The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology (review)

All interpretation of history comes from the present. When not critically engaged, though, present interpretation faces the danger of becoming stuck in a recent past, a past that is easier to pay homage to without being challenged in the present. Thus even events of tremendous sufferings can be become safe harbors for theological thought.

So, too, interpretations of the Holocaust—political, cultural, and theological—segue into this conundrum; what is cutting edge for one era is behind the curve in another. As editor, Stephen Katz alludes to this problematic in his introduction to the latest volume, judging the last twenty-five years as having being devoid of new ways of considering the basic theological questions related to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, there is little in this volume that would contradict his essential judgment.

The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology comes from a series of conferences held in Israel in 1999 and 2001, and thus it is even more surprising that the engine that is moving Holocaust theology forward today—the engagement of post-Holocaust Jews, especially Jews of conscience, with Palestinians who seek a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—is almost completely absent from this volume. Thus the complement to Emil Fackenheim’s 614th commandment that demands Jewish survival after the Holocaust—the 615th commandment, that Jewish survival without some kind of ethical compass relating to the Palestinians is akin to moral suicide—is never mentioned directly and is engaged only peripherally in these pages.

Instead—and with some important additions for a volume such as this—we are presented with reflections on the Holocaust that were already available when I first started studying the Holocaust with Richard Rubenstein in 1970. Steven Katz’s long essay, for example, covers the major Holocaust theologians—along with Rubenstein and Fackenheim, Elie Wiesel, and Irving Greenberg—but the theses of all four are already well analyzed. At the same time, none are followed in their later years, into the 1990s and beyond, and probably for good reason. Their major work was done earlier, to be sure, but their later additions have little relevance to the current situation of Jews in the world and therefore do not help guide us in the theological implications of the Holocaust today.

The sole exception to this is Eliezer Schweid’s essay, “Is There a Religious Meaning to the Idea of a Chosen people after the Shoah?” Here Schweid argues that the 614th commandment must lead to the reassertion of the universal message of Judaism. Though indirectly, without mentioning Palestinians, Schweid also poses the question that could move Holocaust theology into a newer writing of the “Kultur Kampf ” in Israel, the growing assimilation in the Diaspora, and the heightening estrangement between Israel and the Diaspora. Schweid concludes that “unless the Jewish people is restored to its real self as a people engaged in the realization of a redeeming principle for itself and humanity, it will become a stranger to itself, will bring itself to the brink of another catastrophe, as it has already done several times during its long history.”

It is unclear whether Schweid’s essay, the first in the volume but one that is never engaged by later writers, was written for the 1999–2001 conference, or in 1991, almost a decade earlier. Thus we are unclear what “Kultur Kampf” he is alluding to or which Palestinian uprising is then being repressed by the government of Israel. Was it the first with the policy of might and beatings, or the second that occasioned the use of helicopter gunships and the building of the Wall? As difficult as it might seem to some, even in this volume, it is problematic to see how Jewish theology, so changed with the historical event of the Holocaust, could be immune to the use and abuse of power now in the hands of Jews. There are many Jews who have raised this question during...