Wrestling with Biblical Texts after the Shoah

80 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 WRESTLING WITH BIBLICAL TEXTS AFTER THE SHOAH by Steven 1. Jacobs Steven 1. Jacobs serves as the Rabbi of Temple B'nai Sholom of Huntsville, Alabama. He received his BA from Penn State, his MAHL, DHL, and Rabbinic Ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author or editor of five books and more than fifty scholarly articles and reviews dealing primarily with the Shoah, and continues to teach Judaic and Shoah Studies at various colleges and universities. He is alsq the Editor of the papers of the late Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1901-1959), author of our word "genocide" and moving force behind the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. I. WRESTLING WITH BERESHIT/GENESIS 32:22-33 A. First Thoughts The "textual essence" of the religious struggle after the Shoah is attempting to reconcile the "oughts" of theology and religious faith with the realities of experiential history. Both the sacred texts of both Judaism [Torah equalling Bereshit/Genesis through Divre Hayamim Bet/II Chronicles] and Christianity [Bible equalling Torah + New Testament] attempt to present a cogent weltanschauung consistent with what we may term the "historically traditional" understanding of both faith communities-i.e., a loving, caring, protective, interactive God who exists in (1) a covenantal and familial relationship with Jews and/or (2) a familial relationship with Christians through the unique experience of the person of Jesus the Christ. Both faith communities have, throughout their Wrestling with Biblical Texts after the Shoah 81 histories, affinned and re-affinned the centrality of these messages of this "God-who-acts-in-history"-despite, at times, overwhelmingevidence to the contrary-while, at other times, denying the validity of the 'other. The nightmarish horror-and worse-of the events of 1933-1945, specifically 1939-1945, has called into question this historically traditional understanding of God, God's relationship with both Jews and Christians, and the"oughts" ofthese two faiths. The "uniqueness issue" of the Shoah simply refuses to go away_1 By extension, these events have raised anew the problem of the reinterpretation of the sacred texts in light of these new experiences. For better than two thousand years, Jews have chosen to interpret Torah in light of their historically traditional understanding of God as the Author/Inspirer of the text; for slightly less than two thousand years Christians have interpreted both Torah and New Testament in light of their historically traditional understanding of God and Jesus. A post-Shoah interpretation ofbothJewish and Christian Scriptures requires, therefore, at first blush, a "re-thinking" of the whole notion of God in relation to sacred text, the specific implications of such re-thinking, and the meaning of specific texts themselves-the focus of this and other papers.2 'See, for example, Alan Rosenberg, "Was the Holocaust Unique? A Peculiar Question," in Isidor Walliman and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modem Age: Etiology and Case Studies ofMass Death (NewYork: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 145-161, wherein he writes of the "four kinds of evidence" in stressing the uniqueness of the Shoah: "... the simpl~ fact of the size and scope of the destruction . . . the means employed in the Holocaust ... -the varied physical and psychological qualities used to reduce intended victims to their barest physical qualities as "objects" . _. the vast and determined attempt by the Nazis to transform the victims into the image that the Nazis had of them" (p. 156). 'For ajewish re-thinking of the categories of faith-specifically those of God, Covenant, Prayer, Law and Commandments, Life-Cycle, Festival Cycle, and Israel and Zionism, see my book Rethinkingjewish Faith: The Child ofa Survivor Responds (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). For ajewish reflection on Christian rethinking, see, especially, Chapter Eight: "Rethinking Christianity: An Outsider's Perspective." Additionally, I find myself in complete agreement with Emil 1. Fackenheim, who, in the "Forward" to Thejewish BibleAfter the Holocaust: A Re-Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) writes: A re-reading: after the Holocaust, Jews cannot read, as once they did, of a God who sleeps not and slumbers not; and after the resurrection of...