Jeremy Rosen
The Religious Response to the Holocaust: Can There be One?

Jeremy Rosen - The Religious Response to the Holocaust: Can There be One?

- This is of course a very sad, serious day. And I always think of how fortunate I was to have the privilege of being born in a country that enabled me to survive. In 1940, the Russians had got to the channel, they were about to invade, and it was only at the Battle of Britain in 1940 that a handful really of airmen saved Britain by going and sacrificing their lives in many cases to keep the Germans out. Had I been born in Europe, it would’ve been too late, I wouldn’t be around. It wasn’t until I was about 10 that I accidentally came across a book in my father’s library of pictures of the Holocaust in a book printed by Lord Russell. And the shock to my system of seeing the corpses and realising that children like me would’ve been amongst them, has remained with me ever since. So this is second, third hand trauma. One could imagine what firsthand trauma the Holocaust has caused to those who managed to survive. So the big issue that faces us when we look at this, is on the one hand why? And on the other hand, how are we supposed to respond to it? People will argue about whether this was unique because it was far more horrific than anything else that had happened so far in human history. Or was it merely an extension exaggerated by technology and by 20th century efficiency? And the question is, does this in some way change us or does this merely get us to recognise what we human beings are capable of? And in all these kinds of issues, there are different approaches. There’s a historical, there’s a rational, there’s a mystical, and there’s a religious. And I want as usual to look at this from many different points of view and deal not only with the different theologies, but also with the arguments that rage as to how we should deal with this, how we should be responding to it. There has always been a question for thousands of years since people started thinking in philosophical theological terms of why is there evil in this world?

Why couldn’t God just have created a world without evil, without suffering? And of course, there’s no way that it is possible for us to know so to speak, the mind of God. Even if we don’t believe in God, the question of why still remains? Why do human beings do this? The issue of free will comes into it. We were designed or we evolved as human beings who can do good things and bad things without bringing God into this at all. And some people argue that we are intrinsically animals. Of course, sometimes human beings behave a lot worse than animals. I suppose because they’re more advanced of animals, their crimes are so much greater. But why is it that we do this? Is it something in us or is it something that comes from outside? Is this something that is a result of what we might call politics, of the attempt to change the world by forcing one’s views on others and thinking that by getting rid of those who don’t agree with us, whether it’s on the left or the right, we might be able to produce a better world. The whole issue of compulsion and how do we take it? When we look at this from, let’s call it a secular point of view, we deal with a matter of why there was evil, and the straight answer is that we’re still arguing about it. The jury is still out. We might even question whether in the future the Holocaust will be replayed by artificial intelligence. And there are no explanations. There are only different ways of responding to the challenge. So whereas on the one hand you may say, where was God in the Holocaust? You may also argue, where was humanity in the Holocaust?

People have tried to deal with it in a different way. People have said, you can’t possibly explain this. This is such a dramatic tragedy that no words can explain it. And we know when we have our own little personal tragedies, there is no answer that can be given. There are those who take the view that this is a test of us, of what we can achieve as human beings, but then who gives us this test? Are we bringing God back into it? And if we do want to bring God back into it, why is it that some people who went through the Holocaust, abandoned any kind of Jewish or religious identity? And on the other hand, there were those who became more religious as a result of their experience. This shows the fact that we humans respond inevitably in different ways to whatever happens to us when things go wrong or things are cataclysmic in some way. And so there are those who will say that the challenge of humanity is to learn from its lessons. And yet look where we are now. We have not learned from our lessons. And so I want to look at some of the religious responses to see if we can find them any more satisfactory than the non-religious responses because they certainly haven’t got us anywhere at this particular moment in terms of explaining why it happened. I’m going to come to how we deal with this in due course. There are of course those who say this is a Christian crime. This is a crime of 2000 years of Christianity within the European Western world that allowed this to happen and didn’t respond in any way. Certainly didn’t respond in a way that we would now say was satisfactory. In the same way that the United States did not respond to the tragedy in the way we might have expected a civilised country to do so. And the anti-Semitism in America was just as powerful as the antisemitism in Europe. So that the whole challenge of this has to be answered.

Now when we sit at the satyr table and we say this famous phrase, . That in every generation, and this is something that was written a thousand years ago, not recently, people have tried to destroy us and we realise that people have always tried to destroy us for whatever reason, whether it was religious, whether it was nationalist. And even at this moment there are people who are threatening to destroy us. So you could say this is part of our burden, our burden of what some people like to call in a sense, the chosen people, literally means the obliged or if you like, the burdened people who were condemned to have a tradition of their own and to try to protect it against those that try to destroy it. And in the process of been subject to ongoing persecution. But there is this other aspect of it and that is that people just don’t like the other. They don’t like the stranger. And it so happens that we Jews have been around in so many different places more than everybody else, and we’ve survived so long that naturally we’ve been a kind of a lightning rod and we have been the stranger, but plenty of other strangers. You think of Rwanda, Burundi, plenty of the what happens in Serbia and in Yugoslavia. And wherever you look, what’s happening at the moment to in, in Burma with Rohingya and everywhere, there are problems of the other. So is this a specific Jewish issue or is it not? The Jews tend to think that it is. That doesn’t mean to say we don’t worry about the others or shouldn’t worry about the others, but this has a specific Jewish element to it. On the theological side, the Talmud already has this famous statement of Rabbi Yannai which says, don’t give me these answers as to why there’s evil in the world. Don’t give me pseudo answers as to why good people suffer and bad people do well.

The answer says Rabbi Yannai and the ethics of the fathers in Pirkei Avot is we simply don’t know. Now some rabbis responded to say with the answer ah, don’t worry, it’s not in this world. This world is just a testing ground to see if we can do a decent job. That reward and punishment comes in another world at another time. Well, thank you very much. I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’m just saying that doesn’t necessarily help us solve the problem. It might bring us some comfort in the same way that we might think that we will see our loved ones in the next world will bring us comfort and maybe that helps us deal with things in a way. But it’s, it’s not an answer. The catastrophe of the Holocaust was just as much the fact that the religious leadership did not impress upon its people of the dangers that might happen, couldn’t see them for all their supposed greatness, were not aware of them. And not only that, but very often the leadership got out when it could and left its followers behind. This issue of leadership and the role of leadership, and could leadership have foreseen, should it have foreseen remains a massive challenge to the orthodox world. And in one sense the Orthodox world carries this as a burden of guilt. But in another, it has responded to this by saying the following. Look, the civilised world so-called has been responsible for an attempt not only directly to destroy us, but indirectly to deny us refuge and an escape. And therefore for us, everything about the secular world has to be seen as in direct conflict with our right to survive. And the only response we can have is to say, guys, we are going to survive. We are going to show you we’re wrong. We’re going to do everything we can to assert the validity of our religious tradition and of our people.

And we will do this in two ways. We will on the one hand devote ourselves to the study, the knowledge, the content, the passion of our religious tradition and make it a priority over everything else. Some of us will still have to go out and earn a living. Some of us will be able to study full time, but above all will be the idea that we must, to quote Emil Fackenheim, not grant Hitler a posthumous victory. And the second way we will do this is by having as many children of reproducing and of protecting them by bringing them up in a protective environment without these negative secular influences that all contributed to the Holocaust in one way or another. So this is one of their fundamental responses to the Holocaust. And the fact is that I think the Holocaust world, the Haredi world, the ultra-orthodox world, lives the Holocaust in many ways all the time. And this is going to explain later on why there are some problems when it comes to how we remember or memorialise the Holocaust. But their answer then theologically, is that there is a tradition going back thousands of years that God hides. It’s called . That we drive God away by behaving in the wrong manner, and that includes religious people as well as non-religious people. And if we drive God away, we drive the light out of our world. This allows the darkness to come into our world and this allows bad, horrible things to happen. So it’s not that God wants it to happen, it’s just that we have if you like, alienated God, and that’s why it happens. And therefore when it happens through this hiddenness of God, we have to respond by what’s called the sanctification of God. By saying, God, we have betrayed you. We must do whatever we can to rectify. Now, some people have interpreted that to be martyrdom.

And martyrdom has certainly crept into Judaism even though there’s no trace of it in the earlier manifestation of Judaism, of the biblical period. It’s something that emerges later. It emerges we find for example at the time of the Maccabees. Some people refuse to fight on Shabbat and as a result lost their lives. And the authorities of that time said, no, you can break Jewish law to protect yourself. Don’t allow yourself to be killed. But then that emerged and developed parallel with Christianity within the Judaism of the Crusades in which Jews said look, you know, I’d rather die than either be converted against my will or be killed in a tortured way. And therefore sometimes they actually killed their own children or their wives to be preventing them from being tortured. So you had this idea of martyrdom is the right thing to do, but most people said no. And not only that, but if for any reason you are compelled compulsion is not such a terrible thing, you can always make up for it afterwards when you escape or when you have an opportunity. But this idea of martyrdom became very important when it came to the Holocaust because there was a strong, not a universal, but a strong element within the orthodox world which said, look, we don’t have the guns. I mean we’re surrounded by people with machine guns. What option do we have to throw ourselves against the wire, to throw ourselves on somebody who will then kill us directly or to go with dignity saying God’s name into the furnace. Now this was a highly controversial view, particularly at a time when on the other hand, the more assimilated or if you like the more modern Jews who are able to escape, we think of the Warsaw ghetto. We think of those people who escaped into the forests, were actually trying to take action and doing what they could. They couldn’t turn the clock back, they couldn’t stop Auschwitz, but they felt they were doing something. And so you have these two approaches, and who’s to say who is right and who is wrong? It was even an argument if you like, between Ben-Gurion and Bacon over how to achieve a Jewish state.

But some said, accept this is something we have no control over and go with dignity. The idea of , sanctifying God, and if we’re going to have this, maybe somehow there is something else on the other side. But there was also an issue, an issue of what is Hashkafa? What is the idea of divine providence, that God cares? Why is God not caring for me? And this idea led to the theological concept that there’s a difference between , God caring about me as an individual and , God changing about the nation, about the people. And the fact, if you like that not only did we survive that, but we came back and were able to have a Jewish homeland of our own. So this idea also entered into the theology of the Orthodox world. But of course there were always the outliers. The outliers who think they know why God works and think they can pin the blame on somebody. I’ve heard it said that the blame was assimilation and the fact that Jews abandoned or reform or what have you, in which case you still have the theological problem then as to why the ultra Orthodox got proportionally much more decimated and that doesn’t seem to balance things out. And so we come back to the question of explanations in my view cannot be found. Any more than you can convince somebody there is a God or there isn’t a God. So there is in the Orthodox world, no agreement on the actual theology of the Holocaust. The only agreement is on what should the reaction be. And as I’ve said, the reaction should be that we must do whatever we can to combat those forces that want to destroy us. And in the orthodox world the way to do this is by strengthening the tradition and by adhering to it with greater enthusiasm, by multiplying and by going from strength to strength.

But then the question arises, how are we supposed to deal with this in the practical, religious way of a memorial and in the secular way of a memorial? What does a memorial do? Now there’s no question that memory is a crucial part of our tradition. Not just for our parents but for our people from history. We are told in the Bible to remember what our enemies have done to us. So memory is a crucial phenomenon, and traditionally memory is embedded in a ritual. Remember the Shabbat, but keep the Shabbat, keep it. And how do you keep it? Well, you keep it by living it in your lives, not just occasionally, but as regularly as you can. Remembering the good and remembering the bad. So how do we remember? We have festival days and there used to be many, many, many more fasts because different communities set up different fasts to commemorate the tragedies of those catastrophes. There were literally hundreds of memorial days throughout Jewish history, the Jewish communities around the world, and there were a lot more fasts. Many of these fasts have disappeared. All books of fasts have gone out of popularity as we’ve tended to focus on basically two groups of fasts. Essentially there is the fast of atonement on the one hand, which is the most important day of the year in which we atone for our sins, but also for the sins of the community and for the sins of the world. And then you have the memorial days like the ninth of Av, the 17th of Taos linking up to the ninth of Av. And that is all to do with the destruction of Jerusalem the temple with the minor fast of the 10th of Tevet, which was the beginning of the campaign to destroy Jerusalem.

And then you also have the period of mourning between Pesach and Shavuot, which has also over time come to be associated not just with the Roman persecutions but also with the Christian Crusades and those persecutions that have gone on through middle Ages, through the cossacks and to in a sense the present day. So if we have these days, one of the traditions of the mainstream of ultra orthodoxy or the famous Ralf Carellats, the hasanish who lived in Buneburak and died in the fifties was you don’t add new burdens on the people, you strengthen those that already exist. And therefore he was opposed to any memorial day. His attitude was, let’s make one of the others, or as some came after him and said, let’s make every day a memorial day. And in fact memory to the martyrs of the Holocaust comes into orthodox prayer almost every day of the week. Certainly on Shabbat and certainly on major festivals as well is the memorial to them. And so they are arguing, we are living through this and we don’t need a separate day. Interestingly enough, when the state started, the first people to establish a day of mourning for the Holocaust was the chief Rabbinet. And the day they chose was , the tenth of Tevet, down in the wintertime. And there are some people who still adhere to it, but a few years later, belatedly the Knesset and the secular authorities decided to establish a secular memorial day and that is the Yom HaShoah which we celebrate today. Now given the fights and the battles that always went on between the secular state and the Haredi ultra orthodox state, it’s not surprising that the ultra orthodox state said look, you want to celebrate your secular day, do, but it’s not our day of memorial. We memorialise every day and all the time, we don’t need this extra one. You might need it. Well, that’s your business. So so to speak, this division developed over the Holocaust and sometimes unfortunately given the petty divisions that exist within the orthodox world, within the secular world, within all the political worlds, there are those who make a point of not stopping when the memorial sirens go off in Israel, or not turning it into a day of mourning. I think this is typical of the insensitivity that exists on both sides in Israel today towards the extremes of the others.

And it doesn’t justify in any way the extreme and we could solve the problems that exist in Israel if only the two sides would get together and talk reasonable but neither side seems capable of it. So this question of the Memorial Day and does it matter. In one way I think it does matter if not for us, then for those that don’t think of the Holocaust every day and therefore having a day when they do is better than nothing. I also think that having a secular, and by this I mean a United Nations kind of Holocaust day, is also an important feature, even if it has been not only downgraded, seriously abused, and ignored by most of the world, having these tokens is better than nothing. In the same way I think it is true to say that for all the great memorials to the Holocaust and Holocaust museums and to all the great marches and to all the great demonstrations that we have, I believe they’ve done very little to change the attitude of the vast majority of the human beings in this world who anyway don’t study history and know nothing about their own history, let alone any other history. And because in the world in which we live, the internet has reached billions of people and spewed out hatred way beyond the amount that might be influenced for good by coming through a museum in relatively small numbers. That the effect has not been what we expected in the same way that the idea of saying never again has been ignored. And look what’s happening around us at the moment in the world today. Now I do not believe that you can compare the holocaust to any other genocide because no other genocide set about systematically destroying a people and a culture. Many genocides cause one tribe to kill another tribe or one group to enslave another group.

All horrible things have happened and people have been killed and murdered and abused in horrible ways, but none as totally systematic and to the proportional extent as this, the Holocaust. And yet we have to be constantly reminded of how bad we are and how terrible we are and how we allow things to happen, and how in the world we are at this moment divided by people who think nothing of bombing civilians, nothing of destroying. And I’m not talking about in situations of self-defense, although they will justify that it is a form of self-defense. And therefore the presence of anything that at least makes a point. Now, you know, people have told me that in French schools nowadays if your teacher tries to raise the issue of a holocaust, the students will get up and they will shout him down and kick him or her out of the school. Then it is taken off the curriculum in most schools, in most parts of the world. Some people make a grave attempt, brave attempt. And I think that the importance not only of the survivors such as they are keeping on the message and talking about it and documenting it is so important. We have seen how it makes no difference to the minds who are closed in hatred. And therefore the term Zikaron, of remembering how much evil there is there in the world, how much evil there has been in the world, is an obligation upon us. We are obliged to maintain the message. We are obliged to talk about it. We are obliged to stand up to those who attack us and want to destroy us. We have to do this. But I want to end with an important message. And the important message is this. We are in a sense as Jews burdened with chips on our shoulders, with the neurosis of suffering, with the neurosis of abuse. And this sometimes we use to excuse ourselves, either to excuse ourselves by behaving in a way which goes against our tradition or against morality in general or against people we’re involved with conflict in. If we lose our soul by behaving in a way that is unacceptable, how can we then turn to others who do the same?

Nobody is perfect, without any question, and that the imperative on us is to survive. This does not mean that we are allowed to dehumanise other people. Golda Meir’s famous statement that the one thing she cannot forgive the opponents of Israel in her day was that they were forcing us to defend ourselves against them when we didn’t want to. But the emotional damage that is done when we don’t behave according to , sanctifying God’s name, is enormous. And therefore by contrast, the good that we do by sanctifying God’s name, by behaving in an ethical, moral, spiritual way is in my opinion, the most important response to the horror that the Holocaust was. So I now turn over to discussion and to see where we can go through from here.

Q&A and Comments:

Audrey mentioned watching the March of the Living, which yes, it’s very moving and it’s very inspirational. I think people go on, it can go on it. How much good it does, we can debate. But you know there’s a famous story about what the difference once upon a time between England and America was. That in England, if there is a problem, we deal with it in an English way. In America, if there’s a problem, there’s an American way. The American way to deal with it if you see a problem is to determine to overcome the problem. In England, they used to say that the response to a problem is to give up. Don’t even bother to try. I think in the world in general now these two opinions still are there. Those people who don’t bother to try, those people who do. And I think we have to try and if it works or not, we don’t know, only time will tell.

Q: How do the other, May Joan asks, religions of the world on earth make sense of the Holocaust?

A: Maybe there are no religious points of view. You want to opine on this, human rights apply to those who want the advantage of using the badge of themselves. Well this is interesting. There’s a great deal of Christian theology about the Holocaust. And remember within the Christian world there is this very strong idea that Jesus died on the cross to forgive us for our sins. And therefore this is linked of course to the idea of human beings. Human beings are intrinsically evil and the only way to overcome that is through grace, through accepting the sacrifice that Jesus made for us and accepting Jesus as our saviour. For them therefore, in a sense you could argue, and some do, that the punishment of the Jews came because they rejected Jesus. But others, more enlightened one might say, say no. The sacrifice that Jesus made shows that sometimes human beings are sacrificed by God, sacrificed in order to get us to try to be better people. And there are some people who argue that this is what the Holocaust has done, and in certain parts of the world, the world is better. And even if there is anti-Semitism in the world today it’s nothing like what it was once, certainly not in Europe and in America. And therefore it is possible that this sacrifice is something that comes with if you like, a benefit in the end. In the same way that I’ve heard people say this about the Holocaust in regard to the state of Israel. That maybe had there not been a holocaust, the state of Israel wouldn’t have been brought about. Now this mustn’t be confused with the idea that Israel only got the state because of the holocaust, the nonsense that Obama preached in Cairo.

But that it might have contributed to the political impetus at the time. But even that is highly disputed when you look at the papers both in the American State Department and in the Russian archives as to whether it was what happened to the Jews or whether it was just because they wanted to get a foothold in the Middle East and this was the best way of doing it. Earl, great topic. Thank you for doing it, thank you Earl. Romay, to acknowledge the human capacity for evil is important. It seems this truth is necessary to consider no matter what perspective we take. Yes, I think that’s true and that’s why I think that religion is so important. For all its failings, and my gosh it’s got plenty of failings and still has and so much in it that appals me and annoys me and frustrates me. But the beauty of religion is that day by day you are reminded of your values in the rituals that you do. Day by day in a Jewish prayer, in the afternoon prayer we’re asked for forgiveness for the things we do wrong. Now you will say, and quite rightly, but this becomes a routine and it’s a boring routine and people don’t take it seriously and they don’t. And that’s true, and they ignore the words. But I still, to give an analogy, I still think it’s better to give charity without thinking about it than not to give charity at all. It’s better to have a routine that gets you to think about it so that sometimes you’ll switch on rather than not have a routine altogether and you never switch on. So that’s my case for the defence, for a behavioural tradition that keeps on reminding you day by day on how much evil there is. Every day we ask God in our morning prayers not to get us to do the wrong thing, to try to be a better person. And I know people walk out of the synagogue the way they walk out of the synagogue at the end of Tisha B'Av, of the day of atonement, and go back to what they were doing wrong before.

But I still think it’s better to have a day of atonement than to have none at all. Joan, Hitler had a do or die mentality relating to his severe antisemitic mind. And the majority of humanity are mindless, which his success shows. Yes, unfortunately hatred exists. Hatred exists everywhere. It’s a battle that will never end and we have to do our best. I just look at it like this. Marriage is such a wonderful institution, it’s a wonderful institution, beautiful from so many points of view, we applaud it. How many marriages have ended in charity, in disaster rather? How many marriages have brought about pain and suffering and alienation? And yet somehow, as Oscar Wilde said, marriage is the triumph of optimism over experience. We still want there to be love no matter how much pain love has caused. Perhaps God requires us to negotiate the darkness. Well I like to think, you know, I don’t think we have to, Christianity is very keen on this idea that suffering is necessary. I don’t believe it is necessary to suffer. I realise that if you have suffered, you have a different dimension of understanding what it is. But I don’t think it is necessary to suffer evil or bad, which we all do at some stage or another. But I do think having gone through it, we should always learn the lesson. If we step out of a car crash alive over which we had no control whatsoever, we should say thank God I’m alive. You know, I get up every morning and say, thank God I woke up this morning, thank God I’m alive. Thank God my organs are functioning normally because very often they don’t. So I do think it’s important to function on the positive. And if there is evil, that’s what it is.

Q: And Mickey asks why do we push good God away? Why do we push each other away?

A: Sometimes we’re impatient. You know, I look back on my period as a head master and I think I could have done a lot better. I could have helped people more, which you know, I was caught up with the obligations of the school and running an institution and this, that, and the other and I didn’t have time. And one thing we come up with excuses, but I don’t think that we push God away intentionally. I think most of us simply have never experienced God. We were never taught it, we were never experienced it. And even in people brought up in very religious family sometimes have no experience. I was fortunate, I was brought up in a family where there was an experience and it was a positive one. But so many people don’t know. And that’s interesting to me why? In the religious world, one of the reasons why they say now that you should never punish or make a non-religious person feel unwanted or bad or negative because the Talmud talks about . A child who is brought up in a non-Jewish world and has no knowledge of of Jewish law, anything like that. How can you possibly punish him for something he never knew or her for something he never knew. So you can’t blame people for something they never knew.

Miriam says, thank you for a constructive approach. Second generation daughter, mother, grandmother. Yes, yes, it’s, you know, the neurosis continues. We all have a degree of injury and continue. Every time I think of killing a baby, I think of how could human beings ever do that. So I’ve taken it to a point where I am sometimes a bit aggressive and overbearing in my religious stance, but I do this out of pain rather than for any other reason.

Q: Bernard, do you think Palestinian issues contribute to the lack of sympathy for the Holocaust?

A: Oh yes, I’m certain it has contributed because people say, are misusing it all the time. In the same way that I think Black Lives Matter is abusing the Holocaust by comparing slavery to the Holocaust. However awful slavery was and it was, and just as much slavery was imposed by blacks on blacks, that nevertheless there has never been a systematic attempt to destroy every black person I can lay my hands on. And so everybody in that sense is using the holocaust to blame Israel for. So the Arab world says yes, you know, it’s only the Holocaust that you’ve got a Jewish state. So of course the Holocaust is to blame, and Hitler should have finished it off. And if Hitler had finished it, had finished it off, then there wouldn’t be a Jewish state and we wouldn’t have the problem we have in the world today. And so how often around the world today, in football matches, do you get people in the stands making sounds sounding like the gas chambers to get rid of the Jews? So sure the Holocaust plays a very important part in keeping antisemitism alive, but we mustn’t let that in any way diminish our commitment or make us any weaker. We grew up in the concept and pledge of never again. If heaven or forbid did happen, could the lead us back by saying it’s God’s will. Look, I’m sure they might do. However, I think that we are seeing within the Haredi world, more and more people going into the army and fighting and helping when there was a crisis. In Israel in the six day war, when I was living down amongst the Haredi world, in Mea Shearim, when the war broke out, they were in the streets. We were all in the streets digging ditches, driving ambulances, doing what we could to help. So you know, we tend in Israel to make it black and white.

They don’t care, they’re not going to help. They’re just going to lay back. And particularly now that, particularly in America where it’s the Haredi who are bearing the brunt of antisemitism ‘cause they’re immediately recognised, and these are the people who are the least Zionist in one sense, it’s ironic that they are putting up and coping with it. Trying to find the essence of antisemitism is like trying to catch smoke with a butterfly net. Oh, that’s one way of looking at it. I think it’s trying to get to the basis of why humans are humans. And if anything I think the answer might lie in evolution than it does in revolution. How do you think we should use only the shroud, not the Holocaust to explain uniqueness of the former and the latter? Look, I think we should use every opportunity to do both. To stress the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but to stress the uniqueness of genocide and destruction of inhumanity. Begging told Bibby we need an internal threat or we would tear ourselves apart. Lots of people have said that. I heard that from the son of the first chief rabbi of Israel, Yaakov Herzog, blessed memory, that without the conflict from the outside we would have a civil war. So it’s been like that. I’m just reading the, and a relatively recent biography of David Ben-Gurion and I see the hatred that existed within the left at that time of the establishment of the state, who the Marxist wanted a socialist Marxist state and the others didn’t. It’s always been there amongst our Jews. We are Jews. How do we say, the Lord Jacobovici used to say the Jews, we’re the same as everybody else only more so. It seems that everything we do is exaggerated, even our bad side, even our conflict. Which again is why the Talmud said many years ago, why does the Bible describe us as the stars of the heaven and the dust of the earth? And the Talmud replies because when we rise, we rise to the heavens, we are capable of it. And when we sink, we can sink to the dirt. We are capable of that too.

Q: What role should the Pope play in apologising to the Jews?

A: Barry, the Popes have done a lot in recent years. Since Pope John the 23rd they have turned around completely. And of all the Christian denominations, they are the ones who have not only apologised and done as much as they can to go out of their way to make up for it. It’s not so easy because remember, they also have to please the other side and bother about other considerations. But they have. The Pope, the last five popes have done a very good job.

Shelly, in the religious world, destruction of the first temple is because Jews doing the three cardinal sins. Yes sins, including hating each other. The second temple is destroyed because of baseless hatred amongst other things.

Q: Do you think the future religious world will blame Asur on the enlightenment or something else, one group?

A: I think human beings love to find, even religious love, love to find scapegoats, they love to find people to blame. They’ll always blame people for something or other. I don’t think we should bother about this nonsense of anyway, trying to find the answer, the answer to anything. To most problems there are several answers. We’re in a world of of chaos, of random numbers and everything. Single stand answers as Isaiah Berlin, another one of my heroes once said, if you ever come across anybody who says they’ve got the answer, run away as fast as you can. Well he meant the answer to exclude all others.

Q: What do you think of Jewish concepts of limited theism and reconstructionist Judaism that don’t believe in a fully transcendent, imminent God?

A: Look, I do believe there are so many different options. Whether you believe in God, whether you don’t, what kind of God, a deistic God, a theistic God. And I think in the end what God or whoever wants of us is to be good human beings. So to me, it doesn’t matter what theology you take. I have my theology, doesn’t mean it’s right. I have what works for me I tend in religious matters to take a mystical point of view, not a rational point of view. When I’m doing science, I’m a rationalist. When I’m dealing with theories and philosophy, I’m a rationalist. But when I come to religion, it’s experience, mysticism, or if you like existentialism. It seems that we cannot answer the question why.

George Steiner said, you’re arguing that evil is ineffable. No we can’t, and indeed, George Steiner, in last portable to San Cristobal, claimed in his play had Hitler arguing with the Israelis who came to get him that why are they going for him when they started it all when they killed the Canadian Knights? Well, you know, that was a long, long time ago. I think we could be allowed to have developed since then.

Elliot, may I provide us with the opportunity to learn from you? You’re so sweet. Thank you, Joan. Still got time.

Q: Joan, hissing at single matches you mentioned, what do they make this sound in connection to?

A: Because in football matches, there are gangs of opposing supporters that hate each other. Unfortunately, in Israel you have this. When Arab teams play, then right wing teams boo them. And it’s horrible. You get this everywhere in sport. Wherever Israel goes, people try to stop 'em. They try to boo them, they try to prevent 'em. Look what happened in Indonesia where they, they didn’t want to let the Israeli youth team come in for the under 20 something or other 19 youth game. And so FIFA rightfully said okay, so we’re taking the games away from you. We’re going to move them somewhere else. So this is happening all the time.

Q: My father believed said Joan, that being a Jew is innate. You say if a child’s not treated as a Jew, they cannot be blamed for mistakes in life. He was a Hasid. What’d you make of that?

A: Look, I don’t agree with the innate thing. I think there’s a lot of conditioning, but you know how, and a lot of transmission. But how do you explain the idea that are people who, converts, who come from no contact with Jewish life whatsoever and yet become the most Haredi? There are black Haredi converts with long payot in Mea Shearim and in parts of Brooklyn to this very day. Now I know some Hasidim like to explain, well, somewhere along the line, there must have been some Jewish connection or suckled at the breasts of our mothers. But that doesn’t make sense. So I don’t believe it is innate. I believe it is something that can be passed down in some ways just as trauma can be passed down from one generation to another. So I think there is an element of that within our genes that we’re unaware of the extent to which it exists. But I don’t think it is compulsive. It might just be influence.

Rita, in memory of my mother on the 18th, I wish you a long life. So everybody, thank you. I hope we have good news. Next time we meet, I think we’ll be talking about Zionism and how we deal with the situation we have today. I hope something much more positive. Long life to everybody.