Jeremy Rosen
Religious Responses to the Shoah
Jeremy Rosen - Religious Responses to the Shoah
[Judi] Hey, Trudy, I’ve gone live.
Okay. Hello, everyone. I’m waiting to introduce Jeremy. Unfortunately, he seems to be having a problem logging on, so would you bear with us for a little while? And in fact, whilst you’re waiting, if any of you have any questions from my last presentation on Zionism and the Shoah, you can start putting them online because we could deal with them while we’re waiting for Jeremy hopefully to get online. So all you have to do is put them in the Q&As. I hope you all heard that we’re waiting for Jeremy. Hopefully we get him online ‘cause it’s a very important lecture he’s giving tonight. But in, as I said, in the meantime, whilst we’re waiting, those of you who had, who came to the lecture I gave on Zionism and the Shoah, perhaps if any of you want to put any points online, because we didn’t get through it all. Any, oh, I’ve got some questions online. Thank you. This is from your Yolanda. “I heard a great interview about a woman who wrote about Jewish rescuers.” We are, we’re in negotiations with her. She will be giving a presentation on the Lockdown University. That’s sorted. Thank you.
Now, this is an interesting one. “How were survivors of the Shoah received in Israel?” Now, this is a very, very complex problem. By the end of 1948, a quarter of the population of Israel were Holocaust survivors. And if you think of the whole ethos of Israel, think of the words of Abba Kovner, who becomes really the national poet. “We will never again go like sheep to the slaughter.” I can say this until I’m absolutely blue in the face. They never did go like sheep to the slaughter. But if you think of one of the issues I’ve been looking at over the past few months, bar Kochba, ben Zakkai, to the people who created the state, if we’d had power, there wouldn’t have been a Shoah. That was very much the mantra. So many survivors felt very uncomfortable and a lot of them didn’t speak for a long time. But this is also true of the West, by the way. A lot of survivors in the West didn’t speak. I’ve been told by, I’ve worked with survivors for many, many years. I used to work with them when they went into schools to tell their stories. And some of them said they didn’t want to speak, but the majority of them said that when they did speak, nobody really wanted to listen, and it took a decade before it even begins to open up, and really the floodgates don’t open until the '80s and '90s. Judi, have we got any luck? Judi?
[Judi] Trudy, I’m just chatting to Jeremy. He’s just having a few technical issues. We’ll, give us two minutes and we’ll be online.
Okay, well, I will continue with this, thank you.
[Judi] Just a few technical issues.
Good. “Was Ben-Gurion justified in ordering the bombing of the Altalena?” Oh my goodness. You’ve come up with a very important question. I’m not going to fudge it, but I don’t want to answer it until we’ve covered the years '45 to '48. We’ve looked at all the issues between the various groups. And then I promise you we will be looking at the Altalena. And you’ve got to remember, this is one of the issues that still divides Israel. How do we deal? Don’t forget that Begin was on that ship. Stavsky went down with the ship. So I promise you I will be doing that. Uri Avnery, I love his work, Monty. Yes, I have many articles on him. And so yes, were the Haredim always anti-Zionist? Be careful, not all Haredim were anti-Zionist, but the majority of them believed the masciach would lead the Jews back. And this is the whole issue. There were a couple of forerunners of Zionism, two rabbis, Alkalai and Kalischer, in the middle of the 19th century. They both came from areas of incredible nationalisms. They were aware of nationalisms and they said they would, that if the Jews went to Palestine to prepare for the coming of the mashiach. That’s how they reconciled it. It’s very interesting. Have I read “The Revolt”?
Yes, of course I’ve read “The Revolt.” “I still have difficulty understanding the situation with regard to the Nazi encouragement for emigration to Israel.” Jerry, it’s a very, very painful issue. But Hitler, up until 1941, wanted a . Yes, he was obsessed with Jews. He absolutely loathed Jews. But he doesn’t start the wholesale final solution until the invasion of Russia. and Eichmann set up an immigration bureau in Vienna at the end of '38 and in Berlin at the beginning of '39. If the Jews could’ve got out, he would’ve been happy. He wanted all their money, that’s for sure. He just didn’t want them in the German sphere of influence. “Was England the only ally to save Jewish children as a policy?” Be careful with that, Arlene Goldberg. Yes, England allowed in the Kindertransport. So did other countries. But I think we’ve got to be careful about this whole notion of the allies and saving. As friends of mine said, they didn’t save the parents. And frankly, my view on the allies and how they dealt with the Jews is too little, too late. So yes, it was wonderful that they allowed the kinder in and what that Kindertransport did for the British is extraordinary.
But having said that, there were hundreds of thousands of other children who could also have been saved. “Were the majority of rescuers Jews?” That’s a very complex question. All the rescuers… This is from Veinga. All the rescuers at Yad Vashem are non-Jews. That was the whole purpose. But there were many rescuers who were also Jews. David Sandler. “Why were the Jews in America and Canada in the '40s and '50s hostile to Zionism, or were they or were they had different schools of thought?” Be careful about the '40s and '50s. I think the change is the Shoah and the establishment of the state. They didn’t choose to live there, but many of them were supporters of Zionism. And that means we really have to think about what does the word Zionism mean? “I have read about,” this is from Myrna. “I have read about groups of children who were hidden by Catholics or Protestants who were put together to await transport to Israel and didn’t get on with each other. Do you have any comments on this?” Myrna, yeah, people are people, some brought up as Catholics, some brought up as Protestants, and then they in fact are Jews. It’s such a complex issue. “Do I think the elimination of Yiddish was an error by the Israeli government?” David, it was an ideology.
As far as the Zionists were concerned, Yiddish was the language of the diaspora. The diaspora was unwholesome for the Jews. That’s why they politically wanted to recreate Hebrew. When Ben-Yehuda, Ben-Yehuda was a Zionist zealot. He believed passionately in the Hebrew language. They believed only if they resurrected the language could they resurrect a whole people. And of course it wasn’t just Yiddish. The Sephardim spoke Ladino. They felt that it would be the unifying factor going back to a time when Jews walked tall and proud in their own nation. That is the Zionist view on it. The elimination of Yiddish, the great and glorious Yiddish tradition. We’ll be having lectures on that later in the course. Martin Belman, oh, this is a difficult one. “What would the original proponents of Zionism think about present-day Israel?” That would be an extraordinarily interesting debate to put on, because whatever side you’re on in the great debate on Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Begin, and Jabotinsky, I think all of you would agree that they are lions. You might not agree with their politics, but I think you all agree they were lions. What do lions think about with the people who come after them?
Yes, about the Biltmore Declaration using the term United Nations was apparently what the UK, USA, and USSR are called themselves during World War I. It was not the UN that was formulated later. There will be a lecture on the United Nations. Robert Sachs. “Despite the reparations paid by Germany, my understanding is that many survivors in Israel live in abject poverty. Can you comment on this?” I know there are survivors who have very straightened circumstances. Look, it’s not just about German reparations. The claims conference tries to make sure that no survivor anywhere in the world has financial problems. And I’m sure some people do slip through the net, but I also know that they work incredibly hard. So does the joint. So do all sorts of organisations. When I was working in Eastern Europe in particular, I know how powerful they were in trying to help survivors who were still living in the Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania.
[Jeremy] Can you see me?
Yes.
Can you see me?
No, I can’t see you, but I’m glad you’re here. Yes, I can now. All right, I’ve just been holding the fort for you, Jeremy.
[Jeremy] Thank you. So I don’t know what’s gone wrong with me. I’ve been, it must be the subject has put a jinx on me or something like that.
Oh, I hope not.
I’m so sorry.
So Jeremy, I’m so glad to see you. Anyway, as you, I was just taking questions from my last presentation. We will continue this on Monday. It’s now my great pleasure to introduce my friend Jeremy Rosen. I’ve asked him specifically to look at theological responses to the Shoah because he’s by far the best person to do so. So Jeremy, I hope you’re not too jinxed by technology. I am. So over to you, and thank you so much, Jeremy.
[Jeremy] So first of all, ladies and gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry. I have no idea what went wrong this morning, but something’s gone wrong. But anyway, let’s get straight on to the subject. I worry so much about the Holocaust that I find myself caught in a vice of irrationality. And by this I mean to say that for thousands of years, we’ve been asking this fundamental question, why do bad things happen to good people? And if you believe in God, then this is a question that we are bound to put to God himself. If you control the universe, if you are the master of the universe, then please explain why you allow horrible things to happen. And the fact of the matter is that this issue has been an issue right from the beginning of the Bible, right from the moment of Adam disobeying God, we have the problem of why did God allow us to make mistakes? Why does God allow us to make the wrong decisions? So the easy, simple answer is there is no God. But then that would be a conclusion that maybe philosophers would come to.
Theologians assume there is a God and they’re trying to justify how God works. So, for example, in the Bible, Abraham turns to God and says to God, “You want to destroy Sodom. How come if you are the God of justice can you do something unjust?” To which there is no answer. Sodom and Gomorrah get destroyed. Or for example, you have the crazy statement of God to Abraham, “Go and kill your firstborn son.” What kind of God would tell somebody to go and kill their firstborn son? So right from the beginning it seems that God lives in a world of his own, a world that we have no access to. And yet on the other hand, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are constantly interacting with God. So the question, of course, is what kind of God are we talking about? In a simple, primitive world, God is regarded like Superman. That is to say, God can come down on earth and intervene to stop us doing bad things, to reward us or to punish us. The whole of the Bible is predicated on this principle.
And although it’s quite true that the text of the Bible is filched almost identically from earlier Assyrian documents, it’s still there in black and white. What are these earlier Assyrian documents? They are that a king, the Assyrian kings, even earlier than that, made a declaration. When they came to the throne, they said, “I am your king. If you obey me, I will look after you. I will protect you. I will do everything that’s necessary for your welfare. I’ll make sure the crops come at the right time, that the rains come in the right time. If you’re invaded, I’ll keep them away. But if you disagree, if you don’t obey me, I will destroy you. I will smash you. The rains won’t come. The crops won’t come. You’ll be taken into captivity. You’ll be beaten up left, right, and centre.” And those very texts you’ll find in the five books of Moses. The Hebrew term is rebuke. But that is, if you like, a pre-Greek philosophical way of looking at the world. God is involved with everything, but we simply don’t understand how it works. We assume that God cares about us and God worries about whether we do the right thing or the bad thing and will react accordingly.
Once you get to the idea of philosophy, that is to say, look, we’re not accepting anything on face value. We now want to see what we can discover about how the world works and what this thing called God might or might not be. Once you get there, you enter into a whole new zone. You enter into a zone of people who say there are good forces in the world and there are bad forces in the world. And if bad things happen, that’s because there’s a bad force. If good things happen, that’s because there’s a good force. Now, the Jewish response to this was that human beings have a capacity to do the right thing and to do the wrong thing. So in the Garden of Eden, Adam chose the wrong thing to do. He took the fruit. But you can make up for this, and life is a constant challenge. And in the book of Genesis, the text, there is a characteristic, a nature, a in the heart of every person that can incline to good and incline to bad. But most of the time we make the wrong decisions. And God’s role is to try to get us to make the right decisions. Ideally, God would get us to make the right decisions by presenting us with a constitution and a way of life. But unfortunately most of us ignore it or disobey it, and therefore we face the consequences.
And that idea, which is both in the Persian tradition of Zoroastrianism and in the Greek and the Christian idea, is that there are two forces, the force for good and the force are bad. Christianity answered the question of why we do bad things by saying, look, if you don’t accept Jesus as your saviour, given that all human beings are guilty of original sin, we’re all sinners, then we’re going to do bad things, and that’s an inevitable feature of human nature. The philosophers did not agree with this sort of approach. Sorry, the theologians, I meant to say, don’t agree with that approach. They try to find other ways of dealing with it. So let me give you an example of how the Talmud dealt with this issue of reward and punishment. It was very worried. It asked the question, why do good people suffer and bad people seem to survive? And it comes up with a different range of answers. One range of answer is, oh, well, reward and punishment doesn’t come in this world, it comes in the next world, which is fine. Doesn’t help me very much. The other one is to say the reward of a good deed is a good deed.
The punishment for a bad deeded is a bad deed. But my favourite is this opinion of Rabbi Yannai who said, frankly, most honestly, we don’t know. We can’t explain. And it’s because we can’t explain, we have to accept the world as it is. And truly going back to the Bible, to the horrific destruction of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, the book of Ahab, the book of Lamentations says lama, why, God, lama sabachthani, why have you abandoned us? Why I can’t explain. So the straight answer therefore is that the Talmud go in great detail to why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. Cannot explain it, but wants you to take it as a statement of fact that God is benevolent, God wants to do the right thing and wants us to do the right thing. The trouble is we don’t know how God works. The God that we could understand can’t really be a good, but truth, is this such a problem? I should start again and try and log in. I don’t know. Are you telling me, shall I still carry on? Okay, well, I will carry on.
Jeremy, we can’t see you but we can hear you. And frankly, I’ve got a, we’ve got a picture of you in the middle of the screen. And rather than risk the, rather than risk problems, I think it’s perfectly okay to go on as we, do you agree, Judi?
[Judi] Absolutely, Trudy, it’s fine. We can see the picture of Jeremy. It’s perfect.
We can see your picture.
Okay.
We can’t you see moving around.
[Judi] It’s perfect. But we can see a photograph of you.
And look, those of you who come on late, just bear with it. We had a technological, technical problem, and this is much more important. So over to you, Jeremy.
[Jeremy] Okay, I mean, I don’t know if I should, again, if I should try, speaking to you on my iPhone at the moment.
We can hear you loud and clear and the ideas are very important, so go with that.
[Jeremy] Okay, let me just see, anything else I can do? No, I can’t do anything else.
[Judi] Jeremy, you have another device open?
[Jeremy] Yes, I do. I have two other devices open.
[Judi] So what is the other device? And you can start the video on the other device. Go to your other device.
[Jeremy] Okay, so let’s take this here. We’re on the other device and what should I open?
[Judi] And then it’ll say you can start the, you can start your, so you got, well, I can see you. I can see background, so you must be, show me your face. Where are you sitting?
[Jeremy] Well, I’m sitting in front of…
[Judi] Well, I can’t see you now, but I can see that.
Just that you’ve got to reverse your camera, Jeremy.
[Jeremy] Which camera are we talking about? My phone camera. Oh, maybe that’s what it is. Maybe if I reverse my phone camera that would make a difference. Can you see me now?
No, I can see a white blob.
[Jeremy] Now?
What do you think, Jude? Mm-mm. Nope.
[Judi] Let’s just continue this way.
[Trudy] Yes, I agree.
[Judi] I think there’s just a little bit of confusion. It’s absolutely fine. Let’s carry on.
As long as we hear you, more important you get your ideas over.
[Jeremy] Okay, let’s see if we can get this. Any of these things live? No, we don’t want that one. Okay, let’s get out of there. Okay. At least I can see myself. That’s not much good, but… Hold on. I really don’t .
[Judi] Oh, Jeremy, you can just continue talking, because we can see your picture and that’s absolutely perfect. But we can continue.
[Jeremy] Can’t tell you how embarrassed I am by all this.
[Judi] Absolutely don’t worry. It’s absolutely fine. These things happen. We have technical issues all the time and this is, we can see you and the talk is wonderful and this is what we need. We only need to hear you.
[Jeremy] Okay, you’re too kind. Okay, so I was at the stage where I’ve gone through the biblical wrestling with the idea of God. I’ve gone through the Talmudic idea of trying to get to understand how things work. And I want them to look at the mediaeval responses to the terrible things that happened up to that moment before we get anywhere near the Holocaust. The first response, Maimonides, who was a philosopher and a theologian, is, look, we have been given free will. The fact that we’ve been given free will means that some of us can do horrible things with our freedom. And that’s a simple answer. There is free will, there is evil in the world. It’s not that it comes from God. God contains everything, lets the world happen. But that’s what goes on. The other answer is the mystical. The mystical answer is God is yearning for us with a passion, and because we never get close to God, God feels rejected. And so God does two things when God is rejected. One of them is he allows all the bad forces to happen in the hope that that will persuade us that we’re wrong. Or alternatively, he retreats, and first he gave us the exile, the exile didn’t work, and then he retreated from us. This concept of God wants us but then we reject God. And that was and remains to a large extent the mystical answer to this whole question. But we have now experienced this unimaginable horror of what modern technology can do and what modern evil can do in a world which we thought was civilised.
After all, we’re supposed to have had 2,000 years of Christian civilization, of Islamic civilization, of Jewish civilization, and this is what can happen. And therefore in modern thinking terms, the simple answer is there is no God. And the irony is that there are many people who went through the Holocaust and came out on the other side and still did believe in and do believe in God to this very day. So that in itself is a massive problem that we can’t explain in any rational way. The other answer is to say leave God out of this. Where was humanity? Where were human beings? How could any human being do this regardless of whether he or she was religious or not or believed in what they did, to treat a human being as an animal to be exterminated? How could that possibly be? The problem, of course, is that there is this concept that we call benevolence, that God is involved. So, for example, as we’ve mentioned before, Spinoza’s idea that God is the sum total of everything in the universe, but it’s not Superman intervening in our daily lives. The universe runs according to its rules, which includes a God but not an interventionist, not Superman coming out of the sky every time we do something wrong. And on the other hand you have this simplest belief, which is probably the fundamental belief of most Orthodox Jews today, that God actually does reward you, and the only question is, is it in this world or is it in the next? There’s, sorry, got some noise going on in my background. This is turning into a nightmare.
Jeremy, your content is superb. Just see it through, please.
[Jeremy] So on therefore to the question of what has happened is that we have done something to deserve it. Now, the question is who has done something to deserve it? The whole of the Jewish people, the whole of humanity, the good guys, the bad guys? It can’t make any sense. Not only that, but the big problem is that there are people on earth who claim they know how God works, and God works in a particular way in which God punishes people for doing the wrong things, and we were punished because we abandoned God. But that raises an equal question. Well, then in which case, why punish everybody? Why punish every human being who got caught up in the Holocaust? Not only those people who might have been betrayers or left or assimilated or what have you. That wouldn’t make any sense at all. And then you have the argument that says this is nothing to do with human beings punished for their sins. This is entirely to do with the fact that Christianity has failed us, the world has failed us, humans have failed us, and we don’t understand the fact that God is not there handing out cookies to support us and protect us. But unfortunately there are people who insist that God has punished the Jewish people for its own sins, the way it did when it lost the first temple, the way it did when it lost the second temple, and now because we have assimilated and we’re disappearing off the face of the earth.
So these are the kind of broad ideas that then have influenced the modern thinkers that try to explain what happened in the Holocaust. So the first person I would mention is the famous Satmar Rebbe, the rebbe who was born in Transylvania in Hungary who was opposed to Zionism, who was opposed to Jews leaving the area that he lived in. He managed to escape thanks to the Zionists who he detested, came initially to Israel and then ended up in America. In America, the Satmar Hasidim are the largest Hasidic group. They are expanding exponentially out of Williamsburg and out of Brooklyn to New York state and to New Jersey. And they are, like all Jews, divided amongst themselves. There are rebbes who conflict with each other. Two brothers who inherited the previous one can’t get on. The founder of the modern Satmar movement, Joel Teitelbaum, in a famous book of his argued two things. He argued against Zionism and against Jews coming back to… I don’t know why, are you seeing me still? My phone’s gone funny.
We see a picture of you, Jeremy, and we can hear you clearly.
[Jeremy] Okay, thank you. So this man believed that Zionism was evil because you had to wait for the messiah, and any attempt to try to preempt the messiah was a theological catastrophe. Most rabbis over the years have totally disagreed with him. But Teitelbaum’s attitude also was the only way we’re going to survive what happened in the Holocaust is by totally rejecting anything secular. The secular world, the non-Jewish world completely abandoned us. They have no moral authority whatsoever. All their values are hypocritical. They just want to see us gone. And therefore we must turn our backs on them and withdraw within our own holy spaces. The consequence of this is for him to say everything bad that happens happens because people turn their backs on God and because the European Jews were assimilating at such a massive rate, the Americans even more so, that was why God punished us as an act of discipline the way a parent disciplines a child and getting us to pay attention and realise how terrible we’ve been. And that point of view is simplistic.
It takes us a fundamentalist position that God does intervene and chose not to intervene and he chose not to intervene because we were bad. On the other hand, you have those more moderate thinkers, and these moderate thinkers take a slightly different point of view. You have the famous professor Emil Fackenheim, who was a survivor, who said the purpose of all this is to see that it is possible to find good even in the worst, and that even if something terrible happens, it’s an opportunity for individuals somehow to rise if they can. Now, I don’t find that a very satisfactory answer. His response was the Holocaust was a horrific event. We must learn from it, and the way we must learn from it is by being stronger. The way we are going to be stronger is by building up our homeland, by going to live in Israel. And he went to live in Israel. And we mustn’t give Hitler the posthumous victory of disappearing as a result of our own efforts or our own apathy. So that was Fackenheim’s approach. Eliezer Berkovits’s approach was to say very simply that this is what happens when there’s free will. You can’t have it both ways. That God did not create us as angels.
He created us as humans with all the bad side, the good and the bad. And if that’s there, you’ve got to expect us to do bad. What the Holocaust was was a bunch of highly efficient technocrats got hold of the means of production or assassination beyond anything that anybody had done before. But you’ve had other examples of genocide. You think of the Armenians before and other places. So this was just enabled by modernity, which you would argue in the same way that the atom bomb was able to kill far more people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than previous forms. But it was, he would argue, used in a protective way. But that’s a different debate altogether. Then you have the point of view of a Reform rabbi called Ignaz Maybaum, and Ignaz Maybaum actually sounds rather Christian in the sense that he says we are the equivalent of Jesus for Christians. Jesus died for the sins of the Christians. He suffered on the cross in order that the other Christians could live better lives in the future. And we Jews in the Holocaust suffered so that other Jews could go on living and could go on surviving.
And then finally of the kind of general rules, general categories, you have something like Richard Rubenstein who says, no, there is no God. Stop asking about God. Ask about human beings. Where were human beings in the Holocaust? Now, where do I stand when I look back at all these different opinions and what kind of conclusion can I come to myself about this idea? I think very much that the idea of reward and punishment benevolence is not like going into a casino and putting a coin in, pulling a lever, and you get your reward. We live in a mixed world which has its natural disasters, whether they are earthquakes or volcanoes or tsunamis. We have our cycle of climates and our, the good times and the bad times. And our job in this world is to do our best. We come up against two kinds of negative forces, the natural and the human. And that’s because the world we live in is a mixture of the natural and the human. And our job is to cope. The function of Torah is not to reward and punish. It is there to give us guidelines, a kind of a constitution as to how we should live our lives. And as one opinion says in the Talmud, don’t do anything because you expect a reward.
Do it because it’s the right thing to do. And when you look at it like that, you don’t theoretically expect in that sense God to intervene in a way that makes sense to you. Now, we all do. We all ask when something bad happens, why is God doing this to me? We don’t often say when things go well, why is God doing this to me? We should do. But our human nature, we want to find a reason. We want to find an answer. And sometimes there is no answer other than this is how the world was made. An idea you also find in the Talmud. This is how it was created, with the good and the bad in it. And we have to do our best to find the good. If, as the famous myth goes, we can put God on trial and treat God as a human being, of course we would find God guilty. But God is not human, however much we try to make him human or speak to him as if God were, or her or it, as if God were human. But God is simply beyond and therefore by very nature is not us. And as a famous French theologian said, “The God that’s small enough for my mind isn’t big enough for me.” That is to say that if my puny human mind can’t comprehend, then, can comprehend something, then it’s pretty limited.
And here we are constantly expanding our consciousness from two dimensions to three dimensions to four dimensions, and the latest is 11 dimensions. And therefore the issue of trying to understand becomes a massive problem. The Talmud, the Torah, rather, starts off with a letter bet. And the letter bet as opposed to the letter aleph is unique in that it’s covered on the top, covered behind, and covered underneath. And from this, the mystics say that’s telling us something. That’s telling us that the Torah is looking forward. It’s not looking above, it’s not looking below, it’s not looking behind. It’s trying to give us a way of going forward. Now, that doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t be involved in scientific endeavour or trying to find things out. Of course you should and you must, because that’s God’s creation, too. But you have to focus on how you go forward. And that explains the famous story, and it’s a myth, but it’s a nice myth, that in Auschwitz they put God on trial and they argued the case for and against and finally they found God guilty and then everybody got up and they went to pray the evening prayers.
And that’s to some extent what this is a bit like. It is saying that we have in a way to take God out of the equation and we have to focus on ourselves within the equation. And that is why the Torah says the most important principle is to love your neighbour as yourself. Now, it doesn’t mean to love him as much as you love yourself, because it’s worded in such a way as show love to your neighbour in the same way that you care about yourself, which is why Hillel turned it into saying what is hateful to you, don’t do to others. But when you show love, you’re showing an emotional existential commitment in the way that we love our parents, we love our children, our family. We may look to our parents and think they’re going to protect us, but they don’t protect us all the time. They can’t protect us all the time. We have to make our own mistakes. We want to make our own mistakes. So love of something, valuing something does not necessarily go hand in hand with total protection.
And so these people in the Holocaust had a feeling and that feeling of theirs about the nature of God transcended the horror they were going through. And this is why you see amongst the survivors of the Holocaust almost two clear different groups. Of those who did survive and were not fatally damaged, they fall into two categories, either those who said, “This was so horrible, I don’t want my children to know about it. I don’t want to know about it. I don’t want to have anything to do with about it. I’m not interested in my religion. I’m not interested in anything that stuck me out as a Jew to be the object of this hatred and this vindictiveness. I’m turning my back on it.” And on the other hand, you see just as many people who became even more religious afterwards and have become more religious and stayed more religious and passed it on to their family. So you see how human beings respond differently to exactly the same circumstances, which tells us this is all about human beings, and it reinforces to me the idea that to go to God about this is asking the wrong question.
To think of God as Superman is naive. Some people need to. We need props. We all do. We all need to think we’re doing something. And so we pray to God. Praying to God essentially is an expression of our own feeling. I’m happy, I’m sad, I want this, I don’t want that. But to think that you are going to get this answer is dangerous. And I think that many of those rabbis and leaders who claim to be giving answers in a way are misleading their followers. You only hear about the cases where their bets succeed, never where their bets fail. And this is a very dangerous path to go down. It is a path, frankly, that most human beings need. In every religion, the majority of human beings take a simple, naive, simple belief. simple belief. But those who think can only see the pain. They can only see the problems. They can only see the difficulties. And they realise that they can’t solve these difficulties, so they have to live with them. And if they live with them, they live with the responsibility of trying to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. But to look for God, to God for simple answers to reward us does not make sense. In the Talmud, it says very clearly everything may be in the hands of God.
The system is in the hands of God except for catching a cold and falling into a trap. In other words, if you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll get sick, and if you don’t look where you’re going, you’re going to fall into a trap. So human life is subject to these constant, constant tests. The tests of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, whether they come from God or they come from man. We are constantly being challenged, and there are certain things to which there are no answers. And as the famous Gaon Saadia said 1,000 years ago in Baghdad, we must go on searching for answers, but each one of us has a different answer. And in the meantime, if we’re waiting for an answer, we don’t know how to live, so we should focus on living now while parallel we can search. There’s an American philosopher thinker called Steven Spinker. Pinker, rather. And Pinker says everybody talks about God and everybody has a different opinion of God. Everybody, if you ask what do you mean by God, they’ll come up with some other answer. And so he says it’s pointless to talk about God.
It’s valuable to talk about the idea of God. What is your idea of God? If your idea of God is that God only punishes people when they do bad and only rewards people when they do good, you’re in trouble. If your version of God is that God intervenes and sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t, you’re also in trouble. But there again, most of us tread a very fine line. I happen to be a rationalist. I believe that the establishment of the state of Israel was a miracle after 2,000 years, however you understand a miracle. But you can explain a miracle in one of two ways. You can explain a miracle as a confluence of events that come together that create an unusual conclusion or you can treat it as accident or you can treat it as divine intervention. And all this debate about theological explanation of the Holocaust reinforces to my mind that we humans do not have answers. We have accommodations. We have ways of coping. But if you’re looking for an answer, you won’t find it. And the only answer is to love. Love yourself, love people, love the world. And there I will conclude, and again apologise for this ghastly cock-up of technology, which I’m sure is my fault, but I haven’t worked out why yet.
Jeremy, don’t you dare apologise. That was absolutely wonderful. And what I’ll do is you’ve had a lot of questions, so I will read them to you 'cause presumably you can’t see questions. Is that correct?
[Jeremy] Please do.
Q&A and Comments:
All right. The first, it was a wonderful presentation, so people are saying well done, well done. And if anyone, can I just say something? If anyone’s being a bit iffy about this, you’ve got to remember that we have tried so hard to put the Lockdown University together for you, and once in a while we do have technical hitches. And let me just remember that this is a service that has been given free by the Kirsch Foundation in order to make us feel a community. And as we know with communities, things go wrong. So I don’t want any criticisms. We have tried our best, and Jeremy, you’ve been an absolute Trojan. Can I use that expression, by the way, rabbi? Oh yes, this is a question from David. Rabbi Pines helped the early Zionists in 1882.
[Jeremy] Yeah.
Okay, now, you mentioned that Yehuda Bauer pegged March '41 as the time when Hitler decided on extermination. I think that’s a question for me, so I’m dropping that one until later.
Q: Ah, have you read “The Auschwitz Tattooist”? He speaks about how he was to work for the Nazis being tagged… This is so complicated. Go on.
A: [Jeremy] You know, I’ve seen programmes about it and I’ve seen reviews and read reviews, and the fact is that everybody had a different way of coping, and we have to expect anybody who managed to survive, and most people will say, well, our survival was a miracle. So different people find different ways of coping with life in general.
Okay, this is a quote from Jeffrey Fisher, not a question, but a recommendation of a new book called “The Holocaust Jewish Calendars” about Jewish calendars created during the Holocaust in the ghettos, in the camps, often by people who had no experience of creating such things, but recognised the importance of Jewish time in the Jewish way. Author Dr. Alan Rosen. Absolutely fascinating. That does sound very interesting, doesn’t it?
- [Jeremy] It does, yeah. books that have been published by Rabbi Teitel and others about the Holocaust or predicting it and surviving it. A lot of but in the end, it’s a person’s personal faith that enables them either to come through or to draw different kinds of conclusions.
Q: You’ve had some people saying some very nice things, Jeremy. Now here’s a question from Thelma Rosenberg. “Does the sacrifice of Isaac’s story show the people do not sacrifice your children as surrounding religions do, your God stopped you from doing this?” This is the question about the Akeda.
A: [Jeremy] Yeah. Yes, I mean, look, the Torah says in black and white very clearly. This is a test. So if it says at the beginning this is going to be a joke, I’m not saying a joke. It’s going to be a joke. So if somebody says at the beginning the whole purpose of this is a test, you know that that purpose is to make a point, and the point is that everybody sacrificed children. Look at Agamemnon. You mentioned Troy. Look at Agamemnon. Look at what they did around them. And therefore we have to see the Torah in relation to the context of the times. That’s something I’m going to have to talk about when I talk about women.
Good luck to you on that one.
[Jeremy] Yeah. So yes, is saying there are certain things, there’s a limit to what human beings can do. The sad point is that Amalek, and here you have this idea in the Bible, Amalek, no you do, there are people who are going to go for you. Amalek was not in the way of the Israelites coming out of Egypt. On the contrary, the Torah says specifically they avoided them. They went away from them. They were going towards the . And yet Amalek came and attacked them from the back, their women and their children. And here says the Torah is an example of causeless hatred. I mean, I can understand somebody fights you if you’re rivalling them for their land. I would’ve understood the Canaanites fighting back, and they did. And despite the Bible saying get rid of the Canaanites, they never did. They carried on and they managed to learn to live with them. There was accommodation. But Amalek represents pure hatred, which is why Haman, they say, is called Agagi from Agag, who is the Amalekite king mentioned in the Book of Samuel. And there are people just hate, there are people who are frightened, strangers, frightened of the others. And if there’s a culture that whips up hatred against Jews as being in spawn of the devils or killers of the Christ or what have you, or as stealers of their land or whatever it is, this is only going to increase hatred and antagonism and out and out racism, and we see it here.
Stanley points out that man was given free will.
[Jeremy] Yeah.
God taking away some of his divine power, hmm?
[Jeremy] That’s right. I mean, in a sense, God, like in creation, withdraws. The mystical fear of Lurian Kabbalah is that God is every and then God withdraws and into that withdrawal area, we put world, and the world is made up of sparks and shards and beauty and evil and bad and the world we’re in. And if you don’t like it, get off or whether that’s-
Q: There’s, on this subject, apart from many thanks to you. “The few evil people,” this is from Arlene Goldberg. “The few evil people I’ve met in my life do not believe they are evil. They tend to be spoiled, willful, and egocentric. They have justifications for their evil behaviours. Are there ways to change them and make them see themselves as they really are?” Back again to the issue of evil which keeps on-
A: [Jeremy] I’ve always believed somebody whose life is not based on logic will not accept logic to countermand can only speak logically to somebody who is logically inclined. I’m all in favour of education. I think it’s important, particularly Holocaust education. But some people just don’t want to hear. They refuse to hear. And unfortunately at this moment, this is the mood of the vast majority of the Western intellectual mind. The left wing simply does not want to hear another point of view. I’m not saying they don’t have some good arguments and we have plenty of bad arguments, but there’s not even attempts at trying to understand the other side. It’s back to the old Marxism capitalism of the culture.
Q: It’s very, very simplistic ideas, isn’t it, Jeremy? And also, but what I’m really worried about, and I don’t know if you want to comment on this, the ideas of the Enlightenment seem to be very much in abeyance at the moment, don’t they?
A: [Jeremy] Well, yes, but remember the Enlightenment, which we value so much, look at the 30 Days War. Look at 1848. In comes Napoleon. He gives freedom to the Jews. He tries to make things better. Not that he was a great lover of-
[Trudy] Can hardly hear you.
[Jeremy] And then as soon as he’s kicked away-
[Trudy] Jeremy, I’m losing you.
[Jeremy] Oh, as soon as, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Oh no, was that maybe-
[Judi] You know, Jeremy, you are very clear. It’s very clear, Trudy, and maybe it’s your reception.
[Jeremy] Ah, okay.
[Trudy] Okay.
[Jeremy] So what I was saying was that-
[Trudy] I can hear you.
[Jeremy] In Europe after Napoleon, everything went backwards. And within 50 years you’ve got Dreyfus. You’ve got antisemitism everywhere. Because in the rise of nationalism, with the breakup of the old Holy Roman Empire and those old, and then those countries creating new ones said, how do we identify ourselves and who is us and who is not us? And so the Enlightenment started with so much great hope in us, and look how positive Moses Mendelssohn was about it, and look what happened.
Q: Yeah, I think you and I better bring this big debate together at some stage. This is from David Cohen. “Why did the rabbis not declare a fast day for the Shoah if it was the greatest tragedy to fall not only us, but probably humanity in general?”
A: [Jeremy] Well, that’s an excellent question, an excellent question, and there are several answers to this. One of them is that in rabbinic Judaism, the Orthodox world, there is an opinion which says this is merely a continuum of a hatred from Amalek. It’s nothing unique. Maybe in its size it is. But therefore we don’t need to add an extra day when we already have the 9th of Av, Tisha B'Av, and we have three weeks of mourning of the destruction of the temple. And it’s very similar. If you look at the language of Jeremiah, the first temple, you look at the Chronicles of the second, the numbers of killed, sent into slavery, raped, murdered. The horrors were so great, and they’ve been great through the Crusades and great through the Cossacks and great through Europe nonstop, nonstop, and it’s only our religion that’s kept us going, so we’re only going to have the religion to record it, and we record it on Tisha B'Av, which actually was the view of some progressive Orthodox rabbis like Louis Jacobs, although some people will argue with that label. But, so there are some who take that view.
The Zionists, on the other hand, those Jews who cared about being proactive were very important and very concerned with setting up a Holocaust memorial. But look in Israel. In Israel ended up with two Holocaust memorial days. There was the one established by the Rabbinate, which is in , and there’s the other one established by the state, which is just round the time of Independence Day or near enough as well. And this battle between secular and religious in Israel, which again showed the pettiness of our infighting that led to two Holocaust memorial days. So in effect, there are three Holocaust memorial days, and for all the millions of Holocaust days we have around the world today are bloody no good I’m inclined to say because the hatred’s still there.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the other areas that I really think Wendy and I have been discussing that we do need a debate, because obviously as someone who’s been involved in this for 40 years, I personally believe the Holocaust education has failed miserably. And we have to think it, rather than spend more money on memorials, we’ve got to rethink education.
[Jeremy] Absolutely.
And I’m not putting my faith in a great academic education, obviously, because we know where that led. So, but I, we still have to fight. There’s an interesting question here from Edith Cooper.
Q: “The Satmar Rebbe was saved on the train organised by Kasztner. And when the Rebbe, when Kasztner was asked the Rebbe to speak for him, how he saved some Hungarian Jews, the Rebbe refused, saying he was not saved by Kasztner, but by God. Sometimes he even said he was saved by the Germans. Why would we listen to such a person’s ideology?”
A: [Jeremy] I wouldn’t. I find it offensive. I find it so totally offensive, you have no idea. I value a lot of Satmar Hasidim I know to be wonderful, lovely, kind, charitable, caring people. They have their gangsters, but every group has its gangsters. But the Rebbe, the Reb Joel Teitelbaum, I find him horrific. And thank God there was the rebbe who was able to offer a counterbalance and a counterargument to him. And thank God there’s an alternative because that’s absolutely unspeakable, as are those rabbis in Israel today who keep on saying the holocaust happened either because the Jews in Germany were assimilated or because they weren’t modest or whatever. How the hell does anybody know how God works? And the moment somebody tells me, “I know how God works and this is why God did it,” I know he’s a fake.
Yeah, yeah. Very strongly put. Now, Rubenstein clarifies in the second edition of his book “After Auschwitz” that he did not advocate God is dead.
[Jeremy] Yes. No, that’s quite true. That’s quite true. He did not advocate God is dead because he said very clearly you can’t kill God. But the answer he gave initially was that we’ve got to leave God out of this because frankly it doesn’t make sense. And if you want to make sense of the world, you can’t make sense of it. My argument is you should try to make sense of what you can, but recognise there are certain things you can’t make sense of. There’s certain dimensions we just don’t have full knowledge or awareness of.
Now, this is from Stephen Paul. These modern thinkers mentioned by the rabbis, as well as Eliezer Berkovits, can be found in the book “Post-Holocaust Dialogues” by Stephen Katz, “Jewish Faith After the Holocaust: Four Approaches.” That’s information.
Q: Now, this is from Anthony Tiva. “If the world is made so that it contains good and evil, why do we praise God ad nauseum as a benevolent being? Surely we should say he’s creator and that is it.” And then Stephen Paul has added, “Created for what purpose?”
A: [Jeremy] Yes. No, those are both absolutely excellent questions. I could spend a long time, I can’t have time now, talking about prayer. I don’t believe prayer is about asking. Prayer is about expressing one’s own feelings. And one is given a kind of a menu of ideas that we use to express our feelings. Genuine prayer should be private and personal. The public prayer that we have was brought in to substitute for the temple, to have something to get us together. And therefore, it’s intended to be cohesive in a social sense, not in a theological sense. When I pray, I am expressing my feelings, my love for the good, my fear of the bad, whether I’m in a good mood or in a bad mood. These things are not because God needs my prayer. I just need to be reminded that there is more to life. There’s a spiritual dimension. There’s something worthwhile living for. And the text of the prayers for me, apart from being valuable as a tool for meditation, are also a way of reinforcing, feel better, like all these self-help books tell you, look in the mirror and say, “You’re great,” You feel better. And in the same way that I don’t think necessarily if I pray for something to recover it’s going to help them very much, although it might if they feel somebody’s supporting them. But it helps me feeling I’m doing something. Whatever I can do to help, I want to help.
Q: This is from Olivia. “If God is so removed from the world that he doesn’t reward or punish, that he allows natural and human disasters to occur, why should we have anything to do with him?”
A: [Jeremy] Well, because there are many things we have to do with, we don’t have to do with for a reason. I love music not because it’s going to reward me, or art, because I don’t get any benefit. And frankly, love is one of those examples where you have both unrequited love and other kinds of love. I feel God as an experience. In this I’m existential. I have this existential sense that there is another dimension. There is something more that tries to raise me, raise my behaviour, raise my spirituality. It’s a target. It’s in a goal. It’s almost in a sense like having a free psychoanalyst in the sky. Somebody I can talk to. I know I’m not going to offend anybody. It’s rather more a feeling of not being alone, a feeling of something there. But I don’t look on God as being Superman or as giving .
Q: There’s a question from Martine Wilson. “How did the Satmar Rebbe explain the Holocaust?”
A: [Jeremy] He explained it very simply as saying because the Jews after the Enlightenment started to assimilate, moved away to America, abandoned their roots, abandoned their faith, this was God punishing them. Simple as that.
This a very, this is a point, not a question, not a question, just to say, God owes us an explanation for the Shoah.
[Jeremy] Yes. In one way, I think that’s right. I don’t think we’re going to get it and it’s up to us to find something. But I don’t think, there is certain things you can’t explain. You can’t explain the cruelty of people who torture other human beings, of Mexican gangs, of what happens to poor peasants in India. There is so much unbelievable cruelty in the world today, thousands of years after religion. You might say, well, fair enough. Humans have been evolving for millions of years and thousands of years is a drop in the ocean and give us time and maybe they will, and maybe this is the best way of dealing with it that we’ve found so far. Because the truth is that science, important as it is technologically, hasn’t solved our psychological and emotional and spiritual problems, which is why there’s such a vacuum in the material world today.
Q: Can I throw a question at you, please? Do you believe that moral conscience is an acquired or an innate characteristic?
A: [Jeremy] Ah, such a good idea, yeah, yeah. No, I’m not a Kantian. I don’t. I argue I with my wife over this. I don’t believe there is inherent morality. I do believe, as with Freud, we are born these libidinous, egoistic creatures, and we slowly learn to try to discipline them. The superego, if we are educated, too, this helps. If our education is there, if our parents are there, they can help give us certain values. Ironically, the Talmud believes there are, that there are seven commandments which every human being around the world is obeys, but it doesn’t work that way. One of them is don’t murder. There are cannibals who murder their grandparents 'cause they want their brains to be eaten for supper to give them greater wisdom. There’s cruelty to animals all around the world which is including that. So I honestly don’t believe. I believe it is subject to education, to teaching, and it is a constant battle. The battle between the evil inclination and the good inclination is a constant battle we have throughout our lives in every area of our existence, in love, in commerce, in family, in children.
We are constantly struggling. And that’s why Hillel and Shamai argued for three years in the Talmud, is life worth living? Would it have been better had we not been created? And they came to the conclusion, yes, it would’ve been better that we hadn’t been created, but now that we have been created, we have to get on with it and make the best of it. So I don’t know why. The analogy I would give is you’ve got a Ferrari and a coal truck in the garage. They don’t know why they were made, but the Ferrari knows it wasn’t built to carry coals and the coal truck knows it wasn’t built to drive in Le Mans and therefore each one should focus on how they’re designed and what they can best do.
Q: Look, what I find interesting, continuing on this point, and apologies please, but Jeremy and I haven’t had a real discussion for a while. Look, if conscience, look, think what the Nazis did. They actually, Hugo Grimm put it beautifully. They overturned the 10 commandments. They threw away the moral law. How quickly that managed to enter people’s consciousnesses. If there is a certain kind of morals, education, that sounds very Poe, but you know what I mean, then could we actually help moral conscience along the way if we got to kids young enough?
A: [Jeremy] Well, the answer to that is I know a lot of the Germans, children of survivor, of Nazis, who did change, and made in some cases very important valuable humanitarian contributions. So I think it’s a problem. We are so susceptible, we human beings. I mean, just look at American politics with such children. And therefore I think we .
[Trudy] Mm-hmm, yeah.
[Jeremy] And education is the only answer in my view, but the education has to start at home.
Yes, and also, not only does it have to start at home, what it has to be is a certain kind of education. Because one thing that we have learned is that an academic education doesn’t mean a thing in terms of making the world a better place.
Q: Oh, now this is from Miriam. “After your presentation, you have further supported my lifelong question, what is the purpose of God?” Is that, and then she goes on to say, “Is this not essentially the same question asked by Job?”
A: [Jeremy] Yes. Beautifully put. And that’s precisely it.
It’s lovely. It’s beautiful. Beautifully put.
[Jeremy] Could’ve said that.
Oh, this is from Patrick. “I think the tech problems contributed to this being a marvellous lecture. The buildup to a crescendo. Many thanks.” Oh, I like that. I love that.
[Jeremy] Oh, thank you.
Jeremy. You were brilliant. I know when things go wrong, sometimes you really have to pull it out.
Q: And this is from Gerald. “Are you familiar with Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book and explanation that God is weeping with us and trying to console us? In other terms, he’s on our side, even if not omnipotent and was unable to intervene.”
A: [Jeremy] It’s cute, but the idea of God weeping, of God being sort of human doesn’t make much sense to me. I don’t like anthropolizing God. That’s why I don’t like the idea of God as a he. I don’t care if a she, it, or an LBJQXYZ, whatever it is. I don’t like anthropomorphism. And that’s a trouble. We do constantly, our prayers do it, anthropomorphize God as if God was a big human being, and he’s not. So I just don’t buy that.
Q: Anyway, this is from Trevor. “Hi again, Jeremy. How does abandoning the idea of reward and punishment affect your understanding of many of our prayers on Yom Kippur?”
A: [Jeremy] Well, because I take them as metaphors. I take this whole idea of reward and punishment as a metaphor. And as I mentioned before, the Talmud itself can’t agree, can’t agree on what we mean by reward and punishment. They say there is, but then just as much they say the reward of a good deed is a good deed. It’s its own reward. If you keep shabbat, you enjoy it, you keep on keeping shabbat. If you don’t, you miss out on it, you keep on missing out on it. There are so many different ways of understanding reward and punishment. But to understand it’s again like a fruit machine or like a reward or a star does not make any sense to me. If it makes sense to other people, that’s their right. I don’t want to stop anybody believing whatever they want to believe.
I’m going to finish now, Jeremy, with one lovely comment. “Brilliant, Rabbi Rosen. I love your approach as it puts my mind at ease. As for the technical glitch, in fact, I don’t mind a bit, as I stuck you in my pocket and got the housework done.” That’s from Cindy. And I think that’s a lovely note to end on. Thank you so much, Jeremy. You were absolutely brilliant. And can we continue this argument another time? I think we should formalise it-
[Jeremy] I hope so.
…into a debate, don’t you?
[Jeremy] Yeah, yeah, very much.
And there are so many more questions, but you’d probably be here for another hour and I think now you need to go and mend your technology, don’t you? I didn’t say that.
[Jeremy] Okay, thanks very much, Trudy. Thank you. Bye, everybody.
Take care. Thank you. And thank you all very, very much for listening, and thank you, Judi, for keeping us all sane. God bless.
[Judi] Thank you, everybody. Bye-Bye.