The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology

Chapter 1. Is There a Religious Meaning to the Idea of a Chosen People after the Shoah?

Chapter 1 Is There a Religious Meaning to the Idea of a Chosen People after the Shoah? Eliezer Schweid I prefer the above formulation of the problem of Jewish self-understanding after the Shoah because it emphasizes the emotional and intellectual difficulties that are involved in it. The idea of a chosen people established the self-consciousness of the Jewish people from its inception in the Babylonian exile to its second return to Zion. It seems that the Jewish people cannot recognize itself as the same people in any other image, but after the Shoah, the idea of a people created to fulfill a universal mission for humanity became for the majority of Jews a meaningless pretense. Putting the question whether Jews still think of their people in terms of chosenness on the level of ritual and dogma, the answer would be positive with regard to the religious movements, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox , and negative with regard to secular movements. But, going down to the level of the individual, especially of the young generation, it seems that the question whether the individual’s Jewishness endows him or her with a sense of universal mission will be answered with great embarrassment. Indeed, one should refrain from such politically incorrect questions, but on the other hand, one must admit that avoiding the question means covertly avoiding the concept that has given continuity to Jewish selfunderstanding throughout the ages. I therefore believe that the task of integrating the memory of the Shoah into the comprehensive historical memory of the Jewish people obligates us to assume the burden of facing the problem, at least by clarifying the intellectual and emotional difficulties inherent in it. The questions that should be asked preliminarily are as follows. First, what are the profound causes of the unwillingness to relate to the problem 5 philosophically? Second, what does the will of the Jewish people “to hide its face” mean from the point of view of Jewish solidarity in the near future? And finally, is there a possibility that the Jewish people will reclaim a universal message that makes the continuity of its existence important to humanity? Is there a possibility that individual Jews who succeeded in reintegrating themselves socially and nationally into the normal life prevailing in the Western culture of our age will prefer being Jewish to any other form of self-identification that is open for them and that seems much more convenient in terms of normality? I must first summarize very briefly the situation of the problem before the Shoah. Elsewhere1 I have described the background of relations among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the fatal role that the Jewish people had to play in the formation of the new collective identities of secular nations and societies of the twentieth century. Here I will state only briefly that after the Enlightenment the Jewish people became the main challenger of a traumatic conflict in the self-understanding of Western nations and societies, thus placing itself in an unbearable position both for itself and for its sociocultural environment. Trying to get out of the trap, the Jewish people was divided into two parts with regard to emancipation, one of which rejected the idea of Jewish chosenness and internalized the Christian, and afterwards the secular, anti-Semitic view that chosenness indicates a shameful depravity. The other part responded with reaffirmation of chosenness in its traditional halakic meaning, declaring that it means absolute separation, requiring Jews to remain uninvolved in the social, cultural, and political life of the surrounding secular culture. But the dialectics of the conflict eventually brought each of the groups, in its own way, to reclaim the idea of chosenness in new humanistic interpretations. First to re-adopt chosenness through reinterpretation of its traditional meaning was the Reform movement. Against the refusal of the surrounding Christian society to accept the Jews as equals as long as they remained Jewish in any sense, Reform Judaism reinterpreted assimilation as a mission to teach humanity the values of humanism, and the right way to implement them in reality. The engagement with the idea of chosenness became even more profound for Reform Judaism in Germany after the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when it became clear that the success that many individual Jews had in assimilating into secular culture was so great that the vision of emancipation for the whole Jewish people was heading towards a catastrophic failure. The...