from the wartime theme of Israel’s change of mind about ascending to the land of Israel, because of the catastrophic acts by the nations (under divine aegis), towards the concept of God’s direct physical intervention to implement the ascent. Elements of conceptual assimilation and the cooption of ultraOrthodoxy into the assimilation process have been added to the wartime allegation that cultural assimilation caused the catastrophe. While during the war Amalek (as Hitler) was seen as a divine instrument used for positive purposes in history, after the war Amalek represented the realm of darkness in a cosmic mortal struggle against the light as represented by the people of Israel. The suffering process deliberated upon during the war was transformed in postwar thinking into suffering as a fait accompli, as crystallized in the Akedah of Isaac both as the binding for sacrifice and the sacrifice itself. Finally, during the war messianic redemption was conceived of as a metahistorical process (“metahistory” referring to the drama of Israel’s covenantal relationship with God, touching upon and manifest within empirical history), which involved knowledge of the explicit Torah and required human initiative in terms of Torah and land. After the war redemption became a matter of seeking the internal, secret knowledge of Torah (Kabbalah). There were also intimations of a shift towards a heteronomous apocalyptic drama. 132 Anti-Zionism During the Holocaust era, blame for the catastrophe was laid at the feet of secular Zionists. The language used was a mixture of metahistorical, metaphysical , mythic, and empirical elements. For example, Elhanan Wasserman , head of the Baronovichi, Poland, yeshiva, condemned secular Zionism in his 1938–1939 writings as a blatant example of the “we will be as the nations” mentality spelled out by Ezekiel, where God reacted by pouring out fury (Ezekiel 20:32–33). Secular Zionists, he complained, thought that all it took to be a Jew was to “pay a Shekel [for the land of Israel] and sing Hatikvah.” This evoked the nations’ measure-for-measure punishment, under divine aegis. The Mizrahi leader Mosheh Avigdor Amiel,chief rabbi of Tel Aviv,paired Herzlian Zionism with the Haskalah legacy of Moses Mendelssohn as a line of development that diminished Torah (meaning Hebrew scripture and ongoing rabbinic tradition) and neutralized the separate collective identity of Israel, evoking divine punishment. Jakob Rosenheim in New York, the world president of the Agudat Yisrael rabbinical organization, spoke in terms of political identity and attributed the developing catastrophe to a world plagued by quests for national sovereignty. For secular nationalists to seek national sovereignty in the land of Israel, according to Rosenheim, was to court disaster. Indeed, a sovereign Jewish commonwealth, with Torahreality marginalized, was in danger of generating a third Hurban. The anti-Zionism of Shlomoh Zalman Ehrenreich of Simleul-Silvaniei, Transylvania, consisted of categorical opposition to active restoration of the land and to any mass aliyah. Invoking the three oaths of B.T. Ketubot 111a , which inveighed against Jews’ revolting against the ruler and also inveighed against mass settlement, Ehrenreich attacked those who participated in the Betar movement and in the uprisings in Palestine against the British. Ehrenreich was committed to awaiting God’s intervention: “The [secular] Zionist sect wants to conquer and build the Land by its own power, without Torah and without our righteous messiah. [But] we have none to rely upon except our Father in Heaven, who acts without the help of those of flesh and blood.” Indeed, even to give money to Mizrahi religious nationalists or to the halakah-based Agudat Yisrael organization for restoration of the land, Ehrenreich declared, amounted to assisting Haman to destroy Judaism. The violation of the three oaths would incite God’s judgment, and the “flesh would become like prey, like the gazelles and hinds in the field” (Ketubot 111a ).1 Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Thought about the Holocaust since World War II 133 In the years following the war, ultra-Orthodox thinking about the Holocaust removed secular Zionism out of Judaism completely and posited it as belonging to an anti-Israel realm of...