Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah (review)

Richard Rubenstein's 1966 After Auschwitz and Emil Fackenheim's 1982 To Mend the World are respectively the inaugural and probably most influential works of North American 'Holocaust Theology'. Yet one may suspect that for some Jewish readers of a traditionalist orientation the content they will face in encountering them presents not only troublingly radical ideas, but also their articulation in discourses that may seem, at times, curiously un-Jewish. To read After Auschwitz is to face a considerable deluge of psychoanalysis, and with To Mend the World to face lengthy interaction with Hegel and Heidegger. It is thus not wholly surprising that some, such as Norman Solomon and Shmuel Jakobovits, have suggested that Jewish 'Holocaust Theology' responds more to the Enlightenment than the mass-murder of Europe's Jews.

David Weiss Halivni's book resists this difficulty by approaching the task of Jewish theology's response to this event through a most traditional of mediums: commentary upon classical rabbinic texts (e.g. the Talmud and the Mishnah). Peter Ochs, as editor, reflects that this Jewish-American Holocaust survivor "understands himself to be writing in a way that is reassuring to an Orthodox readership" (7). Equally, however, Breaking the Tablets challenges certain elements of ultra-Orthodox thought, notably the view expressed in a 2000 radio broadcast by Obadiah Yosef (the spiritual leader of the Israeli Shas party) that Holocaust victims had sinned in a previous life.

Halivni instead emphasizes a non-static notion of divine proximity to history, "from the days when the rabbinic sages themselves were touched, on occasion, by God's immediate presence, to the terrible days of God's absence during the Shoah" (xi). Two notable outcomes result. The first is the articulation in Breaking the Tablets of a form of "Free Will Defense", in this instance specifically seen in an appeal to tsimtsum (divine contraction) that allows room for moral choice (abused by the Nazis). The second outcome is a hermeneutical one. Because, Halivni suggests, God's absence has grown incrementally in history, there are elements of (particularly later) rabbinic writings that one should treat as human, historical texts, rather than divine ones. Correspondingly, Breaking the Tablets contains a wealth of discussion of the evolution of scripture, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the commentaries of medieval rabbis. This approach is not too surprising given that Halivni's reputation rests on his work as a Talmudic scholar rather than a commentator upon the Holocaust.

Despite Ochs's expositional transitions at the beginning of each of the four chapters, the quantity of pages (in a short book) in which Halivni directs his attention to ancient and medieval rabbinic writings will be somewhat disorientating for readers unused to the contours of the topic. For a book subtitled Jewish Theology After the Shoah, the Holocaust sometimes seems curiously absent from the forefront of the author's attention. This absence is a clear weakness, especially in the second and the third chapters, the latter revealingly having been published as a separate 2005 article on rabbinic scholarship.

The more pertinent question, however, considering the book attempts to engage religiously traditionalist Jewish readers, is whether Breaking the Tablets is likely to influence them. There are some good reasons to suggest that the answer may be 'no'. Firstly, in proposing a version of "Free Will Defense", Halivni does not take a new approach. In 1973, the Orthodox rabbi Eliezer Berkovits' Faith after the Holocaust took a similar path only for the comments of Yosef Obadiah, which provoked Halivni's response, to emerge seventeen years later. Thus, assertions of divine non-intervention for the sake of human freewill do not have a track record of dissuading those who would view the Holocaust through the prism of retributive theology. A further difficulty is that the (at times) unconvincing internal logic of certain of his appeals to traditional texts as a resource to resist such theology. To take one example...