Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

4. The Holocaust and the Holy Tongue

4 The Holocaust and the Holy Tongue Hebrew words describe not only an object but also its very essence.—Rabbi Yehuda Loeve, Maharal of Prague: Pirke Avos We have seen that the Holocaust is characterized by an assault on the sanctity of the human being. So radical is this assault that it eludes language , as Primo Levi has said: there is no word “to express this oªense . . . : the demolition of a man.”1 There is no word for this oªense because the demolition of a man is the demolition of the word, which was, indeed, a defining feature of the Holocaust. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk makes this point when she asserts, “The new set of meanings [of words] provided the best evidence of the devastation that Auschwitz created.”2 In place of the word filled with meaning we have the bleeding wound that remains after the word has been torn from its meaning, like the bleeding word Jude branded into the forehead of Shlamek’s father in Ka-tzetnik’s House of Dolls, “as though it were quite natural that the word Jude should give blood.”3 After Auschwitz, Jewish thought is steeped in the blood that flows from the open wound of this bleeding word: Jew. the wound of the bleeding word When meaning is torn from words, life is bled of its substance, and the world is transformed into a wasteland. That is when the world as Mishkan , as a dwelling place for holiness, is in need of mending, even as the 91 Holy of Holies in the Temple (which was also called a Mishkan) on occasion required repairs. The Talmud relates that whenever the Holy of Holies required mending, a craftsman would be lowered into the sacred enclosure in a tevah, or “box.” There were openings in the box just large enough for the craftsman to see what had to be repaired and to do his work so that he would not be tempted to feast his eyes upon the glory of the Shekhinah (Midot 37a). Now the word tevah signifies not only a vessel; it also means “word.” Entering the vessel of the holy word, we may descend into the post-Shoah world to undertake the task of restoring it as a holy place. Only through such a repair—only through such a tikkun—can we restore our souls. To be sure, Matityahu Glazerson points out that, according to Jewish teaching, the word “is not merely a vehicle for making known the speaker’s intent.Nor is the alef-beit a set of symbols or conventions. Rather, the words and letters shape the soul.”4 Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz elaborates: “Beyond our creations, words are also our creators. . . . ‘The soul is full of words,’ . . . so much so that people believe that each person gets an allocation of words for a lifetime, and once it is used up, life ends.”5 If we come into being through an utterance of the Holy One, our being is also sustained—or threatened—by our own utterances. As Jews entrusted with the care of our Jewish souls, we are entrusted with the care of the holy tongue. What is at stake in this task is inscribed in the face of Shlamek’s father, the face of the Jew under assault in a radical assault upon the word—the face disfigured by the bleeding word. The challenge confronting Jewish thought in the post-Auschwitz era is to answer, as a Jew, to this assault on the word manifest in the assault on the face. “The face speaks,” as Emmanuel Levinas has said. “It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse.”6 And because what speaks from the face comes from an absolute that is beyond the face, “the face is signification, and signification without context. I mean that the Other, in the rectitude of his face, is not a character within a context. . . . All signification in the usual sense of the term is relative to such a context. . . . Here, to the contrary, the face is meaning all by itself.”7 What does the face say? What is the fundamental word that makes possible all discourse? It is this: Lo tirtsach, “Thou shalt not murder” (Exodus 20:13).8 That is the commanding word that instills every word 92 The Holocaust and the Holy Tongue with meaning. Received...