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Chapter 7. Theological Reflections on the Holocaust Between Unity and Controversy
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Chapter 7 Theological Reflections on the Holocaust Between Unity and Controversy Michael Rosenak Ethnic and Theological Perspectives The Holocaust is, first and foremost, a feature and segment of history, that of the European Jews and that of the Christian nations of Europe and their largely post-Christian societies. But the educational, social, and existential concern with the subject is not primarily located in the discipline of history. On the firm basis of historical studies, two fundamental ways of presenting the Holocaust to consciousness, our own and that of the coming generation, are available to us. One is the ethnic-national way that views the Holocaust as the moment of horrible truth about what Herzl euphemistically called “the Jewish problem,” namely, the problem of the Gentiles. The other is a religious-theological way that wonders what is presently the truth of the God-Israel or, if you will, the God-humankind relationship, and what can be said of it after the apparent silence and indifference of God at Auschwitz. Both approaches, the ethnic-national one and the theological one, may have humanistic or nonhumanistic orientations. The ethnic-national approach may just as easily draw ethnocentric and distrustful conclusions from the historical facts as universalistic and hopeful ones. Likewise, theological approaches may be oriented toward returning the divine image to the faces of all people and peoples or it may dwell on the destruction of Amalek, which, alas, can be taken to refer to a great many people and even to many nations. What distinguishes the educational thrust of the ethnic-national approach is that it seems to galvanize united consciousness and united 161 efforts. It evokes, as Rabbi Soloveitchik would formulate it, the covenant of fate,1 that which binds Jews together regardless of their beliefs and practices , simply by virtue of their being in the world as “others” vis-à-vis everyone else. School curricula and Jewish Studies programs at universities informed by this view implicitly bear the slogan, “We are all in this together,” a slogan in which “we,” once again, may be understood as limited to “the Jews” and as wide as “humankind.” Moreover, the ethnicnational approach is intent on solving what appear to be real problems and on thinking about them rationally, in terms of real experience, passed through the prism of modernly informed intelligence and creativity. It seems hard to argue with that! In contradistinction, the theological approach sounds suspect: it appears to be divisive, inviting scholastic controversy, inciting endless polemic . It raises the issue of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s “covenant of destiny,” dealing, sometimes tendentiously, with the substance of Jewish uniqueness and what constitutes authentic commitment and true significance. And while R. Soloveitchik believed that only Orthodox Jews are true and conscious members of that covenant,2 this judgment is obviously part of the very polemic that theological discourse so readily evokes. Indeed, there are numerous theological approaches, each a platform for decision making and action, that restate the differences among Jews, that delineate conceptions of destiny and perhaps accentuate them. What then can speak in favor of taking theology seriously in the context of Holocaust consciousness and education? Don’t we deserve the scant yet significant comfort of unity, at least here? The advocates of the national-ethnic approach will, of course, deny that their preference is therapeutic . They may sincerely state that the questions of belief and ultimate significance are simply not where the action is—that it is more important to understand the status of the Jew in prewar European society, to fathom the socioeconomic crises of Europe between the wars, and to understand the Christian and post-Christian habits of the heart vis-à-vis the Jews than to ask covenantal questions to which most Jews appear indifferent. Only those who understand the past, they tell us, are not condemned to repeat it. If we are yet intent here on taking these issues seriously in an age that is largely secular and skeptical in any case, it is because we consider Judaism and its bearers, the Jews, to be in a state of severe crisis—normative, halakic, and spiritual—in the wake of the Holocaust. For those who do view Judaism as a religious demand and a religious presence in the world 162 m i c h a e l r o s e n a k [18.206.238.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:47 GMT) and for those who may come to see Judaism that way...