History, Metahistory, and Evil: Jewish Theological Responses to the Holocaust 2020030300, 2020030301, 9781644694817, 9781644694824, 9781644694831

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History, Metahistory, and Evil Jewish Theological Responses to the Holocaust

New Perspectives in Post-Rabbinic Judaism Series Editor Shaul Magid (Dartmouth College)

History, Metahistory, and Evil Jewish Theological Responses to the Holocaust

Barbara Krawcowicz

Boston

2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krawcowicz, Barbara, 1976- author. Title: History, metahistory, and evil : Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust / Barbara Krawcowicz. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Series: New Perspectives in Post-Rabbinic Judaism | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020030300 (print) | LCCN 2020030301 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644694817 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644694824 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644694831 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust (Jewish theology) | Orthodox Judaism. Classification: LCC BM645.H6 K73 2020 (print) | LCC BM645.H6 (ebook) | DDC 296.3/1174--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030300 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030301 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 9781644694817 (hardback) ISBN 9781644694824 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644694831 (ePub) Book design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover design by Ivan Grave. Published by Academic Studies Press. 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

For Bryan, who will never read it, and for Martin, who already has.

Contents

Acknowledgementsxi Preface by Shaul Magid

xiii

Introductionxvii 1. Covenantal Metahistory   Covenantal Theodicy   Paradigmatic Thinking

1 4 20

2. Paradigmatic Thinking and the Holocaust   Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich   Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer   Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal  Conclusion

40 43 62 80 96

3. Paradigmatic Thinking and Post-Holocaust Theology   Paradigmatic Thinking and the Rise of Historicism   Richard L. Rubenstein   Emil L. Fackenheim   Eliezer Berkovits  Conclusion

99 101 104 122 138 152

4. The End of Metahistory in the Warsaw Ghetto

156

Conclusion179 Bibliography185 Index202

Comparison does not necessarily tell us how things “are”; like models and metaphors, comparisons tell us how things might be conceived, how they might be “redescribed.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine

Acknowledgments

First of all, I want to thank Robert and Sandra Borns whose friendship and generosity enabled me to pursue doctoral studies in the United States and thus opened a road that led me to this book, which has its origins in the doctoral dissertation I defended at Indiana University Bloomington. Even more importantly, the opportunity Robert and Sandra created for me has profoundly transformed my life. I will never cease to be grateful for that. This book would not have been possible without the work of Gershon Greenberg, who for years practically singlehandedly pursued the study of Orthodox Holocaust theology. Gershon’s generosity, enthusiasm, and unwavering support have been a true boon. I have been enormously lucky to have friends and colleagues who offered advice, shared important suggestions, read and commented on countless drafts, and patiently listened to me venting my frustrations. For all this and so much more, I want to thank Shaul Magid, my teacher, friend, and fellow clawhammer banjo player, as well as Zachary Braiterman, AnnKathrin Bretfeld-Wolf, Sven Bretfeld, James Diamond, Robert Erlewine, Aaron Hughes, Martin Kavka, Russell McCutcheon, Jolanta Mickute, Michael Morgan, Eva Mroczek, and Daniel Reiser. The love, unconditional support and encouragement I have always been receiving from my mother, Julia Krawcowicz, have meant for me more than I will ever be capable of expressing. A “thank you” is only a faint approximation of what I would like to be able to say. There was a time when I became convinced that this book would never be written. The realities of life of contingent faculty are such that a book project is all too quickly and all too often transformed into nothing but a mirage upon which we gaze wistfully while daydreaming about being able to access a decent research library. My appointment as a post-doctoral fellow in Judaic studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of

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the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim made it possible for the increasingly illusionary book project to become reality. I am enormously grateful to the Department for providing me with working conditions that enabled me to complete this book as well as to the employees of the university Library, especially Magnus Rom Jensen, who never failed to fulfill my requests. I dedicate this book, with boundless gratitude, to Martin Kavka, who believed in this project even when I did not, and to Bryan whose contented purring keeps me sane. Portions of some of the chapters in this book have appeared elsewhere in different form: parts of Chapter 2 appeared in The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Volume 22, Issue 2 (2014) under the title “Paradigmatic Thinking and Holocaust Theology” and parts of Chapter 3 in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 33, Number 3 (Spring 2015) under the title “Richard L. Rubenstein and the Death of ‘Ghetto Judaism’.”

Preface

When did the Holocaust begin? I do not refer to what Lucy Dawidowicz referred to as “The War against the Jews” from 1939–1945, the horrific and diabolical genocidal program of the Nazis. I refer rather to the “Holocaust,” a term that came into use in the 1960s to describe those events. In Dov-Ber Kerler and Jeffrey Veidlinger’s extensive interviews with Jews in Eastern Europe who were old enough to remember these events, now archived and available for viewing at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, their interviewees often referred to what we call the “Holocaust” simply as “the milkhome” (the war). The “Holocaust,” of course, is a different matter. Conventional wisdom suggests that most survivors did not speak openly and publicly about “the milkhome” until the 1960s and Jews did not begin to “theologize” about it systematically until the publication of Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz in 1966, followed by important works by Emil Fackenheim, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, and others. Hasia Diner’s We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (2009) exhibited that, in fact, there were groups of Jews who memorialized and talked about the Holocaust before it became more popular to do so in the 1960s. In any case, if we are speaking about the Holocaust and Jewish theology, the beginning was in fact the 1960s, with Rubenstein et al. There were exceptions: for example, Fackenheim learned of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira’s collected wartime sermons Aish Kodesh, which was only published for the first time in the early 1960s, and noted that exposure to this work enabled him to complete the final chapter of his book What Is Judaism: An Interpretation for the Present Age (1986). These new theologians knew a bit about wartime sermons by ultra-Orthodox (haredi) rabbis but not much, and they did not consider them consequential. This is in part because most

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post-Holocaust theologians were committed to an anti-theodicy model that argued that giving reasons, certainly theological reasons, for the Holocaust, was blasphemous. They claimed that the very notion that God was responsible for the murder of six million Jews would break the back of any future Jewish theology. Rubenstein was perhaps most open and honest about this, but it underlies much of the larger post-Holocaust theological project. Other scholars, most notably Gershon Greenberg, Steven T. Katz, and Eliezer Schweid have examined haredi writings during the war as a way to uncover how traditional Jewish thinkers conceptualized and understood the fire that was engulfing them years before the moniker of “Holocaust” came into existence. In this present study History, Metahistory, and Evil: Jewish Theological Responses to the Holocaust, Barbara Krawcowicz takes the whole enterprise of theologizing about the Holocaust to new heights. Rather than viewing post-Holocaust theology’s “anti-theodicy” in isolation, Krawcowicz puts these post-Holocaust theologians in comparative proximity to wartime haredi responses to the events unfolding from 1939–1945. Lest one be skeptical of such a comparison, Krawcowicz deftly deploys a nuanced reading of Jonathan Z. Smith’s work on comparison to make her case that indeed these two very different sets of thinkers, anti-theodic post-Holocaust theologians, and traditional haredi Jews shared enough, and differed enough, to compare them responsibly and constructively. In fact, I think she successfully brings out nuances in the post-Holocaust theologians and the haredi thinkers that were missed by previous scholars precisely through the act of comparison. Many previous readers of wartime haredi writings that responded to the genocide held that they had no real conceptual framework to understand what was happening around them, and except for a few such as Shapira and Shlomo Teichthal, whose ‘Em Habanim Samekha is one of the few haredi works of the time that turns toward Zionism as a solution to the Jews’ existential crisis, they were simply stuck in a covenantal paradigm that prevented them from seeing what would become the Holocaust in a way different than other Jewish tragedies of the past. What Krawcowicz offers us in History, Metahistory, and Evil is a theoretical framework for understanding what is at stake for haredi writers and thus why they could never quite adopt the post-Holocaust theological model proposed by Rubenstein, Fackenheim, Berkovits, or Greenberg. Borrowing Jacob Neusner’s notion of “paradigmatic thinking” that Neusner uses as a way to understand rabbinic notions of history, and J.Z. Smith’s

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notion of comparison as the articulation of sameness and difference, Krawcowicz argues that the haredi writers she analyzes had quite a sophisticated understanding of history and of their relation to the covenantal promise of Torah. She writes in her Introduction, “I argue that the network of mutually dependent and reinforcing paradigms constituted a framework for understanding the vicissitudes of Jewish history and allowed for their meaningful religious interpretation within the boundaries of the master framework of covenantal theodicy.” Krawcowicz joins Neusner’s model of “paradigmatic thinking” with Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi’s popular dictum of Jewish responses to history. “What has occurred now is similar to the persecutions of old, and all that happened to the forefathers has happened to their descendants. Upon the former already the earlier generations composed selihot and narrated the events. It is all one.” Krawcowicz’s haredi subjects did not, could not, view what was happening to them as historically unprecedented, even as they may have viewed their circumstances as such. Close reading of their writings reveals a mighty struggle of how to fit such events into their “paradigmatic thinking.” In some inchoate way, Krawcowicz claims, they understood the challenge of wedding their proximate horror to the larger scope of history refracted through a covenantal promise, a promise that was, for them, unbreakable. By offering us a sophisticated reading of some of these haredi voices instead of suggesting they simply could not make sense of a reality in which they found themselves, Krawcowicz urges us to look back at the post-Holocaust theologians in a new way, suggesting that while their views have become somewhat normative in our day, in fact, they suppose a radical break with tradition beyond what is already articulated by Rubenstein. I would suggest that in some way the fundamental, one might even say monumental, difference between the haredi writers and the post-Holocaust theologians, is this: was the Holocaust an unprecedented event in Jewish history or not? (The question of it being unprecedented in human history is another matter taken up by Steven T. Katz in his recent work.) If the assumption is one of uniqueness, one can choose from Rubenstein, Fackenheim, Berkovits, Greenberg et al. as to what makes the most sense. If on the other hand, you maintain that a historical event outside the purview of God is simply unthinkable, post-Holocaust theology is not only unacceptable, it is blasphemous. This does not mean, however, that the Holocaust is just one more catastrophe that befell the Jewish people. Krawcowicz shows us

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that, in fact, these haredi writers were quite sophisticated in their assessment of their situation. But it does mean that it will need to be understood “paradigmatically,” that is, as a part of a larger covenantal framework that can sustain the horror without rupturing the covenant. What Krawcowicz shows in this book it how much these haredi thinkers struggled to keep their paradigmatic thinking intact as the events unfolded and stretched the elasticity of their imaginative faculties to the brink. Interestingly, living through what Shapira called “the days of rage,” they somehow believed the Jews would survive, and thus while also writing for their suffering constituents, they also wrote for those not yet born who would carry the burden of all this on their shoulders. Much has been written on post-Holocaust theology and also on haredi responses to the Holocaust. But History, Metahistory, and Evil is the first book that puts both camps in complex conversation with the intention of understanding both more deeply and also enabling us to see the weaknesses of both in light of the other. Comparison is a precarious enterprise, but when it works, and it does here, it helps us understand each subject in new and interesting ways. As we move further from the Holocaust, as it slowly becomes more history than proximate memory, as survivors become exceedingly rare, History, Metahistory, and Evil will help guide us in the new territory of a more distanced understanding of the theological and philosophical travails of those who struggled with God in the fire, and those who later struggled to understand Judaism in its wake. Shaul Magid Fire Island, NY

Introduction

In the late fall of 1941, commenting on the biblical passage where God commands Abraham to leave his homeland (Gen. 12:1), Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer, a rabbi of the Weidritz Alley synagogue in Bratislava, wrote: “If we probe the portion of the week . . . we will find that God spoke explicitly about the current situation.”1 Bratislava became the capital of the nominally independent Slovak Republic in March of 1939. Acts of anti-Jewish violence had occurred in the town before, but the situation worsened with the official installation of the pro-Nazi Slovak regime. By the fall of 1941, Bratislava Jews were effectively excluded from the rest of the society. They saw their communal organizations banned, newspapers liquidated, and property confiscated. They wore yellow stars of David, were subject to forced labor, and suffered abuse in the streets of their town. In September 1941, ten thousand of Bratislava’s remaining fifteen thousand Jews were forced to leave. They were told to abandon their homes and wander into the unknown, Unsdorfer wrote. What happened to the patriarch also happened to his descendants. In the past, God tested Abraham’s faith. Now the faith of Abraham’s progeny was submitted to the same trial. Or was it? Were the circumstances not vastly different? For contemporary readers, and for Unsdorfer, certainly they were. But for Unsdorfer— and probably not for us—this was also something very familiar, as every Jewish congregation read the story of Abraham leaving Ur every fall, three weeks after Rosh Hashanah. In the Bible, it is God who addresses Abraham with the fateful command. The order to leave Bratislava came from the hostile Slovak authorities but Unsdorfer had no doubt that the authorities’ decree had not originated solely in human minds. Ultimately, its origin was to be found in the divine will. In his war-time sermons, Unsdorfer 1 Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer, Siftei Shlomo (Brooklyn, NY: Balshon Printing, 1972), 31.

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protested the divine decrees and pleaded for mercy. He confessed he could no longer fathom the will of God. He asked how God could let the innocent suffer and acknowledged his inability to come up with an answer. But he never questioned the fundamental assumption of God’s active involvement in what was happening. Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944. In 1943, Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich told his congregation gathered in the Transylvanian town of Şimleul-Silvaniei that “all the troubles we suffer today by the hands of the evil ones—it is not the evil ones who are hitting us. They are but the staff of God. God is chastising and hitting us.”2 His words echoed those of the prophet who had the enraged God exclaim: “Assyria, rod of my anger, in whose hand, as a staff, is my fury! I send him against an ungodly nation, I charge him against people that provokes me” (Is. 10:50). God uses various instruments to discipline his people, Ehrenreich observed. There was the Pharaoh and there was Haman. Then there was Rome, and then there was Christendom. And then there were the Nazis. In each case, beneath different dress, language, creed, and custom, the same agency lurked: the wicked Esau, as the rabbis invariably referred to him, who has always hated his twin brother Jacob. But even Esau’s undying hatred was ineffectual unless God decided to use it to chastise the Jewish people, Ehrenreich stressed. Why was the punishment so severe? What terrible transgression could have warranted this outpouring of divine wrath? Ehrenreich did not have all answers. Like Unsdorfer, he resorted to silence filled with the certainty of redemption. He did not doubt that redemption would come and bring restoration as well as understanding. By June 6, 1944, most of the Jews of Şimleul-Silvaniei, including Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the post-war period, Jewish thinkers who grappled with the Holocaust struggled to understand its impact on Judaism’s core concepts. In the spring of 1966, in his submission to the survey “The State of Jewish Belief ” organized by the journal Commentary, Richard L. Rubenstein declared that “the greatest single challenge to modern Judaism arises out of the question of God and the death camps” and asked “how can Jews 2

Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, Drashot Lehem Shlomo (Brooklyn, NY: Edison Lithographic and Printing Corp, 1976), 128.

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believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?”3 Rubenstein’s question and emphatically negative answer resonated especially with two other Jewish theologians—Emil L. Fackenheim and Eliezer Berkovits. Fackenheim was one of the few respondents who mentioned the Holocaust as a problem for contemporary Jewish theology in the Commentary survey. Before long, however, he came to consider it the central problem and in 1967 declared that “the events that are associated with the dread name of Auschwitz  .  .  .  call everything into question.”4 In his submission, Eliezer Berkovits wrote about the death camps in the context of the relevance of the “death of God” theology for Judaism. For him, the Holocaust proved that the Christian God, the God who promised to redeem mankind through an act of self-sacrifice, was indeed dead. However, it did not undermine the existence of the Jewish God because “what happened  .  .  .  is explainable in terms of human responsibility.”5 In dialogue and sometimes in fierce disagreement, these three thinkers undertook the task of rethinking Judaism’s central theological categories. Their reflections have been pivotal in the framing of post-Holocaust religious discourse in North America and beyond. In 1970, Emil Fackenheim wrote that questions prompted by Auschwitz were of such magnitude that “until a few years ago Jewish theological thought has observed a near total silence on the subject of the Holocaust. A well-justified fear and trembling . . . has kept Jewish theological thought, like Job, in a state of silence.”6 Fackenheim did not know at the time that the Holocaust in fact never silenced Jewish theology. Only in the 1980s he was to discover that some thinkers confronted the questions posed by the 3 Richard L. Rubenstein, “Symposium on Jewish Belief ” in idem, After Auschwitz. Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1966), 153. Hereafter quoted as AA. All submissions to the survey were published in Commentary 42, 2 (August 1966): 71-160 and reprinted as The Condition of Jewish Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1966). They are also available online under the title “The State of Jewish Belief ” at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/ the-state-of-jewish-belief/ (accessed on February 15, 2020). 4 Emil L. Fackenheim, “On the Self-Exposure of Faith to the Modern Secular World,” Daedalus (Winter 1967): 193–219; reprinted in idem, Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), 278–305; the quotation is from page 281. 5 “The State of Jewish Belief ” at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/thestate-of-jewish-belief/ (accessed on February 15, 2020). 6 Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 70–71. Hereafter quoted as GPH.

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destruction of European Jewish life already during the war. In the preface to What Is Judaism: An Interpretation for the Present Age, Fackenheim wrote that he “would not have known how to complete the last, crucial chapter of this book” without the exposure to the subtleties of the war-time sermons of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira.7 Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the leader of a Hasidic court of Piaseczno, recorded his struggles with the enormity of the Nazi persecutions he was witnessing and experiencing in the form of weekly Torah commentaries. The manuscript was recovered after the war with thousands of other documents collected by the members of Oneg Shabbat, the clandestine group of scholars and activists in the Warsaw ghetto.8 Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer, a graduate of the famous Orthodox Pressburg yeshiva, and Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, a faithful supporter of the leaders of Hungarian ultra-Orthodoxy, also recorded their thoughts in the form of weekly sermons. Unsdorfer’s manuscript was found by one of his sons who discovered his father’s writings in their family home in Bratislava where he returned after liberation from Buchenwald. The sermons of Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich were most likely preserved by a gentile family. Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal, the head of the rabbinical court in Slovakian town of Pieštany, wrote a theological treatise while hiding in Budapest. Read together, these writings give us an opportunity to see Jewish theological thought in extremis, struggling to come to terms with the unfolding destruction, attempting to answer questions about the presence of God, about the covenant, about suffering. In other words, questions not unlike those asked by Rubenstein, Fackenheim, Berkovits, and many others in the post-war period. This book presents the results of a comparative reading of these two sets of materials: on the one hand, the writings of four Orthodox rabbis— Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer, Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal, and Kalonymous Kalman Shapira—and on the other, the works of the so-called post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers—Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, and Eliezer Berkovits. Setting aside, for the moment, the question of the internal variegation of these two comparands, one may wonder whether they are not too 7 Emil L. Fackenheim, What Is Judaism: An Interpretation for the Present Age (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 11. 8 On the Oneg Shabbat (Ringelblum) archive see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007).

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different for a comparison to yield interesting results. According to scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, whose comments on comparative analysis in the study of religion are especially incisive, “comparison requires the postulation of difference as the grounds of its being interesting (rather than tautological) and a methodical manipulation of difference, a playing across the ‘gap’ in the service of some useful end.”9 As many critics observed, comparisons long suffered under the tyranny of similarity. It was a real or perceived similarity, likeness or sameness between various phenomena that prompted scholars to engage in the process of comparison often in order to present an explanation of the resemblance in terms of common origin, mutual or one-sided influence. Such genealogical comparisons were quite frequently falling into the trap of the erasure of difference. In the process of searching for explicable similarities, differences were downplayed or completely ignored, sacrificed on the altar of fundamentally-the-same. Having learned our lesson, today we know that successful comparisons depend on an interplay of similarity and difference. Comparisons need to somehow find their way between the six-head monster of complete similarity and the equally deadly whirlpool of absolute incomparability. As Oliver Freiberger put it, “difference makes a comparative analysis interesting; similarity makes it possible.”10 The question of how much difference or how much similarity between the comparands is required for a comparison to work, however, cannot be answered once and for all, because neither similarity nor difference exist as such out there. Neither is an objective quality that can be parsed independently of the perspective assumed by the comparativist. Neither is given, as J. Z. Smith noted, and both are results of mental operations performed by the person constructing a comparison.11 In principle, there is no limit to what can be compared. This point was argued convincingly by Ralph Weber, who observed that even statements of incommensurability are in fact outcomes of comparisons.12 Against J. Z. Smith, who claimed that there is no point in comparing red Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 35. My thinking about comparison in the study of religion has benefited greatly from Oliver Freiberger’s invaluable Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 10 Freiberger, Considering Comparison, 156. 11 Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine. On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 51. 12 Ralph Weber, “Comparative Philosophy and the Tertium: Comparing What with What, and in What Respect?” Dao 13 (2014): 163–165. 9

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and white wine because they are “sheerly different” and “nothing more needs be said,”13 one can easily imagine a variety of situations when such a comparison can in fact be useful as well as a variety of criteria with respect to which red and white wine can be compared. While Umberto Eco attempted to push the question to its limits by suggesting a comparison between the adverb “while” and the noun “crocodile,” Ralph Weber rightly noted that such a distinction “makes for a good comparison in any grammar or etymology.”14 The ubiquity of the saying notwithstanding, it also makes perfect sense to compare apples and oranges—the qualities that they share make the basis for the more general category of fruit.15 In addition, apples and oranges can be compared, as John H. Elliott observed, and quite fruitfully so, with respect to their nutritional value as well as the methods and costs of production.16 To his assertion that there is not much to be gained from a comparison of apples and electric light bulbs, Caroline W. Bynum correctly pointed out that if one was interested in surfaces and light refraction such a comparison might be profitable.17 Does that mean that all choices in comparisons are in the end arbitrary? Not necessarily. What it does mean is that, as J. Z. Smith put it, “comparison, in its strongest form, brings differences together within the space of the scholar’s mind for the scholar’s own intellectual reasons.”18 Comparisons and judgments with respect to difference are always shaped by the scholar’s interests. In each instance, they are determined by the perspective assumed by the person who makes them and should be evaluated primarily in terms of what is it that we gain from a comparison. The metaphor of the barking dog has been employed to describe some of the uses of comparison in the study of religion.19 It originates in one of 13 Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 28. 14 Weber, “Comparative Philosophy”: 165. 15 See Bruce Lincoln, Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 4. 16 John H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 176. 17 Caroline W. Bynum, “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; Or Why Compare?” History of Religions 53, no. 4 (2014): 345. 18 Smith, Drudgery Divine, 51, emphasis added. 19 See Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, rev. ed. with a new preface, Columbia Classics in Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 27–52 as well as her Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes, reprint (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 136 and Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory:

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Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous stories “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” in which Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of a missing racehorse. In one of the conversations between Holmes and Inspector Gregory, the latter asks: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” Holmes replies. “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” observes perplexed Gregory. “That was the curious incident,” remarks Sherlock Holmes. The criminal entered the house at night and yet the dog did not bark. For Holmes this was a vitally important clue because the dog’s silence indicated that the criminal was a person well known to the dog. Referring to this story and applying it metaphorically to her comparisons of myths, Wendy Doniger observed that comparisons can be used to help us notice the dogs that do not bark, that is, to identify the absence of a particular element in one myth by noting its presence in another.20 In such a case, as David M. Freidenreich noted, comparison is used to learn from parallel cases, and the question it yields is why certain elements might be absent.21 The comparison I propose is of this kind. Through an act of reciprocal illumination,22 the juxtaposition of the comparands I have chosen to analyze sheds light on the presence, absence, and limits of theodicy in Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust. It allows me to outline the conceptual conditions of the possibility of a theodic interpretation of the Holocaust, in which God as the lord of history ensures that justice will win out in the end, and to present a hypothesis about the contexts in which God might either be seen as unjust or as no longer responsible for providing blessed lives for God’s people. Last but not least, my analysis also shows that the Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 300–302. 20 Doniger, The Implied Spider, 37. 21 David M. Freidenreich, “Comparisons Compared: A Methodological Survey of Comparisons of Religion from ‘A Magic Dwells’ to A Magic Still Dwells,” Theory and Method in the Study of Religion 16: 85, 92. 22 This very felicitous term has been coined by Arvind Sharma in his Religious Studies and Comparative Methodology: The Case for Reciprocal Illumination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). Sharma’s concerns in this work are theological and ecumenical in a broad sense of the term, that is to say, he is trying to find a method of comparison between different religious traditions that would bring their practitioners to an enhanced understanding of their own as well as the other religion. I do not share this approach. See also Arvind Sharma, “Reciprocal Illumination,” in Interreligious Comparisons in Religious Studies and Theology, ed. Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Andreas Nehring (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 178–190.

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initial division between the two comparands is in fact less justified than it might prima facie appear. As will become clear, the thought of Kalonymous Kalman Shapira has more in common with that of Richard Rubenstein than that of Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer. Simultaneously, the theology of Eliezer Berkovits will be shown to share more with the approach of Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal than that of Emil Fackenheim. As J. Z. Smith noted, “the statement of comparison is never dyadic but always triadic; there is always an implicit ‘more than,’ and there is always a ‘with respect to’.”23 The latter is what scholars refer to as the tertium comparationis, the “point of contact that allows comparison to proceed.”24 In the case at hand, this tertium is what I describe in chapter 1 as covenantal theodicy: theodicy that conceptualizes evil and suffering as a necessary possibility of the dynamics of the relationship between God and Israel, and is shaped by the stipulations of the covenantal agreement that brought before Israel the following alternative: This day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day. (Deut. 11:26–28)

In its most basic form, covenantal theodicy posits a connection between a breach of the covenantal pact and the retribution it necessitates, between sins that are committed and punishment that is thereby deserved. The covenant gave meaning to historical events by turning history into theophany—an arena of divine action and judgment. Concomitantly, it transformed theodicy into a form of historical emplotment, into a metahistorical framework within which, as evidenced in the biblical writings of the Deuteronomistic school, history unfolds according to the sequence where sin is followed by

23 Smith, Drudgery Divine, 51. 24 Geoffrey Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 32, quoted in Weber, “Comparative Philosophy”: 155. William Paden described the tertium as “a common factor in relation to which either the differences or the similarity of the objects can become explicit and understood,” see his “Elements of a New Comparativism,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8, no. 1 (1996): 7. See also Weber “Comparative Philosophy” as well as his “’How to Compare?’ On the Methodological State of Comparative Philosophy,” Philosophy Compass 8, no. 7 (2013): 593–603 and Freiberger, Considering Comparison, 101–110, 151–155.

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punishment, punishment by repentance, repentance by forgiveness, and ultimately redemption. As I discuss in chapter 1, in the rabbinical imagination covenantal theodicy works in tandem with paradigmatic thinking, the concept I borrow from Jacob Neusner, who created it to capture his understanding of the nature of the rabbinical interpretation of history.25 In response to the question why rabbinical writings exhibit a lack of interest in history striking for our sensibilities, Neusner argued that the rabbis were not interested in history because they had an alternative framework to understand historical events. Instead of attempting to construct chains of causally or chronologically connected events, the rabbis discerned the meaning of historical occurrences by placing them on a metahistorical plane. Instead of focusing on the particular and the unique, they viewed historical events through the lens of the repetitive, the reoccurring. In the Hebrew Bible, the rabbis found not only a narrative describing the unfolding of the covenantal relationship but also models and patterns according to which history was bound to unfold. In Neusner’s words: “They found in the Scripture’s words paradigms of an enduring present, by which all things must take their measure.”26 Elaborating on Neusner’s concept, I argue that the network of mutually dependent and reinforcing paradigms constituted a framework for understanding the vicissitudes of Jewish history and allowed for their meaningful religious interpretation within the boundaries of the master framework of covenantal theodicy. Paradigms made it possible, for instance, to describe various enemies of Israel as different incarnations of Amalek or Esau and thereby to place them within the covenantal structure of meaning and explanation. In other words, paradigms facilitate the emplotment of all moments of history as moments when theodicy is—and must be—in effect. Through paradigms, biblical and rabbinical answers to the question of suffering could be applied to every historical calamity. In this way, covenantal theodicy as well as the very concept of the covenant itself remained immune to the pressures of history. The paradigms themselves were changing over time but their fundamental structure and function remained unaltered. For example, the biblical story of the rivalry between Jacob and Esau was used differently in diverse historical circumstances. The paradigm was 25 Jacob Neusner, “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking: The Case of Rabbinic Judaism,” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (October 1997): 353–377 as well as his The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004). 26 Neusner, The Idea of History, 3.

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reformulated, various details were added or removed, but regardless of alterations the story continued to serve as a lens through which to look at historical occurrences. While Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi does not use the concept of paradigmatic thinking in his Zakhor, he does present there an excellent description of this approach to history. Consider the following example. In 1648, in Poland and the Ukraine, a great wave of anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the Cossack uprising against Polish rule. Hundreds of communities were destroyed, and thousands of Jews murdered. The tragedy called for a liturgical response. One of the prominent religious leaders of the time, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, believed that while there was a need for commemoration and mourning, no new prayers should be written for the occasion. Instead, Heller selected several selihot written after the 20th of Sivan (May 26), 1171 in connection to the martyrdom of the Jews of Blois. He offered the following justification of his decision: What has occurred now is similar to the persecutions of old, and all that happened to the forefathers has happened to their descendants. Upon the former already the earlier generations composed selihot and narrated the events. It is all one.27

Ma’asei avot siman l’banim—the deeds of the ancestors are a sign for the children—these words from midrash Tanhuma28 echo in Heller’s reasoning. The deeds of the ancestors are a sign for the children not because history is cyclical, but because it unfolds according to discernible patterns. In Heller’s view, using Neusner’s nomenclature, significant events always conform to a paradigm. As I argue in chapter 2, it was this mode of approaching and interpreting historical events that allowed Ehrenreich, Teichthal, and Unsdorfer to place the Nazi persecutions within the boundaries of Israel’s covenantal history. Both Ehrenreich and Unsdorfer came to a point when the only answer available for them was silence. However, even this end of explanation could be accommodated by paradigmatic thinking: Moses’ brother Aaron was silent when fire suddenly struck and killed his sons (Lev. 10:1–3), Abraham was silent when he led his son Isaac to the place where he was to offer him as a sacrifice to God (Gen. 22:1–18), and as a Talmudic story imagined it even God is silent in the face of those who taunt 27 Yosef Haiym Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 48–51. 28 Tanhuma, ed. Buber, Lekh Lekha 12.

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and mock Him.29 The framework of covenantal theodicy makes room for silence—human as well as divine—as well as for the protest of the faithful. What it cannot accommodate is the idea that God is utterly and irrevocably absent from the history of God’s people. In my reading of these figures as they react and respond to the Holocaust, as disturbing as they may be, theodic interpretations are not stubborn aberrations but rather examples of a long tradition of theological interpretations of history which arguably constitute an important element of Jewish theology in its various incarnations. They are also significantly more nuanced than it is often assumed. To a colleague who once asked me, “are they all not just cookie-cutter responses,” my answer is, no. It is easy and perhaps tempting for those who live outside the framework of tradition to dismiss Orthodox Holocaust theology as uniform and either too outlandish or not nearly sophisticated enough. Close attention to the writings of these thinkers, however, shows that they struggled with questions not entirely unlike those that troubled post-Holocaust theologians. Their answers were often—but crucially not always—different. To see Orthodox reflections on the destruction as simplified, if not crude, applications of the sin-punishment framework is misleading. Similarly, misleading is an approach that substitutes psychological mechanisms for conceptual considerations as exemplified in the following passage by historians Judith Baumel and Jacob J. Schecter: In their effort to maintain faith in God in the face of often incredible suffering, Jewish victims of tragedy in all centuries felt constrained to view their experiences as part of a continuum and not as something radically new and different. Although they might have objectively believed that the magnitude of their suffering was unprecedented, they never presented it as such, for fear that this might indicate that God was finally breaking His covenantal bond and severing His close relationship with His people, a thought they simply could not abide and one that their faith would not allow them to accept. Whatever cataclysmic event they experienced was never seen in isolation, as sui generis, but, on the contrary, was portrayed as just the latest example of the age-old, consistently recurring phenomenon of God’s punishment for Jewish sin. Indeed, the Jewish collective memory was so long and sharp that any time it confronted even a tragedy of major proportions, it was able to place it into paradigms of previously experienced tragedies and destructions. In fact, 29 See BT Gittin 56b and chapter 3 in the present volume.

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the greater the tragedy, the more potentially dangerous it was to Jewish faith and, hence, the greater the effort to absorb it and subsume it under already established patters and archetypes. Such a conception, in which even the unprecedented was assigned a precedent, was a comforting and reassuring one, allowing for the classical covenantal construction to remain intact. This continuity with the past provided great hope for the future.30

Seeing an eruption of anti-Jewish animus as a part of the continuum of Jewish history certainly could and probably did serve as a source of comfort and hope. As long as one could believe that the suffering came, ultimately, from God, one could also believe that sooner or later God would put an end to it. In no way do I wish to dismiss the role of psychological and existential factors affecting conceptual considerations. I do not believe, however, that psychological reductionism provides a satisfactory account of theological reflection. The body of theological writings that came to be known as postHolocaust theology is often presented as having rejection of covenantal theodicy as its starting point. Emil Fackenheim argued that the Holocaust constituted a unique rupture in Jewish history. As Shaul Magid has noted, “theologically, uniqueness refers to an event that cannot fit into any previous theological paradigm and is thus unanswerable with traditional theories of theodicy.”31 This is precisely what Fackenheim was attempting to convey: the uniqueness of the Holocaust meant that no traditional theodicy was capable of providing a meaningful explanation. Less categorical regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Richard Rubenstein openly claimed that any attempt to understand the Holocaust within the dynamics of covenantal reciprocity is obscene.32 Was it, however, indeed the confrontation with 30 Judith Baumel and Jacob J. Schacter, “The Ninety Three Bais Ya’akov Girls of Cracow,” in Reverence, Righteousness and Rahamanut: Essays in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, ed. Jacob J. Schecter (Hoboken, NJ: Aronson, 1992), 109. 31 Shaul Magid, “The Holocaust and Jewish Identity in America: Memory, the Unique, and the Universal,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 18, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 126. In the article Magid presents an analysis of a variety of positions regarding the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust. The debate on this subject has been unfolding at least since the 1970s. For more on the subject see Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008), now in its third edition. 32 For Rubenstein’s position regarding the uniqueness of the Holocaust see his essay “Religion and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” in Is the Holocaust Unique, 39–46, where Rubenstein argues that the uniqueness of the Holocaust consists in its Christian context.

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the enormity of the Holocaust that led Rubenstein and Fackenheim to conclude that traditional categories of Jewish theology needed to be revised or rejected? In chapter 3 I argue that this was not the case. Inspired by psychoanalysis, socio-psychological understanding of religion, naturalism, and existentialism, Rubenstein rejected the “transcendental God of Jewish patriarchal monotheism”33 before the Holocaust became an important part of his argument for a necessity of a radical reconstruction of Judaism. Traditional Judaism, as Rubenstein understood it, did not and could not answer to the needs of the modern Jews whom he described as “children of the secular city”—a phrase reflecting the influence of Harvey Cox with whose diagnosis about the collapse of traditional religion Rubenstein agreed.34 The fact that an application of theodic interpretations of suffering to the Holocaust led to morally repulsive conclusions indicated for Rubenstein that an unbridgeable chasm already existed between the modern Jew and her religion. It was a symptom, rather than a cause, let alone the cause, of the crisis that Rubenstein perceived as undeniably affecting Jewish religious life in the post-war era. In his early writings, Emil Fackenheim presented Judaism as fundamentally immune to the pressures of history and the vagaries of the empirical. God, he claimed, was a man’s existential a priori. Faith could be tested but it could not be destroyed because no event can undermine “man’s primordial openness to the Divine.”35 As long as Judaism’s messianic promise is not rendered completely implausible, a Jew can rely on traditional responses to temporary silences of the divine. Fackenheim came to reconsider and reject this position in later years—in his own assessment, it was the greatest doctrinal change in his career. The existential critique of Hegel and idealism led Fackenheim to realize that Judaism was in fact vulnerable to history. Human response to the act of divine disclosure occurred in history. Revelation was received by beings whose very existence was 33 Richard Rubenstein, “The Symbols of Judaism and Religious Existentialism,” Reconstructionist 25, no. 6 (1959): 13–19. The essay, originally read at a conference in 1955, was later reprinted in After Auschwitz as “The Symbols of Judaism and the Death of God.” 34 Richard L. Rubenstein, The Religious Imagination: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc., 1968), 182. Harvey Cox’s The Secular City was published for the first time in 1965 and reprinted many time since. 35 Emil L. Fackenheim, “On the Eclipse of God,” Commentary (June 1964): 55–60, reprinted in Quest for Past and Future: Essays in Jewish Theology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 242. Hereafter quoted as QPF.

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historically situated. The predicament of history was thus inescapable. It was this recognition of Judaism’s vulnerability that made it possible for the Holocaust to become the radical rupture Fackenheim argued it to be in his mature thought. It was the conditio sine qua non of his project of post-Holocaust Judaism. Both Rubenstein and Fackenheim pointed to the Emancipation of the Jews and the resulting processes of modernization and secularization as crucial in the development of Judaism. Following their suggestion, I submit that this is precisely where—and not solely in the Holocaust—one can discover the cognitive and cultural conditions of post-Holocaust crisis of covenantal theodicy. The Nazi persecution of the Jews during World War II was obviously a historical event. As such, every interpretation of it, including one that involves a deity, is at least in part informed and shaped by a prior understanding of history. For this reason, in our considerations of post-Holocaust theology we should take into account the impact of the historicist mode of cognition on theological interpretations of history. Paradigmatic thinking, by and large, determined the contours of traditional responses to the Holocaust. It provided a network of paradigms through which historical occurrences were given meaning as elements of the drama of the relationship between Israel and God. By recasting history as purely human affair, historicism and the practice of modern critical history made this interpretive approach impossible and thus undermined covenantal theodicy as a viable explanation of the Holocaust. Paradigmatic thinking constructs the meaning of historical occurrences by placing them within the constraints of an elaborate network of eternally valid models. This network, while not inflexible, excludes radical novelty. Eliezer Berkovits’s description of the Holocaust as historically but not theologically unique reflects the role of theological interpretation of history in this thought. For Berkovits, as for Fackenheim and Rubenstein, the Holocaust cannot be accounted for in terms of sin and punishment, as the classical covenantal paradigm would dictate. Some of the victims of the Holocaust lost their faith. Others did not. Jewish faith after the Holocaust needs to embrace both the “holy faith” and the “holy disbelief ” of the victims. Such troubled, questioning faith, however, is not new in Jewish history, as Berkovits asserts. Theologically, from the perspective of faith, Auschwitz is not unique and Job’s brother, as Berkovits refers to a post-Holocaust Jew, can follow in the footsteps of ancestors whose faith was also intimately familiar with the experience of disbelief brought by

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intense and inexplicable suffering. The disbelief described by Berkovits as a necessary part of the post-Holocaust faith is, however, only partial. As I argue in chapter 3, while for Berkovits history is not an area of a clearly discernible divine moral judgment, it does remain a realm of divine presence. As paradigmatic thinking dictates, Jewish history inexorably progresses toward redemption. In this respect, Berkovits’s thought can be compared to that of Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal who also saw the Nazi persecutions as different—but not radically different—from what had happened before. It was this realization that led Teichthal to focusing on what he believed to be the only proper response to the disaster. Despite the novel character of the event, he was able to assimilate it into the framework of covenantal history: the destruction came as a punishment and a waking call from God. For Teichthal, God’s hand remained clearly visible in Jewish history. The punishment proved that God was still actively involved in it and that he was bound by the rules of the covenantal agreement. Redemption could be counted on if Jews did their part, that is: repented by returning to their God and their land. Out of the Orthodox thinkers whose writings I analyze in this book, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe, is undoubtedly the best known. A variety of interpretations of his war-time sermons has been presented since the publication of Nehemia Polen’s The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira in 1994. The recent publication of the new, critical edition of the manuscript kept in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw had spurred renewed interest among scholars as well as among the wider public.36 Most interpreters thus far have followed in Polen’s footsteps and presented Shapira’s sermons as a testimony of faith—a faith profoundly troubled, nearly shattered by traumatic experiences of suffering and anguish, and yet a faith of such depth and intensity that ultimately impossible to extinguish completely. Only very recently has an alternative interpretation been presented by Shaul Magid, and it is the direction also I have chosen to follow. As I show in chapter 4, Shapira’s sermons take us close to the point where both covenantal theodicy and paradigmatic thinking crumble into pieces and thus they indicate that post-Holocaust theology did not emerge 36 Daniel Reiser, A Critical and Annotated Edition of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Sermons during the Holocaust, 2 vols. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, The World Union of Jewish Studies and the International Institute for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem, 2017).

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exclusively from the historicist and secular foundations of Jewish modernity. Due to his location in the Warsaw ghetto, Shapira’s knowledge of the scale of the destruction was more extensive than Ehrenreich’s, Unsdorfer’s, and Teichthal’s. He lived through—and crucially, as we know from the new edition of Esh Kodesh, committed his thoughts to paper after—the first phase of the liquidation of the ghetto when about 254,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka, over 11,000 deported to various labor camps and 10,000 killed in the ghetto. Arguably, this experience had a decisive influence on Shapira’s thoughts. Like Teichthal, he described the persecution as unprecedented in Jewish history. Unlike Teichthal, however, Shapira categorically rejected the idea that the destruction of European Jewry could be assimilated into any established pattern of explanation and meaning. For him, the conflagration he witnessed suggested a dawn of a new history: a history in which the covenant would no longer—because it could no longer—operate as the primary framework of understanding events. Already in the sermons from the fall of 1939, sermons written shortly after the capitulation of Warsaw, Shapira indicated, as I show, that traditional explanations of suffering were insufficient in confrontation with the experiences of the Jews of Warsaw. While in later sermons Shapira did return to various forms of covenantal theodicy, his last comments scribbled on the margins of earlier sermons indicate that for him the dramatic events of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto irrevocably undermined the very notion of the covenant. One of the most striking differences between the war-time writings of Shapira, on the one hand, and of Teichthal, Ehrenreich, and Unsdorfer, on the other, is Shapira’s sense that the rules of the covenant did not work anymore, that God’s behavior became completely unpredictable and incomprehensible. Nowhere in the writings of Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer, and Teichthal do we encounter such palpable and dramatic recognition that it was already too late for redemption. Such perspective, albeit for different reasons, is also missing from the works of Richard Rubenstein and Emil Fackenheim. Despite their knowledge that the Holocaust did not mean the end of Jewish history, Fackenheim and Rubenstein refused to try to situate it in the traditional framework of explanation. It was so, I submit, because the framework had not been available for them. It was irreparably undermined by the rise of historicism and the secularization of history. In a modified, reduced form, it did remain viable for Eliezer Berkovits for whom, like for Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer, and

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Teichthal, history remained covenantal and continued to unfold under divine guidance. In his essay “Bible and Religion,” J. Z. Smith argued that comparison should aim at “the redescription of the exempla . . . and a rectification of the academic categories in relation to which they have been imagined.”37 Elsewhere he wrote that such redescription results in a defamiliarization of the comparands.38 The comparison around which this book is construed achieves defamiliarization and redescription through reciprocal illumination, or as Barbara A. Holdrege put it, a “bidirectional re-vision.”39 The focus on covenantal theodicy as a form of theological interpretation of history allows me to show that the Orthodox responses, while in themselves variegated, are firmly entrenched in Judaism’s classical sources and hence that dismissing them as outlandish or blasphemous brings no benefit to the study of Jewish thought. While neither Unsdorfer, nor Ehrenreich, nor Teichthal stepped irrevocably outside the boundaries of the traditional discourse about suffering and Jewish history, their reflections are often more nuanced than they might prima facie appear. On occasion, they raised questions not unlike those posed by the post-Holocaust theologians. At times, they also shared some of their doubts. In such moments, Ehrenreich and Unsdorfer resorted to silence which, albeit remaining within the traditional array of responses to suffering, did betray at least a partial recognition of the limitations of any absolute covenantal theodicy. Ultimately, however, paradigmatic thinking made it possible—if not necessary—for them to place the events they witnessed into a continuum of the history of the Jewish people, the history that was unfolding according to predictable patterns and in which all events could be described as meaningful parts of the covenantal drama. Read in this context, Eliezer Berkovits’s response to the Holocaust proves to be less radical than it has been suggested. It is so, however, not because of Berkovits’s use of classic free-will theodicy but rather due to his conviction that the history of Israel is sacred and continues to flow in the direction posited already in the biblical literature—toward redemption. At 37 Smith, Relating Religion, 198. 38 Idem, “Dayyeinu,” in Redescribing Christian Origins, ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004), 483–484. 39 Barbara A. Holdrege, “Interrogating the Comparative Method: Whither, Why, and How?,” in “Methodical Aspects of Comparison,” ed. Oliver Freiberger, special issue Religions 9, no. 2 (2018): 58.

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the same time, the works of Emil Fackenheim and Richard Rubenstein are rendered less familiar, because in my interpretation the effect the near-total destruction of European Jewry had on their thought was possible only due to the gradual decline of theological interpretations of history that preceded the Holocaust. Consequently, I submit, post-Holocaust theology should be seen as less affected by the Holocaust itself and more by the manifold processes of modernity and in particular by historicism that carefully erased the divine footprints from history and reconstructed it as a human, all too human affair. It is in the writings of a Hasidic rebbe, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, rather than those of Fackenheim and Rubenstein that we see the Holocaust delivering the final and fatal blow to covenantal theodicy and paradigmatic thinking. We will never know whether Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer and Teichthal found themselves compelled to step outside the boundaries of covenantal theodicy not in a prayer for redemption or the silence of the faithful. What we do know is that Kalonymous Kalman Shapira—at least for a moment— did take this fateful step. We cannot know where it took him, but we can see where it takes us: toward a world where the covenant—far from being the fundamental horizon of life and thought—becomes something that needs to be proven, re-forged, or rejected.

Chapter 1

Covenantal Metahistory The meaning of history is guaranteed by Scripture; one observes an event in the historical world and discovers its meaning by understanding it as an actualization of a scriptural text. Alan Mintz, Hurban

In the wake of Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE the city was in ruins. The king Zedekiah, a scion of David to whom God himself promised that his dynasty would be everlasting, was blinded and led to Babylonia with other leaders of the kingdom. “Our dancing is turned into mourning. The crown has fallen from our head,” the poet wrote (Lam. 5:15–16). For many of the survivors and their descendants, the fall of Jerusalem and of the Temple that had been erected in the city on God’s command was a catastrophe of overwhelming and unprecedented proportions. The destruction was not limited to Jerusalem alone. Judah in its entirety was devastated by the ferocity of Babylonian assault.1 “Is there any agony like mine,” Fair 1 There have been disagreements among scholars regarding the scale and results of Babylonian military campaign against Judah. Some authors, most prominently Hans M. Barstad in his The Myth of the Empty Land: A Study in the History and Archeology of Judah during the ‘Exilic’ Period (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996), diminish the scope of destruction. In Barstad’s view, only 5–10% of the entire population of Jerusalem and Judah was deported by the Babylonians. The deportees, however, belonged to the literate elite of the society and as such were able to create the “myth of the empty land” with its idea that God himself left Judah together with the exiles. See also Robert Carroll, “Exile! What Exile?” in Leading Captivity Captive: “The Exile”

2

History, Metahistory, and Evil

Zion asked rhetorically (Lam. 1:12). It seemed there was not. The poems of Lamentations, written by an anonymous poet not long after the disaster, convey bewilderment and profound sense of abandonment. The poet had no doubt that the hand of God was behind the catastrophe. So much so that in his verses not the Babylonians but rather God himself is portrayed as the one who brought the destruction about: The Lord has acted like a foe, He has laid waste Israel . . . The Lord has rejected his altar, Disdained his sanctuary (Lam. 2:5–7)

This belief in divine agency, however, multiplied doubts instead of dispelling them. If the Lord has rejected his altar, has he also rejected his people? No, the poet avers, “The Lord does not reject forever, but first afflicts, then pardons in his abundant kindness” (Lam. 3:31). Or does he? “Why have you forgotten us utterly, forsaken us for all time?” asks the poet (5:20) and bitterly continues, “for truly, you have rejected us, bitterly raged against us” (5:22). Lamentations end on this despairing note. The final plea, “take us back, o Lord, to yourself, and let us come back” (5:21), remains unanswered. In the poetic rendering, God’s rage against Jerusalem is followed by his ominous silence. The book of Lamentations does not offer an explanation of the catastrophe. Rather than to search for an answer to the question why the disaster had struck Judah, the poet focused on the misery that came in its wake. “Jerusalem has greatly sinned, therefore she is become a mockery” (1:8), he declares, and makes Fair Zion herself admit that “the Lord is in the right for I have disobeyed him” (1:18). These and similar admissions of guilt, as Ideology and History, ed. Lester Grabbe (Sheffield Academic Press: Sheffield, 1998) and Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (New York: Free Press, 2001), 306. According to others, the archeological evidence indicates a massive depopulation as well as profound and lasting economic devastation of Judah. In the words of Ephraim Stern, an archeologist from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, “the results of the Babylonian conquest  .  .  .  brought the once-flourishing country to one of the lowest ebbs in its long history,” quoted in William Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book. The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press: New York 2004), 142. For more on the topic and discussion of relevant literature see: Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, 139–149; Daniel Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 2002), 30–34, 45–74; Oded Lipshitz and Joseph Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 3–89.

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3

however, sound hollow in the poems and are effectively drowned out by the haunting images of Fair Zion’s agony. In the poet’s perception, the magnitude of destruction exceeded the enormity of any sins Fair Zion might have been guilty of. Situating the poems in the context the Ancient Near Eastern mourning poetry allows us to see Lamentations’ vague confessions of generalized sinfulness as a genre convention rather than an explication. The author of Lamentations mourned. He did not construct a theodicy.2 The term “theodicy” was coined by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1709 when he decided to compose a treatise designed to “show that it has been possible for God to permit sin and misery, and even to co-operate therein and promote it, without detriment to his holiness and his supreme goodness.”3 Technically, “theodicy” means vindication of God. It was Leibniz’s intention to prove that the existence of evil in the world did not contradict the righteousness of the creator. Although the term is relatively young, the problem itself is as old as the idea of an omnipotent and benevolent deity capable of interfering in the affairs of men. It appears that one can legitimately expect such a deity to be able as well as willing to remove misery from the world, to create a universe where evil would simply not exist. Leibniz and many others before and after him attempted to solve the riddle posed by the existence of evil by showing that contrary to what our limited cognitive capacities indicate evil does have a legitimate place in the greater scheme of things. From this perspective, theodicy is an attempt to incorporate the threads of evil into a tapestry of intelligible order. This is how theodicy was described by Peter Berger who argued that its primary goal was to provide “the religious legitimation of anomic phenomena,” 2 In the recent years, a growing number of studies offer alternative to the traditional, predominantly theodic, readings of Lamentations: Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2000), 35–61; Alan Cooper, “The Message of Lamentations,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, 28 (2001): 1–18; Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 17–48; F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Instituto Biblico, 1993) and idem “Tragedy, Tradition and Theology in the Book of Lamentations,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 74 (1997): 29–60; Claus Westermann, Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994); Ian Provan, Lamentations, New Century Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Press, 1991); Johan Rankema, “Theodicy in Lamentations?” in Theodicy in the Word of the Bible, ed. Johannes Cornelis de Moor (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 410–428. 3 Gottfried W. Leibniz, Theodicy. Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), 61.

4

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phenomena that threaten to dismantle a sacred order established through human activity.4 The destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians could certainly be described in Berger’s terms as an explosion of anomic forces that put at risk the sacred canopy under which the Israelites dwelled. In what follows I focus on theodicy understood as construction of meaning, as discursive strategy aimed at preventing the sacred order established by Jewish religious belief and practice from unravelling under the pressure of traumatic historical events. Among various theodicies proposed by the biblical authors the most prominent one that attempts to do exactly that is to be found in the Deuteronomistic history.5

Covenantal Theodicy The concept of the Deuteronomistic history was proposed in 1943 by Martin Noth who argued that the biblical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings were composed by a single author in response to the crisis precipitated by the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile.6 Textual evidence, Noth averred, warranted speaking not only of separate biblical books in which one could discern various Deuteronomistic elements but rather of a unified presentation of the history of Israel from the time of Moses until the fall of the Northern and Southern Israelite kingdoms. 4 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), 55. 5 In my reading of the Deuteronomistic history I follow the interpretation presented by Thomas C. Römer in his The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical and Literary Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2005 and 2007). Römer’s novel approach combines aspects of the layer model and the block model thus far dominating in the scholarship: in his opinion, as the layer model suggests, successive redactional stages of the composition of Deuteronomistic history can be traced throughout the entire text and, as the proponents of the block model submit, those stages should be understood in connection to three important historical periods (the Josianic reforms, the exile, and the Persian era). According to Römer, the period of the exile and the problems it posed was crucial for the development of Deuteronomistic history which he understands as an example of Weberian crisis literature. For an in-depth discussion of Römer’s approach see: “In Conversation with Thomas Römer,” ed. Raymond F. Person, Jr., The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9: 1–49. 6 Martin Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien. Die sammelnden und bearbeitended Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament (1943) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 3rd ed., 1967). Hereafter quoted as ÜS; English translation of the first part: The Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup 15; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1981). Hereafter quoted as DH.

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Thus Deuteronomy through 2 Kings became Deuteronomistic history that Noth believed to be “probably the independent project of a man whom the historical catastrophes he witnessed had inspired with curiosity about the meaning of what had happened, and who tried to answer this question in a comprehensible and self-contained historical account.”7 Noth’s hypothesis was met with wide but not universal acceptance.8 Over time, the single Deuteronomistic historian was replaced by the Deuteronomistic school and the timeline of the composition and redaction extended from the 7th century BCE into the post-exilic period. Scholars continue to debate the structure of the text, the history of its composition as well as the identity of its authors. Both the text as it is and what we think we know of its transmission history indicate that while Noth’s hypothesis of a solitary historian puzzling over the riddle posed by the destruction of Judah may not be tenable,9 it is likely that there was a group of Judeans, probably members of the intellectual and economic elite displaced in the result of the kingdom’s fall, for whom the catastrophe constituted a quandary of paramount importance. The author of Lamentations might have belonged to that group. His response was to find a poetic expression for the scale 7 Noth, ÜS, 145; DH, 99. 8 The double redaction hypothesis proposed by Frank M. Cross was the first major modifications of Noth’s interpretation; see Frank M. Cross “The Structure of Deuteronomistic History,” Perspectives in Jewish Learning 3 (1968): 9–24 and idem, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). Richard D. Nelson is also a proponent of the double redaction model; see his The Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup 18; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981). In Germany, in 1971 Rudolf Smend formulated a model of multiple exilic redactions of the Deuteronomistic History in his “Das Gesetz und die Volker: Ein Beitrag zur deuteronomistischen Redaktiongeschichte,” in Probleme biblischer Theologie, ed. H. W. Wolf (Munich: Kaiser, 1971), English translation by P.T. Daniels, “The Law and the Nations. A Contribution to Deuteronomistic Tradition History,” in Reconsidering Israel and Judah: Recent Studies on the Deuteronomistic History, ed. G.N. Knoppers and J.G. McConville (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 95–110. Subsequently both models were further elaborated and the block model and the layer model in various forms continue to dominate in the studies of the Deuteronomistic history. 9 Steven McKenzie and John Van Seters, however, argue for a return to Noth’s model in this regard. See John Van Seters, In Search of History: History in the Ancient World and the Origin of Biblical History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); Steven L. McKenzie, The Trouble with Kings: The Composition of the Books of Kings in the Deuteronomistic History (Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 42; Leiden: Brill 1991) and his “The Trouble with Kingship,” in A. de Pury, T. Romer and J.-D. Macchi, eds., Israel Constructs its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research (JSOTSup 306; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 286–314.

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of the disaster, for the shattering of Judah, for the pain of the survivors and the fear that the covenant itself had been ruined together with the temple that stood in Jerusalem as its sign. The exilic Deuteronomists, on the other hand, created a comprehensive and comprehensible portrayal of the past in the form of a historical narrative where the rises and falls of individuals and communities are explained as consequences of Israel’s actions vis-à-vis God. The concept of the covenant with its requirements of absolute loyalty and observance of the law stands at the center of this narrative and makes it possible to envision the Israelite history as shaped by the covenantal nexus of sin and punishment. The stipulations of the covenant become yardsticks with which to measure triumphs as well as failures: national achievements can be interpreted as signs of faithfulness and calamities as consequences of treachery. From this perspective, history is not shaped exclusively by human and natural forces but gains an additional dimension of divine activity. With God as an active agent who shapes history according to his will, the history of Israel as a community bound to the divine by the covenantal pact becomes a theodicy that legitimizes anomic phenomena, tames the forces of chaos and transforms them into elements of intelligible order. Combined with the prophetic visions of restoration, the Deuteronomistic rendition of the past provides a template for understanding the present and the future as unfolding according to the sequence of sin, punishment, repentance, and redemption. An important aspect of theodicy based on the covenantal stipulations is its corporate character that corresponds to Israel’s corporate identity.10 The covenantal bound is imagined as existing between God and the people of Israel conceived of as a discrete entity. That does not mean that individual sins are irrelevant from the perspective of covenantal theodicy. On the contrary, covenantal theodicy includes the principle of corporate responsibility as well as corporate punishment in the way it portrays community as a whole to be liable for the sins of its individual members.11 In Deuteronomy 31:16–17, God shares the following prediction with Moses: 10 Writing about what he calls Deuteronomistic theodicy, Adam Gregerman rises this important point and observes, correctly in my opinion, that “some scholars insufficiently differentiate between corporate and individual theodicies.” Adam Gregerman, Building on the Ruins of the Temple: Apologetics and Polemics in Early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 142–4. 11 See Joel S. Kaminsky, Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible (JSOTSup 196; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). Kaminsky provides a detailed analysis

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You are soon to lie with your fathers. This people will thereupon go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land that they are about to enter; they will forsake me and break my covenant that I made with them. Then my anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide my countenance from them. They shall be ready prey, and many evils and troubles shall befall them.

This fragment was most likely added to Deuteronomy by the exilic editors when the earlier scrolls were incorporated into the Deuteronomistic history as its introduction. The use of anticipatory and retrospective speeches that summarize past events or offer hortatory predictions about future is characteristic for the entire Deuteronomistic history. In God’s words to Moses, the authors encapsulated the essence of what was to follow: a rather bleak story of gradual decline beginning after the death of Joshua and ending tragically with the fall of Jerusalem. Admittedly, Deuteronomistic history is not uniformly gloom. There are brighter moments and optimistic accents in the narrative.12 The final passages of 2 Kings offer a glimmer of hope as King Jehoiachin of Judah is released from Babylonian prison. Some scholars consider it likely, however, that these verses, among others, were added in the post-exilic period when the political circumstances made room for cautious optimism. The final sentence of the Deuteronomistic history in its exilic edition was probably the statement of 2 Kgs 25:21: “So Judah was exiled out of his land.” The nature of the covenantal pact between God and the Israelites provided an answer to the question why Judah was exiled. Deuteronomistic history presents this answer in the form of a long and elaborate narrative, the form of history emplotted as theodicy. Abraham and later David were privileged recipients of unconditional promissory covenants. The Mosaic covenant, on the other hand, presents benefits flowing from divine benevolence as conditioned upon observance of the law. The covenants with Abraham and David reward loyalty. The covenant with the Israelites induces it. Nowhere is it formulated more clearly than in the Book of Deuteronomy itself where the depiction of the agreement between God and the Israelites closely resembles the Neo-Assyrian vassal treaties, specifically the loyalty on those passages from the Book of Kings where the fall of Judah is explained as a consequence of the actions of the king Manasseh. 12 The fact that parts of the Deuteronomistic history appear to have nothing to do with the cataclysm of 586 BCE led Frank Cross to his double redaction hypothesis.

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oaths of Esarhaddon from 672 BCE.13 The author of Deuteronomy 13 enjoins the Israelites to “follow none but the Lord your God, and revere none but him; observe his commandments alone, and heed only his orders; worship none but him, and hold fast to him” (13:5). In a fashion similar to the Esarhaddon treaty, the chapter describes three cases of apostasy.14 In each the punishment for unfaithfulness to Israel’s divine suzerain is death. The list of curses in Deuteronomy 28:20–44 is also inspired by the Assyrian document. As Thomas Römer suggests, it is possible that a copy of the Esarhaddon loyalty oaths was available for the Deuteronomist scribes who copied it during the time of Assyrian domination and altered the original text to make a subversive point that Israel owed absolute allegiance to Yahweh and not to the Assyrian overloads.15 In place of the deities of the Assyrian pantheon bringing disasters upon disloyal vassals, in Deuteronomy, it is Yahweh who punishes his unfaithful people: But if you do not obey the Lord your God to observe faithfully all his commandments and laws which I enjoin upon you this day. . . . The Lord will let loose against you calamity, panic, and frustration in all the enterprises you undertake, so that you shall soon be utterly wiped out because of your evildoing. . . . The Lord will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and draught, with blight and mildew, they shall hound you until you perish. . . . and you shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. (Deut. 28:20–25)

13 That document focuses on the recognition of Assurbanipal as the legitimate successor to Esarhaddon and contains stipulations of loyalty very similar to those from Deuteronomy: “You shall love Assurbanipal . . . king of Assyria, your lord, as yourself. You shall hearken to whatever he says and do whatever he commands, and you shall not seek any other king or other lord against him. This treaty . . . you shall speak to your sons and grandsons, your seed and your seed’s seed which shall be born in the future.” Cited by Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History, 75. The neo-Assyrian royal treaties have been published in Simo Porpola, Kazuko Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths (Helsinki University Press: Helsinki, 1988). Compare this to the biblical: “Hear, Israel. The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your life and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children” (Deut. 6:4–7). 14 See Bernard M. Levinson, “Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty as the Source for the Canon Formula in Deuteronomy 13:1,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 3, 337–347. 15 Römer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History, 76.

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Read by the rivers of Babylon, these curses must have sounded like a prophecy fulfilled. The exilic Deuteronomists edited them to drive the point home and added curses describing an invasion of foreign forces and expulsion of the population: Because you would not serve the Lord your God in joy and gladness over the abundance of everything, you shall have to serve—in hunger and thirst, naked and lacking everything—the enemies whom the Lord will let loose against you. . . . The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar. . . . You shall be left a scant few, after having been as numerous as the stars in the skies, because you did not heed the command of the Lord your God. And as the Lord once delighted in making your prosperous and many, so will the Lord now delight in causing you to perish and in wiping you out; you shall be torn from the land that your about to enter to possess. The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other. (Deut. 28:47–63)

Thus, in Joshua-2 Kings available historical traditions were adapted and modified to illustrate the principle of covenantal dynamics of reciprocity and emphasize the divine factor in Israelite history. The Deuteronomists repeatedly assert that Israelite history is a domain of divine providence and judgment. The sin of idolatry is each time followed by military defeat and suffering coming in its wake. Nothing is random. Everything happens “as the Lord declared and as the Lord had sworn” (Judg. 2:15). 2 Kgs 17 describes the Assyrian invasion and the ultimate demise of the kingdom as the price Samaria had to pay for following “the way of Jeroboam”: Jeroboam caused Israel to stray from the Lord and to commit great sin, and the Israelites persisted in all the sins which Jeroboam had committed, they did not depart from them. In the end, the Lord removed Israel from his presence, as he had warned them through all his servants the prophets. So the Israelites were deported from their land to Assyria, as is still the case. (2 Kgs. 17:21–23)

Neither political nor military considerations enter into this account as they are ultimately utterly irrelevant. The defeat at the hands of Assyria happened because of the sinful ways of the kingdom’s leaders and inhabitants. The downfall took place not because the forces of the Northern Kingdom were overwhelmed by a powerful opponent who wanted to expand its domination in the region but rather because “the Israelites sinned against

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the Lord.” Israel’s treachery invariably prompts disaster and it is this logic of reciprocity and retribution that explains the victory of Assyria famously described by the prophet Isaiah as the “rod of [God’s] anger” (Is. 10:5). The fall of Judah, similarly, is explained as a consequence of the wrongful ways of king Manasseh who “did what was displeasing to the Lord” and followed “the abhorrent practices of the nations that the Lord had dispossessed before the Israelites” (2 Kings 21:2). It was not just another event of the historical order explicable by causes not extending beyond the domain of geopolitics and military strategy. The success of the Babylonians in their campaign against Judah was first and foremost an expression of God’s judgment. In the words of Isaiah: “Ah, Jerusalem has stumbled and Judah has fallen, because by word and deed they insult the Lord” (Is. 3:8). The Deuteronomistic history, as Jan Assmann remarked, is a history of guilt.16 It is the guilt engendered by the existence of the covenant that gives structure to events organized into a narrative unfolding inexorably toward disaster. Noth argued that the Deuteronomistic historian “did not write his history  .  .  .  to satisfy a curiosity about national history but intended to teach the true meaning of the history of Israel from the occupation to the destruction of the old order. The meaning which he discovered was that God was recognizably at work in this history, continuously meeting the accelerating moral decline with warnings and punishments and, finally, when these proved fruitless, with total annihilation.”17 Covenantal stipulations in conjunction with the assumption of God’s absolute righteousness made it possible to posit the principle of retribution as determining the fate of God’s earthly vassal. By presenting the exile as a just punishment for Israel’s disloyalty and sin, the Deuteronomists were perhaps countering the notion that the castigation was not proportionate to the offense as well as the belief that Babylonian deities managed to defeat the God of Israel. The latter probably had certain attractiveness as an alternative explanation of the fall of Judah and the former seems to stand behind the anguish the author of Lamentations conveyed in his poems.

16 Jan Assmann, “Guilt and Remembrance: On the Theologization of History in the Ancient near East,” History and Memory 2, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 20; see also his “Monotheism, Memory, and Trauma: Reflections on Freud’s Book on Moses” in Religion and Cultural Memory, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006): 55. 17 Noth, ÜS, 100; DH, 89.

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The apprehension that the severity of punishment may have exceeded the gravity of sin appears also in Ezekiel 18 where the Israelites complain that “the way of the Lord is unfair.” God’s reply is unequivocal: Listen, O House of Israel: Is my way unfair? It is your ways that are unfair! When a righteous person turns away from his righteousness and does wrong, he shall die for it; he shall die for the wrong he has done. And if a wicked person turns back from the wickedness . . . and does what is just and right, such person shall save his life. . . . Be assured, O House of Israel, I will judge each one of you according to his ways—declares the Lord God. (Ez. 18:25–30)

And yet, in chapter 20 Ezekiel himself seems to struggle with doubts and in an attempt to explain why the exile happened presents a reinterpretation of the foundational moment in Israelite history that preserves the idea of retribution only to suggest that it may in fact be entirely irrelevant.18 In Ezekiel’s rendering, the Exodus is not an act of divine love and mercy but rather a prelude to punishment. Through the prophet God declares: On the day that I chose Israel, I gave my oath to the stock of the House of Jacob; when I made myself known to them in the land of Egypt, I gave my oath to them. . . . I swore to them to take them out of the land of Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey. . . . I also said to them: Cast away, every one of you, the detestable things that you are drawn to and do not defile yourselves with the fetishes of Egypt. . . . But they defied me and refused to listen to me. They did not cast away the detestable things they were drawn to, nor did they give up the fetishes of Egypt. Then I resolved to pour my fury upon them, to vent all my anger upon them there, in the land of Egypt. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it might not be profaned in the sight of the nations among whom they were. . . . I brought them out of the land of Egypt and I led them into the wilderness. (Ez. 20:5–8)

Ezekiel describes the Exodus as a disciplinary rather than salvific intervention: God’s goal is not to free the Israelites from the misery of slavery but to purge them of idolatry. Despite the stupendous show of divine might, however, the Israelites persisted in their sinfulness and “their hearts followed 18 Alan Mintz noted that Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s “fierce belief in the covenant paradigm was not seriously shaken by the Destruction” (Hurban, 21). I believe chapter 20 to indicate otherwise. I thank Eva Mroczek for bringing it to my attention.

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after their fetishes” (20:15). God “had pity on them and did not destroy them” but they rebelled again and again: Then I resolved to pour out my fury upon them, to vent all my anger upon them, in the wilderness. But I held back my hand. . . . However, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the nations and disperse them through the lands, because they did not obey my rules, but rejected my laws, profaned my Sabbaths, and looked with longing to the fetishes of their fathers. (20:21–24)

The exile, in other words, had been declared already in the times of Moses. There was nothing the Israelites who lived through or died during the calamity could have done to prevent it. They suffered because of their ancestors’ sin of idolatry. This, by itself, is not a radical statement as the idea of trans-generational punishment appears elsewhere in the Bible. The Book of Exodus describes God as “visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject” him (Ex. 20:5). However, Ezekiel goes further than that and has God declare: Moreover, I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live . . . that I might render them desolate, that they might know that I am the Lord. (20:25)

God deliberately led the Israelites to sin through the laws he had given them, Ezekiel avers, so that he could punish them later. If it was the faithfulness to the divine given laws that led to sin, of what use was the category? If the law was an instrument of punishment rather than a way to holiness, perhaps the framework of retributive justice together with the image of God as the righteous judge was not really relevant? In this chapter, Ezekiel appears to suggest that the Babylonian exile could not be accounted for in these terms. Nothing that the generation of the destruction had done deserved a punishment such as this. It must have been a punishment for something else. Ultimately, as the prophet presented the events, God was punishing Ezekiel’s generation for a sin he himself had forced an earlier generation of the Israelites to commit. As Zachary Braiterman observed, the Bible contains both theodicy and antitheodicy.19 Some biblical authors, the Deuteronomists most 19 Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also N. N. Trakakis, “Anti-Theodicy,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul J. Moser (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 124–143.

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prominently among them, assert God’s justice and explain communal suffering by placing it in the framework of sin and punishment, repentance and restoration. Others, like the author of Lamentations and Ezekiel in chapter 20, probe and mitigate that position. In his study of responses to catastrophe in Hebrew literature, In Alan Mintz’s words, “the establishment of the covenant had the simple but extraordinary effect of endowing history with meaning. History ceased being a list of rises and falls . . . [and] became the record of the vicissitudes of a relationship acted over time.”20 The rules of the covenantal pact provided hermeneutical keys for interpreting historical events: political independence or successful conquest signified divine favor and Israel’s faithfulness. National woes indicated disloyalty, sin and divine wrath. No longer seen as incomprehensible disruptions, national calamities were transformed into meaningful elements of orderly reality, into threads that had their place in the sacred canopy. Last but certainly not least, the covenant with its connection between human action and divine reaction made room for hope. Sin was followed by punishment, but repentance brought forgiveness and restoration. The price of accepting this fundamental dynamic of covenantal relationship was very high, however, whenever suffering was found to be disproportional to transgression that triggered it. The rabbis, to whose interpretation of the exile I will now turn, inherited this tension between affirmation and doubt. The most salient indication of the agonizing confusion that overwhelmed the author of Lamentations is his inability to point out any specific sins that could have possibly deserved such a catastrophic punishment as the fall of Jerusalem. In Lamentations Rabbah, an interpretation of Lamentations composed sometime in the 5th century CE, the rabbis attempted to fill this lacuna. Consider, for example, how the following fragment where a rather cloudy suggestion of Zion’s guilt in Lamentations—“Her uncleanness clings to her skirts” (1:9)—is further developed by the rabbis: There was a place below Jerusalem with the name Topheth.  .  .  .  A hollow image was set up there within the innermost of seven chambers, holding a copper plate in its hand upon which a fire-pan was placed. When a person brought an offering of flour one chamber was opened for him; when he brought one of doves and pigeons, two chambers were opened for him; of a lamb, three were opened for him; of a ram, four were opened for him; of a 20 Mintz, Hurban, 19.

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calf, five were opened for him; of an ox, six were opened for him; but when a person brought an offering of his child the seven were opened for him. They placed the child on the copper plate, kindled the fire-pan beneath him, and sang before the image, “May the sacrifice be pleasant and sweet to thee!” Why did they do this? So that the parents should not hear the groans of their children and retract.21

The rabbis take beshuleha to refer to a geographical location and provide a rhetorically elaborated description of an offense not even suggested in the biblical text. This passage contains more than an accusation of the sin of idolatry. By means of hyperbole, the rabbis produce a striking image of people who not only offer sacrifices to idols but who descend into darkness and abomination until the utmost level of atrocity: burnt offerings of their own children. In place of a vague admission of an unspecified transgression in the verse from Lamentations, in its rendering in Lamentation Rabbah we find a description of an infamy of monstrous proportions. It is as if the rabbis were saying: if the Jerusalemites committed such heinous deeds, they clearly deserved the punishment that came to them. In another fragment the rabbis go even further in their effort to make it transparent that the catastrophe, while terrifying, was a just punishment for specific sins. “Judah has gone into exile because of affliction,” we read in Lamentations (1:3). Such generalized statement was not satisfying for the rabbis who provided the following list of sins: “Because of affliction.” Because they ate leaven on Passover, contrary to what is stated, “Thou shalt eat no leavened bread” (Deut. 16:3). Another interpretation of “Because of affliction”: because they seized the pledge of the poor within their houses, contrary to what is stated, “And if he be a poor man, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge” (Deut. 24:12). Another interpretation . . . : because they dealt oppressively in the matter of the wages of a hired servant, contrary to what is stated, “Thou shalt not oppress a hired servant that is poor and needy” (Deut. 24:14). Another interpretation . . . : because they robbed the poor of what was due to them, contrary to what

21 Lamentations, trans. by A. Cohen, in The Midrash Rabbah. Lamentations, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Song of Songs, trans. by H. Freedman, Maurice Simon (London, Jerusalem, New York: The Soncino Press, 1977), 110 (I. 9:36). Compare the idolatry passage in proem 22.

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is stated, “Thou shalt leave them for the poor and for the stranger” (Lev. 19:10). . . . Another interpretation: because they worshipped idols.22

Lamentation Rabbah “raises the heights and lowers the depths,” Shaye Cohen noted in his analysis of the midrash.23 Instead of nebulous admissions of sinfulness that appear to be little more than reflections of traditional piety or a genre convention in Lamentations, the rabbis strove to firmly place the destruction of the Temple within the boundaries of covenantal theodicy. They heap exaggerated indictments upon Israel, as Alan Mintz argued, precisely in order to “shore up the battered paradigm of the covenant.”24 The scale of the devastation demanded a matching monstrous sin and the rabbis were able to read it into the most unexpected places: [Ben Azzai] said to them: “Israel did not go into exile until they had repudiated the Divine Unity, circumcision which had been given to the twentieth generation, the Decalogue, and the Pentateuch. Whence have we this? From the letters constituting the word eikah.” Rabbi Levi said: Israel did not go into exile until they had repudiated the thirty-six ordinances in the Torah for which the penalty is excision, and also the Decalogue. Whence have we this? From the numerical value of the letters constituting the words eikah and badad (solitary).25

As Shaye Cohen pointed out, the words “since they sinned, they were exiled” end fourteen out of the thirty six proems to Lamentation Rabbah.26 The author of Lamentations might have reached the brink of utter despair and wonder whether God had not abandoned Israel entirely but the rabbis, in response to both the destruction itself and the hopelessness it engendered, strove to make the framework work, to show the destruction as a confirmation of divine justice that always operates according to the model of sin and punishment, merit and reward. And yet, contrary to some interpretations,27 22 Ibid., 97 (I.3:28). 23 Shaye J.D. Cohen, “The Destruction: From Scripture to Midrash,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 23. 24 Mintz, Hurban, 57. 25 Lam. R. I.1:1 26 Cohen, “The Destruction,” 26. 27 “To speak of ‘messages’ in . . . Lamentations Rabbah,” Jacob Neusner argued, “simply is misleading. Our compilers have focused upon a single message, the one beginning with Deuteronomy. Theirs is a covenantal theology, in which Israel and God have mutually and reciprocally agreed to bind themselves to a common Torah; the rules of the relationship are such that an infraction triggers its penalty willy-nilly; but

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this is not the sole message of the midrash. In Lamentation Rabbah we encounter not only affirmations of covenantal theodicy like the ones cited above, but also powerful images of God as a father overwhelmed by irrational, uncontrollable rage as well as dramatic portrayals of the divine as a mourner, so weak and broken in his grief that he needs to call for women mourners to assist him:28 The Holy One, blessed be he, said to the Ministering Angels, “Come, let us see together what the enemy has done in my house.” Forthwith the Holy One, blessed be he, and the Ministering Angels went, Jeremiah leading the way. When the Holy One, blessed be he, saw the Temple, he said, “Certainly this is my house and this is my resting place into which the enemies have come, and they have done with it whatever they wished.” At that time the Holy One, blessed be he, wept and said, “Woe is me for my house! My children, where are you? My priests, where are you? My lovers, where are you? What shall I do with you, seeing that I warned you, but you did not repent?” The Holy One, blessed be he, said to Jeremiah, “I am now like a man who had an only son for whom he prepared a marriage canopy, but he died. Do you feel no anguish for me and my children?”29

obedience to the Torah likewise brings its reward” (Jacob Neusner, The Midrash Compilations of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, vol. 1, Lamentations Rabbah [Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989], 185). Studies that recognize the diversity of views expressed in Lamentations Rabbah include: Alan Mintz, Hurban, 49–83; Shaye J.D. Cohen, “The Destruction,” David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); idem, “Imitatio Hominis: Anthropomorphism and the Characters of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Prooftexts 12 (1992): 151–174. Tod Linafelt and Adam Gregerman offer decidedly antitheodic readings of the midrash; Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations, 100–116; Gregerman, Building on the Ruins of the Temple, 157–215. 28 “R. Simeon ben Lakish said: ‘God may be likened to a king who had two sons. He became enraged against the first of them, took a stick, and thrashed him so that he writhed in agony and died; and the father then began to lament over him. He later became enraged against the second son, took a stick, and thrashed him so that he writhed in agony and died; and the father then exclaimed, ‘No longer have I strength to lament over them, so call for the mourning women and let them lament over them,’” 5, proem 5. On the role of women see Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), chapters 6 and 7 as well as her “Bodies Performing in Ruins: The Lamenting Mother in Ancient Hebrew Texts,” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter 2014), 33–63. 29 Lamentations Rabbah, proem 24.

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This is only one of the examples of what Alan Mintz described as divine pathos in the midrash.30 Here God is portrayed as weeping, lamenting over himself and his children. He mourns as if he has lost the only son. In the next scene, God calls for the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses “for they know how to weep.” Abraham arrives first and weeping is exactly what he does when he sees what has happened to Israel. He refuses to acknowledge that Israel was sinful and received her just portion. Who will testify against Israel, Abraham demands. The Torah is called by God to testify, but Abraham shames it into silence. The letters of the alphabet are called next and they also are rendered mute by Abraham’s defense of Israel. Finally, all patriarchs join with Abraham to remind God of their merits and to plea for mercy for Israel. Moses attempts to convince God that the people of Israel are his children and that he is failing at his parental duties. In one version, the proem ends with a scene of Moses pleading that the enemies of Israel at least did not kill children in presence of their parents. The plea falls on deaf ears and a father is told to kill his own son as the boy’s mother watches. The last image is that of the mother, weeping over the body of her child. The supplement that follows describes a striking turn of events. God, thus far unwilling to put an end to the afflictions, is finally moved by the appeal of Rachel who asks him: “Why should you, everlasting and merciful King, be jealous of idolatry in which there is no reality? Why should you exile my children, let them be murdered by the sword, and permit the enemy to do with them whatever they please?” The answer to Rachel’s questions should be straightforward: the Israelites brought the calamity upon their own heads by their sinfulness. Yet God replies only, “For your sake, Rachel, I will restore Israel to their place.” This reply can be read as an indication that the rabbis doubted the validity of the accusation of idolatry, of the charge they brought up themselves. In a particularly striking passage, the rabbis present the persecutions without any reference to the categories of sin and punishment: A Jew passed in front of Hadrian and greeted him. The king asked, “Who are you?” He answered, “I am a Jew.” He exclaimed, “Dare a Jew pass in front of Hadrian and greet him!” He ordered, “Take him out and cut off his head.” Another Jew passed, and seeing what had happened to the first man, did not greet him. The king asked, “Who are you?” He answered, “A Jew.” He exclaimed, “Dare a Jew pass in front of Hadrian without giving greeting!” 30 Mintz, Hurban, 58–64.

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He ordered, “Take him and cut off his head.” His senators said to him, “We cannot understand your actions. He who greeted you was killed and he who did not greet you was killed!” He replied to them, “Do you seek to advise me how I wish to kill those I hate!”31

One could augment this image by adding that Hadrian’s hatred for the Jews was in some way instigated by God who saw it fit to use Rome as a tool to chastise Israel. The rabbis would probably agree with such a suggestion. After all, they did describe Nebuchadnezzar as reluctantly following God’s command: “Wicked servant, go and destroy your master’s house, because his children disobey him.”32 Yet in this fragment any connection to the divine is missing and Hadrian hatred remains incomprehensible. It does not matter what a Jew does, he will be killed anyway. Neither Lamentations nor Lamentations Rabbah unequivocally proclaim covenantal theodicy. The concepts of sin, punishment, guilt, and repentance appear in both but unsurprisingly their centrality for the texts’ message or messages depends on hermeneutical premises accepted by interpreters.33 Both can be read as texts that not so much affirm but rather struggle with the idea of divine justice operating on the principle of retribution. The rabbis did succeed in strengthening the interpretation of the destruction of the Temple as brought about by Israel’s sinfulness, but it appears that they did not manage to entirely assuage their own doubts. The author of the Targum Lamentations presented a much more unequivocal interpretation of national calamity and covenantal theodicy dominates in his work.34 Already in his rendition of the first verse of 31 Lam. Rab., 211, III.58. 32 Ibid., proem 23. 33 Alan Cooper argued persuasively that the traditional attribution of the authorship of Lamentations to Jeremiah facilitated theodic interpretations of the book; Cooper, “The Message of Lamentations,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 28 (2002): 1–18. Jason Kalman made a similar point specifically in reference to the rabbinic readings of Lamentations; Jason Kalman, “If Jeremiah Wrote It, It Must be OK: On the Attribution of Lamentations to Jeremiah in Early Rabbinic Texts,” Acta Theologica 2 (2009): 31–53. 34 The Targum of Lamentations. Translated, with a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes by Philip S. Alexander, The Aramaic Bible, vol. 17B (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008). On theodicy in the Targum Lamentations see Christian M.M. Brady, The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations: Vindicating God (Brill: Leiden 2003); Tod Linafelt argues that theodic interpretations of the Targum are reductionistic and do not pay sufficient attention to those fragments where, in his opinion, the author of the Targum gives voice to a more conflicted and nuanced approach to exile and suffering; Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations, 80–99.

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Lamentations, the Targumist proclaims that the ruin of Jerusalem is “on account of the extent of her sins, and the sedition and rebellion that are in her midst” (1:1). Similarly to the rabbis, the Targumist lists both generic violations of the Torah and specific transgressions to justify the severity of divine punishment. The Israelites oppressed orphans and widows (1:3), failed to free Israelite slaves (1:3), did not observe the Pilgrim Festivals (1:3), practiced robbery (3:38), and idolatry (4:13). The specific transgressions include Israel’s response in the wilderness to the report of the spies about the Land (1:2), Josiah’s disobedience of God’s command not to oppose Pharaoh Necho (1:18; cf. 4:20), and the murder of Zechariah the son of Iddo, the high priest and faithful prophet “in the House of the Sanctuary of the Lord on the Day of Atonement” (2:20). “And for the sins of Israel Jerusalem is devastated,” Targumist stresses repeating this fundamental message again and again: “The Lord had broken her on account of the multitude of her rebellions” (1:5); “because of her sins her people fell into the hands of wicked Nebuchadnezzar” (1:7). Chapter 1 of the Targum resembles a relentless bombardment with accusations of sinfulness hurled at Jerusalem without a momentary reprieve. The Targumist does not avoid the images portraying the magnitude of pain we know from Lamentations. Some of them he augments with additional graphic details but in the Targum the descriptions of the depth of the depredation are interspersed with admissions of guilt and as a result the anguished imagery of Lamentations loses some of its edge: See, O Lord, that I am in distress. Therefore, my innards are heaped up, my heart is overturned within me, because I have grievously transgressed against the decree of the Word of the Lord, and on this account, outside the sword bereaves, while inside famine slays, like the destroying angel who is appointed over death. (1:20)

“You brought upon me the day of retribution,” the Targumist has Jerusalem declare. And it is all measure for measure, he announces in his rendition of verse 1:3: the House of Judah oppressed orphans, widows, and Israelite slaves, “and, therefore, they in turn have been given into the hand of the nations” (1:3). Unlike the author of Lamentations, the Targumist has an answer to the question why the devastation occurred and uses the images of anguish not to convey the unmatched and inexplicable magnitude of the disaster but rather to reinforce covenantal theodicy. Absent from the Targum are the images of God overcome with irrational and incontrollable

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rage or of the divine as a father mourning his only son. The Targumist’s God is first and foremost a stern and righteous judge. And it is from this vision of the divine that the Targumist is able to derive hope. Explaining the catastrophe in terms of a deserved punishment for sin confirms the strength of the covenantal bond between God and Israel. The exile as punishment carries in itself a sign of redemption. Punishment serves a purpose and once it is achieved, the suffering ends. The suffering serves as atonement. Once it is complete, the pain will stop. Eventually, God’s wrath will pass. God will turn against Israel’s enemies because of their excessive cruelty, and Israel will have her share of vengeance. And then, the Messiah will come, and the enemies of Israel will be devastated, measure for measure: And after this, your iniquity shall be expiated, Congregation of Zion, and you shall be delivered at the hands of the King Messiah, and Elijah the High Priest, and the Lord shall no longer keep you in exile. (4:22)

“Because of our sins we were exiled from our land,” proclaims the text of the additional prayer service for festivals included already in Saadya Gaon’s prayerbook from the 10th century CE. The inclusion of this line in liturgy certainly strengthened the position of the framework of retributive justice as the dominant explanation of historical calamities. It is tempting to think that securing the centrality of this message stood behind the decision to incorporate it in the prayer book. David Kraemer noted, “as the rabbis, centuries later, read the Bible and sought explanations for their own suffering, on both personal and national level, this is the one that would suggest itself to them most immediately and persistently.”35 While Kraemer’s words refer to the thinkers from the early period of Judaism’s development, they are equally applicable to those who, many centuries later, confronted the horrors of Nazi persecutions from within the sphere of covenantal theodicy, as I will show in the following chapter.

Paradigmatic Thinking Speaking to the congregation gathered at Sinai, God introduced himself as the one who “brought you out of the Land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (Ex. 20:2). Rather than the mysterious Ehyeh asher ehyeh, this time God 35 David Kraemer, Reponses to Suffering in Classical Rabbinic Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), 22.

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presented himself as the one who intervened in history on behalf of the people, as the one who caused specific historical events. To use the felicitous formulation of Ernest G. Wright, the biblical God is first and foremost a God who acts—a God who acts in history: “Biblical theology is the confessional recital of the redemptive acts of God in a particular history, because history is the chief medium of revelation.”36 The view of history as theophany determines the character of the Bible’s historical writing. Reflecting upon the differences and similarities between the historical writings of the Bible and various forms of history-writing in the cultures surrounding ancient Israel, Arnaldo Momigliano noted that “the Books of Kings we read now are not comparable with the ordinary Royal Chronicles we know from Assyria and must assume to have existed in Persia. The Books of Kings are a record of events connected with the relationship between Jehovah and the Hebrew nation as a whole.”37 It is the understanding of human history as a scene upon which the relationship between God and Israel unfolds that provided the biblical authors with the primary principle of selection: “the selection was that of a privileged line of events which showed Jehovah’s special relation with Israel.”38 From the biblical perspective, human history, as Lionel Kochan remarked, is first and foremost “a record of divine revelation.”39 Hence, “it is above all God’s acts of intervention in history, and man’s responses to them, be they positive or negative, that must be recalled.”40 The Deuteronomistic history is an excellent illustration of this approach. The kingship of Manasseh of Judah lasted for fifty-five years and yet from the Book of Kings we learn only that “he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Kings 21:2) and that his sinfulness was the reason of the fall of Jerusalem. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observed, this could hardly qualify as a historical description of a long rule of a powerful king according to our modern standards.41 However, for the Deuteronomists it was enough, because their focus on the meaning of history implied a highly selective approach to events of the past. Only the events that happened within and reflected 36 Ernest G. Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1954), 13. 37 Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1990), 16. 38 Ibid., 19. 39 Lionel Kochan, The Jew and his History (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 7. 40 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 11. 41 Ibid., 10.

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the framework of the covenantal relationship between the people of Israel and God mattered. Little else merited description and remembrance. To quote again from E. G. Wright: “Happenings become history when they are recognized as integral parts of a God-planned and God-directed workings.”42 and the primary thread around which history revolves is—from the biblical perspective—the covenant between God and Israel with its internal dynamics of reciprocity. History is the scene of God’s activity and the “historical narratives of the Bible serve to illustrate God’s lordship”43 not over a generalized world-history but rather over the history of a particular people. This history consists of particular, unique events that took place in specific moments in time. God took the Israelites out of Egypt, led them through the desert, entered the covenant with them at Mount Sinai etc. Every event of what has been described as the biblical Primary History44 happened only once in the irreversible flow of time. The biblical authors undoubtedly had a strong sense of historical time in which events happen in the present and then become a part of the past that always illuminates the future. The past is imbued with meaning and allows predictions about the future, but that does not make it present. In Deuteronomy 26 every Israelite coming to the central sanctuary to celebrate the holiday of the first fruits is commanded to declare: A wandering Aramean was my father, and he went down to Egypt, and sojourned there, few in number; and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians dealt ill with us, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. And we cried unto the Lord, the God our fathers. . . . And the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand. . . . And he has brought us into this place, and has given us this land. (Deut. 26:5–10)

The Deuteronomist admonishes to “remember the days of old” and to “consider the years of many generations” and this very admonition betrays an acute sense of a distinct line drawn between what was and what is or will be. 42 Wright, The God Who Acts, 82. 43 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “History” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Arthur Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Free Press 1988), 575. 44 Sara Mandell and David Noel Friedman, The Relationship between Herodotus’ History and Primary History (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press for South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism, 1993). The notion of Primary History is used by Jacob Neusner in The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism.

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With this in mind, it may come as a surprise to encounter the words of Franz Rosenzweig who declared that for Israel “the memory of its history does not form a point fixed in the past, a point which year after year becomes increasingly past. It is a memory which is really not past at all, but eternally present.”45 This concept is paradoxical because the very notion of memory presupposes the idea of a past that is no longer present and hence must be remembered. At the same time, however, Rosenzweig’s words aptly describe an attitude towards the biblical historical narratives characteristic of the writings of the rabbis. Unlike the biblical writers the rabbis seem to play with Time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will. Where historical specificity is a hallmark of the biblical narratives, here that acute biblical sense of time and place often gives way to rampant and seemingly unselfconscious anachronism. In the world of aggadah Adam can instruct his son Seth in the Torah, Shem and Eber establish a house of study, the patriarchs institute the three daily prayer-services of the normative Jewish liturgy, Og King of Bashan is present at Isaac’s circumcision, and Noah prophesies the translation of the Bible into Greek.46

Crossing the barriers between past, present and future was not a problem for the rabbis, noted Yosef Haim Yerushalmi. In the Bible, Abraham is not portrayed as observing the laws given to Moses on Mount Sinai because Abraham lived much earlier, and Adam is not teaching his son Torah because the Torah was given to Israel much later. For the rabbis, however, there was no earlier and later in the Torah. Most scholars agree that the rabbis did not practice historiography. That is to say, unlike the biblical authors, the rabbis did not provide us with an account of the events of their own time that would take a form of chronologically ordered narration. Neither did they try to record what happened from the moment the biblical history closes. In the vast corpus of rabbinical writings we do not encounter much material that might possibly be qualified as a sustained historical narrative. Yerushalmi asked, “why the rabbis did not see fit to take up where the biblical history broke off?”47 Jacob 45 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. by William W. Hallo (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 304. 46 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 17. 47 Ibid., 20. On the rabbinic lack of interest in historiography see also Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);

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Neusner proposed an answer: “Sages did not write history because they wrote something else.”48 To understand what Neusner meant, let us consider the fourth proem to Lamentations Rabbah: R. Abbahu opened his discourse with the text “But they like a man (adam), they have transgressed the covenant” (Hos. 6:7). This alludes to the first man, of whom the Holy One, blessed be he, said, “I brought him into the garden of Eden and imposed a commandment upon him, but he transgressed it; so I punished him by driving him out and sending him forth, and lamented over him, Eichah.” “I brought him into the garden of Eden,” as it is said, “And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden” (Gen. 2:15). “I imposed a commandment upon him,” as it is said, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying” (Gen. 2:16). “But he transgressed my command,” as it is said, “Did you eat from the tree from which I had forbidden you to eat?” (Gen. 3:11). “So I punished him by driving him out,” as it is said, “So he drove out the man” (Gen. 3:24), and “by sending him forth,” as it is said “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth” (Gen. 3:23), and “lamented over him, Eichah,” as it is said, “Where are you?”—ayyekah (Gen. 3:9), this being written eichah. Similarly with his descendants. I brought them into the land of Israel, as it is said, “And I brought you into a land of fruitful fields” (Jer. 2:7). I gave them commandments, as it is said, “Command the children of Israel” (Lev. 24:2). They transgressed my ordinances, as it is said, “And all Israel has violated your law” (Dan. 9:11). So I punished them by driving them out, as it Daniel R. Schwartz, “From Alexandria to Rabbinic Literature to Zion: The Jews’ Departure from History, and Who It Is Who Returns to It,” in Zionism and the Return to History: A Reappraisal [Hebrew], ed. S. N. Eisenstadt and M. Lissak (Jerusalem: Yad Yitshak ben-Tsevi, 1999), 40–55; Isaiah Gafni, “Rabbinic Historiography and Representations of the Past,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. C. E. Fonrobert and M. S. Jaffe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 295–312. 48 Jacob Neusner, The Idea of History in Rabbinical Judaism (Brill: London, Boston, 2004), 210. See also Neusner’s “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking: The Case of Rabbinical Judaism,” History and Theory 36, no. 3 (October 1997): 353–377. In chapter 8 of his book Neusner presents a highly critical review of Yerushalmi’s Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory. I allow myself, however, to use their descriptions of rabbinic attitude towards history and historical narratives in the Bible jointly because as Neusner himself notes his criticism is not directed at Yerushalmi’s “characterization of the facts” but at “his incapacity to explain them” (211) and this part of the argument between the two scholars has no bearing upon my considerations.

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is said, “From my house I shall drive them” (Hos. 9:15), and by sending them forth, as it is said, “Cast them out of my sight and let them go forth” (Jer. 15:1). And I lamented over them “How has the city sat solitary” (Lam. 1:1).

How does this passage illustrate Neusner’s point that the rabbis wrote something other than history as we understand it? The life of the first man serves here as a model applicable to events from the history of the Jewish people. The first part of the passage identifies relevant events from Adam’s existence: he was brought to the Garden of Eden and given a commandment which he broke. As a consequence Adam was exiled from Eden. The second part presents a systematic comparison between Adam and Israel and between Eden and the Land of Israel. Israel sinned just like Adam did. And just like Adam was exiled from Eden, Israel was exiled from its land.49 Obviously there are more elements to the story of Adam’s existence and to Israel’s history than the author of this passage chose to select. This, however, is precisely how the paradigms or models work: They define the criteria for the selection as consequential and noteworthy of some happenings but not others. They further dictate the way to think about remarkable happenings, events, so as to yield sense concerning them. They tell people that one thing bears meaning, while another does not, and they further instruct people on the self-evident meaning to be imputed to that which is deemed consequential.50

This is the basis of what Neusner has called “paradigmatic thinking”: it is the paradigm that defines and shapes reality and not the other way round. Paradigmatic thinking identifies “a happening not by its consequence . . . but by its conformity to the appropriate paradigm.”51 The model which posits a symmetry between Adam’s and Israel’s fates by doing so provides a criterion for selection of events—of all the happenings only those that fit the template are selected as meaningful. The order and structure are not taken from facts but imposed on them. 49 A less elaborated version of the same comparison is included in Targum Lamentations: “Jeremiah the prophet and the high priest said: How has it been declared against Jerusalem and her people that they should be condemned to banishment and that ‘Eikhah’ should be pronounced over them in mourning, just as Adam and Eve were condemned, when they were banished from the Garden of Eden, and the Lord of the World pronounced ‘Eikhah’ over them in mourning?” (1:1). 50 Neusner, The Idea of History, 27. 51 Ibid., 25.

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The following fragment of Pesikta de Rav Kahana (7:11.3) provides another example of paradigmatic thinking: R. Levi in the name of R. Hama bar Hanina: “He who exacted vengeance from the former [oppressor] will exact vengeance from the latter. Just as, in Egypt, it was with frogs, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke’ (Job 3:3). Just as, in Egypt, it was with frogs, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘The sound of an uproar from the city, an uproar because of the palace, an uproar of the Lord who renders recompense to his enemies’ (Is. 66:6). Just as, in Egypt, it was with lice, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘The streams of Bosrah will be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch’ (Is. 34:9). ‘Smite the dust of the earth that it may become lice’ (Ex. 8:12). Just as, in Egypt, it was with swarms of wild beasts, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘The pelican and the bittern shall possess it’ (Is. 34:11). Just as, in Egypt, it was with pestilence, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘I will plead against Gog with pestilence and with blood’ (Ez. 38:22). Just as, in Egypt, it was with boils, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘This shall be the plague wherewith the Lord will smite all the peoples that have warred against Jerusalem: their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet’ (Zech. 14:12). Just as, in Egypt, it was with great stones, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘I will cause to rain upon Gog . . . an overflowing shower and great hailstones’ (Ez. 38:22). Just as, in Egypt, it was with locust, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘And you, son of man, thus says the Lord God: Speak to birds of every sort . . . the flesh of the mighty shall you eat . . . blood shall you drink . . . you shall eat fat until you are full and drink blood until you are drunk’ (Ez. 39:17–19). Just as, in Egypt, it was with darkness, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘He shall stretch over Edom the line of chaos and the plummet of emptiness’ (Is. 34:11). Just as, in Egypt, he took out their greatest figure and killed him, so with Edom it will be the same: ‘A great slaughter in the land of Edom, among them to come down shall be the wild oxen’ (Is. 34:6–7).”52

The fragment begins with a general formula positing what might be described as a dynamics of vengeance in the divine economy—God who punished Israel’s oppressors in the past will punish those who persecute her in the present. What follows is a list of the plagues with which God 52 Ibid., 133–134.

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afflicted Egypt accompanied by words “so with Edom it will be the same” and an appropriate proof-text from the Bible. The biblical description of the events transpiring in Egypt before the Exodus forms a part of a larger historical narrative. It is historical itself in the sense of being a linear narration of events organized in chronological order and set in specific place and time. Moses, having received the task of bringing the Israelites out of Egypt, confronts the Pharaoh. What follows is a show of divine power meant to influence Pharaoh’s judgment. The plagues happen one after another and each constitutes a unique event in time. Once over, they belong to the past. Israelites leave Egypt and history, so to speak, moves forward. This is not how the plagues are presented in the cited passage from Pesikta de Rav Kahana. Here we find them taken out of their historical context and placed on another plane altogether. The biblical description of calamities that struck Egypt becomes a model, a paradigm of how events unfold regardless of their historical specificity—just as God punished Egypt, he will punish Edom, whoever Edom will happen to be. In other words, what the rabbis found in the biblical description of Egyptian plagues was not only a narrative concerning a unique event from the past but also a pattern the meaning of which is encapsulated in these words: “He who exacted vengeance from the former [oppressor] will exact vengeance from the latter.” In this fragment we can see how “paradigmatic thinking recasts Israel’s recorded experience . . . into a set of models that pertain everywhere and all the time.”53 Such models were precisely what the rabbis discovered in the Bible. As Yerushalmi noted, “for the rabbis the Bible was not only a repository of past history but a revealed pattern of the whole of history, and they have learned their scriptures well.”54 For the rabbis, Scripture contained not only facts but also paradigms that made it possible to discern the meaning of events. These models were not created arbitrarily but given by God—embedded in the very structure of creation and revealed through the words of divine origin. The study of the Torah was, inter alia, a means for discerning the recurring patterns that— once applied to other events—would make their meaning transparent. As Neusner put it, “for our sages of blessed memory, the Torah, the written part of the Torah in particular, defined a set of paradigms that served without regard to circumstance, context, or for that matter, dimension and scale 53 Ibid., 134. 54 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 21.

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of happening.”55 This was possible because the models contained in the Torah were—like the Torah itself—eternal, independent of the flow of time and changing historical circumstances. From this perspective, the Exodus from Egypt did not happen only once in a given place and time but instead it became a prototype—a past that was eternally present—through which various events could be understood.56 “So with Edom it will be the same,” the rabbis declared in the cited passage, but what Edom were they referring to? Our knowledge about the Edomites, a Semitic people who came to occupy the southern area of today’s Jordan in the 14th century BCE, is rather limited. Their kingdom was destroyed by the Babylonians most likely a few decades after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. Before that happened, taking advantage of the weakening of the Kingdom of Judah, the Edomites expanded their territories. Their migration continued after the fall of the Kingdom of Edom as the Edomites were pushed westward by nomadic tribes coming from the east. In the Hellenistic period, the Edomites, now known as Idumeans, lived in the southern hills of Judea. In other words, by the time the rabbis arrived at the scene, the Kingdom of Edom had been long gone. And yet Edom 55 Neusner, “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking,” 360. 56 The tendency to interpret diverse historical events as instantiations of biblical models has been noted not only by Yerushalmi and Neusner. D. S. Russell wrote that examples of treating events as realizations of biblical prototypes can be found already in the Bible itself, e.g. when the return of the exiles from Babylon is described in terms of the exodus from Egypt, as well as in Jewish apocalyptic writings; The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalypic (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1964), 134–137 and 205–212. Michael Fishbane noted that in the post-exilic writings the pre-exilic non-prophetic fragments of the Bible were often treated as if they were predictions of the future; “Revelation and Tradition: Aspects of Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” Journal of Biblical Literature 99, no. 3 (1980): 343–361. The question of temporality in the rabbinical writings has been discussed by e.g. Isaac Heinemann, The Method of the Aggadah, [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1970), 32–34; Marc Bregman, “Past and Present in Rabbinic Literature,” Hebrew Annual Review 2 (1978): 45–59; Joseph Heinemann, “The Nature of Aggadah,” in Midrash as Literature, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). In their studies of Jewish responses to catastrophe, David Roskies and Alan Mintz noted the writers’ tendency to rely on what Roskies described as “historical archetypes”: “events or images, rooted in sacred history, that established the precedent for all times to come. Though punctual and never superseded, the archetypes were understood transtemporally; that is to say, they could be reenacted throughout time and place.” David Roskies, ed., The Literature of Destruction. Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 4. In his essay on Lamentations and Lamentations Rabbah, Shaye D. Cohen used the term “paradigmatic thought” in the footnote to the well-known statement “There is no early or late in the Torah.” Cohen, “The Destruction,” 37.

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and Edomites kept occupying an important place in rabbinic imagination because like the Egyptian plagues or the life of the first man over centuries Edom took on meanings extending far beyond its immediate historical and textual context. In Genesis 25 God addresses Rebekah with these words: “Two nations are in your womb, two separate peoples shall issue from your body. One people shall be mightier than the other and the older shall serve the younger” (25:23). Genesis 36 identifies the Edomites as descendants of Jacob’s older twin brother Esau. The Genesis narrative does not present Esau as a villain, nor Jacob as a paragon of virtue and similar ambiguity is reflected in other parts of the Bible. Numbers 20 describes a belligerent king of Edom who does not grant the Israelites passage through his country. In Deuteronomy 2, on the other hand, the same situation is described differently and the Edomites let the Israelites pass through their territory unmolested. And Deuteronomy 23:8 gives a clear instruction: “You shall not abhor an Edomite—he is your brother.” This ambivalence disappears entirely after the destruction of the First Temple. In the prophetic books Esau/Edom is portrayed as a bloodthirsty enemy mercilessly persecuting the descendants of Jacob. In the book of Ezekiel God thunders: Because you harbored an ancient hatred and handed the people of Israel over to the sword in their time of calamity . . . I will doom you with your blood; blood shall pursue you; I swear that for your bloodthirsty hatred, blood shall pursue you. . . . I will make you a desolation for all time. (Ez. 35:5–9)

The author of the book of Obadiah accuses Edom of helping the Babylonians in their assault against the Israelites and describes them as joyful and eager participants in the calamity that struck Judah (Obad. 1). Jeremiah promises that Bozrah, the main city and fortress of northern Edom, “shall become a desolation, a mockery, a ruin, and a curse; and all its towns shall be ruins for all the time” as God will bring “Esau’s doom upon him” (49:7–22). Psalm 137 asks God to remember “against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall. How they cried: Strip her, strip her to her very foundations!” (Ps. 137:7). Rejoice and exult, Fair Edom, who dwell in the land of Uz! To you, too, the cup shall pass, You shall get drunk and expose your nakedness.

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Your iniquity, Fair Zion, is expiated; He will exile you no longer. Your iniquity, Fair Edom, he will note; He will uncover your sins. (Lam. 4:21–22)

Thus raged the narrator in Lamentations and his words echoed through the centuries as the book was read as a part of annual rituals commemorating the destruction of the Temple. It did not matter that Fair Edom was also destroyed by the Babylonians. Likewise, the fact that centuries later the Edomites/Idumeans were forcibly converted and integrated into Judea did not diminish the rich symbolic capacity of the story of Jacob, Esau and their descendants. Its hermeneutical potential was accurately perceived and promptly seized by the rabbis in whose writings Esau emerged as a villain par excellence whose wickedness was evident even before he was born. In Genesis Rabbah 63:6, the rabbis explain why Jacob and Esau struggled already in their mother’s womb: when Rebekah was passing by an idolatrous temple, Esau wanted to enter it and thus strived to be born. When she passed by the study house established by Shem and Eber, Jacob struggled to emerge overcome by the passion for learning. The biblical description of the day when Jacob received the blessing of the firstborn does not offer a particularly flattering image of Esau’s young brother. Esau agrees to exchange his birthright for a bowl of stew but does so because this is what Jacob demands. Later on, Rebekah and Jacob trick blind Isaac into giving Jacob his blessing. Jacob himself is not in the least troubled by his mother’s plan of deception and his only voiced concern is that although blind Isaac may still be able to see through the subterfuge. In the rabbinic rendition, however, Esau is presented as inherently unworthy of receiving his father’s blessing and God’s covenant. According to the biblical account, on that fateful day Esau came back weary from the field. Why was he so tired? “Rabbi Johanan said: That evildoer committed five sins on that day. He violated a betrothed girl, he took a life, he denied the principles of the faith, he rejected the revival of the dead and he spurned his birthright”57. The authors of Pesikta Rabbati go even further: Esau came and said to [Jacob], “Why are you sitting and cooking lentils?” He said to him, “Because my grandfather has died and I am sitting mourning 57 BT Baba Batra 16b, see also Genesis Rabbah 63:12

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and grieving in order that he will know how I grieved over him. And when the dead resurrect in the future he will have love for me.” He replied to him, “Fool do you think so? After a person is dead and decayed in the grave how can he be revived?” Thus he rejected the revival of the dead. . . . He continued saying to him, “Furthermore, that birthright which you think has some value, I will give it to you if you give me a bowlful of these lentils.” (12:8)

Even the story of the brothers’ reconciliation from Genesis 33 was altered by the rabbis in whose interpretation Esau did not embrace Jacob but rather bit him.58 For the rabbis, no such reconciliation was possible because they knew that Esau was still persecuting Jacob. Gradually, the biblical story was lifted from its immediate textual context and transformed into a metahistorical pattern describing not so much a concrete situation of sibling rivalry but rather a paradigm that meaningfully illuminated conflicts between Israel and its enemies throughout history and provided means for predicting their ultimate outcome: as God declared through the prophet: “I have accepted Jacob and rejected Esau” (Mal. 1:2–3). However improbable it seemed, Esau’s fate was to ultimately succumb to Jacob’s dominion. It must have appeared particularly unlikely after the defeat of the Bar Kochba rebellion in 136 CE and yet this was precisely when Esau and Edom were for the first time explicitly identified with Rome: “Jacob’s voice cries out about what Esau’s hand did to him in Beitar.”59 About this identification Malachi Hacohen argues that it was irresistible for the rabbis because of the way Edom had been portrayed in the prophetic writings.60 Hacohen’s 58 Genesis Rabbah 78:9. 59 PT Taanit 24a. See also Genesis Rabbah 65:21 as well as BT Gittin 57b. According to some scholars the earliest instance of identification of Esau with Rome can be found in 4 Ezra 6:7–10. See Spurling, “Symbol of Edom,” 273–276 and Louis Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton, Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993), 102–106. 60 Malachi Hacohen, Jacob and Esau between Nation and Empire: A Jewish European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press University Press, 2019), 69. For more about rabbinical portrayal of Esau, see Gershon D. Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in idem, Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 243–269; Harry Freedman, “Jacob and Esau. Their Struggle in the Second Century,” Jewish Bible Quarterly, 23 no. 2 (1995): 107– 115; Gerhard Langer, “’Brother Esau?’ Esau in Rabbinic Midrash,” in Encounters of the Children of Abraham from Ancient to Modern Times, ed. Antti Laato and Pekka Lindqvist (Leiden, Boston: Brill 2010), 75–94; Helen Spurling, “The Biblical Symbol of Edom in Jewish Eschatological and Apocalyptic Imagery,” in Sacred Texts. Explorations in Lexicography, ed. Juan Pedro Montferrer-Sela and Angel Urban (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2009), 271–299 and Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Jerusalem against Rome (Leuven,

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analysis sits well with Neusner’s view that paradigmatic thinking emerged in connection to the destruction of the Second Temple. According to Neusner, the rabbis had no doubts that this catastrophe was to be understood by reference to a similar calamity from about five centuries earlier. Paradigms began to dominate because “what had taken place as unique and unprecedented took place the second time in precisely the same pattern and therefore formed an episode of series.”61 The authors of Lamentations Rabbah read the biblical text as speaking in equal measure about the aftermath of the destruction of the second Temple, the wars under Trajan, the Bar Kokhba rebellion, and the destruction of 586 BCE. The exact same verses apply to Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuzaradan as well as to Vespasian, Trajan, and Hadrian. The rabbis often speak of the destruction of the Temple without specifying which Temple they have in mind. In an important sense, the two separate destructions—and the enemies that brought it about— blended into one. The Edomites, accused by Obadiah of gazing with glee and loudly jeering on the day of the destruction of the first Temple, were now responsible for the destruction of the second and for the slaughter at Beitar. Paradigmatic thinking is not interested in historic specificity but in distinguishable patterns. Not in what happened in a particular moment but rather in what always happens. And Esau always hates Jacob. In Lamentations the poet wrote that God’s wrath would turn against “Fair Edom who dwell in the land of Uz” (Lam. 4:21) The Targumist found Edom elsewhere: Rejoice and be glad Constantinople, city of wicked Edom, that is built in the land of Romania, with great crowds from the people of Edom. Upon you too retribution is about to come. . . . And at that time [God] shall requite your iniquity, wicked Rome, that is built in Italy, and is full of crowds of the sons of Edom. The Persians shall come and oppress you, and devastate you, because it has been disclosed before the Lord concerning your sins.62

For the Targumist, the Edomites dwelled in Constantinople and Rome. The enemy that persecuted Israel was, for him, Roman and Christian. The political scenery might have changed significantly, but for Jewish perception the Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2005), 497–512. On Christendom as Edom in Kabbalistic mysticism, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond - Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim. 61 Neusner, “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking,” 375. 62 Tg. Lam. 4:21–22.

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paradigm remained as powerful and accurate as it had been. Over time, Rome was replaced by Christianity but to the Jew “it was a shift from one idolatry to another, one more aggressive and openly hostile, but not a change in kind . . . it required no effort on the part of Jewish homilists to extend the name of Edom to Christendom. Esau might have exchanged his eagle for a cross, but he was Esau nonetheless.”63 In popular medieval sources, Esau/Edom was also conflated with his grandson Amalek—another arch-enemy of the Israelites who were commanded by their God not only to never forget the Amalekite’s treacherous assault against them in the desert but also to obliterate this people from “the face of the earth”.64 According to an opinion attributed to R. Levi, “when Amalek’s seed will be removed from the world, [God’s] throne and name will [again] be whole.”65 In his commentary to the Torah, Rashi paraphrased these words and stated that “God had sworn that neither his name nor his throne would be whole until Esau’s name was utterly destroyed.”66 The teaching was repeated in Abrabanel’s commentary on Obadiah and also in Nachmanides’ commentary to the Torah: It is Amalek who declared the war against us “at the beginning of nations” (Num. 24:20), and Esau’s descendants who have caused us to suffer our last exile and destruction, as our sages have taught that we are today in the exile of Edom. When he shall be vanquished, and he together with the nations that are with him shall be weakened, we shall be redeemed [from that exile] forever, as it is stated: “And the saviors shall come up on mount Zion to judge the mount of Esau; and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s (Obad. 1:21).”67

As the above fragment from Nachmanides indicates, this ahistorical mode of thinking where biblical episodes serve as eternally valid prototypes for any historical contingency remained very much alive well after the last generation of Amoraim. “The hands of our people grew weak when they saw the hand of wicked Edom was overpowering them,” wrote Solomon ben Simson, the 63 Cohen, “Esau as Symbol,” 249. 64 Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites. Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 105–146 as well as Carol Bakhtos, “Figuring (out) Esau: The Rabbis and Their Others,” Journal of Jewish Studies 58, no. 2 (2007): 250–262. 65 Midrash Tanhuma, ed. Buber, Ki Teitzei 18. 66 Rashi on Exodus 17:6. 67 Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 126.

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putative author of one of the Hebrew chronicles depicting the catastrophes that befell the Rhineland Jewish communities in 1096 when the preaching of the First Crusade inspired a wave of anti-Jewish violence.68 Written most likely in the early 12th century, the chronicles exemplify how paradigmatic thinking assimilates novelty into timeless patterns. The narratives describe in gruesome detail the scenes of Jewish mass suicide where “women girded their loins with strength and slaughtered their sons and daughters and also themselves . . . men . . . slaughtered their wives, children, and babies.  .  .  .  They all stood, men and women, and slaughtered each other.  .  .  .  One sacrificed and the other was sacrificed until blood touched blood.”69 All of them, wrote Solomon ben Simson, “were killed and slaughtered for the unity of the venerated and awesome Name.”70 Death for the unity of the Name or its sanctification (al kiddush ha-Shem) had been well-known in Jewish textual tradition. The law of the Talmud considered it a divine commandment to sanctify God’s name in martyrdom to avoid engaging in idolatry especially in times of violent anti-Jewish persecution.71 68 Scholarly literature devoted to the Hebrew First Crusade chronicles is extensive. Jeremy Cohen’s Sanctifying the Name of God. Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), apart from a novel approach to the chronicles themselves, contains a critical overview of earlier scholarship. Lena Roos’ “God Wants It!” The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and Its Jewish and Christian Background (Turnhout: Brepolis Publishers, 2006) contains a very rich bibliography. See also Yom Tov Assis, Jeremy Cohen, Aharon Kedar, Ora Limor, and Michael Toch, eds., Facing the Cross: The Persecutions of 1096 in History and Historiography [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2000). A critical edition of the texts of the Hebrew First Crusade chronicles prepared by Eva Haverkamp is available in Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des ersten Kreuzzugs. MGH Hebräische Texte aus dem mittelalterlichen Deutschalnd, I (Hannover: Hahnsche, 2005). Several English translations are available. I cite the one by Lena Roos included as appendix in “God Wants It!,” A42. 69 Roos, A46–47. 70 Ibid., A47–48. 71 BT Sanhedrin 74a. The literature exploring various aspects of martyrdom in Jewish tradition is very rich and it would be impossible to list all valuable positions here. For a general and chronological overview see Simha Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom, trans. by Yigal Levin, ed. C. Michael Copeland (Turnhout: Brepolis, 2008). An extensive discussion of the origins of Jewish martyrdom can be found in Jan Willem van Henten, ed., Die Entstehung der judischen Martyrologie. Studia Post-Biblica 38 (Leiden: Brill, 1989). For the question of parallels between rabbinic and patristic concepts of martyrdom see Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God. Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: University of California Press, 1999); Judith M. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) as well as Jan W. van Henten, “Jewish and Christian

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The Bible provided a model in the description of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah who were thrown into a fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar enraged by their refusal to worship Babylonian deities in the Book of Daniel from the 2nd century BCE. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah did not perish but were miraculously saved by God. Others were less lucky. The 2 and 4 Books of Maccabees from the 2nd century CE furnished a dramatic portrayal of a mother and her seven sons who one after another refused to bow to an idol and whose loyalty to God was punished by death.72 Although not included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible, the story of the Maccabean martyrs made its way to the rabbinic literature where the mother, originally anonymous, was given a name and from then on has become known as Hannah.73 The Talmud provided descriptions of the martyrdom of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Haninah ben Teradyon who were arrested, tortured, and killed for engaging in the study of the Torah against the Roman prohibition.74 The Hebrew Crusade chronicles do not portray the Jews of Rhineland as the first who chose to die rather than transgress. Their authors do emphasize, however, that in their act of collective suicide the Jews of Rhineland did surpass all previous martyrs. In her study of the chronicles, Lena Roos finds it striking that despite the novel character of the martyrdom of 1096, the chroniclers repeatedly describe the tragic events in reference to earlier models.75 The concept of paradigmatic thinking helps to explain that. As Yosef Yerushalmi observed, the medieval Jewish chronicles show a “marked tendency to pour new wine into old vessels.”76 Their authors, as their insistence on the unprecedented character of the Rhineland martyrdom indicates, were convinced that the events they set out to describe and commemorate were new in an important sense. Simultaneously, in their Martyrs,” in Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity, ed. M. Poorthuis and J. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill 2004). 72 For a detailed study of 2 and 4 Maccabees see Jan Willem van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish people. A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees (Leiden: Brill 1997). 73 For example, Lamentations Rabbah 1:16 and BT Gittin 57b. See G. Stemberger, “The Maccabees in Rabbinic Tradition,” in The Scriptures and the Scrolls: Studies in Honor of A. S. van der Woude on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. F. Garcia Martinez, A. Hilhorst, C. Labuschagne (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Gerson D. Cohen, “The Story of Hannah and her Seven Sons in Hebrew Literature,” in Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 39–60. 74 BT Berakhot 61b, BT Avoda Zarah 17b-18b. 75 Roos, “God Wants It!,” 87. 76 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 38.

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interpretation of the events, they reached for a well-established pattern. The wine was new, but the vessels were very old indeed. “Because of our transgressions, in every town the crusaders came, the townspeople incited them against us,”77 Solomon ben Simson announced early in his account of the dramatic events but as the narrative unfolds and more blood is spilled the idea of punishment for sin fades away to be replaced by an entirely different image: ‘The precious children of Zion’ (Lam. 4:2), the children of Mainz, were tested ten times like our father Abraham, and like Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. After that, they offered up their children like Abraham bound up (akod) his son Isaac. . . . Was there ever such a numerous sacrifice (akedah) since the days of the first man? Were there ever one thousand, one hundred sacrifices (akeidot) on one day, all of them like the sacrifice of Isaac, the son of Abraham?78

Yosef Yerushalmi and Alan Mintz have noted that the notions of sin and punishment could not serve as an explanation of the tragic events of 1096 because in their response to violence, in their choice of self-inflicted martyrdom rather than baptism, the Rhineland Jews had proven themselves to be, in the words of Solomon ben Simson, the “holy ones, the pious of the Most High.”79 Theirs was not a generation crooked and perverse but rather exemplary in its loyalty to God. An alternative interpretation was required also, as Robert Chazan observed, because an emphasis on Jewish culpability would strengthen the already dominant Christian explanation of Jewish suffering as a sure sign of divine rejection of the old covenant.80 In their search for a meaningful interpretation of the destruction of the Rhineland communities, the authors of the chronicles and commemorative poems reached for a different idea: that of the suffering of the righteous, of suffering as a sign of divine love rather than wrath. “Raba, in the name of R. Sahorah, in the name of R. Huna, says: If the Holy One, blessed be He, is pleased with a man, he crushes him with painful sufferings,” the rabbis averred and introduced the notion of issurim shel ahava, afflictions of love. Even though they were not in agreement as to how much suffering constitutes an affliction of love, they had no doubt that 77 Roos, “God Wants It!,” A10. 78 Ibid., A48. 79 Mintz, Hurban, 84–105. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 37–39. 80 Robert Chazan, God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 140.

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“whom He loves, He rebukes” (Pr. 3:12). Suffering is like salt, they argued: salt improves meat and makes it edible, and suffering “purifies the sins of man,” cleanses him of any residual imperfections thereby preparing him for even more sublime existence.81 It is a divine gift of love rather than expression of displeasure, a lovingly granted opportunity for further improvement of the state of excellence already achieved. “Suffering is precious,” the rabbis claimed,82 because it gives the faithful a chance to attain a still higher degree of purity and to prove their steadfastness. There is no better example of this than the great patriarch Abraham whose life was described as a succession of ten trials already in the Book of Jubilees from the 2nd century CE: And the Lord was aware that Abraham was faithful in all of his afflictions because he tested him with his land, and with famine. And he tested him with the wealth of kings. And he tested him again with his wife, when she was taken, and with circumcision. And he tested him with Ishmael and with Hagar, his maidservant, when he sent them away. And in everything in which he tested him [Abraham] was found faithful. And his soul was not impatient. And he was not slow to act because he was faithful and a lover of the Lord. (Jubilees 17:17–18)83

Transformed into a paradigm, Abraham’s life was distilled into a series of ordeals. The Book of Jubilees presents the binding of Isaac as the eighth trial and the problems with the burial of Sarah as the tenth. The ten trials and Abraham’s successful passing of them all is mentioned in the Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot and from then on it appears in various rabbinic sources in different configurations.84 “The Lord tests the righteous,” says the psalm.85 “This is Abraham,” add the rabbis.86 Not surprisingly, it was the binding of Isaac, tersely described in Genesis 22 and listed in some of the rabbinic midrashim as the tenth, final trial, that etched itself most powerfully into 81 BT Berakhot 5a. 82 BT Sanhedrin 101a. 83 R. H. Charles, The Book of Jubilees (Jerusalem: Makor, 1972), 121–122. See also James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 295–326 as well as Albert van der Heide, “Now I Know”: Five Centuries of Aqedah Exegesis (New York: Springer, 2017), 1–17. 84 For example in Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer and Avot de Rabbi Natan. See van der Heide, “Now I Know,” 460–463. For a rich bibliographies of Akedah studies see van der Heide as well as Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, Edward Noort, eds., The Sacrifice of Isaac. The Aqedah (Genesis 22) and its Interpretations (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 211–223. 85 Ps. 11:5. 86 Bereshit Rabbah 55a.

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Jewish (and non-Jewish) imagination. In his depiction of the 1096 events, the author of the chronicle known as Mainz Anonymous, described one of the Jewish inhabitants of Worms, Meshullam ben Isaac, as deliberately following in the footsteps of the great patriarch. “God gave me this son, and my wife Zipporah gave birth to him in her old age. His name is Isaac. I shall now offer him up [as a sacrifice] as our father Abraham did with his son Isaac,” Meshullam declares.87 In the biblical description of the binding of Isaac his mother, Sarah, is absent. In Mainz Anonymous, the mother is given a voice. She does not protest but only asks that she be killed first so that she did not have to witness the death of her son. Meshullam denies his wife request: “And he bound (vaya’akod) his son Isaac and he took the knife in his hand in order to slaughter his son. He recited the benediction over slaughter, the boy answered: ‘Amen,’ and he slaughtered his son.” Then Meshullam and his wife Zipporah went out together to meet the crusaders who killed them.88 The echoes of rabbinical interpretations of the binding of Isaac reverberate in this dramatic scene. Already in the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Isaac is portrayed as a willing sacrifice. Not only does he consent to being killed and asks his father to bind him properly, but actually it is Isaac who prompts the ordeal in the first place by declaring, in an argument with his brother Ishmael, that if God demanded all parts of his body, he would not delay. It was upon hearing this declaration, according to the Targum, that God addressed Abraham with the words, “Take your son, the only son that you love, Isaac, and go into the land of worship, and offer him there, a whole burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will tell you.”89 In the Talmud likewise, the Akedah is presented as the divine response to Isaac’s declaration, “If the Holy One, blessed be He, were to ask me to sacrifice myself, I would do so.”90 It is not only Abraham who was tested in the Akedah, in other words, but Isaac as well. Both were unblemished and in this test both proved their loyalty to God. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and Isaac’s readiness to die on the altar became the paradigm

87 88 89 90

Roos, “God Wants It!,” A20. Ibid., A20. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 22. BT Sanhedrin 89b.

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of suffering and death in sanctification of the Name and the word akedah became synonymous with sacrifice.91 About medieval Jewish chronicles Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observed that they “tend to assimilate events to old and established conceptual frameworks. . . . It is important to realize that there is also no real desire to find novelty in passing events. Quite to the contrary, there is pronounced tendency to subsume every major new events to familiar archetypes.”92 The lack of interest in novelty is easily explainable in the light of Neusner’s thesis—from the perspective of paradigmatic thinking it is not the new and unique that matters but, on the contrary, the truly meaningful events are these that follow the established pattern traced back to the biblical text. Regardless of the garments he wears and the language he speaks, Esau forever remains Esau and what happens to the forefathers, happens to their descendants. Suffering can be explained as deserved punishment, test of the faithful or act of purification. In either case, historical events are strung, like beads, onto the string of covenantal history that unfolds according to metahistorical patters.

91 Some interpreters went so far as to say that Isaac did actually die. “R. Judah said, when the blade touched his neck, the soul of Isaac fled and departed, but when he heard His voice from between the two cherubim saying to Abraham, ‘Do not lay your hand the lad’, his soul returned to his body, and Abraham set him free, and Isaac stood upon his feet. And Isaac knew that in this manner the dead in the future will be quickened. He opened his mouth and said, ‘Blessed art You O Lord, who quickens the dead’” Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, chap. 31. For a detailed study of this tradition of interpretation see Shalom Spiegel’s classic The Last Trial. On the Legends and Lore of the Command of Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice, trans. by Judah Goldin (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993). 92 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 36.

Chapter 2

Paradigmatic Thinking and the Holocaust Maasei avot siman l’banim. Tanhuma, Lekh Lekha 12 Exile itself is clear proof of redemption. Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal, Em ha-Banim Samekha It is a well-known rule: Esau hates Jacob. Sifrei 69

“The future history of Israel is written in Scripture, and what happened in the beginning is what is going to happen at the end of time.”1 In this sentence Jacob Neusner captured the essence of paradigmatic thinking that sees the Bible as a repository of eternally valid patterns according to which the occurrences in the world are bound to unfold. From the perspective of the covenantal relationship between Israel and God, history is a scene upon which revelation happens. God reveals himself in history and through history. Revelation, however, is rarely evident and transparent. In other words, while God’s agency can be found, discovering it often requires a hermeneutical key. The chaotic abundance of happenings requires order to become comprehensible and meaningful. Paradigms provide precisely that—as 1 Neusner, “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking,” 368.

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eternally valid, timeless models embedded in the structure of creation itself, they determine what elements of the chaotic whole are noteworthy. They decide what happenings are important and meaningful by including them within their framework. Elaborating on Neusner’s notion of paradigmatic thinking, I propose that the paradigms created by the rabbinic imagination be ordered into concentric circles according to their level of generality. At the very center one would find most encompassing models—such as the master paradigm of covenantal theodicy itself. Inside the most outward circle I would place paradigms with the highest level of specificity. The story of the rivalry between Jacob and his brother Esau or life of Abraham would fall into this category. This classification highlights the logical interdependence of the paradigms. Each of the models depends on, reinforces, and supports others. Taken as a whole, paradigms constitute metahistory, an elaborate network or matrix that makes history intelligible and describable in theological terms in accordance with the master framework of covenantal theodicy. Paradigmatic thinking was a crucial element of the war-time theological responses to Nazi persecution coming from the Orthodox thinkers. It was precisely using these timeless models, looking at the events they witnessed through the lens of metahistory that enabled Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer, and Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal to describe the events in such a way as to assert that covenantal theodicy, and with it the covenant itself, were not disrupted. By interpreting the anti-Jewish persecutions through the lens that focuses on the repetitive they were able to uphold the tenets of covenantal theodicy even though reality appeared to negate it. Paradigms—originating in the sacred scriptures and understood as implanted in the fabric of creation itself—ultimately create the reality they describe. They decide what is real and what matters. Metahistory determines history. The strength of paradigmatic thinking lies in its ability to assimilate new factual material into a timeless pattern. Considering the events he was witnessing, Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal concluded that the anti-Jewish fervor reached a new level of intensity. This realization brought about a major reorientation in his approach to one of the fundamental issues of the time—that of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Simultaneously, however, Teichthal managed to present the situation as yet another instantiation of the sequence of sin, punishment, repentance, and redemption. Jewish history remained a spectacle scripted by God. It included the long

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period of exile and was to conclude in redemption and the ingathering of exiles. Application of the exile/redemption pattern allowed Teichthal to see the Nazi persecution in a continuum of Jewish history even though he described the events as unprecedented. Despite that recognition, for Teichthal, the oppression was still a part of the covenantal relationship: it came as divine punishment for the sin of complacency in exile and as a call to leave the exile behind. The strength of the paradigms does not consist of the absolute exclusion of novelty—that would make them useless as interpretative tools given the constantly changing, fluid reality. What paradigmatic thinking achieves is an accommodation of novelty— its transformation into a building block of the covenantal relationship between Israel and God. Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer and Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich were not immune to doubts and questions. Neither of them managed to formulate a convincing answer to the question of the suffering of the innocent. Both adhered to the covenantal framework and used classical rabbinic models to describe the events affecting their communities. In this way, they were able to see the unfolding persecutions as another chapter in the covenantal history. That does not mean, however, that their response was limited to a mechanical application of the concept of retributive justice. Covenantal theodicy places communal and individual suffering within the framework of sin-punishment-repentance-and-restoration and makes it possible to interpret punishment not only as a sign of covenantal treachery and divine wrath but also as a gesture of divine corrective benevolence and a step preceding future redemption. Suffering can be meaningfully described as punishment, but also as a precious gift. It can purify, but it can also afflict the innocent for the sins of others. The answers cannot always be known, but the hand of God remains active in Jewish history and covenantal dynamics continues to be seen as the fundamental mechanism governing the history of the Jewish people. In the end, if everything fails, one can follow in the footsteps of Aharon who stood silent when his sons were suddenly slain by God. Aharon’s silence is as much a paradigm, a hermeneutical tool as it is an existential stance. It was in such silence that Ehrenreich and Unsdorfer found themselves when the framework of covenantal theodicy appeared to have lost its explanatory power. It was the silence of the faithful who despite everything continue to trust in the promise of redemption.

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Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich was born in 1863 in a family with strong connections to the Hasidic court of Chaim Halberstam, the rebbe of Sanz (1797–1876). In 1880s, Ehrenreich’s father had to flee his native Sobrance, and young Shlomo Zalman with his brother Chaim Zvi grew up in Beregszasz, a small town on the southern slopes of the Carpathian mountains, in the house of their maternal grandfather, Avraham Yehuda Hakohen Schwartz (1824–1883), known as the Kol Aryeh. Schwartz, a graduate of Moses Sofer’s yeshivah in Pressburg,2 developed a strong affinity to Hasidic interpretation of Jewish tradition. He was a frequent visitor at the court of Chaim Halberstam and a student of Moshe Teitelbaum of Ujhely (1759– 1841), the progenitor of the Satmar dynasty.3 In 1939, Ehrenreich wrote an introduction to Dov Baer Spitzer’s biography of Schwartz, Toldot Kol Aryeh, 2 Moses Sofer (1762–1839), known as the Hatam Sofer, was a towering figure of the 19th century Central European Jewry. He was born in Germany and moved to Hungary in 1798. Five years later he became the chief rabbi of Pressburg where in 1805 he established a yeshivah which quickly became second in size and importance only to the one in Volozhin. At the time of his death, Sofer was already widely recognized as one of the most prominent rabbinical figures of his generation. Scholarly opinions about Sofer’s legacy vary: some see him as a staunch conservative, a forefather of Orthodoxy who devoted his life to an unqualified defense of traditional society against the detrimental changes brought by modernization, others point out that Sofer’s position was in fact more nuanced. On the Hatam Sofer see: Jacob Katz, “Towards a Biography of the Hatam Sofer,” in Frances Malino and David Sorkin, eds., From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe 1750–1870 (Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 1991), 223–266; Moshe Samet, Everything New is Forbidden by the Torah: Chapters in the History of Orthodoxy [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur, 2005); Meir Hildesheimer, “The Attitude of the Hatam Sofer toward Moses Mendelssohn,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 60 (1994): 141–187; Aaron Schreiber, “The Hatam Sofer’s Nuanced Attitude to Secular Learning, Maskilim and Reformers,” Torah U-Madda Journal 11 (2002–2003): 123–173; Meir Hildesheimer, “The German Language and Secular Studies: Attitudes towards Them in the Thought of the Hatam Sofer and His Disciples,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 62 (1996): 129–163; Adam Ferziger, “Religious Zealotry and Religious Law: Rethinking Conflict and Coexistence,” The Journal of Religion 84, no. 1 (January 2004): 48–77; Adam Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance, and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 61–89; Marc B. Shapiro, “Aspects of R. Moses Sofer’s Intellectual Profile,” in Jay M. Harris, ed., Be’erot Yitzhak: Studies in Memory of Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005): 285–310; Maoz Kahana, “The Hatam Sofer: The Self Image of a Posek,” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 76, nos. 3–4. (2007): 519–556. 3 For more on Moshe Teitelbaum and his legacy see Menachem Keren-Kratz, “Maramaros, Hungary—The Cradle of Extreme Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism 35, no. 2 (2015): 147–174.

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where he fondly recalled the great piety and wisdom of his grandfather and teacher.4 It was he who introduced Ehrenreich into the world of Hungarian ultra-Orthodoxy: a separatist, anti-modernist, and anti-Zionist movement born out of the 19th century conflicts between the modernist and traditionalist wings of Hungarian Jewry.5 Ultra-Orthodoxy came to dominate in the two regions where Ehrenreich spent his life—Carpathian Ruthenia and Northern Transylvania—and Ehrenreich remained one of its few non Hasidic representatives to the end of his life.6 In 1899, he became the rabbi of Şimleul-Silvaniei (Szilágysomlyó) where he opened a small yeshivah.7 4 Dov Baer Spitzer, Toldot Kol Aryeh (Kleynvardeyn: Kisvárda, 1939/40), 3–6. 5 Avraham Yehuda Hakohen Schwartz participated in the Orthodox rabbinical gathering in Michalovce in 1866 and in the Hungarian Jewish Congress held in Budapest in 1868/1869. The congress was preceded by gradual crystallization of what was to become Hungarian ultra-Orthodoxy. For detailed discussion of those events, their background and consequences see Jacob Katz, A House Divided: Orthodoxy and Schism in NineteenthCentury Central European Jewry, trans. by Ziporah Brody (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), 31–233; Michael K. Silber, Roots of the Schism in Hungarian Jewry: Cultural and Social Change from the Reign of Joseph II until the Eve of the 1848 Revolution [Hebrew] (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1985); Michael K. Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in The Uses of Tradition, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1993), 23–84; Nathaniel Katzburg, “The Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869,” in Randolph L. Braham, ed., Hungarian Jewish Studies 2 (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1969), 1–34; Menachem Keren-Kratz, “The Politics of Jewish Orthodoxy: The Case of Hungary 1868–1918,” Modern Judaism 36, no. 3 (2016): 217–248. 6 On Orthodoxy, ultra-Orthodoxy, and Hasidism in Carpathian Ruthenia and Northern Transylvania see Menachem Keren-Kratz, “The Politics of Religious Enclave: Orthodox Jews in Interwar Transylvania, Romania,” Modern Judaism 37, no. 3 (2017): 363–391; Menachem Keren-Kratz, “Maramaros, Hungary—The Cradle of Extreme Orthodoxy;” Benjamin Brown, “The Two Faces of Religious Radicalism: Orthodox Zealotry and ‘Holy Sinning’ in Nineteenth Century Hasidism in Hungary and Galicia,” The Journal of Religion 93, no. 3 (July 2013): 341–374; Yizhak Peri, History of the Jews in Transylvania in the Twentieth Century [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hotsat Tarbut, 1995); Menachem KerenKratz, Maramaros-Sziget: Extreme Orthodoxy and Secular-Jewish Culture at the Foothills of the Carpathian Mountains [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mifal Dov Sadan, 2013). For a more general overview of Jewish life in Carpathian Ruthenia before World War II, see, e.g. Aryeh Sole, “Subcarpathian Ruthenia: 1918–1938,” in The Jews of Czechoslovakia: Historical Studies and Surveys 1 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1968), 125–154. For a very interesting analysis of Transylvania Jewish Question in the broader context of Hungarian - Romanian struggle for control of Transylvania, see Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea During World War II (Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 2009), 175–198. 7 For more biographical information about Ehrenreich see Yitzhak Yosef Cohen, “R.  Shlomo Zalman Berav Yaakov Ehrenreich” in Sages of Transylvania, 1630–1944 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mifal Moreshet Yahadut Hungarya, 1988/89), 17–19; Yehoshua

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Ehrenreich delivered his last sermon in Şimleul-Silvaniei on Shabbat Parshat Ha-Chodesh in late March 1944. In early May of the same year, all Jews living in the town were forcibly gathered in the vicinity of their synagogue and then marched to the ghetto in the Klein Brickyards of Cehul Silvaniei. At its peak, the ghetto, located in a marshy and muddy area about three miles from Şimleul-Silvaniei, held about 8,500 Jews from the Sălaj County.8 Most inhabitants had to live under the open sky. The ghetto was administered by Laszlo Krasznai, one of the most cruel and sadistic ghetto commanders in Hungary. The Jews living in the brickyards were deprived not only of shelter but also of adequate nutrition. Even the supply of water was extremely limited. Weakened by torture and debilitating living conditions, the Jews from the Cehul ghetto were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in three separate transports between May 31 and June 6, 1944. Most—including Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich—were selected for immediate death.9 Posthumously translated from Yiddish into Hebrew, Drashot Lehem Shlomo is a collection of sermons delivered by Ehrenreich in the years 1938–1944.10 Given his position as the leader of the Şimleul-Silvaniei Jewish Katz, “Hakdamat Nekhed Vetalmid Hamehaber” in Drashot Lehem Shlomo (Brooklyn, NY: Edison Lithographic and Printing Corp, 1976), 1–51; Tsvi Yaakov Abraham, “Harav Rav Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich—Simleul” in Eleh Ezkerah II, ed. Yitshak Levin (New York: Research Institute of Religious Jewry, 1957), 218–227; Gershon Greenberg, “Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich’s (1863–1944) Religious Response to the Holocaust: February 1939-October 1943. Şimleul-Silvaniei (Szilágysomlyó), Transylvania,” Studia Judaica IX 9 (2000): 65–93. 8 See Alexandra Lohse, “Szilágysomlyó and Somlyócsehi,” in Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany. Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, vol. 3, ed. by Geoffrey P. Megargee, Joseph R. White, Mel Hecker (Bloomington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2018), 377–378. 9 On the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania see Randolph L. Braham, Genocide and Retribution: The Holocaust in Hungarian-Ruled Northern Transylvania (Boston: Kluwer, 1983); Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, Condensed Edition (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 117–153; Bela Vago, “The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania,” in Hungarian Jewish Studies 1, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1966), 171–222; Franz Sz. Horváth, “Ethnic Policies, Social Compensation, and Economic Reparations: The Holocaust in Northern Transylvania,” East Central Europe 39 (2012): 101–136. 10 Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, Drashot Lehem Shlomo (Brooklyn, NY: Edison Lithographic and Printing Corp, 1976), hereafter quoted as DLS. Other published works of Ehrenreich include: Tiyul Bepardes I (Şimleul-Silvaniei: 1938/1939), Tiyul Bepardes II (SzilagySomlyo: 1941/1942) and published posthumously Iggeret Hatiyul Hashalem (Jerusalem: 1961/1962); Even Shlomo al Hatorah (Jerusalem: 1963); Gan Shlomo al Hatorah and Hiddushei Aggadah Uderashim Niflaim (Jerusalem). I thank Gershon Greenberg for his generosity in sharing these materials with me.

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community, it is safe to assume that one of Ehrenreich’s tasks was to provide comfort to its members. This, however, does not mean that his sermons should be seen primarily or exclusively in terms of psychological defense mechanisms. For a deeply observant and traditionalist Jew like Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich and his congregants comfort could come from such an understanding of the unfolding persecutions that established a meaningful relation between their suffering and their God. God’s presence behind historical events was an axiom of Ehrenreich’s thinking. A communal fast was declared on February 26, 1939, because of the bad tidings reaching more and more Jewish communities. In his sermon for that day, Ehrenreich referred to a recent event—he saw a transport of Jews expelled from Germany going through the nearby town of Grosswardein: At this time there are unheard-of troubles for Israel. The people who passed in a transport through Grosswardein (Oradea) had swastikas [on] their faces and their flesh. Some had no fingers; the evil ones bit them off. There were those whose fingernails were torn out and other such things. Things that wild animals do. Some think this is an accident. In Germany the people are educated. How could such cruelty be found among people? Expelling people and taking their wealth to the last penny? With such great troubles?11

One could not explain an event like that as a mere happenstance. Nor could the inhumane treatment the expelled Jews received from their tormentors be accounted for in terms of human hatred. The tidings on the surface of history had to have an explanation on a deeper level. Ehrenreich’s answer is straightforward: “It is the hand of God.”12 The unnatural character of the persecutions called for an explanatory connection pointing beyond the realm of nature. Only God’s involvement could, in Ehrenreich’s view, explain the hatred towards the Jews displayed by the Germans. It is a theme to which Ehrenreich returns in his sermons again and again: what is happening is not happening by accident. In the fall of 1939 Ehrenreich wrote: We must not think and say that this is all accidental, heaven forbid, because everything is God’s providence and decree, and the Holy One, blessed be he, does all that.13 11 DLS, 284. 12 Ibid. 13 DLS, 13.

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The explanatory recourse to supernatural causation was necessary not only because of the unusual intensity of the persecutions. The history of Israel was not unfolding according to an internal logic of causation but rather was governed by the rules of the covenantal pact established between Israel and God. On Shavuot, June, 10, 1943 Ehrenreich quoted the words of the prophet Balaam: “As I see them from the mountain top, gaze on them from on the heights. There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations.”14 The prophecy now came true, Ehrenreich declared. The Jews are persecuted and despised by the nations who treat them as if they were not human beings. These developments are not incidental. Nor can they be explained by any laws of the realm of nature. Ehrenreich quotes the rabbinic statement “There is no star for Israel”15 by which the rabbis meant Israel’s immunity to the influence of the zodiacal signs. He continues by offering an important addition: “for this reason [Israel] does not behave according to the stars or nature but only in accordance with [the will of] the Holy One, blessed be he.”16 In other words, when looking for an explanation of the sudden explosion of hatred directed against the Jews, one should not try to find the reasons in the murderous ideology that drives the persecutors. The fate of the Jews lies exclusively in the hands of God who shapes events through earthly instruments. This assumption is a fundamental premise behind paradigmatic thinking. Biblically rooted paradigms can be understood and employed as models according to which history is structured only if God’s agency is presupposed. Paradigms are tools that allow for discerning God’s otherwise invisible, or at least not transparent, presence. Firmly supporting the notion of God’s agency in history, in a sermon from September 1940 Ehrenreich went so far as to deprive the tormentors of any agency whatsoever: The enemies that cause distress to Israel themselves do not know why God is indignant and strikes at Israel. They believe they hate Israel for this or that reason. But in truth they are a rod of God’s anger and the Holy One, blessed be he, when he wants to punish Israel for her sins, plants hatred in the heart of the nations of the world and orders them to oppress Israel. Like the prophet said, “Assyria, rod of my anger, in whose hand, as a staff, is my

14 Num. 23:9–10. 15 BT Shabbat 115a, BT Nedarim 32a. 16 DLS, 250.

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fury! I send him against an ungodly nation, I charge him against people that provokes me.” (Is. 10:50)17

The intensification of the persecutions did not make him change his mind in this regard and Ehrenreich expressed the same view three years later: All those troubles which we suffer today by the hands of the evil ones—it is not the evil ones who are hitting us. They are but the staff of God. God is chastising and hitting us. To be sure the evil ones are evil: Good things come to pass on auspicious days and bad things come to pass on unholy days (Taanit 29a). But the nations are not doing the hitting. God alone does that.18

Ehrenreich goes even further. Not only does he relieve the oppressors of moral responsibility by presenting them as a mere instrument in the hand of God—an instrument unaware that it is being used—but also suggests that in the ultimate scheme of things they might, in fact, have certain merit and hence should be evaluated positively. This idea is not new. Already in the Talmud, the rabbis asserted that one of symbolic arch-enemies of Israel, Haman, was through his actions more efficacious than “forty eight prophets”19 because his scheme to destroy the Jews of Persia ultimately led Israel to fulfilling “what they had already accepted,”20 that is to say, to accepting the Torah anew. Ehrenreich presented his reasoning on the subject in the sermon on Simchat Torah, October 4, 1942: The author of the Haggadah writes, “In every generation they arise to destroy us, but the Holy One saves us from them.” This was so with Pharaoh and Haman. When the Holy One helps us and the enemies of Israel are removed from the world and defeated, the name of heaven is sanctified because of the great sanctification of God’s name in the world. Everyone recognizes and knows that the Holy One [destroyed Israel’s enemies]. Through this, the name of the Holy One will be magnified.21

The thought presented in this passage does not appear radical. The idea that God’s glory in the world is magnified when God destroys the enemies of Israel remains in perfect accord with the notions of God’s agency in history. 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 128. BT Megillah 14a. BT Shabbat 88a. DLS, 149.

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This, however, is only the first step of Ehrenreich’s reasoning in this sermon. An important qualification follows: Sometimes the evil of the enemy is so great that the enemy is unworthy. It is inappropriate for the name of God to be sanctified through such an enemy because it is completely evil. Such an enemy does not have the privilege of being a factor in the sanctification of his great name in the world. For this, very great worthiness is required. . . . God’s name will be sanctified in the world when the enemies of Israel suffer a great defeat. The enemy will have achieved something great because the world was created for his name to be sanctified. One needs to be most worthy for this.22

In other words, not every enemy’s defeat contributes to the glorification of God’s name in the world. For this to be the case, the enemy needs to have a certain merit. God, Ehrenreich is saying, does not use instruments that are unworthy of him. What did Pharaoh and the Egyptians do to deserve the honor of glorifying God’s name through their defeat? Pharaoh honored Joseph and made him viceroy. Through this Pharaoh with his people became worthy of suffering a catastrophe and having God’s name sanctified through them.23

Likewise, Haman was worthy to be defeated by God because through his actions Israel returned to the Torah. In cases of Haman’s and Pharaoh’s demise, what on the surface appears to be God’s severe punishment for persecuting his chosen people, is, in reality, an act of great mercy because “they were worthy; and through their defeat the name of God was sanctified . . . among all nations.”24 Coming to the end of the sermon Ehrenreich briefly referred to the current situation: Now too, if because of the troubles we take matters to heart, redemption will be easy. Through this the enemies of Israel will gain great merit. For through their disasters the name of God will be sanctified.25

There are two possible interpretations of this conclusion. According to the first one, the current oppressors of the Jews should be seen as similar to Haman. Their hatred against the Jews can bring about Israel’s repentance 22 DLS, 149–150. 23 Ibid., 150. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 151.

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and hence they will become worthy of being defeated by God and of contributing to the sanctification of the divine name. It is also possible that—like the Egyptians—the enemy already has certain measure of merit coming from his earlier actions toward the Jews. Either way, in his Simchat Torah 1942 sermon, Ehrenreich, possibly against the sentiments of his congregants, presented a reevaluation of the enemy. His reasoning and conclusion may appear morally problematic. It is important to stress, however, that they logically follow from the broader theological framework. Asserting a positive quality of the enemies of Israel was the only way for Ehrenreich to avoid the idea that God was using instruments that were inherently and unredeemably evil which in turn would necessarily lead to a diminishment of God’s righteousness. In other words, Ehrenreich’s sermon from October 4, 1942 can be understood as a determined defense of one of the fundamental premises of covenantal theodicy: “The Rock, his work is perfect; for all his ways are justice; a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and right is he” (Deut. 32: 4–5). This sermon also shows what Yerushalmi described as the “pronounced tendency . . . to fit the recent catastrophe into the mold of past tragedies.”26 By positing similarities between the current and past oppressors, Ehrenreich presented Jewish history as unfolding according to eternally valid templates. This history is, clearly, something else than a complex interaction of human and natural causes. It is seen in theological terms, as governed by the master framework of covenantal theodicy with its host of assumptions regarding the nature of the relationship between God and Israel. In his further explanation of the relationship between the nations used as an instrument of God’s justice, Ehrenreich explicitly reached for a biblically rooted paradigm to illuminate the present. Nations descend from Esau, Jacob’s older twin brother, and the animosity between the two, first described in the Bible, was transformed in the rabbinical interpretations of the story into a metahistorical paradigm serving to illuminate the nature of the relations between the Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors.27 Given the power and strong textual basis for the identification of Esau and his progeny with enemies who persecuted the Jews at various stages of history, 26 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 51. 27 See, e.g. Sacha Stern, Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 18–21 where Stern observes that “Israel and Rome, the avatars of Jacob and Esau, are . . . current manifestations of a changeless structure, an ever-lasting reality.” This “changeless structure” is what I describe as paradigm.

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it does not come as a surprise that when searching for a meaningful interpretation of the events he was witnessing, Ehrenreich reached for this symbolic imagery. In a sermon delivered on February 26, 1939 Ehrenreich quoted the words of the patriarch Isaac confused by his son Jacob’s disguise: “The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22). He proceeded to offer an explanation of the metahistorical meaning of the utterance following a midrash in which a philosopher, Eunomos of Gedera, was asked by the enemies of Israel how could they hurt the Jews. Eunomos answered: Go and look at the synagogues and study houses. If the children are raising their voices [studying Torah] then you can do nothing against them. If not, then you can prevail against them. For their patriarch assured them saying, “The voice is the voice of Jacob. As long as the voice of Jacob is in the synagogue and study house, the hands of Esau will not prevail.”28

The “voice of Jacob,” Ehrenreich explained, should be understood as the written and oral Torah. As long as it is heard in synagogues and study houses, that is, as long as the Torah is diligently studied by the Jews, the enemies of Israel cannot prevail, and Esau does not present any danger. This changes, however, once the voice of Jacob is silenced as a result of the Jews having neglected their fundamental obligation to study the divine word. When this happens, the hands of Esau are no longer only Esau’s hands—they draw their strength from God himself who in his anger uses Esau as an instrument of justice: There is nothing for us to fear except if the hands of Esau are the hands of the Holy One, the rod of his wrath. Surely, if Israel observes the Torah and the voice of Jacob is heard in the synagogue and the study house, then the hands will remain the hands of Esau and not those of the Holy One. Obviously, they will not be able to have power over us.29

In the sermon from Simchat Torah, October 14, 1941, Ehrenreich argued that had Israel kept the Torah, God would have never allowed the enemy to dominate and tyrannize Israel.30 Isaac gave Esau the following blessing: “you shall serve your brother, but when you grow restive, you shall break his yoke from your neck” (Gen. 27:40). Rashi explained these words to 28 Bereshit Rabbah 65:20. DLS, 285. 29 Ibid. 30 DLS, 147–149.

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mean that “when Israel will transgress the Torah, and you will have cause to complain regarding the blessing which Israel took, ‘then you shall break his yoke.’” As long as Israel lives according to the laws of Torah, explained Ehrenreich, the descendants of Esau do not even think about attacking Israel. However, once Israel abandons the way of the Torah, the nations begin to regret the blessing and their attitude toward Israel changes dramatically because they no longer see it as superior.31 Ehrenreich returned to the same sources and the same line of reasoning in 194332 which suggests that his belief in the explanatory power of the Esau/Jacob paradigm was not affected by the intensification of the persecutions. It proved viable as a source of meaning during the times of the dominion of Rome and later when the Roman eagle was displaced by the Christian cross. It did not lose its explanatory power when the enemy bore the symbol of the swastika. In one of his sermons Ehrenreich quoted the line from midrash Tanhuma: “What happened to the ancestors is a sign for the children.”33 The story of difficult relationship between the ancestral siblings provided a key to understanding yet another eruption of anti-Jewish hatred. In Ehrenreich’s writings, paradigmatic thinking coalesced with covenantal theodicy. In February 1939, Ehrenreich spoke to his community about the difficult situation of the Jewish communities in Germany and Austria: At this time the words of Jeremiah the prophet are being fulfilled, “Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him; but weep sore for him that goes away, for he shall return no more, nor see his native country” (Jer. 22:10). So it is at this time. Thousands of Jews have been expelled from Germany and Austria. Everything has been taken from them and they suffer immeasurable troubles. They have nowhere to turn. They are not allowed to enter the Land of Israel or America.  .  .  .  Thousands of Jews are sighing. They have been expelled from their homeland and their home to become wanderers.34

This description of troubles is immediately followed by a declaration in the strongest tradition of theodicy: “The Holy One will not do anything

31 32 33 34

Ibid., 148. Ibid., 128–129. Tanhuma, ed. Buber, Lekh Lekha 12, DLS, 288. DLS, 284.

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unjust,”35 assures Ehrenreich and recalling the brothers of Joseph who admitted to be “verily guilty concerning [their] brother”36 (Gen. 42:21) adds: “They did not pin it on accident, but said [the distress] was of the hand of God. We can only do penitent return.”37 In a sermon for the first day of Slichot, in the fall of 1939, Ehrenreich recalled a rabbinical teaching: “if a man sees that painful sufferings visit him, let him examine his conduct. For it is said ‘Let us search and probe our ways, and return to the Lord’ (Lam. 3:40)”38 and encouraged his congregation to do exactly that, noting that they should ponder not only their individual behavior but also the conduct of Israel as a whole for the Holy One, blessed be he, does not punish without justice and great sin. God sends suffering as punishment for sins. If the nations of the world rise against Israel, persecute and humiliate it, and bring it sufferings and grief, Israel must examine its conduct and walk the direct way to penitent return.39

In other words, the current oppression by Esau is a realization of God’s judgment designed to bring about repentance and purification. On account of what sins came the punishment? In accord with the idea that one should first and foremost search her own behavior and not attempt to find the causes of suffering in the external circumstances, Ehrenreich points out two cardinal transgressions: assimilation and Zionism. Every person should become embittered in his heart and say, “Woe, what have I done? I have sinned, I have transgressed, I have done wrong, I have not behaved as a Jew. I wanted to be Mr. Herrschaft. That is why these troubles have come upon us. It was the resultant jealousy toward us that caused it.” . . . It is the hand of God, on account of the greatness of the sins that were done in Germany. [The Jews in Germany] assimilated among the gentiles. For several generations they married non-Jewish wives.  .  .  .  Similarly, in Vienna there was no end to the sins committed by Jewish daughters who came from Poland, including daughters and granddaughters of rabbis and Hasidic rebbes. They sat in their houses on the third floor while their daughters, wives, and granddaughters went to the theatre, and so on.40 35 Ibid. 36 Gen. 42:21. 37 DLS, 284. 38 BT Berakhot 5a. 39 DLS, 13. 40 Ibid., 284.

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Assimilation silenced the voice of Jacob and as a breach of the covenantal contract it triggered a reaction of the other participant of the covenant. The descendants of Esau began to regret the blessing their ancestor lost to his brother and started to resent Israel who this time willingly traded its privileged position for the equivalent of another bowl of lentils—for the right to behave more like the non-Jewish neighbors. Esau, according to rabbinical tradition, always hates Jacob and will seize any opportunity to translate this feeling into action. And the opportunity arises, as explained before, when God, indignant over Israel’s behavior, makes the hands of Esau his own. In other words, Ehrenreich understood anti-Semitism as a corrective measure. Anti-Jewish hatred was a sign of Israel’s abandonment of its divinely prescribed way of life.41 On Purim, February 24, 1940 Ehrenreich described the story of the book of Esther as showing the dangers of assimilation. Ahashverosh, he argued, was actually more dangerous than Haman. Overcome with murderous passion, Haman planned a physical annihilation of king’s Jewish subjects. The actions of the king himself, however, were much more perilous: Israel can be destroyed in two ways: one way is through oppression, murder and sword, troubles and high taxes. Jews can be despised and diminished so that they are not considered citizens, etc. There is another way to obliterate and destroy Israel, God forbid. This happens through elevating them, through making them officials. Brought slowly closer and closer the Jews abandon the holy Torah and before long they forget the name Israel, God forbid, because they mix with the nations and learn their ways. As a result they are lost for they abandon the mitzvot and behave just like the nations.42

Through seemingly friendly behavior, Ahashverosh was setting a trap for the Jewish soul. He invited the Jews to participate in the feast, elevated Mordekhai to a high status. The Jews were to become more similar to other inhabitants of the kingdom—to partake in their meals, to behave according to the local law and custom. This—losing the connection to ancestral norms and traditions and ultimately renouncing the Torah—was a true 41 This position was by no means new or unique. R. Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the rosh yeshivah of the famous Volozhin yeshiva, expressed a similar understanding of anti-Semitism in his Shaar Israel published for a first time in the 1890s. See Why Antisemitism? A translation of The Remnant of Israel by R. Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1996). 42 DLS, 176.

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menace, according to Ehrenreich, because, as he remarked on another occasion, Israel without the Torah is akin to a corpse.43 The Torah constitutes not only the true soul of Israel. It is also Israel’s true land, a sacred space within which Israel is meant to dwell.44 Ehrenreich did visit Palestine at least two times and was offered the position of the chief rabbi of the Edah Haredit in Jerusalem which he turned down because his Transylvanian community had problems finding a rabbi to replace him. As many other ultra-Orthodox Jews, however, Ehrenreich was appalled by the Zionists project and in 1939 published a fervently anti-Zionist leaflet Kol Israel Saba in which he accused the Zionists of polluting the holy land with their anti-Torah activities.45 He pleaded with Jews around the world not to give money to any organization associated with Zionism, be it religious or secular. Instead, those who wanted to support the Jewish community in Palestine should offer help to those who devoted their time to Torah study.46 One theme comes to the fore in Ehrenreich’s criticism of Zionism: his unrelenting opposition to the idea that Jews could and should contribute to their final redemption by an active involvement in the political sphere. The true redemption is in the hands of God and in his hands alone—this belief reverberates through Ehrenreich’s sermons: There are two things we must not forget. First, that all the troubles come from the Holy One, blessed be he. Second, that we cannot redeem ourselves without the Holy One, blessed be he, and without the holy Torah. Whenever we forget these two things, our problems increase and increase. But if we keep in mind that only the Holy One, blessed be he, by himself, without our help, will give us our holy land and take us from this dark exile and that it is not within our power to redeem ourselves, then God’s mercy will help us and the Holy One, blessed be he, will save us and gather us from four corners of the earth through our redeemer.47

On Hanukkah 1939 Ehrenreich offered an interesting reading of the passages in Exodus describing the confrontation between Israelites and Egyptians on the shore of the Sea of Reeds. The Israelites, said Ehrenreich, 43 Ibid., 160. 44 Ibid., 35. 45 The text of the leaflet consisted of a selection of passages from Tiul Bepardes I, I:30:15, 7:15, 20:12. 46 Greenberg, “Ehrenreich’s Religious Response,” 74–75. 47 DLS, 144–145. See also Tiul Bepardes II, 1:2, 3:7, 70:2, 70:5

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stood trapped between the water of the sea and the incoming Egyptian army. Desperation crept into their hearts and they cried to Moses accusing him of taking them out of Egypt only to die in the wilderness. The sense of utter hopelessness and unavoidable doom may awaken desperate heroism and there were some among the Israelites who stood their ground and prepared to confront the Egyptians in battle. To those, according to Ehrenreich, Moses said: “Have no fear! Stand by and witness the deliverance which the Lord will work for you today. . . . The Lord will battle for you and you hold your peace!” (Ex. 14:13). Moses knew not only that the Israelites had no chance of military victory, but he was also aware that their active involvement would prove counterproductive because in response God would abandon them. In Ehrenreich’s own words: It is essential to know that we cannot help ourselves, on the contrary, if we try to help ourselves then we fail and God turns away from us. Only if we know that it is not in our power at all to redeem ourselves then the Holy One, blessed be he, saves us. . . . We must realize that our redemption is not within our power, we cannot redeem ourselves without God’s help and without the holy Torah.48

In the centuries long debate over the role of human involvement in the process of redemption, Ehrenreich stood firmly among those for whom the only activity that might contribute to final redemption was penitent return and renunciation of sin. The Zionist project was doomed, according to Ehrenreich, just like doomed were the members of the tribe of Ephraim who decided to leave Egypt thirty years before the appointed time only to meet their death in the Holy Land.49 In the sermon for the holiday of Shavuot, May 25, 1939, Ehrenreich referred to the well-known passage from the Talmudic tractate Ketubot where the rabbis interpret the verse from the Song of Songs—“I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles, and by the hinds of the field, that ye awaken not, nor stir up love, until it please” (Sg. 8:4)—to mean that the

48 DLS, 144. It is puzzling that in his interpretation of the Exodus passages Ehrenreich ignores the fragment in which God says to Moses: “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward.” [Ex. 14:15] which is perfectly suited to serve as a counterargument to Ehrenreich’s reasoning. 49 BT Sanhedrin 92a, DLS, 144, 240.

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Jews should not immigrate to the Land of Israel in large numbers.50 He offered the following comment: God forbid that we maintain the beliefs of the heretic Zionists who want to take the holy land by a force and rebel against the kingship. Their end will be bitter. They are enemies of the Torah that is like a thorn in their eye . . . they are not Jews because without Torah they are not a people and not Israel. And they have no right to speak in the name of Israel.51

Ehrenreich returned to the subject on Simchat Torah, October 5, 1942: We have to know that we cannot redeem ourselves with our own strength without the help of God and without the holy Torah. The heretical Zionists want to conquer and inherit Eretz Israel by their own strength, without God’s help and without the Torah. They want to be Jewish nationalists without the Torah. And their end will be bitter.52

The Zionists, says Ehrenreich, are akin to those who wanted to actively oppose the Roman occupation of Palestine. Their rebellion brought about catastrophe. And this is also the only possible outcome of the Zionist project. Finally, in the sermon for Shavuot, June 13, 1940, Ehrenreich posited a direct link between the actions of the Zionists and the persecutions against the Jewish communities in Europe: “all the troubles we suffer come because of those who defile the Holy Land by all kinds of contamination.”53 The primary fallacy of Zionism, for Ehrenreich, consists in the rejection of a fundamental premise that Jews are to rely only on God’s power which, in turn, led the Zionists to a misunderstanding of the nature of redemption. The only redemption Jews should hope for is the one brought about by a miraculous intervention of the divine. Redemption is not realized by any human effort other than repentance. Partial solutions, such as immigration to the land of Israel, are not solutions at all. It is not redemption, but a prelude of doom. On the first day of Slichot in 1940 Ehrenreich asserted that the end of the war would not mean salvation because salvation should be understood 50 BT Ketubot 111a, DLS, 240; for more on the three oaths see Aviezer Ravitzky, “The Impact of the Three Oaths in Jewish History,” in his Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. by Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 211–234. 51 DLS, 240. 52 Ibid., 144. 53 Ibid., 243.

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as complete and ultimate redemption.54 In March 1940 he assured his congregation that redemption would be the handiwork of God and that once it happened it would be complete. And on Yom Kippur, October 13, 1940, Ehrenreich explained what this redemption redemption entails: As the Holy One promised in the holy Torah, parshat Nitzavim, “the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples” (Deut. 30:3). This is what we need to pray for—that the Holy One, blessed be he, will send us true redemption, our righteous Messiah, and will redeem us from this long and dark exile. And will build us the Holy Temple and we will worship him with all heart and soul. This is the essence of our prayers. There is only one salvation for us—the coming of the Messiah and complete redemption.55

Interestingly enough, the subject of Zionism does not appear in Ehrenreich’s later sermons. According to the sources discovered by Gershon Greenberg, however, Ehrenreich’s sentiments did not change. His son-in-law, Hillel Lichtenstein, remembered that in the ghetto Ehrenreich would often repeat: “The evil ones, the Zionists, brought us to this point.”56 The lack of references to Zionism in Ehrenreich’s sermons from 1942–1944 can be explained by a general shift of his attention. Over time, Ehrenreich appeared less inclined to point to any specific sins that might have caused divine retribution. The emphasis changes and in place of harsh criticisms leveled against either Zionism or assimilation, in Ehrenreich’s sermons one encounters attempts to place the sufferings of the Jewish community in the context of future redemption. Already in 1939 Ehrenreich drew a direct connection between suffering and redemption rather than suffering and sin: In Berakhot 5a it says that Israel merited receiving the Torah and the land of Israel only through suffering. So it was in Egypt. And so it will be with the future complete redemption. It is impossible to merit a good so great other than through troubles and suffering.57

It is so because teshuvah, penitent return, is a necessary condition of redemption and repentance, obviously, has to be preceded by sin. On Erev 54 55 56 57

Ibid., 97. Ibid., 90. Greenberg, “Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich’s Religious Response to the Holocaust,” 77. DLS, 288.

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Yom Kippur, October 12, 1940, Ehrenreich suggested that there might be other ways for God to evoke teshuvah. For instance, God could pour the spirit of piety from above.58 However, later Ehrenreich will say that suffering, penitent return, and redemption are bound together by the force of divine decree.59 This connection leads to a revaluation of suffering: In principle, the decree was good and very sweet, because its purpose was teshuvah.  .  .  .  The good was only dressed in, and covered by, the evil troubles. If we do teshuvah and take it upon ourselves to turn from evil from now on, and behave in a good way, then the evil will be removed from the decrees. . . . The purpose of the trouble is to awaken us to do teshuvah for our trespasses.60

Suffering, then, as a trigger of penitent return, is a step on the way toward redemption. On Shabbat Shuva, 1943, Ehrenreich reiterated the point and quoted the rabbinical dictum “Suffering is precious”61 to assert that the value of suffering lies precisely in that it leads to teshuvah—a prerequisite of redemption.62 What might be seen as an act of the divine attribute of judgment should be then understood as a revelation of the attribute of mercy.63 Ehrenreich was not oblivious to the questions arising in face of the intensification of persecution. Nor was he unaware of the level of suffering experienced by the members of his congregation. And he clearly understood that it put covenantal theodicy under question. Already in February 1939, confronted with the pain of the Jews exiled from Austria and Germany, Ehrenreich confessed: It is difficult to understand why [God] should punish the innocent. But one cannot question this. It is God’s judgment. When God will help us and redeem us, we will understand all this.64

These words can be seen, admittedly, as a rather unsophisticated avoidance of the fundamental question that lies at the heart of the problem of theodicy: Why do the innocent suffer? I suggest, however, that we understand 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 88. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 88. BT Sanhedrin 101a. DLS, 75. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 284.

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them as an attempt to adhere to the principles of covenantal theodicy in spite of the evidence against it and as an expression of an existential decision to persevere in faith in spite of the most difficult circumstances and doubts. Silence, for Ehrenreich, was an existential stance to be taken in the time of immense suffering preceding redemption with which everything will be revealed and all problems resolved: We see today how the enemies of Israel rise against us and torment us with all sorts of persecutions. . . . How many tens of thousands have been killed by the evildoers for no reason? How many have been buried alive, they, their wives, their sons, and their daughters? The reckless among us will open their mouths and, asking questions and doubting God: Why did God do this to pious and good Jews? They will actually ask: where is your God? But we remain silent and closed. For we are unable to answer these people at all until God has mercy on his people and sends us our redeemer and takes us out of this dark and long exile. It was the same in Egypt. . . . Just as they said, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” (Ex. 14:11). Moses our teacher, of blessed memory, answered them, “Fear not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord. The Lord will fight for you and you shall hold your peace” (Ex. 14:13–14). That is, “Watch yourselves and do not say anything, heaven forbid, against the Holy One.” Undoubtedly justice is with him, may he be blessed. We are unable to resolve all the problems now. But when the Holy One will help us and send us our Messiah and Elijah the prophet with him, Elijah will resolve all our problems concerning the Holy One.65

Silence, for Ehrenreich, was also an act of imitatio Dei. In his Shabbat Nahamu sermon from the summer of 1943, Ehrenreich referred to a Talmudic teaching according to which the verse “Who is like you among the gods [elim]?” (Ex. 15:11) should be read as “Who is like you among the mute ones [illemim]?”66 and offered the following comment: [God] has a great power of self-restraint. They desecrate his name and say “where is your God?” They turn to heavens and mock and taunt him saying “come, God, and help them if you can.” They curse and swear but the Holy One, blessed be he, keeps silent.67 65 Ibid., 215. 66 BT Gittin 56b. 67 DLS, 252.

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And this is how the Jews should be behaving as well, Ehrenreich told his congregation: “We must not open our mouths to speak about God in anger. We are like mutes and we keep silent.”68 Silence, in other words, is not only a sign of the fear of divine retribution for the sin of blasphemy. Accepting pain in silence is an emulation of God himself, because God also suffers without complaint. In the same sermon, Ehrenreich quotes a rabbinical teaching according to which the suffering of the Jewish people affects the divine presence in the world, the Shehinah.69 Ehrenreich’s turn toward silence, evident in his sermons from the latter part of 1943, considered together with the shift of his attention from sins that might have caused divine retribution to the role of suffering in the redemptive process, indicate Ehrenreich’s recognition of the limits of the explanatory power of retributive justice. However, it does not imply a rejection of covenantal theodicy or a step outside the framework of the covenant. The understanding of suffering as a purifying gift that precedes redemption is in itself paradigmatic. So is silence. Even though Ehrenreich never referred to the figure of Job, his final answer was similar to the one epitomized in the words of Job: “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him. But I will argue my ways before him” (Job 13:15). Silence recommended by Ehrenreich is not absolute. It is filled with the voice of prayer and Torah study and with deeds of loving kindness. Accepting the pain without a word of protest is not a sign of resignation and should not be seen as giving in to despair. On the contrary, the silence should be accompanied with a loving acceptation of suffering understood as a revelation of divine attribute of mercy. It should also be filled with hope for final redemption. That redemption would arrive was a given for Ehrenreich. The history of the Jewish people was unfolding towards this moment when outside historical time the ultimate restoration was bound to occur. According to Gershon Greenberg, “Ehrenreich recoiled from interpreting historical events and fell into silence. He suspended his faith in the God of history, without surrendering it, in anticipation of theological solutions in the future.”70 I agree that for Ehrenreich the complete understanding was tied to redemption and not available before it came about. However, I also suggest that it was precisely his faith in the God of history that made this belief 68 Ibid. 69 BT Hagigah 96. 70 Greenberg, “Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich’s (1863–1944) Religious Response to the Holocaust,” 86.

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possible. Redemption was certain because God’s agency in the historical realm was certain. A suspension of this belief would lead to silence, indeed, but to a silence of desperation and hopelessness. Silence that Ehrenreich recommended as a proper response to suffering was predicated on a firm conviction regarding God’s active involvement in the earthly realm of historical occurrences.

Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer was born in Pressburg in 1888 and in this city he spent his entire life as an active member of the Orthodox community which boasted a legacy extending back to the days of the Hatam Sofer.71 Before World War I, Pressburg (or Pozsony as it was called in Hungarian) was the largest and most prominent city of the western part of Hungary, the region known as Oberland.72 After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in October 1918, Pressburg was renamed Bratislava and the region—now known as Slovakia—was incorporated into the newly created First Czechoslovak Republic. Unlike their ultra-Orthodox brethren in Carpathian Ruthenia, most Jews of Bratislava and its environs belonged to what has been described as mainstream Orthodoxy. In the words of Menachem Keren-Kratz, “they were non-Hasidic Jews who kept an open mind regarding modernism and general education.”73 The Orthodox community of Bratislava was led by Akivah Sofer, the great-grandson of the Hatam Sofer, who from 1907 served as the city’s chief rabbi and the head of the Pressburg yeshivah. Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer was one of its many graduates. Starting in mid-1920s, Unsdorfer served as a rabbi of the Weidritz Alley Synagogue where he was delivering very popular weekly sermons and lectures.74 He did not leave the city after Bratislava became the capitol of the pro-Nazi Slovak Republic in March of 1939 and continued to teach Torah 71 See note 2 above. 72 For a discussion of the differences between the Oberland and Unterland see Katz, A House Divided, 38, 48–69. On Jewish communities in both regions after 1918 see Menachem Keren-Kratz, “The Campaign for the Nature of Jewish Orthodoxy: Religious Tolerance versus Uncompromising Extremism in Interwar Czechoslovakia,” Modern Judaism, 38, no. 3 (2018): 328–353. 73 Keren-Kratz, “The Campaign for the Nature of Jewish Orthodoxy,” 330. 74 See Shmuel Hakohen Weingarten, History of the Jews of Bratislava (Pressburg) [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1960), 154.

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and to lead the Burial Society. On the margins of his sermons, Unsdorfer occasionally wrote brief comments about increasing persecutions and acts of violence. German army entered Slovakia and occupied Bratislava in August of 1944. At that time Unsdorfer was in possession of false American papers that were to protect him, his wife and youngest son, Simcha Bunem, from deportation. Together with other owners of American passports, they were transferred to the castle in Marianka (Marienthal) near Bratislava. On October 11, nearly all the 300 Jews staying at the castle were rounded up and deported first to the transit camp in Sered and a few days later to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer and his wife were among those immediately selected for death.75 Simcha Bunem survived Auschwitz and after the war returned to Bratislava where in the ruins of their house he discovered the manuscripts of his father’s writings. Unsdorfer’s sons translated his writings from Yiddish and published them under the title Siftei Shlomo.76 75 See Gila Fatran, “Die Deportation der Juden aus der Slowakei 1944–1945,” Bohemia: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Böhmischen Länder 37 (1996): 111–112. On Marianka see Ján Hlavinka, “Marianka,” in Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany. Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, vol. 3, ed. by Geoffrey P. Megargee, Joseph R. White, Mel Hecker (Bloomington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2018), 871. Simcha Bunem Unsdorfer wrote about the family stay at the Marianka castle, the arrest, deportation and death of his parents in his memoir The Yellow Star: A Boy’s Story of Auschwitz and Buchenwald (New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2014; first edition in 1961). For more on the Holocaust in Slovakia see Yeshayahu A. Jellinek, The “Final Solution”: The Slovak Version (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1971); Ivan Kamenec, On the Trail of Tragedy: The Holocaust in Slovakia, trans. by Martin Styan (Bratislava: Hajko & Hajková, 2007); Wacław Długoborski, Dezider Tóth, Teresa Świebocka, Jarek Mensfelt eds., The Tragedy of the Jews of Slovakia 1938–1945: Slovakia and the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” trans. by Jarek Mensfeld (Oświęcim and Banská Bystrica: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, 1992); Barbara Hutzelmann, “Slovak Society and the Jews: Attitudes and Patterns of Behaviour,” in The Holocaust and European Societies: Social Processes and Social Dynamics, ed. by Frank Bajohr and Andrea Löw (London: Springer, 2016), 167–185; Eduard Nižňanský, “On Relations between the Slovak Majority and Jewish Minority During World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 42, no. 2 (2014): 47–90; James Mace Ward, “The 1938 First Vienna Award and the Holocaust in Slovakia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, no. 1 (2015): 76–10. 76 Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer, Siftei Shlomo (Brooklyn: Balshon Printing, 1972). Thereafter quoted as SS. Unfortunately the original Yiddish writings could not be recovered. For more biographical information about Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer see Shmuel Alexander Unsdorfer’s introduction to the volume as well as Gershon Greenberg, “The Suffering of the Righteous According to Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer of Bratislava, 1939–1944,” in John Roth, ed., Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 422–438 and idem, “Shlomo Zalman

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In the last week of December 1941 a dramatic event shook the already difficult life of the Jewish community of Bratislava. In brief remarks accompanying the sermon prepared for January 3, 1942, Unsdorfer noted: “In this last week the old age home in Patronka where the aged were brought several days earlier, was completely burned. The old people gathered in great fear and confusion in the dining room.”77 The brevity of the description clearly belied the impact of the tragedy that overshadowed Unsdorfer’s sermon. His response to this event consists of both affirmation of the fundamental tenets of the covenantal theodicy and expression of intense anguish that puts these very tenets in question. Lord of the universe, we have sinned greatly and have been evil. All justice is with you and there is no injustice to the just and righteous. It is measure for measure. But have we sinned so much against you that you judge old men and women to flames and panic? Lord of the universe, heaven forbid that we should question your attributes and justice of you judgments. But please be merciful as a father to his children. Have mercy on us, out of your great mercy and out of your love of the world and the great love with which you loved us.78

“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and right is he. Is corruption his? No, his children’s is the blemish” (Deut. 32:4–5). These words of the Deuteronomist echo in Unsdorfer’s utterance: the righteousness of God is axiomatic and so are the deficiencies of the human participant of the covenant. God’s activity in history is obvious as well. Sin triggers a punitive divine response. Yet the question of the adequacy of the punishment remains. What sins could deserve to be punished by death in flames? In his sermons Unsdorfer attempted to interpret suffering in such a way as to maintain both covenantal theodicy and the covenant. Yet on occasion, explanations had to give way to questioning and doubt or desperate pleas. It is important to underscore, however, that even in such moments Unsdorfer never went so far as to reject the covenantal framework. On March 12, 1942, he asked God: “What will satisfy you? Penitent return and Unsdorfer: With God through the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies XXXI: 61–94. Three of Unsdorfer’s sermons were translated into English by Gershon Greenberg and published in Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, Gershon Greenberg, eds., Wrestling with God. Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): 51–60. 77 SS, 81. 78 Ibid., 88.

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confession? We hereby return and confess to you: we have sinned, trespassed, and committed crimes. Broken spirit? Behold our spirits are broken by the troubles. Charity? Behold we give charity. Please do not be overly furious with us. What would be achieved by our blood should you slaughter us?” These questions came from the depth of personal anguish. An unqualified affirmation, however, precedes them in the sermon: “You are righteous in everything that happens to us. You are the redeemer of Israel, your holiness is eternal.”79 Addressing his community on January 3, 1942, Unsdorfer began with an apology: “To my great sorrow, my head and heart have not been there to prepare the sermon as is appropriate before this dignified community. This is because of the anguish of the servitude.”80 “Woe is me if I speak! Woe is me if I do not speak!”81 he exclaimed. In spite of the tribulations of an anguished spirit, however, Unsdorfer continued thus: Still, perhaps it is our obligation to awaken ourselves about the contemporary events, about the evil decrees that are repeated every day [and to recognize that] “Unto you, Lord, belongs righteousness but unto us confusion of face” (Dan 9:7). Many of the evil decrees that we see with our senses are measure for measure.82

We have not been giving enough to charity, says Unsdorfer, and we preferred to keep our savings in banks. Now, because of the new laws, we cannot take our money from the bank even if we want to. Jews were forbidden to leave their homes on New Year’s Eve. Why? “Because of our many sins, during peaceful times we also celebrated and rejoiced according to the calendar of the nations.”83 Similarly, Unsdorfer argues, the Jews were taking advantage of secular education and modern means of communication. Now the schools are closed to them and they are forbidden even to have a radio at home. The ritual slaughter has now been forbidden because in the earlier years the Jews bought and consumed non-kosher food. They ordered us to wear yellow insignia to announce that we are Jews. Because of our many sins, how ashamed we were of our Jewish garments and names, of our fringes and of the mezuzah on our doorposts, when it 79 Ibid., 128–129. 80 Ibid., 81. 81 Ibid., 86. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid.

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was our obligation to have everyone who saw us recognize that we were the seed of the blessed God.  .  .  .  Now, as over-against this, the evil ones have decreed that everyone should recognize that we are Jews. Therefore, they have decreed that each of our shops display a prominent sign indicating that it is a Jewish shop.84

In this sermon Unsdorfer crafts a detailed list of trespasses of the covenantal obligations and punishments meted out for them. Legal regulations promulgated by the pro-Nazi Slovak authorities are presented in Unsdorfer’s sermons not simply as anti-Jewish measures devised by the government to further complicate the already difficult life of the Jewish community, but rather as responses to the breaches of the covenantal contract. These responses, in turn, have their origin, ultimately, in the divine. The afflictions lifted from their secular and political context are assigned meaning that would transcend their immediate circumstances. Unsdorfer was not free of doubts about the adequacy of the divine punishment. In the sermon he said: “Many of the evil decrees that we see with our senses are measure for measure.” Many but not all of them. How could the burning of the sick and elderly alive be a punishment? Despite doubts, however, Unsdorfer did not question the connection between sin and punishment nor did he try to offer an alternative interpretation. Instead, he focused on those cases in which he was able to point out the symmetry between trespasses and retribution. In this way the measure for measure framework remained intact and could still serve as a heuristic tool. Responding to the pre-war legal regulations negatively affecting the life of the Jewish community in Bratislava, Unsdorfer voiced his firm belief that “all this comes from heaven as a rebuke and admonishment for us to mend our deeds, confess our sins, and straighten our ways”85 and this basic understanding did not change over time. In his commentary to Pirkei Avot, Unsdorfer quoted the words Judah said about his daughter Tamar—“more in the right than me” (Gen. 38:26)—and interpreted them as referring to God: Jews always have to justify God’s judgment because he is righteous and “ours is shame.”86 God does not punish without justice,87 and hence

84 85 86 87

Ibid., 87. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 284. See BT Berakhot 5b.

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a trespass has to be discovered in order for the covenantal framework to endure. As stated in the Talmud: If a man sees that sufferings have come upon him, let him scrutinize his deeds, as it is said: “Let us search and try our ways, and return unto the Lord” (Lam. 3: 40). If he did scrutinize his deeds without finding [any sin for which he would deserve to suffer] let him attribute it [the suffering] to the sin of neglect of the Torah, as it is said: “Happy is the man whom Thou chastenest, and teachest out of Thy Torah” (Ps. 94: 12).88

Biblical and Talmudic perspective does not entirely eliminate the possibility of undeserved suffering. Classical Jewish sources, however, provide enough support for covenantal theodicy and hence they allow for treating such a situation as an inexplicable anomaly, a temporary disruption in the accepted framework of meaning, but importantly—an exception and not a rule. The rules, in turn, are unequivocal and posit a connection between sin and suffering. To paraphrase the Talmudic statement above: if one searches long enough and carefully considers her deeds, a sin will be found. It is not enough, however, to assert a link between sin and suffering. Sin provides the immediate cause, but by itself it does not point to any telos and hence it is insufficient to imbue suffering with constructive meaning. Suffering needs to serve a goal to be meaningful and covenantal theodicy recognizes that by linking suffering as punishment with repentance and purification. For this reason, it does not come as a surprise that in his January 3, 1942 sermon Unsdorfer approvingly quotes the oft-repeated sentence from the tractate Berakhot: “certainly suffering purifies sins of man.”89 He expressed this idea both in earlier and later sermons.90 In the Pirkei Avot commentary, Unsdorfer argued that purification and repentance were the goals of suffering.91 Troubles and pain come as a gift from God who wants to remove any pollution from his treasure—the Jewish people—and thereby restore it to its pristine state of purity and closeness to the divine realm.92 God is more exacting with us, declared Unsdorfer, because

88 89 90 91 92

BT Berakhot 5ab. BT Berakhot 5a. SS, 86. See e.g. the sermon from Sept 17, 1943 and from Sept 27, 1941. SS, 182. Ibid., 227.

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we are “the sons of the chosen people” and God “rebukes those he loves.”93 In this way, Unsdorfer established a connection between suffering, purification and divine love. Suffering does not come undeserved but even when it is a punishment it can still be perceived as afflictions of love rather than signs of divine wrath. God indeed punishes because he loves. Punishment is not a goal in itself but rather an opportunity for repentance and thereby a step toward restoration. Suffering comes so that we can get closer to God, Unsdorfer asserted.94 Or in other words, what seems to be an expression of the divine attribute of judgment is a manifestation of the attribute of mercy. Ultimately, the two are one and the differentiation itself originates exclusively in the imperfect nature of human perception.95 Suffering of the innocent, however, cannot be explained. On Yom Kippur, October 8, 1943, Unsdorfer pleaded: Sovereign of the world! . . . Behold, you know of all our hardships. We do not have the language to recite them all, but all is revealed to you. So many pious men and women have been murdered and slaughtered. Scholars, elderly men and women, youths, boys. All have been taken from their homes to sacrifice their souls in sanctification of God’s name. The rabbinic sages asked: why do we remember the death of the children of Aharon on Yom Kippur? To see that Aharon too atones (Yoma 53a). How many of those [who have been murdered] could not endure the troubles and died on the way? “O earth, do not cover their blood and let my cry have no place” (Job 16:18) until God looks down from heaven and avenges his nation and his Torah. Remember those sacrifices, look upon the Akedah and offer consolation. Subdue your wrath, stop the crime and destruction of your nation and have pity upon the remnant.96

The suffering of the innocent forced Unsdorfer to reach for the idea of martyrdom and the image of the Akedah. The explanatory connection between sin and punishment proved insufficient and so did the link between punishment and purification as an act of divine love. The persecution he witnessed compelled Unsdorfer to entirely abandon the idea of punishment. 93 Ibid., 226. Cf. Deuteronomy 8:5: “Bear in mind that the Lord your God disciplines you just as a man disciplines his son.” 94 SS, 280. 95 Ibid., 57. See also 85, 88, and 90. 96 Ibid., 156.

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On Rosh Ha-Shana, September 22, 1941, Unsdorfer expressed the state of nearly utter helplessness: We do not know what to do, what to say before you. How to placate you, how to lessen the wrath and anger and ire and your wish that we return to you. It is impossible in the time of trouble like this. . . . We are depressed and our souls are broken. . . . We desire to come close to you and to worship you but there is no strength in us.97

Continuing his sermon, Unsdofer explicitly questioned whether the rebuke from heaven was appropriate to the sins committed.98 There clearly were moments when Unsdorfer was incapable of providing explanations or comforting his community. He continued to offer explanations that employed the categories of sin and punishment until the suffering of the innocent rendered them unpersuasive and then reached for the idea of martyrdom. The biblical story of the binding of Isaac, elaborated further by the rabbis, is in itself a metahistorical paradigm. Unsdorfer’s doubts did not lead him to a rebellion against the covenantal pact but rather, like in Ehrenreich’s case, toward silence filled with hopeful anticipation. The source of hope was the covenant itself. While putting on the Jews the burden of numerous obligations and threatening them with calamities in case they did not live according to its requirements, the covenantal framework also made God’s involvement in Israel’s fate an unquestionable axiom. In his wartime commentary to the tractate Pirkei Avot, Unsdorfer wrote: Especially in the times like these we draw comfort from the fact that we are called God’s children. . . . As the prophet says: “I have shown you love, said the Lord. But you ask, ‘How have you shown us love?’ After all, declares the Lord, Esau is Jacob’s brother; yet I have accepted Jacob and have rejected Esau” (Mal. 1:2–3). The prophet comes with the words of consolation to the people of Israel in the time of trouble and says that God loves the world and loves us with fatherly love also in the time of trouble.99

The bound of love is present even in the time of hester panim, assures Unsdorfer. God hates the sin and not the sinner, he continues, and quotes an opinion attributed to Rabbi Meir according to whom whether sinful or 97 Ibid., 151. 98 Ibid., 153–154, 74, 84. 99 Ibid., 243.

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not the Jews remain the sons of God.100 The link between God and Israel can never be broken: “Forever we are God’s people and everything that happens to us comes from love a father has for his children.”101 In addition, the story of Jacob and Esau meaningfully illuminated the present as well as the future. The metahistorical paradigm assured the continuity of history, of the covenantal theodicy and of the covenant itself. God’s strict providence over history is a given of Unsdorfer’s thinking and he expressed his conviction numerous times over the years and always with unflinching certitude. On December 20, 1941 he appealed to his congregants: “And most importantly, do not despair, heaven forbid. Do not lose your spirit and trust. Because every moment is preordained in the higher providence and there will come a time when the darkness will end.”102 A year later, on January 3, 1942, Unsdofer said: In the future the joy will increase and we will forget all the days of trouble. But for now we are in a time of terrible trials. Heaven forbid that we should forget that everything is under the supervision of divine providence from heaven.103

On Shabbat Hagadol, March 28, 1942, Unsdorfer used the name of the ceremonial Passover dinner—seder (order)—to allude again to divine providence: This holy night is called seder, because this night and all the troubles, all the evil decrees, God forbid, and also redemption and salvation that came in the past and will come in the future—all this is in order; it is what the Holy One, blessed be he, wants and does to us.104

God’s continuous presence in history was indubitable for Unsdorfer as it was for Ehrenreich. Seeing it, however, Unsdorfer admitted, requires faith and trust. God’s presence is not obvious or transparent and can be discerned only from within the perspective of faith: The Talmud alludes to this: “If one omits to say the prayer ‘True and firm’ in the morning and the ‘True and trustworthy’ in the night, he has not performed his obligation. For it is written, ‘To declare your loving kindness 100 101 102 103 104

BT Kiddushin 36a. SS, 243. SS, 244. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 132.

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in the morning and your faithfulness in the night seasons’” (Ps. 92:3). Night alludes to the darkness of exile. Day alludes to redemption. If in time of trouble one truly believes that everything is from heaven and for one’s good, then one will be worth to see the “true and firm,” the “to declare your loving kindness in the morning” revealed, which is the day. On the condition of “your faithfulness in the night seasons.”105

Reflecting upon the words of Jacob—“The angel who has redeemed me from all evil” (Gen. 48:7)—Unsdorfer asked how possibly could Jacob, whose life was marked by so many troubles, say that he was redeemed from all evil? He answered as follows: Jacob [really] said, “Command our hearts to know that even when I was in very great trouble, I had faith and trust within me that the trouble would not be complete, heaven forbid. In the midst of my troubles I saw the light of God’s word.” This is “The angel who has redeemed me from all evil.” “The angel” means faith in God’s divine providence.106

What Unsdorfer recommends here could be described as both theological and existential hermeneutical circle reminiscent of the Anselmian formula credo ut intelligam107: faith and trust make understanding possible. Understanding, in turn, reinforces faith. The key to proper understanding of the events lies, then, in the perspective of the observer. Unsdorfer explained it by means of the story about a man who bought a mirror and was unhappy with it: After a few days the buyer came back to the store. He wanted to return the mirror because it was not good. All he saw in it was an angry face and ugly clothes. The store owner explained to him that there was nothing wrong with the mirror. The problem was in the viewer. And indeed, this is where the fault lied. When we see great troubles surrounding us and a lack of divine influence, the problem is not, heaven forbid, in God because evil never comes evil from him. The Holy One, blessed be he, has only goodness and mercy for us and all the creation. The problem is on the side of the receivers who cannot see and do not deserve all the goodness and mercy.108 105 Ibid., 84. 106 Ibid., 84. 107 See Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion: With the replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. by Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2001), I. 108 SS, 305.

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The pious are not spared the suffering. However, their existential stance of faith and trust deeply alters their perception of the afflictions. In his commentary to Pirkei Avot, Unsdorfer quotes the following talmudic passage: R. Samuel ben Nahmani stated that R. Johanan said: Calamity comes upon the world only when there are wicked persons in the world, and it always begins with the righteous, as it says, “If fire breaks out and catch in thorns” (Ex. 22:5). When does the fire break out? Only when thorns are found nearby. It always begins, however, with the righteous, as it says: so that the stack of corn was consumed. It does not say “and it would consume the stack of corn,” but “that the stack of corn was consumed” which means that the “stack of corn” had already been consumed.109

Unsdorfer referred to this passage also in his sermon for Rosh Hashanah, September 12, 1942. The righteous and the wicked seem to suffer equally, he observed.110 However, there is a crucial difference between them: The righteous ones do not undergo tribulations because for them doing God’s will is not suffering. . . . As it is said, “those who turn to the Lord shall not lack any good” (Ps. 34:11) which means that they do not want because all is good for them. And although it may seem sometimes that they do lack something because they have no bread, their houses are empty and garments worn out, their hearts rejoice and they do not feel any of this. It is so because their thoughts are always directed to God and his Torah and they are not worried. . . . They are thankful for every attribute he measures them and they trust deeply in the Lord that everything is for their good and that from him comes no evil.111

Even the proper attitude of faith and trust, however, does not yield an absolute or complete understanding—it is precluded by the ontological differences between God and human beings. How can a creature that is limited, embodied, and caught in the flow of time ever hope to fully comprehend the actions of an unlimited, timeless being? God is eternal, says Unsdorfer, and for this reason we will never be able to fully understand his actions in history.112 For now, the Jews can—and indeed must—trust that God is present behind the events they witness and the suffering they endure 109 110 111 112

BT Baba Kamma 60a. SS, 244. See also 141. SS, 141. Ibid., 265. See also 141. Ibid., 145.

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knowing that “there will come the time when we shall see that it is all for our good,” says Unsdorfer in the sermon from March 7, 1942.113 Elaborating on this point, Unsdorfer reaches for a distinction between commandments the rationale of which can be discovered by reason and those that remain beyond the limits of rational justification.114 The biblical commandment regarding the sacrifice of the red heifer (Num. 19:1–10) is an example of the latter. The Jews accept this commandment together with the entire covenant with love, declares Unsdorfer, without questioning or searching for justifications. The current afflictions should be received in the same manner: We do not ask and do not question, only keep the commandments with joy. We do the will of our father in heaven who gave us the Torah for our good, to elevate and improve us. We are accustomed to receiving and keeping God’s commandments without rationale in love and full faith. And just in this way when harsh decrees and oppression afflict us we should not ask questions and wonder about the attributes of God, because my thoughts are not your thoughts, said God. About this our rabbis taught: “I have laid down a statute; I have issued a decree! You cannot ponder it!”115

Recognizing and admitting the limits of possible explanations Unsdorfer takes recourse in an existential commitment of faith and trust. The heavenly decrees cannot always be fathomed, but always have to be accepted. On some occasions, understanding may come only ex post factum, states Unsdorfer, and refers to the verses from the book of Exodus: “And the Lord said . . . as my presence passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take my hand away and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen” (Ex. 33:21–23): In the end we can see that everything that comes from the Holy One, blessed be he, is for our good. Only beforehand we cannot see that. Before the act we cannot see everything. Only once the darkness is lightened up by the new light we will achieve the vision of God’s providence over us.116

Full comprehension, in other words, the certitude of knowledge, will come only with redemption. Until then, faith and trust must take the place of 113 114 115 116

Ibid., 117. Saadia Gaon, The Book of Doctrines, III, 2. Maimonides, The Guide, XXVI. SS, 118–119. Ibid., 117.

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understanding. Unquestioning faith and trust, one must add, and at this junction Unsdorfer reaches for the biblical example of such attitude in the figure of Abraham. For Unsdorfer, Abraham’s life serves as a paradigm through which to look at the dramatic situation of the Jewish community. Throughout 1941 and 1942, Unsdorfer employed two biblical stories as paradigms through which the events he witnessed were firmly placed within the boundaries of the covenantal history and theodicy. In the sermon from October 31, 1941, Unsdorfer quoted the idea to which Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich referred as well: “Maasei avot siman l’banim.”117 Unsdorfer’s sermons are yet another example of the way in which biblical and biblically rooted stories provided guidance to interpreting historical events. Lifted out of their immediate textual context and recast not so much as narratives but rather as models according to which reality unfolds, paradigms provided invaluable tools that enabled Ehrenreich and Unsdorfer to frame the events they were witnessing into the eternally valid framework of the covenantal relationship between Israel and God. In this way, the current oppression could have been placed in the metahistorical continuum instead of disrupting it. On December 13, 1941, Unsdorfer remarked that the Jews of Bratislava were not only reading the assigned Torah portions but actually living through them as well. Every portion describing the trials of Abraham was accurate as a depiction of the experiences of the community.118 In his Pirkei Avot commentary, Unsdofer listed the crucial elements of the paradigm and what he saw as their contemporary counterparts: 1. Ur Kasdim, when [Abraham] was cast into the fiery oven and he sanctified the name of God. For on account of our many sins, many thousands of our brothers in Poland and Germany have sacrificed themselves in sanctification of God’s name, have been murdered and burned, dying unnatural deaths. May God have mercy. . . . 2. “Get thee out of thy country” (Gen. 12:1). We too are in exile, leaving. Many thousands of our brothers have been exiled and wander around from dispersion to dispersion. 3. “And there was famine” (Gen. 12:10). 4. “And his wife was taken” (Gen. 12:15). So many wives have been separated from their husbands and children, as is known, may God have mercy. 5. War of the kings (Gen. 14). We too are amidst a terrible war, and danger looms over the head of every one, as in the battlefield, from 117 Ibid., 31. See also the sermon from November 7, 1942, Ibid., 48. 118 Ibid., 64.

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the new military weapons and firepower. May God guard and rescue us. 6. Slavery under evil rulers. 7. Circumcision. We too are smitten from head to foot, fearing terrible pain and suffering. 8. “And Abimelech king of Gerar sent, and took Sarah” (Gen. 20:2). 9. He chased out the mother and her child. Our children were chased out into prisons camps for hard labor. 10. Binding of Isaac. “For your sake we are killed all the day long, we are counted as sheep for the slaughter” (Ps. 44:23). And we too can say, what was said by Hannah to her seven sons: “My sons, go and tell Abraham your father, you bound one sacrifice but I bound seven” (Gittin 57b). It is impossible to go further into the matter. For it is dangerous. We are not even permitted to cry out.119

Every paradigm is doubly selective. First, not all elements of a narrative are included but only those deemed essential. Second, it is the paradigm that determines which parts of the historical reality are relevant and hence real and meaningful. Seeing events through its prism is necessarily selective— not everything that happens conforms to a paradigm. What lies beyond its scope is essentially bereft of meaning, precisely because it is the paradigm that makes things meaningful. The oppression of the Slovak Jewish community becomes a part of the larger covenantal narrative by being retold in terms of an eternally valid model rooted in the revelation itself. Not all events falling within the scope of a paradigm are equally important. Application of a model always allows for a differentiation in emphasis. Unsdorfer chose to emphasize two elements in particular—Abraham’s tests of leaving his home country and of biding of Isaac. Referring to the deportations of Jews from Bratislava, in October 1941, he wrote: We did not think, it did not occur to us, that also upon us and upon our children would come this test of lekh lekha. And now, in these days, it came. We are expelled from our homeland and the home of our father. . . . Many of our sons and many impoverished in our holy community were expelled to a strange land to hard work and hard troubles.120

Unfortunately, it is impossible to say when it became clear for Unsdorfer that the Jews deported from Slovakia and transported allegedly to labor camps were in fact destined to die in the death camps located in the Nazi occupied Poland. It is possible that this realization prompted Unsdorfer to refer to the binding of Isaac as an event finding its reenactment right now. 119 Ibid., 271–272. 120 Ibid., 31. See also SS, 32 (sermon from October 24, 1942).

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The first reference to the Akedah in Unsdorfer’s sermons occurs on October 24, 1942, when he lists those of Abraham’s trials that he saw as happening to his own community.121 Unsdorfer returns to the subject in 1943, when in the sermon prepared for January 17 he uses the biblical description of the binding of Isaac as both an accurate depiction of contemporary situation and as an example of how all trials coming from heaven should be received: “And about our times, today, parashat Akedah well explains what happens in actual fact. It speaks of mesirat nefesh of the sons of Israel in both body and possessions.”122 Mesirat nefesh or sacrificial submission of the self to the divine will was exemplified in Abraham’s unquestioned acceptance of God’s demand to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Now, as the trial is repeating itself, so are Abraham’s virtues: Where from comes to us the power and strong faith? Only from the inheritance of our forefathers. The strength of this old man, our father Abraham that showed at the trial to kill his only son as a sacrifice before the Holy One, blessed be he. His faith in God who promised to make his seed like the dust of earth and the stars in heaven did not abandon him.123

Abraham’s faith and trust in God was exemplary and today, argued Unsdorfer, it serves not only as a model to emulate but also—being a part of the patriarchs’ legacy—as a fundament and source of strength. Abraham was a true righteous man who lived each day of his life “in faith and trust”: And the one who truly believes in strict divine providence does not lack anything, his troubles are not really troubles, his death is not a real death, his grave is not forever. This is because a righteous man lives in faith and everything that the Holy One, blessed be he, wants is good for him, God’s will is his will. He annuls his own will before the will of the Holy One, blessed be he.124

Another paradigm Unsdorfer was relaying on especially in the years 1941–1942 is the story of the rivalry between Jacob and Esau. Similarly to Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer found this particular model very helpful as a lens 121 Ibid., 32. 122 Ibid., 42. For more about the Akedah in rabbinical and non-rabbinical interpretations see Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial. On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice. The Akedah (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). 123 SS, 41. 124 Ibid., 45.

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through which to look at the events that were unfolding before his eyes. Commenting upon the portion of the Torah describing the beginnings of the conflict between the brothers Unsdorfer said: Here begins the evil and crime that continues from the birth of Esau up to our day. Generation after generation, with short moments of respite, we are oppressed and crushed by Esau’s evil up to this day. And in our times this evil erupted with a bigger force than ever from the time of Esau’s birth.125

Interestingly, in this passage application of a biblical paradigm to new historical events is combined with a recognition that this time the Jews are submitted to persecution more intense than ever before. New historical context, however, does not invalidate the model. Although Esau’s hatred and aggression reached a new level, they still emanated from the same source. In other words, Unsdorfer uses the paradigm and as a result a novelty is seamlessly incorporated into the flow of covenantal history. The candle burns brightest shortly before it expires completely and the darkness is deepest right before the sunrise, offers Unsdorfer as an explanation of the increased intensity of oppression.126 Esau’s hatred is at its peak now, because soon it will be eradicated for good. Unsdorfer does not explain why Esau and his descendants hate the sons of Jacob, presumably because the reasons were established and elaborated upon sufficiently in rabbinical writings. He does, however, offer reasons that in his opinion account for the periodical eruptions of the otherwise latent animosity. Unsdorfer stance on the matter is yet another variation of the dynamics described by Ehrenreich—anti-Semitism erupts in acts of active violence against the Jews whenever they cross the boundaries set by the covenantal agreement. According to one interpretation, one of the fundamental requirements of the covenant is that the Jews remain different and separated from other nations: different by the dint of covenantal obligations and separated by continuous effort to uphold the prescribed way of life. Once the borders distinguishing Jews from gentiles become blurred due to increasing Jewish participation in the general culture, the latent animosity of the descendants of Esau is activated as a corrective measure. The Jews, argues Unsdorfer, provoked violence against them by their deeds and behavior, by displays of wealth, by modern clothing, by 125 Ibid., 49. On December 6, 1941 Unsdorfer remarks: “Everything that happened to our father with his brother Esau, happens to us always with the sons of Esau,” ibid., 58. 126 Ibid.

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participating in secular activities such as sports or theatre, and by entering public universities. Esau walks his own path. Why have we gotten involved with them? Why have we been teasing them? The holy Torah warned us: I will separate you from the nations and do not rejoice, Israel, over joys of the nations. . . . When we are secluded in our houses of study, when we do not imitate them, try to act like they act, to dress like they dress, to study their alien wisdom, when we remain separated from them—then they are not suspicious of us.127

Unsdorfer returns to this topic also in his commentary to Pirkei Avot where he puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of assimilated Jews whom he describes as responsible for “all our troubles”: “Because in truth all the time when the sons of our people remember that we are separated from the nations, that the holy Torah is our portion, that we are the treasure among the nations, then there is no persecution against Israel.”128 Anti-Semitism, then, is correlated with Jewish behavior and serves as a tool in covenantal economy. Does that mean that Unsdorfer subscribed to the logic sometimes described and decried as blaming the victim? Of course, the answer to this question is, as it has to be, positive. One has to keep in mind, however, that in the general framework that posits God as the ultimate active agent of history and connects suffering with punishment for sin no other understanding of anti-Jewish violence is readily available. That does not mean that it is impossible or non-existent, however. In the sermon for the holiday of Shavuot, June 9, 1943, Unsdorfer reaches for an alternative interpretation of anti-Jewish hatred, one that presents the antagonism between the gentiles and the Jews as rooted in the struggle between monotheism and idolatry. According to this understanding Jews became the object of hatred due to their commitment to monotheism or in other words ever since they accepted the Torah on Mount Sinai: “From the day when the Holy One, blessed be he, gave us our holy Torah we are at war with the nations of the world that want to annihilate us, the people Israel, the people of the Book.”129 In this sermon Unsdorfer explains anti-Jewish aggression not as a punishment from God for a breach in the covenantal contract but on the contrary—as a price Jews pay for their faithfulness to it. 127 Ibid., 58–59. 128 Ibid., 237. 129 Ibid., 138. BT Shabbat 89b.

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Many ideas expressed in Unsdorfer’s sermons resemble those put into writing by Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich. This does not come as a surprise given the common background of tradition these two thinkers shared. The most striking difference between these two authors lies more in what is absent than in what is present. While both of them were highly critical of assimilationist tendencies and listed assimilation as one of the sins deserving retribution from God, Unsdorfer, unlike Ehrenreich, is relatively silent about Zionism.130 I do not have an explanation for this. It may be a reflection of Unsdorfer’s more open attitude toward the idea of Jewish settlement in Palestine which would be in line with his mainstream Orthodox background. As the historian Jacob Katz, who attended the Pressburg yeshivah, recalled in his autobiography, by the 1920s the leadership of Bratislava’s Orthodox community aligned with Agudat Israel and while it was vehemently opposed to secular Zionism it did tolerate, if barely, the Zionism’s religious wing.131 It may also be linked to the theme of Jewish solidarity present in his sermons. More than once Unsdorfer appealed to his congregants to help those who found themselves in an even more difficult situation. Unsdorfer stressed this motif also in his comments to the tractate Pirkei Avot. When we ask God for help and mercy, he declared, we need to remember that God requires us to be helpful and merciful to our brothers.132 And commenting upon Pirkei Avot 2:5133 he again emphasized the need for solidarity and non-judgmental attitude.134 That, however, does not explain why Unsdorfer was willing to blame the assimilated Jews. Perhaps from his perspective those Jews, unlike the religious Zionists, willingly put themselves outside the boundaries of the community. Paradigmatic thinking provided Unsdorfer with such an understanding of the history of the Jewish people where the blurring of the boundaries 130 There are only two references to Zionism in Unsdorfer’s war-time sermons (SS, 233, 246). Both are critical but the criticism is mild. 131 See Katz’s short but insightful description of his time in Bratislava in With My Own Eyes: The Autobiography of an Historian, trans. by Ann Brenner and Zipora Brody (Hanover: University Press of New England), 50–61. Rabbi Akivah Sofer left Bratislava for Palestine in 1939. The yeshivah was closed in the summer of 1943 and later reestablished in Jerusalem. 132 SS, 191. 133 “Hillel said: Do not separate yourself from the community; do not believe in yourself until the day you die; do not judge your fellow until you have reached his place; do not make a statement that cannot be easily understood on the ground that it will eventually be understood.” 134 Ibid., 223–226.

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separating Jews from gentiles prompts an eruption of anti-Jewish hatred and violence. Similarly, it was the source from which Unsdorfer could gain the insight that disaster implies restoration. Similarly to Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer did experience moments when covenantal theodicy appeared to crumble. Even then, however, he managed to interpret the suffering he witnessed as martyrdom, as a sanctification of the divine name. And when even this interpretation proved inadequate, there always remained the trustful silence of the patriarch Abraham as a path to follow. The hand of God might be mysterious and terrifying, but for Unsdorfer it remained a hand of God. The covenantal theodicy, however undermined, remained viable. Ultimately, it was human comprehension that was limited.

Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal was born in Kiskunhalas in south Hungary in 1885. His father, Itzhak Teichthal, made sure that his son received proper religious education and was introduced into the world of Hungarian Orthodoxy by significant scholars of the time. In 1920, Teichthal moved to Pieštany in Slovakia. In this small town, quite a popular summer resort at the time, Teichthal had an opportunity to meet and interact with many of the prominent members of Hungarian ultra-Orthodoxy, most notably the Munkaczer Rebbe, Chaim Elazar Shapira whose follower he became.135 The Slovak Republic was one of the first members of the Axis to consent to the deportations of its Jewish residents. The agreement between Slovakia and Germany regarding deportations was signed in March 1942 and first transports of Slovakian Jews left the country on March 25 of that year. The wave of deportations reached Pieštany in the end of summer of 1942. Teichthal and his closest relatives managed to avoid the Slovak forces that rounded up the Jewish inhabitants of the town by hiding in the attic of the local synagogue. In October 1942, Teichthal made his way to Budapest where he spent a year and a half. During this time, he completed Em ha-Banim Samekha—the book he had started working on already in 135 On Chaim Elazar Shapira see Allan L. Nadler, “The War on Modernity of R. Hayyim Elazar Shapira of Munkacz,” Modern Judaism 14 (1994): 233–264; Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Religious Radicalism, 40–62; Levi Cooper, “The Munkaczer Rebbe Chaim Elazar Shapira the Hassidic Ruler: Biography and Theology,” (Ph.D. diss., Bar Ilan University, 2011); Motti Inbari, “Messianic Activism in the Works of Chaim Elazar Shapira, the Munkacz Rebbe, between Two World Wars” [Hebrew], Cathedra 149 (2013): 77–104.

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Pieštany and in which he presented his reflections about the ongoing persecutions. In the spring of 1944, Teichthal decided to return to Slovakia, convinced that the danger had already passed. He was mistaken. He was detained shortly after crossing the border and soon afterwards deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Em ha-Banim Samekha was published in Budapest in December of 1943. It contains Teichthal’s interpretation of the catastrophic events he witnessed as well as a description of what he believed to be the proper response to them on both religious and political level. In the 1980s Em ha-Banim Samekha became an important reading in the religious Zionist circles in Israel. It has come to prominence due to what has been described as Teichthal’s change of heart: while in his pre-war writings Teichthal, as one would expect from a follower of the Mukaczer Rebbe, expressed radically anti-Zionist views,136 in Em ha-Banim Samekha he furnished a theological justification of Jewish emigration to the Land of Israel. All interpreters of Teitchthal’s writings agree that his thinking underwent a major change, albeit its details as well as the question whether Em ha-Banim Samekha should indeed be described as a religious Zionist work remain disputable.137 Rather than directly adding to these debates, 136 In 1936 Teichthal contributed a letter to Tikun Olam, a volume edited by a student of Chaim Elazar Shapira contains the Munkaczer Rebbe’s high holidays sermons and a collection of letters by prominent rabbis against Agudat Israel and Zionism. Moshe Goldstein, Tikun Olam (Mukacevo, 1936), 104–107. 137 For various interpretations of Em Ha-Banim Samekha see Shmuel Hacohen Weingarten, “From Yeven Metsula to the Celestial Jerusalem” [Hebrew], Or ha-Mizrah, 19 (1970): 235–245; Rivka Schatz-Oppenheimer, “Confession on the Brink of the Crematoria and ‘Afterword,’ a Haredi Rabbi Regrets” [Hebrew], Kivunim 23 (1984): 49–62; Pesach Schindler, “Tikkun as Response to Tragedy: Em Habanim Smeha of Rabbi Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal–Budapest, 1943,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, no. 4 (1989): 413– 433; Eliezer Schweid, “A Happy Mother of Children: The Theodicy of the Zionist God of Rabbi Yissakhar Schlomo Teichthal” [Hebrew], in Tribute to Sarah: Studies in Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah Presented to Professor Sara O. Heller Wilensky, ed. M. Idel, D. Dimant, and S. Rosenberg [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1994), 380–98; Eliezer Schweid, “The Turn to Historical Activism: The Dispute Between Rabbis Teichtal and Rokeach in the Belz Hasidic Court on the Attitude Toward Zionism” [Hebrew], in his History of the Philosophy of the Jewish Religion in the Modern Era (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2006), 280–295; Yitzhak Hershkovitch, “The Vision of Redemption in Rabbi Yissakhar Shlomo Teichtal’s Writings. Changes in his Messianic Approach during the Holocaust” [Hebrew] (PhD. diss., Ramat-Gan, 2009); Yitzhak Hershkovitch, “’Em Habanim Semecha’: A Canonic Treatise or a Dialectical Composition?” [Hebrew], Alei Sefer 22 (2011): 115–127; Daniel Reiser, “Aspects in the Thought of Rabbi Yisachar Shlomo Teichtal and a Study of New Documents,” Yad Vashem Studies 43, no. 2 (2015): 143– 190; Motti Inbari, “Messianic Expectations in Hungarian Orthodox Theology before and during the Second World War: A Comparative Study,” Jewish Quarterly Review

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I focus on the metahistorical dimension of Teichthal’s response to Nazi persecutions. There was little doubt, according to Teichthal, that the day of redemption was near. The belief in the coming of the Messiah, he noted, is fundamental to the Jewish people. The vision of the messianic future, however, is accompanied by dreadful predictions: “our prophets, as well as our sages of blessed memory, have predicted in the literature of the Talmud, the Midrash and Kabbalah the period of great suffering, persecutions and slaughter which will befall the Jewish people in the end of days prior to the advent of the Messiah. From these demonstrations of suffering, one may already recognize the period in which the light of the Messiah glows.”138 The notion of hevlei mashiah—the birth pangs of the Messiah—has a long history in Jewish tradition and points to an apocalyptic tension in Jewish messianic mythology.139 Already in the Mishnah we read: With the footprints of the Messiah: presumption increases, and dearth increases. The vine gives its fruit and wine at great cost. And the government turns to heresy. And there is no reproof. . . . And those who fear sin will be rejected. And the truth will be locked away. Children will shame elders, and elders will stand up before children.140

Although the notion of hevlei mashiah itself does not appear in Scripture, Scripture provides enough images of turmoil preceding redemption to feed messianic imagination. In such apocalyptic visions, redemption does not occur through a chain of discrete and imperceptible events, but instead it is heralded by a dreadful shaking of the established order—moral and political. By the time of Mishnah’s final redaction there existed a generally accepted theory of the Messiah’s coming: We may surmise that Jews in general believed in the coming of a Messiah, and in the resurrection of the dead, which was somehow related to that (Fall 2017): 506–530; Motti Inbari, The Making of Modern Jewish Identity: Ideological Change and Religious Conversion (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019), 67–85. 138 Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal, Em ha-Banim Samekha (Jerusalem: Machon Pri HaAretz, 1983), 62. Hereafter cited as EHS. 139 See Gershon Bacon, “Birth Pangs of the Messiah: The Reflections of Two Polish Rabbis on Their Era,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry 7: Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 86–99. 140 M. Sotah 9:15.

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advent. They further believed that the ‘footprints of the Messiah’ would mark a path through deepening darkness and decay, a world so miserable that only supernatural intervention could save it.141

The vision of this darkness led some rabbis to voice the following wish that encapsulates both the hope and the fear of redemption: “Let him [the Messiah] come, but let me not witness it.”142 However, for those who lived through what seemed to be the fulfillment of the direst prophecies, the notion of hevlei mashiah provided a source of consolation: when “many troubles wash over the people like a river, [you may] expect him [the Messiah].”143 Already in the biblical book of Daniel, the gruesome imagery of the war between the four kingdoms that would drench the world in blood concludes with a comforting picture: At that time, the great prince, Michael, who stands besides the sons of your people will appear. It will be a time of trouble, the like of which has never been since the nation came into being. At that time, your people will be rescued, all who are find inscribed in the book. . . . And the knowledgeable will be radiant like the bright expanse of sky, and those who lead the many to righteousness will be like the stars forever and ever. (Dan 12: 1–2)

In other words, in the deepest darkness a careful observer could discern the light of the dawning redemption. Teichthal was convinced he was witnessing precisely that: The wars which took place in our time, from the year 5674 . . . , having as yet not actually ceased, flaring up here and there, only to erupt on a worldwide scale larger than ever . . . point to the dawning of redemption, as it is said in the tractate Megillah: “War is an omen of the dawning of redemption.” The Midrash Rabbah, Lekh, confirms this: “If you see nations who provoke one another [to war] you may anticipate the footsteps of the Messiah. [How may we know this?] We know this from Abraham. During his time there erupted warfare between the kings. Consequently, it was Abraham who was redeemed.”144

141 Jacob Neusner, Messiah in Context. Israel’s History and Destiny in Formative Judaism (Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1984), 38. 142 BT Sanhedrin 98b. 143 Ibid. 144 EHS, 131.

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Abraham’s life, seen as a metahistorical paradigm, makes it possible to interpret the animosity and warfare between the nations of the world as correlated with the approaching redemption. The chaos that engulfed the war-torn Europe and the persecutions against the Jews indicate that redemption is near. “There is no doubt,” writes Teichthal, “that we have drawn near to these very times. One may hear the voices of weeping in the corners of Jewish homes which are filled with great horror, may God have mercy. This holds true even more for our fellow Jews in Poland, Slovakia, and other European countries. The destruction, the murders, the massacres, the cruelties, [directed against] infants and the aged, the annihilation of great communities once filled with scholars, authors and pious schoolchildren who were flowering amidst the study of Torah—this is known to all.”145 The idealized image of the peaceful past is contrasted with the reality of current oppression and destruction. There is hope, however, to be found within the devastation as the dramatic present carries in itself a promise of an infinitely better future: There is [a lesson] in the Tikkunei Zohar Hadash appended to the Zohar Hadash on the verse: “I the Lord will speed it in due time.” It has been established: “If they are worthy, I will speed it; if not, [the Messiah will come] in due time. One ought to know what is meant by the ‘time’ of ‘the Lord.’” [After all] there is a time and there is a time. This is the hidden meaning of Kohelet: “A time to weep and a time to laugh.” As soon as it is time for weeping, because Israel is oppressed, the time for our redemption will be at hand. This is why it is written: “It is a time of trouble for Jacob, but he shall be delivered from it.” . . . And when Moses saw the oppression and poverty of Israel it was written: “and behold a boy was crying.” Yet what does the verse indicate immediately following the crying? “She took pity on him.” This is redemption.146

The Messiah will come whether Jews are worthy or not. Only the timing will differ. Redemption itself remains a certainty. It has to arrive, because this is what the covenantal relationship demands. Teichthal, following in the footsteps of numerous predecessors, imbues suffering with meaning by placing it in an eschatological perspective. The truth of the promise of the ultimate reconciliation between the partners of the covenant remains 145 Ibid., 80. 146 Ibid., 79–80.

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axiomatic for him. The exact nature of messianic future may be unclear and the timing of its arrival uncertain, but the fact itself is unquestionable. The idea that the suffering he was witnessing was of redemptive nature is central to Teichthal’s reasoning. Em ha-Banim Samekha can be understood as a description of the conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for the period of the birth pangs of the Messiah to reach its redemptive conclusion. Redemption entails the end of exile which Teichthal, following the insight of the Maharal of Prague in his Netzah Yisrael,147describes as an unnatural state, as a departure from natural order of things: Observe the interpretation of our sages of blessed memory in the Midrash on the verse “And He said to Abram: Know well [that] your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs”: “Know that I shall disperse them. Know as well that I shall gather them.” That is to say, from the very dispersion you will know that I shall gather them in. . . . Exile itself is clear proof of redemption, since it is a departure and a deviation from [the natural] order. . . . Exile is a deviation and departure from the natural habitat. Hence, from exile we may understand redemption.148

The natural habitat of the Jewish people is Eretz Israel to which it is destined to return. The Maharal argued that in the “normal” or “natural” order, every nation has its place on earth assigned by God. Teichthal subscribes to this reasoning. Exile is an abnormality and as such is bound to end—Israel will return to its God-given land. Jews can, however, through their physical as well as spiritual activities influence the timing of the redemption. Against a long-standing tradition of passive attitude toward redemptive process, Teichthal takes a pronouncedly activist approach. Among many debates regarding the nature of the ultimate redemption one controversy concerns the following question: does the fulfillment of the messianic hope depend on any kind of deliberate human action? This issue can be divided into three more specific questions: Will redemption simply happen at some predestined although yet unknown time regardless of the events in the historical realm? Is it at all possible and is it advisable to try to “hasten the end” by human involvement? And last but not least—if it is both possible and in fact desirable, then what kind of activity can bring the time of redemption closer? 147 R. Judah Loew ben Bezalel (c. 1525–1609). His work Netzah Yisrael, devoted to the problem of exile and redemption, was published in Prague in 1599. 148 EHS, 261–262.

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As in many other questions regarding the messianic future, these three have been answered in many diverse ways. Prior to the dramatic failure of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion (132–136 CE), numerous uprisings against foreign domination testify to the fact that many Jews believed that the advent of the Messiah not only could but also should be hastened by means of military and political action. The calamitous consequences of BarKokhba’s defeat, however, prompted a change and the further development of messianic ideas in Judaism betrays a constantly existing tension between activism and a quietist approach. The verse 2:7 of Song of Songs reads: “I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles and by the hinds of the field, do not awaken or stir up love until its ready.” It was given the following rabbinical commentary: “Four vows are contained here. The Israelites are adjured not to revolt against the kingdoms of the world, not to press for the End, not to reveal their mystery to the nations of the world, and not to come up from exile like a wall [in great masses].”149 Rabbinical leaders for many centuries continued to warn against “pressing for the End” and discouraged various attempts at calculating the date of the coming of the Messiah.150 As R. J. Zwi Werblowsky observed, “Whatever the historical experience that led to this unequivocal rejection of all messianic activism, the temptation was evidently there and had to be guarded against. The only activism that was admitted was of a spiritual kind.”151 The principal and most accepted form of this spiritual activism was repentance. It was not a unanimous opinion, but according to many the coming of the Messiah did—at least partially—depend on human spiritual action. Jews could make themselves worthy of redemption by repentance: “If Israel would repent even for a single day, they would be instantly redeemed and the Son of David would instantly come, for it says (Ps. 95:7): Today if you will listen to his voice.”152 It was Teichthal’s firm conviction that “his 149 Song of Songs Rabbah, II, 7 (Cf. Ketubot 11a). See Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, 211–234. 150 For instance, Maimonides in the introduction to Sanhedrin, ch. 10, of Mishneh Torah declared: “The twelfth principle concerns the Days of the Messiah. . . . And one must not determine a time for him nor speculate on biblical verses in order to bring about his coming. And the sages said: ‘May the spirit of those who calculate the End be extinguished.’” 151 R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Messianism in Jewish History” in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. Marc Saperstein (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), 47. 152 Exodus Rabbah 25:16.

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voice” was audible numerous times during the long history of Jewish exile. Unfortunately, it has not been listened to. The call for teshuvah resounded again and again. In Teichthal’s view it asked, however, for something more than a purely spiritual act: “The very act of return to Eretz Yisrael is the essence of repentance.”153 Teichthal agrees with the tradition that repentance is a condition sine qua non of redemption. But what he has in mind extends beyond a renunciation of sin and pious life filled with Torah study. Unless the Jews repent, the Messiah will not come, but repentance requires not only a spiritual act—it needs to be combined with an involvement in the restoration of the Jewish people in the land given them by God. Just like Israelites left the bondage in Egypt in order to establish themselves as a free people in their own land, now it is time for the Jews of Europe to leave behind the subjugation and suffering of exile and return to the place on earth that has always been their true home. The existence in exile—similarly to the life of slavery in Egypt—is not a natural state, but rather it reflects the fact that Jewish people have fallen from their original state. Neither prayer nor good intentions are enough to alleviate this situation, according to Teichthal: This faith in the coming of the Messiah is relevant to us as well. Should we choose to refrain from action and prefer to await his coming, when he would swoop down and carry us off to Eretz Yisrael, [this attitude] would confirm that we have no faith at all. Such faith would be merely superficial and self-deceiving. One who acts upon this faith, however, testifies to such faith. . . . Such we have witnessed during the first redemption in Egypt, which is considered the origin of all subsequent redemptions. The Lord asked “Why do you cry out to me?” (Ex. 14:15) in prayer. Prayer will not help you at all. Rather “tell the Israelites to go forward” [Ibid.]. Though the journey in itself was dangerous, since they had no alternate route except by means of the sea with its turbulent waters, yet this very act of movement complemented for them their faith in redemption. Consequently, the true redemption of the Holy One, blessed be He, followed in its wake. This must be our model as well.154

Teichthal interprets the long history of suffering and persecution in exile from the perspective of the relations between Jews, God, and Eretz Israel. 153 EHS, 106. 154 Ibid., 333.

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For him, it is beyond any doubt that it is God—the Cause of all Causes155— who is the ultimate agent operating in Jewish history: “This is the will of God. What we are experiencing in exile has not come about by random chance.”156 Writing in 1943, Teichthal perceived the wave of anti-Jewish measures as different from previous periods of persecution: Never in all of Israel’s history has there been such a misfortune. True, there have been difficult periods in the past. But these were spaced during different periods and places which permitted our forefathers alternate sites for refuge. The massive and comprehensive form of the current destruction of this European continent  .  .  .  is now characterized by complete imprisonment with no opportunity for escape. Everything is being destroyed. Every nation has shut its gates before us.157

Something like that has not occurred since the time of Haman, remarks Teichthal in the second preface to Em ha-Banim Samekha.158 This judgment, however, is modified later in the text when Teichthal repeatedly returns to his interpretation of the difficult periods in the history of European Jewry to argue that all of them should be seen in the context of the double triangle: one between Jewish people, its land, and God, and another between exile, repentance, and redemption. Consider the following passage where Teichthal uses imagery from Song of Songs Rabbah: The mystery of exile and the hardships of the decrees which have constantly been our lot are designed to arouse us from our slumber in exile. This is the 155 Ibid., 76. 156 Ibid., 138–139. Commenting upon a similar expression of Teichthal’s conviction of the role of God as an active agent in the covenantal drama, Pesach Schindler, the translator and editor of the English edition of EHS, voices doubts as to whether such language should be taken literally: “Are these mere conventional phrases of rabbinic language? Would even such standard parlance have been expunged by the author had he known in 1943 the true extent and final consequences of the Shoah? Surely, a treatise which places Ahavat Yisrael in the center of its concern would not simultaneously allow the architects of the Final Solution to appear even remotely as agents of the Divine. . . . Though Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar were depicted as God’s agents in rabbinic literature, no serious scholar would go so far with Hitler.” EHS, xliv. I disagree with Schindler’s words the apologetic intention of which is, I believe, rather transparent. We may only stipulate as to what Teichthal would have said had he survived the Holocaust. The textual evidence of EHS, however, testifies clearly to the fact that he did share the traditional belief regarding God’s historical agency. See also Schweid “The Other Face of Orthodoxy,” 92–94. 157 EHS, 17. 158 Ibid., 18.

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voice of our Beloved. This refers to the Holy One, blessed be he, who knocks at the portal of our hearts to stimulate within us a desire and longing to return to our Holy Land.159

In accordance with traditional understanding of history perceived through the lens of the covenant and with the image of God as the omnipotent agent who shapes events according to his will Teichthal declares: Now, however, the Prime Advisor, Planner and Mover of that is formidable and awe-inspiring, has seen fit to cause all of our neighbors to persecute us with oppressive decrees.  .  .  .  . Suddenly, they have been transformed into enemies and evil neighbors who hound us. But this is only because they have been incited against us by a particular Source. This impulse emanates from the profound purpose of God, in order that “we will return,” to ascend to Eretz Yisrael.160

These drastic measures were, in Teichthal’s opinion, justified. “Now, should redemption take place in a setting of goodness, tranquility and calm among the nations, many of our Jewish brethren would never consider leaving. What would they lack here in exile?”161 he asks rhetorically and refers to a midrashic commentary upon a verse from Lamentations: “She dwells among the nations, she finds no rest” (Lam. 1:3). R. Judah b. R. Nehemiah said in the name of R. Simeon b. Lakish: If she had found rest, she would have not returned [to Eretz Israel].162

A brutal intervention of the divine was, in other words, necessary to wake the Jews from their complacent slumber in exile. In fact, they have forgotten, says Teichthal, that they are in exile at all. They decided to settle down “among the nations.” Some, as Teichthal puts it, “have sold the birthright of Israel for a portion of lentil stew of the nations.”163 Not surprisingly, Teichthal is critical of assimilationist tendencies. Referring to the Nuremberg Laws adopted in the Nazi Germany and to similar albeit less extreme regulations introduced in Hungary, he speaks of an act of divine goodness—God, declares Teichthal, saw to it that the Jews were reminded of being Jews. Only through the actions of the now hostile environment 159 160 161 162 163

Ibid., 68. See also Ibid., 31. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 66. Lamentations Rabbah, I. 3, 29. EHS, 67. Ibid., 68.

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they could have been made aware—voluntarily or not—of their Jewish heritage.164 Even harsher, however, is Teichthal’s judgment regarding the actions— or, to be more precise, the inaction—of religious leaders of the Jewish community. As he states succinctly in the second preface to his work, “the suffering which befalls Israel is due to bad leaders.”165 Jewish leaders failed their followers both in the past and in the present. With respect to the former Teichthal declares: The prophet Jeremiah had this in mind in his elegy: “Our fathers sinned and are no more; we remain to bear their iniquities.” They sinned by eliminating themselves from the efforts at creating an autonomous way of life for themselves in their sacred Land, like every other nation. They acted as if they were no longer in the world at all, as if they were not an independent nation with rights to live in its own land. . . . What is the consequence of all this? We bear their iniquities and pay with the suffering we presently endure.166

The current leadership performs no better. Religious leaders are not guilty of assimilation, but their attitude towards the Land of Israel is ultimately not different from those who completely renounced their attachment to the Jewish community—both are indifferent if not outright hostile to the idea of returning to Jewish ancestral homeland even if the pious still pay a lip service to the idea of restoration. Teichthal compares the Jewish leadership to biblical spies whom Moses sent into Canaan (Num. 13:1–16): Since their ambition for authority was firmly rooted within them . . . they were afraid that should they come to Eretz Yisrael they will lose their positions of authority. They turned against this lovely land and deceived others as well  .  .  .  the spies suffered from a deeply rooted bias because of selfish motives. The current situation is similar even among rabbis, rebbes and their Hasidim. This one has a good rabbinic post; another is endowed with a lucrative Rebistve. This one owns a profitable business or factory or is appointed to a good and prestigious position offering great satisfaction. They are frightened that should they move to Eretz Yisrael their status will be shaken.167 164 165 166 167

Ibid., 68–70. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 209. Ibid., 26–27.

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Teichthal did recognize and admit that the opposition to the idea of returning to the Land of Israel was not always motivated by ambitions for power and earthly success. In response to arguments rooted in rabbinical sources, Teichthal argued that halakhic rulings formulated in an entirely different historical situation could not be uncritically accepted and applied. There were factors other than the inner logic of halakhic decision-making that had to be taken into account. “If we do not change our attitudes,” declared Teichthal, “our misfortunes will further undermine us.” Those, who oppose the idea of the restoration of Jewish national life in Palestine, ignore signs that are, in his opinion, unambiguous, just like the Israelites repeatedly ignored the calls of their prophets. The “misfortunes and shameful calamities” happening currently to the Jews of Europe “actually represent a substitute for the exhortations of the prophets. They entreat, urging us to awake from our idle slumber.”168 They should be seen as “the finger of God directing us to leave exile for the inheritance of our fathers.”169 Teichthal places the persecutions of the Jews under the Nazi domination within the paradigm of exile and redemption, punishment and reconciliation preceded by repentance. The exile initially happened as a just retribution for sin.170 According to Teichthal’s interpretation of Jewish history, the time allotted by God for this punishment has already run its course. The Jews, however, instead of responding to repeated divine calls for return, decided to settle in exile and in this way added to their initial offence. Complacency in exile, acceptance of the exilic existence as normal, itself should be considered a sin. Exile constitutes a divergence from the primordial order of reality on the ontological as well as moral level. Redemption is certain, but it requires human action. The penitent return— teshuvah—is a condition of redemption. However, for Teichthal teshuvah means more than renunciation of sin. It entails return to God and to the Land.171 On a certain level, in fact, these two are the two sides of one coin: 168 169 170 171

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 139. See also Ibid., 202–204. See, e.g., Ibid., 94. While some of Teichthal’s ideas, such as this one, resemble those of Rav Avraham Kook, it remains unclear whether Teichthal was familiar with his writings. Teichthal did know the works of Yehudah Alkalai and Zvi Kalisher, however Em ha-Banim Samekha does not contain any references to those of Avraham Kook. It is impossible to say with certainty why it is so. It is possible both that Teichthal was not aware of them and that although he did know them he decided not to use them to support his arguments.

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The Tosefta in Avodah Zarah remarks upon the verse: “And I will faithfully plant them in this Land,” “[Whevener] they shall be on the Land they will be as if I planted them before me, faithfully, with all my heart and soul, [but if they] not be settled upon her, they will not be planted before me faithfully, neither will my whole heart nor soul.” It is indeed startling for the Holy One, blessed be he, to declare that when Israel is not in its Land they are not at one with him in heart and soul. What has befallen us in our time and the limited degree of evident [divine] providence should not astonish us, since he is not faithfully linked to us with his entire heart and soul. We are after all in the land of other nations. When we shall attempt to return to her, then we will immediately cleave to him with all our heart and soul.172

Physical separation from the Land causes a separation from the divine. The connection between Israel and God is channeled through the Land. With Israel living in exile, the ties are not severed but they are significantly diminished. This helps explain the intensity of Jewish suffering: God is not as close to his people as he would have been, had they lived in the Land. Had they lived where they were supposed to, the enemies of Israel would never have been able to persecute them as much as they did. Instead of striving to restore the covenantal bond to its pristine form, Jews, accepted their lives in exile, accommodated to the demands of their host cultures, and further alienated themselves from God. The physical return to Erez Israel constitutes, according to Teichthal, the first and necessary step toward reconciliation and rectification of the covenantal relationship. Full repentance, he argues, is impossible without divine help which in turn is conditioned upon Israel’s presence in the land that was promised to them. Why Elijah has not yet come, Teichthal asks and finds the answer in the following fragment of the book of Deuteronomy: And the Lord your God will bring you to the Land which your fathers inherited and you shall occupy it. . . . Then the Lord your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live. (Deut. 30: 5–6)

Referring to the Or Ha-Hayyim commentary Teichthal continues: Now the verse first specifies our entry into the Land and its occupation as our inheritance from our forefathers. Following this, the Lord will open our 172 Ibid., 23–24.

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hearts and project upon us a spirit of purity from above, which in turn will direct our hearts to him. However, this is impossible as long as we are in an alien land. The spirit of purity would then necessarily be prevented from reaching us.173

Teshuvah, then, is a prerequisite of redemption, but it can be complete only when Jews dwell in Eretz Israel. They cannot passively wait for a miraculous divine intervention to bring them there. For Teichthal, redemption depends on human initiative: “all which is of divine concern requires first the human act. Thereafter, the individual is assisted by Heaven.”174 In the case at hand, this principle translates into a call for action: Primarily, God expects us to assume the initiative and yearn to return to our Land. We should not wait until he himself brings us there . . . we are consciously to strive and yearn for this purpose, faithfully, with all our abilities. Then he will successfully complete the task for us.175

The Torah does not rely on miracles, asserts Teichthal, echoing Maimonides, and neither should the Jews.176 There will be no sudden and miraculous ascent to the Land, but rather a gradual process of immigration, of settling and rebuilding: “our future redemption will evolve naturally. That is to say, it will appear as a miracle disguised in a natural setting.”177 The initiative needs to come from the Jews themselves and the time for it, according to Teichthal, is now. Although Teichthal does describe the new wave of anti-Jewish persecutions as a novum in Jewish history at least since the times of Haman, his theological considerations effectively minimize the distinctiveness of the event. It may be the greatest calamity in European Jewry’s history, but it does not disrupt this history which remains shaped by the covenantal relationship between Israel and God. The most recent assault against the Jews is different in scale, but not in quality: it is yet another occurrence that can be explained by the precarious condition of exile. The only genuine novelty on the level of historical developments, according to Teichthal, consists of the sustained efforts on the part of some to settle in the Land of Israel. Even 173 174 175 176 177

Ibid., 76. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 91.

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this, however, fits into a metahistorical paradigm of exile and restoration or the ingathering of exiles. The divine promise of putting an end to exile and restoring the Jewish people in the Land appears for the first time in the book of Deuteronomy where after the detailed description of destruction and exile one reads the following declaration: The Lord you God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the end of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there he will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed and you shall possess it. (Deut. 30:3–5)

This belief in the ingathering of the exiled communities echoes again and again in the prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. “[God] will hold up a signal to the nations and assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth,” asserts Isaiah (Is. 11:12).178 In the words of the book of Jeremiah: “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock from all the lands to which I have banished them, and I will bring them back to their pasture, where they shall be fertile and increase” (Jer. 23:3).179 Ahistorical—or paradigmatic—reading of the biblical text predictably divorces these promises from their historical context. For the rabbis, the divine promise referred neither to Babylonian nor to Assyrian exiles exclusively, but rather to the exile as a general condition on a metahistorical level. The ingathering of exiles was not a notion referring only to a historically specific event of the past. It was transformed into a part of the messianic age, an occurrence beyond the limits of history and comparable to creation itself: “The day of the ingathering of exiles is as great as the day on which heaven and earth were created.”180 The pious ask for it three times a day in the Amidah prayer: Sound the great shofar for our freedom, raise the banner of to gather our exiles and gather us together from the four corners of the earth. Blessed are you, God, who gathers in the dispersed of his people Israel.181 178 179 180 181

See also Is. 27:13, 56:8, 66:20. See also Jer. 16:15, 29:14, 31:8, 33:7 as well as Ez. 20:34, 37:21. BT Pesachim 88a. The Complete ArtScroll Siddur. Weekday, Sabbath, Festivals. Nusach Ashkenaz.

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This, I believe, is the fundamental metahistorical paradigm that shapes Teichthal’s thinking in Em ha-Banim Samekha. Placing the war-time persecutions against the Jews within the parameters of this framework enabled him to distinguish religious meaning in the suffering he was witnessing and to locate it in the continuum of the covenantal history. It made it possible as well to formulate a program that—if realized—would bring the end to the calamities the Jews faced during their exilic existence. The program’s essence consists of the understanding of immigration as an act of teshuvah. Traditionally, the penitent return is an event occurring primarily in the realm of the spirit. It is a moral rectification of the relationship between an individual or a community and God. Teichthal’s understanding of the persecutions against the Jews as correlated with the sin of complacency in exile together with his vision of messianic redemption led him to the notion of communal teshuvah that focused on the non-spiritual and political dimensions. For Teichthal, the immigration to Eretz Yisrael is a teshuvah done with one’s feet. It is the penitent return to the forgotten mother—the Land—that has the power of averting the divine decree directed against the European Jewish community. This interpretation of the notion of penitent return was not altogether new. Similar ideas appeared earlier in the writings of the precursors of religious Zionism such as Yehudah Alkalai and Zvi Kalisher with which Teichthal was very well acquainted.182 In Teichthal’s thought, it was transformed into both practical-political and spiritual response to the Nazi persecutions. Even though Teichthal at one point did see the unfolding events as unprecedented in Jewish history, he managed to avoid questioning covenantal theodicy by making the difference to be of quantity rather than quality. The tragedies that struck European Jews, in Teichthal’s understanding, always occurred as divine punishments for the complacency in exile. They were calls to penitent return. Some of them were louder than others. The scale of the destruction was unprecedented, but it was a destruction ordered by God and intended to serve as a call to repentance. With the covenantal bond still intact, it was possible for Teichthal to devise a plan for 182 Eliezer Schweid points out to both Alkalai and Kalisher as Teichthal’s precursors in this regard; see “Two Faces of Orthodoxy,” 94–95. For more about the influence of these two thinkers on Teichthal’s views see Itzhak Hershkovitz, The Vision. On the immigration to the Land as an act of teshuvah in Yehudah Alkalai see Gershon Greenberg “Mordekhai Yehoshua Atiyah’s Kabbalistic Response to the Holocaust” in Iggud. Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, vol. 2, History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewish Society, ed. Gershon Bacon et al. (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2009), 145.

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action. Paradigmatic thinking supplied an understanding of Jewish history as unfolding according to the metahistorical sequence of sin, punishment, repentance, and redemption. Teichthal believed that the key to redemption was in the hands of the Jews themselves. The key was immigration to the Land of Israel.

Conclusion In place of distinguishing happenings through the confluence of time, measured by the passage of the sun and moon, and events, distinguished by specificity and particularity, paradigmatic thinking takes another route. It finds an event in what conforms to the paradigm, what is meaningful in what confirms it.183

Paradigms impose order upon the chaos of happenings through selection. They are akin to a fisherman’s net. Many creatures can easily pass through it. Similarly, numerous happenings are not caught by the net cast out by a paradigm. Only those that remain within in are important, the rest is just chaotic clutter. Paradigms or eternally valid templates focus on what is repetitive, recurring. As Jacob Neusner put it: “the event is not what is singular and distinctive but what conforms to the rule: we notice what is like the paradigm, not what diverges from it.”184 I submit that this perspective, this way of imposing order upon otherwise incomprehensible reality, to a significant degree shaped the responses to the war-time persecution that came from thinkers associated with the world of Orthodox Judaism. For Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer, and Teichthal the history of the Jewish people was unfolding according to models discovered through a careful interpretation of the Scripture. As originating in the revelation itself and implanted in the very fabric of creation, these templates could not be invalidated by historical events—it is paradigm that determines what constitutes an event and hence it is, by its nature, immune to empirical falsification. Referring to the Orthodox war-time thinkers Gershon Greenberg noted: While fraught with hesitation about probing the unprecedented events and thus initially invoking silence, the thinkers eventually found ways to 183 Neusner, The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism, 24. 184 Ibid.

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understand the tragic developments and to delineate a path of religious consciousness through it.185

In contrast to this statement, I argue that by applying metahistorical paradigms of various levels of specificity such as that of the rivalry between the brothers Esau and Jacob, of the life of Abraham or of exile and redemption, Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer, and Teichthal could effectively assimilate the events they were witnessing into the continuum of the history of Jewish people and thus to perceive them as not unprecedented. Describing the Nazi persecutions as, for example, a manifestation of the recurring animosity between the descendants of Esau and the progeny of Jacob was tantamount precisely to describing them as yet another chapter of the same story. For the paradigmatic imagination, an interpretation of the Nazi assault as not unique, as not unprecedented, was the most compelling and in fact the only available one. It is so because paradigms are not concerned with what is distinctive or particular. Strictly speaking, the unique and distinctive by definition falls out of the scope of a paradigm which makes it, ultimately, irrelevant and meaningless since meaning is derivative of paradigms. Timeless patterns impose order upon the happenings and imbue them with meaning. For Unsdorfer, Teichthal, and Ehrenreich the reality of the war-time oppression was meaningful in the context of the covenant, because it was possible to describe it as a part of the covenantal drama; as an event orchestrated, ultimately, by God. For the authors considered in this chapter, God’s providential presence in history did not need to be proven. It was the axiomatic starting point, the fundamental premise of all reasoning that followed. That, however, does not mean that Unsdorfer and Ehrenreich were able or even willing, to quell all doubts. Both questioned the ways of the providence. Both protested against what they saw as disproportionate punishment. And both tried to offer interpretations alternative to the sin and punishment framework. Neither Unsdorfer nor Ehrenreich, however, questioned the premises that God actively participates in history and that his activity can be discerned if one knows how to look. For Unsdorfer, the ability to perceive God’s benevolent agency depended on the attitude of the observer. According to him, faith and trust were necessary prerequisites for discerning God’s presence. Understanding was possible only from within the hermeneutical circle of faith. And even then, absolute comprehension was impossible. 185 Greenberg, “Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer,” 62.

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Here Unsdorfer and Ehrenreich agreed—the limitedness of human cognition and the infinite character of the divine precluded full understanding. Once the limits of comprehension were reached, only faith remained—the trusting faith of the patriarchs who in silence accepted God’s demands. Ehrenreich presented such silence as an act of imitatio Dei and argued that Jews should be silent in front of their oppressors as God is silent in response to those who desecrated his name. For Teichthal, on the other hand, God’s presence behind the contemporary events was self-evident. The admission of their unprecedented character did not prevent Teichthal from seeing the anti-Jewish persecution as yet another chapter in the history of Jewish peregrinations in exile. The time allotted by God for the punishment of exile run out and God decided to wake up the Jews from their complacent slumber among the nations. The oppression came as a punishment for Jewish complacency and instead of prophetic exhortations. Thus, it was a direct manifestation of God’s providential agency and a confirmation of the covenant. Paradigms are interconnected in a network of mutually dependent and reinforcing elements. Covenantal theodicy, as a master paradigm, structures Jewish history as unfolding according to the sequence of sin, punishment, repentance, and redemption. Placing the Nazi orchestrated oppression of the Jews within the borders of the paradigmatic framework makes it possible to see it as a meaningful element of covenantal history. A crisis of covenantal theodicy is not only avoided but rendered impossible. The events conform to the paradigm, because it is the paradigm that defines what counts as an event. No empirical event can disrupt the network of the paradigms. Seen from this perspective, the Holocaust is not and cannot be essentially different from other calamities. It does not present a unique or new challenge, because it is seamlessly assimilated into the totality of Jewish history whose meaning is established by the covenantal pact between Israel and God. Once the fundamental premise of God’s agency in history ceases to be compelling, the crisis of covenantal theodicy looms large. Bereft of its footing, paradigmatic thinking crumbles and empirical events have the power to disrupt the suddenly tenuous thread of the covenant.

Chapter 3

Paradigmatic Thinking and Post-Holocaust Theology We are children of the secular city. Richard Rubenstein, The Religious Imagination History is a predicament for man who must live in it. Emil Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity For the Jew, his past is the guarantee of the future. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust

Post-Holocaust Jewish thought conveys a sense of a deep crisis of theodicy. Richard Rubenstein decided that the collection of his essays should bear the title After Auschwitz and these two words were to stand for the question, how can a Jew believe in God, as tradition describes him, after the Holocaust. How can anyone believe in an omnipotent and benevolent deity who providentially watches over history after the eruption of such an evil in this history? Traditional depictions of God and solutions to the problem of evil furnished by classical Jewish sources appeared seriously undermined if not damaged beyond repair in result of the Holocaust. Emil Fackenheim claimed that the doctrine according to which calamities visit the Jews as punishments for their sins suffered a total shipwreck in confrontation with this catastrophe.1 1 GPH, 73.

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Richard Rubenstein and Emil Fackenheim as well as Eliezer Berkovits, albeit to a different degree, argued that at least some of traditional Jewish theological claims and vocabulary used to express and describe them stood in need of significant revisions because of the Holocaust. The question I ask and attempt to answer in this chapter is this: was it indeed the Holocaust that dealt the final and fatal blow to covenantal theodicy? Or perhaps there were other factors, independent of the tragedy of the European Jewry that contributed to its demise? Predictably, my answer to the second question is positive. While not denying the impact of the Holocaust on the thought of Richard Rubenstein and Emil Fackenheim—which would indeed not be possible—I submit that their reflection owes its shape to the gradual erosion of Judaism’s traditional theological categories, a trend that predates the Holocaust. Both Rubenstein and Fackenheim in their writings pointed to the Emancipation and, more generally, to the processes of modernization and secularization as transformative for Jewish self-understanding vis-à-vis their religious tradition. Rubenstein diagnosed the theological sympathies of the majority of American Jewry as Reconstructionist. On his part, Fackenheim rejected his earlier understanding of Judaism as radically ahistorical and found himself compelled not only to describe the rabbinical tradition as historically situated but also to present Judaism as evolving and changing in response to epoch-making events. Eliezer Berkovits’s work serves in this chapter as a counterpoint to Rubenstein’s and Fackenheim’s reflections. Berkovits’s theological response to the Holocaust, although less traditional than it might at first appear, preserves residual paradigmatic thinking—an understanding of the history of Jewish people as developing in accordance with metahistorical patterns. It is due to this interpretation of history, I contend, that Berkovits was able to present an interpretation of the Holocaust that emphasizes continuity over disruption and does not contain a categorical rejection of more the traditional forms of theodicy. In a short essay about Spinoza, Emmanuel Levinas remarked: “Biblical criticism can ruin only a faith that has already been weakened.”2 In this chapter I argue that the Holocaust could ruin only those parts of Jewish theology that had already been undermined and only because of this prior erosion. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Spinoza Case,” in idem, Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism, trans. by Sean Hand (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 107.

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Paradigmatic Thinking and the Rise of Historicism “The modernization of Europe was accompanied by an upsurge of interest in the past and an ideological and scholarly preoccupation with history,” wrote Shmuel Feiner. “Signs of the modern sense of history include changes in the attitudes towards the past and its re-evaluation; a critical approach to the sources, which had hitherto been regarded as incontrovertibly authoritative; the secularization of history; the break with traditional theological modes of historical thought, and the use of history to serve modern social and political ideologies.”3 The concepts of modernization and secularization, as well as the multiplicity of historical phenomena they attempt to capture and describe, have been a subject of numerous scholarly works and debates. While it is a matter of general agreement that modernity brought about a fundamental transformation of the Western European life, the questions regarding the nature of modernity or secularization abound. I do not wish to enter into these complex debates. For my purposes, it is sufficient to focus on two developments mentioned by Feiner: the secularization of history and the rise of non-theological modes of historical thinking.4 In particular, I am interested in the process by which “following centuries of tumultuous theological struggle, modern historians . . . asserted their right to displace God as the primary causal force in history.”5 A well-known anecdote tells us that when asked by Napoleon about the role of God in his explanation of variations of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, Pierre-Simon Laplace proudly answered: “Sire, je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.” Before long this hypothesis was of no use for historians either and in explanations of historical events God was replaced by causation rooted in a variety of natural and human forces. 3 Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History. The Emergence of a Modern Historical Consciousness (Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 1. 4 Bryan R. Wilson noted that while no standard definition of the concept of secularization is available there are certain common elements in the wide range of phenomena associated with it. As one of these Wilson lists “a pattern of diminishing recourse to supernaturalist explanations.” It is this pattern as reflected in the development of modern historiography that interests me in particular. Bryan R. Wilson, “Secularism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd Edition (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 8215. 5 David N. Myers, Resisting History. Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2.

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In his Religion and the Rise of Historicism Thomas Albert Howard noted that according to a widespread view, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century “a secular historical consciousness freed itself from long-standing theological conceptions of history.”6 The process that removed God from history, however, started earlier. Amos Funkenstein showed that already in the works of Giambattista Vico, from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, “the ‘finger of God’ disappeared from the course of human events”7 to be replaced by an “invisible hand.” The secularization of history and the changes that resulted in the birth of modern critical historiography started, as Shmuel Feiner points out, with the “historical revolution” of the 15th and 16th centuries and this gradual process affected Jewish consciousness to various degrees before “the new Jewish historiography crystallized in the nineteenth century, and before the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement formulated and shaped its concepts of scientific study.”8 Although the changes associated with modernity and secularization started to affect Jewish thinking well before the 19th century,9 it was then, “long after an essentially secular view of world history has permeated ever-widening European circles,” Yerushalmi wrote, that modern Jewish historiography was born.10 As Yerushalmi observed, this historiography, as modern, had to “stand in sharp opposition to its own subject matter, not on this or that detail, but concerning the vital core: the belief that divine providence is not only an ultimate but an active causal factor in Jewish history, and the related belief in the uniqueness of Jewish history itself.”11

6 Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism. W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burkhardt, and Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 7 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 205. 8 Feiner, Haskalah and History, 9. 9 See, e.g., Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe, trans. by Chaya Naor (Philadelphia and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); David J. Sorkin, “The Early Haskalah,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (Oxford: Littman Library, 2001), 9–26; David J. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 10 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 89–90. 11 Ibid., 89.

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The repudiation of this fundamental principle was a consequence of the adoption of the rules of historicism and their application to Jewish history. According to Georg Iggers, historicism “had become the dominant, inescapable attitude of the Western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”12 In an oft-quoted passage Friedrich Meinecke described it as “one of the greatest intellectual revolutions that Western thought has experienced.”13 Since the term historicism has been defined in numerous, diverse, and sometimes contradictory ways,14 it is not easy to describe the exact nature of this revolution. I will follow Frederick Beiser’s description of historicism. In his view, the belief in the autonomy of historical knowledge, characteristic of the proponents of historicism understood as a program that aimed at assigning history the status of science, was accompanied by an affirmation of the principle of the autonomy of historical world. Beiser offers the following succinct characterization of this principle: Everything that happens in history must be explained within history and accordingly to specifically historical method. This principle excludes alternatives: metaphysics, i.e. explaining historical action by goals outside history, such as the ends of providence; and naturalism, i.e. explaining historical actions as part of nature and according to the methods of the natural sciences.15

Covenantal theodicy and paradigmatic thinking, like other theological modes of interpreting history, in many cases gave way to the logic of 12 Georg Iggers, “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (Spring 1995): 129. 13 Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. by J. E. Anderson (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), liv. 14 On the meanings of the term “historicism,” see Georg Iggers, “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (Spring 1995): 129–152; Georg Iggers, “Historicism,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 2 (New York, 1974), 456–64; Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, “The Meaning of Historicism,” American Historical Review 59 (1954): 568–577; Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 41–140; Harry Ritter, “Historicism, Historism,” in Dictionary of Concepts in History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 183–187; F. R. Ankersmit, “Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,” History and Theory 34 (1995): 143–173; Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism. 15 Frederick C. Beiser, “Historicism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter, Michael Rosen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 157. See also Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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modern historicism. Over time, as David Myers observed, “the tools of critical history have become ubiquitous. So too has the broader worldview out of which these tools have been forged. This worldview proclaims that human history belongs to an old, undulating, but ultimately chartable current—not to a vast divine terrain whose grand designs eludes full human comprehension.”16 In this sense, historicism was a success despite the opposition it faced, despite opinions that it was marred by internal contradictions, and despite all those who prophesized its quick demise. Historicism won and, to quote David Myers once again, “it has come to dominate our way of thinking about the past, conditioning us to place the single event in context and then to link it to a chain of other contextually bound events.”17 The fundamental premise of historicism—that historical events not only can but must be explained without reference to the realm of the transcendent—challenged the way of making sense of events theologically by placing them in the context of eternally valid models of divine origin. Simultaneously, critical biblical scholarship, initiated by Spinoza, which argued that the Bible was a human document and should be treated as such, rendered the very idea of such eternal models problematic.18 Thus, God was removed from history not only as a possible or necessary explanation but also, ultimately, as a source of meaning. No event, catastrophic or otherwise, could be anymore meaningfully accounted for in terms of God’s will, plan for the Jewish people, or humanity as a whole. Theological interpretation of history would no longer be possible.

Richard L. Rubenstein I believe the greatest single challenge to modern Judaism arises out of the question of God and the death camps. . . . How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz? Traditional Jewish theology maintains that God is the ultimate, omnipotent actor in the historical drama. It has interpreted every major catastrophe in Jewish history as God’s punishment of a sinful Israel. I fail to see how this position can be 16 Myers, Resisting History, 5. 17 Ibid. 18 On Spinoza’s role in the process of creation of a secular Jewish Bible see David Biale, Not in the Heavens. The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59–91.

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maintained without regarding Hitler and the SS as instruments of God’s will. . . . To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, antihuman explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purposes. The idea is simply too obscene for me to accept.19

This fragment comes from Richard Rubenstein’s contribution to the Symposium on Jewish Belief organized by the journal Commentary in 1966. The essay Rubenstein wrote for that occasion contains the most succinct and powerful expression of what later came to be known as his post-Holocaust theology. This particular passage highlights several important elements of his position. In it Rubenstein identifies the Holocaust as the source of the most important challenge to Judaism, a challenge encapsulated in one seemingly simple question: How can Jews believe in an omnipotent and beneficent God after the tragedy of the destruction of European Jewry? Next, he presents his understanding of the traditional image of God as the ultimate agent in history and then a corollary of this interpretation: God’s implication in the Holocaust. If we accept the antecedent, we are bound to accept the conclusion. If God is the ultimate agent in history, he must have been in some way involved in the slaughter of the Jews. Traditional theodicy suggests that catastrophes in Jewish history come as punishments for Israel’s sinfulness. Hence, the Jews killed under the Nazi occupation should not be seen as innocent victims but rather as sinners rightfully punished by God. The Holocaust, then, was a part of a divine plan. Such an idea, declares Rubenstein, is obscene. If we are unwilling to accept it, that is, if we reject the assumption that Hitler indeed served as an instrument of God’s will, there is only one alternative left—we must claim that God is dead. It is tempting to read Rubenstein in this way: as presenting a variant of the classical problem of theodicy and solving it by denying one of its premises. This is how Rubenstein’s position was summarized by Steven T. Katz: Rubenstein’s position can be summed up in three words: “God is Dead.” The logic that has driven him to utter these three extraordinarily powerful words can be put in the following syllogism: (1) God, as He is conceived of in the Jewish tradition, could not have allowed the Holocaust to happen; (2)

19 Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz. Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1966), 153. Hereafter cited as AA.

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the Holocaust did happen. Therefore, (3) God, as He is conceived of in the Jewish tradition, does not exist.20

In Katz’s reading the Holocaust for Rubenstein is an empirical event that disconfirms God’s existence or as he puts it: “the empirical test case for the existence or non-existence of God.”21 There are, indeed, statements in Rubenstein’s writings that invite such an interpretation. To cite only one of them: “We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?”22 In this passage it certainly seems that according to Rubenstein God is dead and that his demise was in some unspecified way related to the Holocaust. As it turns out, however, a lot more could be said about God after Auschwitz and it was Rubenstein himself who said it. Moreover, there is substantial textual evidence to suggest that in Rubenstein’s thought the death of God was not primarily a consequence of the Holocaust. According to Zachary Braiterman, Rubenstein “was less a revolutionary than a revisionist who began the inevitably awkward process of remolding Jewish theological and textual traditions in light of the Holocaust.”23 While the impact of the Holocaust on Rubenstein’s theology obviously cannot be dismissed, I submit that other factors contributed significantly to the shaping of his reflections: according to Rubenstein Jewish theological and textual tradition did need revision but not exclusively and not even primarily because of the Holocaust. As I will show, for Rubenstein the death of God was not an ontological statement but rather a diagnosis of a modern, secularized moment. This catchy phrase used to describe primarily a group of Protestant theologians24 was used by Rubenstein to capture and 20 Steven T. Katz, “Richard Rubenstein, the God of History, and the Logic of Judaism” in idem, Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York and London: New York University Press, 1983), 174. The essay was reprinted more recently in Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, Gershon Greenberg, eds., Wrestling with God. Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 582–594. 21 Ibid., 180. 22 AA, 152. 23 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 88. 24 For more about the death of God theology and the works of Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, Paul van Buren and Gabriel Vahanian see Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: The BobbsMerrill Company, Inc., 1966); Bernard Murchland, The Meaning of the Death of God. Protestant, Jewish and Catholic Scholars, Explore Atheistic Theology (New York: Random House, 1967); Lisa McCullough and Brian Schroeder, eds., Thinking Through the Death

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convey certain aspect of modern human condition—a lack of transcendent reference point or as Rubenstein himself wrote: “the total absence of God from our experience.”25 As Michael Morgan remarked, for Rubenstein “Auschwitz is an especially powerful indicator of how modern life and institutions have deteriorated and how confidence in science, government, family, religions, and Western culture has crumbled.”26 Confidence in religion, however, specifically confidence in traditional Jewish understanding of such concepts as God’s providential presence in history, had crumbled well before the Holocaust. The Jewish God of history, in other words, was dead before Auschwitz. “From the unutterable evil of the Holocaust,” wrote William Kaufman, “Rubenstein draws the conclusion that the traditional conception of the God of history is no longer tenable.”27 My interpretation of Rubenstein’s thought differs from this, rather conventional, reading, in that it argues that although Rubenstein was indeed convinced that this conception of God was untenable it was not so because of the Holocaust. Rather, the Holocaust, as the realization of its potential theological significance coalesced in Rubenstein’s thinking with his earlier ideas shaped by psychoanalysis, social-psychological understanding of religion, naturalism, and existentialism provided Rubenstein with an opportunity to formulate his position in particularly strong terms. Auschwitz, more prominently than other historical or social event, indicated a need for revision of traditional Jewish theology. It was not, however, I submit, a primary cause of such revision. Nor was it necessary for it.28 As Rubenstein himself put it in

25 26 27 28

of God. A Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004); Martin Kavka, “Can Jews Be Radical Theologians?,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 95, no. 1 (2012): 47–71. While Rubenstein himself was occasionally described as a member of this movement he was very careful to distinguish himself from its exponents and presented a critique of their views in the essay “Death of God Theology and Judaism” included in AA. See also Rubenstein’s essay “Thomas Altizer’s Apocalypse,” in The Theology of Thomas Altizer: Critique and Response, ed. John Cobb (Philadelphia, 1970), http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter. asp?title=1105&C=1159. AA, 245. Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz. Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 93. William Kaufman, Contemporary Jewish Philosophies (New York: Reconstructionist Press and Behrman House, 1976), 78. Kaufman’s is one of the very few early responses to Rubenstein free of personal attacks against him. Here I agree with Michael Morgan according to whom in Rubenstein’s thought Auschwitz “reveals itself as an occasion—a stimulus—for interpretive revisions, and while not a necessary object of examination, it becomes an especially valuable object

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an autobiographical essay “Making of the Rabbi”: “The death camps helped me to understand the religious meaning of our era.”29 I take these words to mean that cast against the backdrop of the Holocaust certain aspects of the religious landscape of the 20th century became prominent. In particular, the limitations of a certain form of Judaism became evident for Rubenstein. It does not mean, however, that these limitations appeared only after the Holocaust had shaken the Jewish life in Europe and beyond. On the contrary, what Rubenstein conceived of as a sign of the ultimate demise of the traditional Judaism and its vocabulary, was preceded and caused by a process of gradual weakening of the traditional Judaism with its understanding of God and of the problem of theodicy. In 1955 Rubenstein presented a paper on a conference devoted to “The Symbolic Content of Religion.” The essay, with some revisions, was published four years later in the journal Reconstructionist under the title “The Symbols of Judaism and Religious Existentialism” and later still included in the first edition of After Auschwitz.30 By Rubenstein’s own admission this essay is his earliest theological statement. In it Rubenstein addressed what he understood to be the problem located in the background of the general decline of religious commitment among the Jews evident in the post-war American life and pointed out two issues that in his opinion presented insurmountable difficulty for traditional Judaism. After introducing and explaining the Tillichian idea of God as the ground of being Rubenstein writes: The God who is the ground of being is not the transcendent God of Jewish patriarchal monotheism. Though many still believe in that God, they do so ignoring the questions of God and human freedom and God and human evil. For those who face these issues, the Father-God is a dead God. Even the existentialist leap of faith cannot resurrect this dead God after Auschwitz.31

that can change our way of coping with the crises of our lives.  .  .  .  The Holocaust, then, does not demand anything; nor does it merely psychologically motivate response. Rather, it can play a central role in the interpretive revision that will enable us to deal most effectively with our historical situation.” Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 107. 29 AA, 224. 30 Richard L. Rubenstein, “The Symbols of Judaism and Religious Existentialism,” Reconstructionist 25, no. 6 (1959): 13–19. Included in AA under the title “The Symbols of Judaism and the Death of God,” 227–241. 31 AA, 238.

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In this essay Rubenstein does not explain what exactly he means by the term Auschwitz nor in what ways the problems of human freedom and evil contributed to the decline of traditional Judaism. A confrontation with these two problems shows, in Rubenstein’s mind, that the traditional idea of God is not tenable. One can assume that in this argument Auschwitz is connected to the problem of human evil and perhaps to the issue of human freedom as well. The link, however, remains unexplored and unexplained. Nor does Rubenstein say why Auschwitz in particular—as different from other instances of human evil—is so important. Rubenstein returned to the questions of human evil and human freedom in their relation to the traditional idea of God four years later, in an essay published in the Reconstructionist under the title “Religious Naturalism and Human Evil”32 where he succinctly stated that the “real objections against a personal or theistic God come from the irreconcilability of the claim of God’s perfection with the hideous human evil tolerated by such a God.”33 Not surprisingly in this context Rubenstein referred to Dostoyevski’s Ivan Karamazov and his famous rejection of theodicy according to which all the horrible suffering and pain human beings undergo in this world would be justified in the final divine harmony at the end of times: I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: “Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.” When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, “‘Thou art just, O Lord!” then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony. . . . I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to “dear, kind God”!34

A deity who constructed the world in such a way that the future harmony requires or allows for the suffering of the innocent children is neither dear 32 Richard L. Rubenstein, “Religious Naturalism and Human Evil,” Reconstructionist 24, no. 19 (January 1959): 5–10. Later included in AA under the title “Reconstructionism and the Problem of Evil.” 33 AA, 86. 34 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Constance Garnett (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 226.

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nor kind. “A God who tolerates the suffering of even one innocent child is either infinitely cruel or hopelessly indifferent,” adds Rubenstein.35 Interestingly enough in this context Rubenstein does not mention the Holocaust. In fact, there is no single reference to it in this short essay. Instead, Rubenstein approvingly quotes Ivan Karamazov’s words and in the sentence cited above rejects not only any theodicy that would describe suffering as meaningful through its connection to the ultimate reconciliation of all things in divine harmony but also states that a case of one innocent suffering is—or should be—enough for us to realize that a God who would allow it to happen must be at worst cruel and at best indifferent. Rubenstein does not present an argument here. He does not explain in what way “the suffering of even one innocent child” leads to invalidation of the traditional image of God as benevolent and caring. Nor does he try to seriously engage any of the available theodic arguments that might at least suggest that his conclusion is not at all obvious. The quoted sentence is more a somewhat hyperbolic outcry of moral indignation than a conclusion of a precise line of reasoning. Rubenstein refers, as if in passing, to one traditional response to the problem of evil, by saying: “Our ancestors attempted to solve this problem by projecting the existence of another world wherein this world’s cruelties would be rectified. We cannot accept such a solution.”36 The obvious question to ask at this point is this: why such a solution cannot be accepted if indeed it cannot? Before addressing this question and offering an explanation missing from Rubenstein’s own essay I would like to discuss the second problem Rubenstein identified in his 1955 essay as one a confrontation with which leads one to realize that the old Father-God is dead—the problem of human freedom. Here Rubenstein repeats in a much abbreviated form a view that Paul Tillich expressed in his The Courage To Be37 and combines it with Erich Fromm’s insight regarding authoritarian personality:38 Tillich . . . claims that a God who stands above all human activity and who controls the cosmos is ultimately the enemy of human self-fulfillment. As Job discovered, we must be in the wrong before such God. . . . Tillich claims the 35 AA, 87. 36 Ibid. 37 Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). 38 Erich Fromm, The Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1941).

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theistic God is dead and deserved to die because He opposes human freedom. When Tillich’s contention that a personal God is the enemy of freedom is compared with Erich Fromm’s analysis of the types of human personality which an authoritarian conception of deity either reflected or engendered, it becomes apparent that human moral autonomy is incompatible with the traditional conception of a personal God.39

Unlike some Protestant theologians who in the death of God saw first and foremost an opportunity for the human freedom and potential to become truly realized, Rubenstein remains markedly pessimistic. Traditional conceptions of God may be incompatible with human freedom and dignity but the removal of them is not a reason for a joyous celebration. Rubenstein appreciates many ideas of Reconstructionism and his founder, Mordecai Kaplan, and admits their influence on his own thinking but simultaneously categorically rejects Reconstructionism’s “optimistic philosophy of man.”40 While Rubenstein’s pessimistic outlook does not come to the fore in this short essay, it is conveyed clearly enough in his appreciative remarks about Freud or in his description of man as “essentially a tragic, ironic figure of extremely limited possibilities.”41 In his early thinking Rubenstein was clearly heavily influenced by the thought of Paul Tillich whose lectures he attended as a graduate student at Harvard.42 Tillich’s impact is evident in both essays discussed thus far. Apart from numerous insights regarding the classics of German philosophy that Rubenstein gained from Tillich’s lectures and published works, it was Tillich’s critique of the traditional theistic idea of God that Rubenstein found most appealing. A detailed description of this critique lies beyond the scope of this chapter. However, certain aspects of Tillich’s rejection of the idea of God conceived of as a being among other beings need to be mentioned here. “Ordinary theism,” Tillich wrote in his Systematic Theology, “has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter 39 40 41 42

AA, 87. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 90. See chapter 9 of Richard L. Rubenstein, Power Struggle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974) where Rubenstein recalls that “Even before coming to Harvard, I was deeply impressed by Paul Johannes Tillich” (p. 154) and “the profound sense of both shock and illumination” that he gained from Tillich’s lectures (p. 158).

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of ultimate concern.”43 According to Tillich, “the being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside other beings. If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance.”44 A God who is a being constitutes a part of the ontological structure of reality and as such is determined by it instead of transcending it. Such a God, argued Tillich in The Courage To Be, is bound to the subject-object structure of reality, he is an object for us as subjects. At the same time we are objects to him as a subject. And this is decisive for the necessity of transcending theological theism. For God as subject makes me into an object which is nothing more than an object. He deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I revolt and try to make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant, the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. . . . This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control.45

Such a God “becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted,” Tillich continued.46 For Rubenstein, the traditional Jewish understanding of God as the lord of history constituted one of the examples of theological theism rejected by Tillich. Rubenstein revolted against it like the existentialists and like Nietzsche before him. When in his contribution to the Commentary symposium in 1966 Rubenstein identified himself as a “religious existentialist after Nietzsche and after Auschwitz”47 he was pointing out to two, equally important, rationales behind his theological position. For him “there [was] no way around Nietzsche.”48 It was in Nietzsche and 43 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), vol. 1, 245. The most comprehensive presentation of Tillich’s views about God is to be found in the first volume of his Systematic Theology, especially pp. 211–292. See also Langdon Gilkey, Gilkey on Tillich (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 99–113 and Martin Leiner, “Tillich on God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, ed. Russel Re Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37–55. 44 Ibid., 235. 45 Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 185. 46 Ibid. 47 AA, 152. 48 Ibid. Describing the similarities and differences between his own position and that of the death-of-God theologians Rubenstein again referred to this influence on his thought: “We share the same cultural universe as contemporary Christian thinker;

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Tillich, I submit, that Rubenstein first discovered reasons for the rejection of the traditional Jewish understanding of God who within history administers punishments for the misdeeds committed by his covenantal partner. At this point in Rubenstein thinking Auschwitz appears as if somewhere in the background. It is mentioned but the exact connection between the destruction of European Jewry and the death of God is neither explained nor explored. Indeed, if a single instance of innocent suffering is enough to question the traditional image of God, why refer to Auschwitz at all? The argument that the existence of evil in the world contradicts the description of God as caring and omnipotent could have been made, and indeed was made, centuries before the Holocaust. What then accounts for Auschwitz’s special position in Rubenstein’s thought? This question was raised by Steven T. Katz who answered it thus: “The answer to our question is at once obvious and unsatisfying. It is: the existential impact of the Holocaust on Rubenstein, who was alive to witness it.”49 It is obviously impossible to deny that the Holocaust had a profound existential and psychological impact on Rubenstein and I will explore this matter a little later. However, as Zachary Braiterman noted referring to Peter Berger’s notion of plausibility structure,50 the death or suffering of a single individual does not render any symbolic framework implausible. Although from a strictly logical point of view Katz’s objection is certainly correct, theodicy does not function in a vacuum ruled exclusively by the laws of logical reasoning but rather it constitutes a part of a larger—both theological and sociological—structure. For this reason, the Holocaust as an assault on the entire community that considered this particular symbolic system as an important part of its makeup did present a crisis of different proportions. The impossibility of squaring the existence of evil with the idea of benevolent, omnipotent, and caring deity as well as the thorny question of securing human freedom and agency in a universe dominated by all-powerful God should, in Rubenstein mind, be seen as sufficient reasons for discarding the traditional idea of God. In “The Symbols of Judaism and Religious Existentialism,” however, Rubenstein begins his diagnosis we experience the radical secularity of our times as do they. We have been deeply influenced by Freud, Sartre, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville, and Kierkegaard. Above all, we have been moved by Nietzsche.” AA, 245. 49 Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 184. 50 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 91. See also Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1969), 46.

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of contemporary crisis of religious commitment by pointing out another theological difficulty that faces traditional Judaism alongside these two issues. In the opening section of the essay Rubenstein writes: The postwar decline in religious commitment has been very much in evidence in the prospering synagogues of America. While the decline in belief is largely a cultural phenomenon, it does reflect a theological problem which has been covertly understood in religious circles for several decades. The rise of scientific scholarship in the field of religion has been especially threatening to the believing Jews. As a result of the new insights, it has been impossible to accept at face value the myths concerning the authority of traditional Jewish belief and practice. Religious Jews have been compelled either to retreat to a fideistic dogmatism which ignores modern scholarship, or to seek a new rationale for their theological commitments.51

The primary reason of the decline is to be found then, according to Rubenstein, in the crisis of authority. Tradition does not carry unquestionable weight any longer. As he puts it a little later in the essay: “The traditional believer did not have to face the problem of why he ought to fulfill religious commandments of doubtful origin and authority. We do. The traditional believer was convinced that in obeying the Torah he was fulfilling God’s will. We no longer possess that assurance.”52 For a traditional believer neither the origin nor the authority of religious commandments was doubtful. As stated in the Talmudic tractate Pirkei Avot: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; Joshua to the Elders.”53 A seemingly unbroken chain of tradition established by the rabbinical authority connected religious Jew not only to the revelation itself but also to the broader framework of Jewish belief and practice. The Torah came from God and, if properly interpreted, was a source of knowledge about his will. To put it in the terms I have employed earlier, the Torah was perceived as containing eternally valid keys to both understanding the world and leading a morally proper life; keys of unique authority due to their divine provenance. This situation, however, had changed, Rubenstein argues, primarily due to the impact of modern scientific biblical scholarship. Traditional Judaism, in his words, “depended upon the belief in the historical authenticity and 51 AA, 227. 52 Ibid., 228. 53 BT Pirkei Avot 1:1.

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the literary unity of the Torah.”54 The Bible as presented by the modern scholars, however, differed greatly from its traditionally accepted image. No longer was it a unitary work faithfully describing God’s interactions with Israel but rather a collection of materials coming from various sources, influenced by their environment and shaped by a variety of interest of authors and redactors. Confronted with this new knowledge “one is forced either to reject Jewish religious practice or to find a new rationale for continuing to fulfill that sector which remains meaningful.”55 Traditional “validations have become altogether transparent,” declares Rubenstein, and thus “no man can seriously pretend that the literal meanings given to our tradition before our time retain much authority today.”56 In Rubenstein view, then, traditional Judaism crumbled under the impact of modern, critical scholarship. The Torah, that is both the Bible and the body of rabbinical teachings, could no longer be perceived as it was before its rise. The main argument of Rubenstein’s 1955 essay is that in the light of that momentous change a new rationale, a new justification for Judaism is required. Rubenstein returned to the topic of the impact of modern biblical scholarship in his essay “The Meaning of Torah” written and published in the Reconstructionist in 196357 where again he underscored that the new approach to the Bible refuted its image as a unitary document faithfully recording the will of the divine. I would like to point out another consequence of this development, one not mentioned by Rubenstein himself, but in my opinion crucial to understanding his rejection of traditional 54 AA, 228. 55 Ibid., 229. 56 Ibid. and 241. On the process of the secularization of the Bible see David Biale, Not in the Heavens. The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59–91. 57 “The Meaning of Torah,” Reconstructionist, 29 no. 12 (1963): 6–16; reprinted in AA as “The Meaning of Torah in Contemporary Jewish Theology, An Existentialist Philosophy of Judaism.” In this essay Rubenstein wrote: “Biblical scholarship has had an especially important impact on modern Jewish thought. At least one result of this scholarship seems beyond refutation: the Torah is not, as normative Jewish tradition had claimed, a unitary work communicated by God directly to Moses, save for a few verses at the end of Deuteronomy. As long as this view had been convincingly maintained, it had enormous consequences in the life of the individual Jew. If the Torah was the perfect revelation of God’s will, when properly interpreted, then none of its injunctions, no matter how opaque to the lucidities of common sense, could be ignored. To have ignored them would have been to rebel against the will of the Creator. The modern Jew lacks the security of knowing that his religious acts are meaningfully related to God’s will.” AA, 114.

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theodicy. Biblical criticism undermined the status of the Bible and the rabbinical corpus as a repository of eternally valid keys enabling a careful reader to see events as parts of the covenantal history. In the previous chapter I showed how paradigmatic thinking enabled traditional Jewish thinkers to assimilate the events they witnessed into the framework of the covenantal relationship between Israel and God and hence uphold the tenets of covenantal theodicy. Jacob Neusner pointed out that the onset of historicism brought about the end of paradigmatic thinking gradually replaced by different modes of reasoning and conceptual organization of historical events.58 When Rubenstein declared that “we are children of the secular city”59 he was echoing his own earlier assertion that God was radically absent from the experience of modern man. The death of God claim is not an ontological statement, but a diagnosis of a deeply secularized reality. It does not say much about God but a lot about human beings. As Rubenstein put it, “the statement ‘God is dead’ is only significant in what it reveals about its maker. It imparts information concerning what he believes about God. It reveals nothing about God.”60 It reveals that, for a modern Jew and man in general, “God is totally unavailable as a source of meaning and value,”61 that we all “experience the radical secularity of our time.”62 For the children of the secular city God is no longer available as a source of meaning—also of meaning in history. Biblical criticism on the one hand and historicism on the other made recourse to supernatural causation at least highly problematic if not simply completely unacceptable. Historical events were to be explained by reference to other events in the realm of human activity and not by pointing to their alleged supernatural causes. Confronted with the rise of modern awareness of historical situatedness, paradigmatic thinking—looking at all events through the prism of the recurrent, through the timeless models of divine origin—receded into the past and ceased to be able to bestow meaning upon historical occurrences. Biblical paradigms of any degree of generality, so prominent in the thought of the Orthodox thinkers analyzed in the previous chapter, are absent from Rubenstein’s reflection. I do not think 58 Neusner, “Paradigmatic versus Historical Thinking,” 377. 59 Richard L. Rubenstein, The Religious Imagination: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Jewish Theology (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merill Company, Inc., 1968), 182. 60 AA, 246. 61 Ibid., 205. 62 Ibid., 245.

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it is so due to Rubenstein’s conscious decision not to employ this means of understanding historical events. Rather, it is a consequence of the fact that historical consciousness rendered paradigmatic thinking implausible and thus removed it from the array of interpretative tools available for thinkers influenced by the modern modes of thinking. In “The Meaning of Torah” Rubenstein noted that “the theological foundations of normative Judaism were most keenly disrupted in a period when Jews were entering the secular society of contract and commerce which developed in the Western World following the French Revolution.”63 This is where, I submit, one needs to look in order to discover the reasons behind Rubenstein’s rejection of the traditional understanding of the relation between God and Israel with its theodic explanations of evil and suffering. Already before the Holocaust God’s presence in history, if existing at all, could not have been any more discerned by looking at Jewish history from the encompassing perspective of the covenantal relationship between God and the people Israel. Historicism with its exclusion of extra-historical determinants of historical events put the explanations offered by paradigmatic thinking beyond the border of acceptability. For children of the secular city paradigmatic thinking was no longer a viable option of understanding history. With the new canons of interpretation, history lost its status of theophany, of a scene upon which the covenantal relationship was unfolding. The erosion of the authority of the Torah which Rubenstein describes as an evident fact of historical development is a crucial reason behind Rubenstein’s rejection of theodicy as traditionally constructed. If God no longer endows history with meaning, a reference to him cannot serve as an answer to the question of evil and suffering that occurs in history. The authority of the theological claims of traditional Judaism has been irreparably crippled by the development of historical criticism. Additionally, according to Rubenstein, the content of these claims became deeply dysfunctional, that is, it could no longer serve the needs of the believing community and on occasion it proved even harmful. Zachary Braiterman noted that Rubenstein “has rejected what he perceives to have been a traditional Jewish doctrine on the basis of how Christians wield it against Jews.”64 This is evident in Rubenstein’s treatment of the idea of choseness and his vehement protest against what he describes as Christian 63 Ibid., 114. 64 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 92.

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Heilsgeschichte so prominently present in the opinions of Dean Gruber whom Rubenstein encountered in Berlin in 1961. In an essay written after this meeting Rubenstein asked: Can we really blame the Christian community for viewing us through the prism of a mythology of history when we were first to assert this history of ourselves? As long as we continue to hold to the doctrine of the election of Israel, we will leave ourselves open to the theology expressed by Dean Gruber, that because the Jews are God’s Chosen People, God wanted Hitler to punish them.65

In this essay Rubenstein’s argues for the rejection of the idea of election on the pragmatic grounds echoing the view of Mordecai Kaplan who in The Future of the American Jew argued that this doctrine had to be abandoned as an anachronism and a hindrance in future development.66 According to Zachary Braiterman, for Rubenstein “traditional assertions about God, covenant, and suffering are not intrinsically problematic. They become problematic only insofar as they engender crippling feelings of collective guilt. In particular, they trouble Rubenstein when Christians exploit them in order to fault the Jewish people.”67 It is the pragmatism of Rubenstein theological thinking that makes him evaluate ideas primarily according to their function, according to the ways in which they benefit or are detrimental to the community that accepts them. This approach is evident in Rubenstein’s psychological and sociological justification of religion and religious ritual presented already in his 1955 essay. There he argued that 65 AA, 58. For an interesting analysis of the ways Jews as the chosen people functioned in Christian religious imagination see Stephen R. Haynes, Jews and the Christian Imagination. Reluctant Witnesses (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1995). 66 Mordecai Kaplan, The Future of the American Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 211– 230 where Kaplan wrote: “Far from being a factor for Jewish survival, the doctrine of Israel’s election is henceforth bound to be, ideologically, a definite hindrance. In its traditional form, that doctrine belongs to the same universe as the one in which God was conceived as a magnified human being, sitting on a great throne. . . .It belongs to the universe of discourse in which the supernatural miracles, believed to have taken place in the past, were a guarantee of like miracles in the future. . . . To get back to this premodern universe of discourse is possible for the modern-minded man only in the same sense as it is possible to revisit the scene of one’s childhood,” 225. See also “Towards Jewish Religious Unity,” Judaism 15, no. 2 (Spring 1966): 156 where Kaplan argues that the idea of election should be abandoned because Auschwitz showed to what uses it can be put. See also David Novak, “Mordechai Kaplan’s Rejection of Election,” Modern Judaism 15, no. 1 (1995): 1–20. 67 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 91.

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the “fact that myth and religious symbol no longer are regarded as true at the manifest level is entirely irrelevant to their central function, which is to give profound expression to our feelings at the decisive times and crises in life” and that modern Jews need synagogues because they “possess no better instruments for sharing the decisive events in the timetable of life.”68 In other words, for Rubenstein the traditional theological teachings are not intrinsically problematic because he is not at all interested in whatever qualities they might intrinsically possess. What matters is how an idea functions in the life of the community. This approach is prominent in Rubenstein’s 1959 essay “The Vocation of the Modern Rabbi”69 where he presents his evaluation of the “ghetto Judaism.”70 In this essay Rubenstein offers the following description of what he sees as “the core myth of traditional rabbinic Judaism”71: “that once upon a time God gave his people laws and commandments, but that they sinfully rejected them and were subjected to hideous retaliatory punishment of exile and disaster.”72 Traditional Judaism, Rubenstein argued, was born in the anomalous tragedy of exile and its theological fundaments were shaped by the social, political, and psychological dynamics of the precarious condition of the Jewish people. This “ghetto Judaism” was “necessary for an alienated community living as a helpless pariah-minority among peoples possessed of and by the meta-historical myth of Jewish wickedness.”73 Its time, however, is over as it “is clearly insupportable as a living faith for the modern Jew.”74 In this essay Rubenstein evaluates Judaism exclusively in terms of its role in the life of the Jewish community. He does not make any argument regarding its truth or falsity but instead focuses on psychological and social needs it fulfilled. According to Rubenstein the most 68 AA, 233 and 237. 69 Richard L. Rubenstein, “The Vocation of the Modern Rabbi.” Reconstructionist 25, no. 15 (1959): 9–15. 70 It is also a very important aspect of Rubenstein’s analysis of the Aggadah in the light of psychoanalysis in his doctoral dissertation, revised and published in 1968 as The Religious Imagination. Nearing the conclusion of this study Rubenstein writes: “In a sense, I have written an obituary of the world of the Aggadah. Every word of appreciation I offer in its praise is veritably a further nail in its coffin. I can appreciate the Aggadah only functionally—that is, in terms of what it did for those who lived within the framework of its myths and symbols.” 71 Richard L. Rubenstein, “The Vocation,” 9. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 11. 74 Ibid., 9.

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important problems plaguing the modern Jew are connected to his “search for rootedness, self-determination, and ultimate integration with the powers of being and the divinities which nurture his person.”75 These words are admittedly vague but the point Rubenstein is trying to make remains clear: traditional or ghetto Judaism is irrelevant today because it answers to different needs than those of the Jew of today.76 In Rubenstein’s understanding, “lacking power of their own, the Jews compensated by magically claiming a pre-eminent portion of divine concern.”77 This idea came to haunt them as Rubenstein realized during his fateful meeting with Dean Gruber who said: “For some reason, it was part of God’s plan that the Jews died” during the Holocaust.78 Later Rubenstein recalled: After recovering from my initial shock, I recognized that there was nothing new or surprising in this argument, that it had been asserted by the Prophets of Israel, by the Rabbis, and by the Fathers of the Church alike. . . . Given the Judeo-Christian conception, so strong in Scripture, that God is the ultimate actor in the historical drama, no other theological interpretation of the death of the six million Jews is tenable.79

No other interpretation is tenable but the only tenable one is unacceptable or in Rubenstein’s own words: “The logic of rabbinic theology is as inescapable as it is unacceptable”80—this is the conundrum Rubenstein aims to resolve. He attempts to do so by showing that the entire framework upon which this interpretation of the Holocaust rests belongs to the past. Based on his own descriptions of the encounter with Dean Gruber there can be little doubt that this meeting had a tremendous psychological impact on Rubenstein. It would be hasty and confusing, however, 75 Ibid., 11. 76 One of the factors that rendered the ghetto Judaism irrelevant in Rubenstein’s mind was the establishment of the State of Israel which he then perceived as the end of Jewish history of alienation and a dawn of a totally new understanding of Jewish religion. In “The Vocation of the Modern Rabbi” Rubenstein argued that the creation of the State “makes of the ghetto period and ghetto Judaism an episode in Jewish life” (p. 15), an episode once and for all relegated to the past. The role of the State of Israel in Rubenstein’s thinking has been exhaustively described by Zachary Braiterman and Michael Morgan. 77 AA, 6. 78 Ibid., 54. 79 Ibid., 65. 80 Rubenstein, “The Vocation,” 9.

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to use it as an explanation of the content of Rubenstein’s argument. The conversation with Dean Gruber provided Rubenstein with an opportunity to see how the problems that interested him most could be brought together. As Rubenstein recognized, Dean Gruber’s views had not been new. They were a part and parcel of what Rubenstein described in 1959 as “ghetto Judaism”: a religious tradition born in the tragic circumstances of exile, a way of thinking that sustained a persecuted minority and which today, in Rubenstein’s view, is not only deeply dysfunctional but also no longer relevant for modern Jews. Rubenstein’s description of contemporary culture as the time of the death of God was not a radical attempt to solve the traditional question of theodicy by removing some of its premises. Rather, it was a diagnosis underscoring the existential, psychological, and intellectual condition of modern man, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, the “radical secularity of contemporary culture.”81 Traditional Judaism, as Rubenstein understood it,82 had been crippled by various developments of modernity to the point where Rubenstein thought it justified to assert that all of American Jewry “is Reconstructionist, in fact, if not in name.”83 God understood and worshipped as the lord of history is dead but the Holocaust was not the reason of his demise. Auschwitz, rather, is a factor that forces the realization that “ghetto Judaism” is bankrupt. Or to put in differently: it serves as the last nail to God’s casket. For Rubenstein, Auschwitz provided an opportunity to express his stance in particularly strong terms and enabled him to show the morally outrageous consequences of applying the traditional vocabulary to the Holocaust. The fundamental elements of his position and the reasons behind his main argument according to which Judaism stands in need of a radical revision, I submit, remain logically independent of it. 81 AA, 247. 82 Numerous objections can be and were made against Rubenstein’s description of traditional Judaism. According to Zachary Braiterman, Rubenstein “repeatedly obfuscates the heterogeneity of opinion found in traditional Jewish thought” and “has  .  .  .  effectively marginalized any antitheodic counter-tradition that might have qualified his own reading of the Bible.” (God) After Auschwitz, 103, 104. This critique is doubtlessly accurate. Further, Braiterman offers a very interesting argument according to which this misreading “constituted the very motor of Rubenstein’s project” and shows him to criticize and reject not so much traditional Judaism but rather a nineteenth century reading of it, ibid., 109-110. 83 Richard L. Rubenstein, “Franz Rosenzweig on Jewish Education and Jewish Law,” Reconstructionist 22, no. 13: 30.

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Tillich, Nietzsche, and existentialism provided Rubenstein with reasons for a rejection of the idea of God as an active and ultimate agent in history. Modern biblical criticism undermined traditional theological commitments and the processes of secularization rendered them even less credible. In addition, many theological claims of traditional Judaism were no longer capable of performing any positive function in the lives of the Jewish community. On the contrary, they proved harmful which the history of Jewish persecutions made evident. The attempts to interpret the Holocaust within the traditional framework constituted for Rubenstein the final proof of the bankruptcy of the “ghetto Judaism.”

Emil L. Fackenheim To argue that the Holocaust had less than decisive impact on the thought of Emil Fackenheim would be at best implausible. The Holocaust, in Fackenheim’s own words, is “an event that called into question all things— God, man, the ancient revelation and the modern secular self-confidence, philosophic thought and indeed any kind of thought.”84 These are remarkable words. All the more so as they came from a thinker who for nearly thirty years defended both possibility and indeed necessity of philosophy and of the “ancient revelation.”85 The majority of the literature devoted to Fackenheim’s thought focuses on the mature phase of his reflection, i.e. on his writings published from the late 1960s onward. My analysis emphasizes one moment in the development of his reflection about Judaism and the Holocaust: the moment to which he later referred to as the “greatest doctrinal change in [his] whole career.”86 In the simplest terms this change consisted of Fackenheim’s recognition that Judaism was not immune to history, that there was nothing in Judaism that could not be put into question and rejected as false because of the occurrences in the realm of history. This recognition was a conditio sine qua non of Fackenheim’s entire theological project of post-Holocaust Judaism. 84 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 9. Hereafter cited as TMW. 85 In 1951 Fackenheim wrote: “Judaism stands or falls . . . at least with the possibility of revelation in principle.” “Can There Be Judaism without Revelation,” in idem, Quest for Past and Future. Essays in Jewish Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 73. Hereafter cited as QPF. 86 TMW, 13. In this my reading of Fackenheim is indebted to Michael Morgan’s incisive interpretation of his work.

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Without the assumption according to which there are historical events that could negate certain aspects of Jewish theology, there would obviously be no need for Judaism to respond to the Holocaust in any way. The theological significance of the tragedy of the European Jewry is dependent upon a prior assumption that any historical event can have such significance. And this assumption is by no means obvious. As Fackenheim himself noted, “the ‘normative’ thought of rabbinic Judaism and its ‘Midrashic framework,’ is generally thought to affirm that nothing decisive has occurred, or can occur, between Sinai and the Messianic days.”87 To put this idea in terms of paradigmatic thinking, every theologically meaningful event conforms to the paradigm because it is precisely the conformity with the model that endows it with meaning. To argue for the potentially theologically transforming meaning of the Holocaust one has to assume that, contrary to the logic of paradigmatic thinking, there can be events that do not conform to the paradigm but nonetheless remain relevant and may even necessitate a reformulation or rejection of the paradigm itself. Such an approach, it could be said, takes history seriously—as at least in principle capable of refuting theological claims. To think otherwise, Fackenheim writes in the Introduction to To Mend the World, “would be to prejudge” and “dismiss (a priori) the challenge of contemporary events.”88 Allowing history to decisively influence theological thought, admitting the possibility that something meaningful may, in fact, occur in the hiatus between Sinai and the Messianic days, requires accepting the idea that “rabbinic Judaism, its normativeness included, is itself historically situated: that it is permeated if indeed not constituted by an epoch-making response to grave historical events.”89 And this move, Fackenheim recognized, “is no light matter. It is a fateful step.”90 It is a fateful step indeed and, importantly in the present context, a step taken against what I argued earlier to be the fundamental premise of the Orthodox thinkers who confronted the Nazi persecutions. While they would not argue that nothing significant can occur in history between Sinai and the Messianic days, their thinking exhibits a conviction that all such events conform to the general framework of the covenantal dynamics and hence also of the covenantal theodicy. Indeed, the conformity with 87 TWM, 15–16. 88 Ibid., 16. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 17.

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paradigms organizing the otherwise chaotic realm of historical occurrences into an intelligible whole is a condition of events significance. Paradigmatic thinking excludes the very possibility considered by Fackenheim: the possibility of an event that might disrupt or at least put into question the entire paradigmatic framework. In what follows I explore how Fackenheim arrived at a point when taking this fateful step appeared necessary as well as to his conviction that the Holocaust was an event possessed of not only theological but also deeply transformative meaning. The question of the relation between history and transcendence occupied Fackenheim for many years.91 He formulated the problem succinctly in the following words: History is a predicament for man who must live in it. In order to act in history he must seek to rise above it. He needs perspectives in terms of which to understand his situation, and timeless truths and values in terms of which to act in it. Yet the perspectives which he finds often merely reflect his age; and what he accepts as timelessly true and valid is apt to be merely the opinion which is in fashion.92

Is there a way out of this predicament? Is it possible to rise above history and achieve knowledge the truth value of which would be independent of the flow of time? While this question had always been a part of the human condition, the problem has become ever more pressing since the 19th century when “Western man has developed an ever-increasing historical self-consciousness.”93 For a man aware of the fact that what was regarded true in the past has been recognized as an error in the present, it is difficult, if not altogether impossible, not to suspect that such is the fate of all human beliefs. Historically embedded, shaped by the circumstances of the time of its birth, every idea true today may turn out false tomorrow. Hence, argues Fackenheim, the historical self-consciousness often gives birth to historical skepticism claiming that all we have and all we can have at our disposal are various, often conflicting views and beliefs and the choice between them has to be made without any absolute criterion. Metaphysics, Fackenheim

91 See Michael L. Morgan, Dilemmas in Modern Jewish Thought. The Dialectics of Revelation and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 75. 92 Emil L. Fackenheim, “Metaphysics and Historicity,” in The God Within. Kant, Schelling, and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 122. 93 Ibid., 123.

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observes, used to be understood as a domain of timeless truths, but not anymore: It is a most disturbing fact that what has never been questioned by metaphysicians before has been questioned by metaphysicians since the middle of the nineteenth century. For the first time, the view has come to be entertained that metaphysical truth, far from transcending history, is on the contrary essentially tied to it.94

In “Metaphysics and Historicity” Fackenheim attempts to find a metaphysical truth that is immune to the flow of time. He asks the following question: assuming that the doctrine of historicity is true and that human being is inherently and radically historical, is a metaphysical, timeless truth still possible? After a careful consideration of the doctrine of historicity itself Fackenheim finds such truth in the moment when an individual discovers herself to be both situated and at the same time able to recognize this very situatedness and the limitations it brings: These attempts must be radically individual, made by each person for himself. But the knowledge attained through them is radically universal. For this is not a person’s mere knowledge of his personal situation. It is his knowledge that he is both in principle situated and yet able to recognize his situatedness. This knowledge is universal; and the person who has acquired it has risen to philosophical self-understanding.95

Timeless truths do exist then but only in one sphere—that of the ontological analysis of man. They are possible because human being, although described as a self-constituting process in a situation, is still capable of philosophical self-recognition and self-understanding.96 Fackenheim was doubtlessly opposed to philosophical historicism and this opposition, as Michael Morgan remarks, had both moral and 94 Ibid., 124. 95 Ibid., 141. 96 Fackenheim returned to the problem of historicism, in particular the historicism present in late Heidegger’s works, in “The Transcendence and Historicity of Philosophical Truth,” in Proceedings of the 7th Inter-American Congress of Philosophy 1 (1967): 77–92. In “Metaphysics and Historicity” Fackenheim addressed Heidegger’s historicism in an extensive footnote and described this position as self-refuting. A letter from Leo Strauss prompted him to reconsider the problem and in “The Transcendence and Historicity” Fackenheim presents an argument according to which even Heidegger’s own recalling thinking of the history of Being needs to preserve transcendent philosophical truth.

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epistemological reasons behind it.97 For my considerations, however, an even more important question is whether Fackenheim’s philosophical antihistoricism extended also to religious thought.98 Two early Fackenheim’s essays leave no doubt that the answer to this question is positive. In “SelfRealization and the Search for God”99 (1952) and “On the Eclipse of God”100 (1964) Fackenheim presented an understanding of Judaism characterized by “absolute and fact-defying certainty of God.”101 “God’s existence is man’s existential a priori,”102 argued Fackenheim in the 1952 essay. God can never become an object of man’s objective and critical inquiry—an attitude proper for scientific endeavors and mistakenly extended to the domain of human existential predicaments. Man’s existence cannot become an object of critical detachment for him. Likewise such an approach is impossible with regards to religious faith because confronted with revelation man is always a participant and never a spectator: A God who can be an object is not God. Because a God who is subjected to man’s objective judgment is not God, God can neither be proven nor disproven. If God is God, He is not an object, but the Subject. He is man’s absolute existential a priori.103

The echoes of Buber’s understanding of revelation as a direct I-Thou encounter are evident in this essay as well as in “On the Eclipse of God” where Fackenheim presents Buberian understanding of revelation as a successful refutation of the challenges presented by subjectivist reductionism that “has become a modern—perhaps the modern—way of life.”104 97 Morgan, Dilemmas, 116. 98 For more about Fackenheim’s philosophical antihistoricism see: Sharon Portnoff, Reason and Revelation before Historicism. Strauss and Fackenheim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Martin D. Yaffe, “Historicism and Revelation in Emil Fackenheim’s Self-Distancing from Leo Strauss,” in Emil L. Fackenheim : Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, ed. Martin D. Yaffe, Sharon Portnoff and James A. Diamond (Brill Academic Publishers: Boston, MA 2008), 107–124 as well as W.H. Dray, “Historicity, Historicism, and SelfMaking,” in Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought, ed. Louis Greenspan and Graeme Nicholson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 118–137. 99 Published in Judaism (Fall 1952): 291–306. Reprinted in QPF, 27–51. 100 Published in Commentary (June 1964): 55–60. Reprinted in QPF, 229–243. 101 QPF, 48. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 51. 104 Ibid., 236. See also Emil L. Fackenheim, “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation,” in The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim. A Reader, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 85–101.

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Subjectivist reductionism, in Fackenheim’s description of it, follows the advice formulated by Ockham to eliminate unnecessary assumptions and eliminates God as precisely such an assumption. According to this position the existence of God’s can in no legitimate way be inferred from a feeling of God’s presence experienced by believer. This attitude lies at the root of what Fackenheim describes as an “unprecedented crisis of religious faith.”105 Fackenheim begins “On the Eclipse of God” from acknowledging the reality of this crisis but immediately rejects a “widespread view” which links it with the “catastrophes of the 20th century.” It is not correct to argue, according to Fackenheim, that these catastrophes brought about a crisis of religious faith. Indeed, such a view “reflects a complete lack of understanding of the nature of religious faith in general and Biblical faith in particular”: Biblical faith—and I mean both Jewish and Christian—is never destroyed by tragedy but only tested by it; and in the test it both clarifies its own meaning and conquers tragedy. Here, precisely, lies the secret of its strength.106

There is no direct reference to the Holocaust in this essay. To provide examples of Jewish faith not destroyed by tragedy Fackenheim reaches much further in the past, to the Bible itself and cites Jeremiah, Job, and the Psalmist. No experience could shake their faith in God. Jeremiah describes the destruction of the Temple as a sign of divine wrath and not of divine absence. The Psalmists knows that God sometimes hides his face but is also confident that this state of concealment does not last forever. Even Job, whose faith “is reduced to utter unintelligibility,”107 persists in it. Fackenheim offers the following conclusion: Put radically, this means that there is no experience, either without or within, that can possibly destroy religious faith. Good fortune reveals the hand of God; bad fortune, if it is not a matter of just punishment, teaches that God’s ways are unintelligible, not that there are no ways of God. A full heart within indicates the Divine Presence; an empty heart bespeaks not the non-existence or unconcern of God, but merely His temporary absence. Religious faith can be, and is, empirically verifiable; but nothing empirical can possibly refute it.108 105 106 107 108

Ibid., 229. Ibid., 229–230. Ibid., 230. Ibid., 231.

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A believer, in other words, always remains within the circle of faith that cannot be refuted by any experience. History presents no danger and no challenge for Judaism because all historical occurrences can be interpreted within and absorbed by the unshakable framework determined by the primary commitment of faith or, as Fackenheim puts it, “man’s primordial openness to the Divine—an openness, to be sure, which is interrupted by eclipses of God.”109 Given the absolute immunity of religious faith to the empirical it is not surprising that, in Fackenheim’s view at that time, no historical event, however catastrophic, could have decisively refuted or even affected Judaism: Hence the catastrophes of our time  .  .  .  cannot by themselves account for the contemporary crisis of religious belief; or rather, they can be regarded as having produced this crisis only on the assumption that religious belief was already undermined.110

The second part of this sentence expresses an idea similar to what I have argued about Rubenstein’s thought. In my interpretation, the crisis of theodicy Rubenstein was trying to respond to was a result of an erosion of traditional Judaism that predated the Holocaust. I will return later to the idea that the post-Holocaust crisis of religious belief in general and of Judaism specifically was possible only because of the prior weakening of religion. For now, suffice it to say that in his early period Fackenheim conceived of religious faith as immune to historical events. In 1969 Fackenheim published an essay in which he attempted to address the empiricist challenge again.111 This time he started from admitting that at least in principle Judaism was open to the possibility of empirical disconfirmation. Judaism presupposes God’s empirical manifestation in the world. In addition, the divine presence in Judaism’s case cannot be limited exclusively to the remote past: manifestations of this presence must continue to occur, if not in the present, then at least in the future. Hence, it “must be said that Judaism is vulnerable both to empirical reality and to

109 Ibid., 242. 110 Ibid., 231. 111 Emil L. Fackenheim, “Elijah and the Empiricists: The Possibility of Divine Presence,” in The Religious Situation 1969, ed. D.R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), later reprinted as the first chapter of Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy. A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

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empiricist philosophy.”112 Judaism is open for empirical disconfirmation because it claims not only that certain manifestations of divine presence happened in the past but also that they are bound to occur in the future. The question is: is this belief still plausible? Or maybe it has been already refuted by history? Sophisticated philosophers have overlooked this possibility at a time when even ordinary Jewish believers are unable to overlook it. After Auschwitz, it is a major question whether the Messianic faith is not already falsified— whether a Messiah who could come, and yet did not come, has become religious impossibility.113

The falsification of the belief regarding the coming of the Messiah is not, Fackenheim declares, “unimaginable”: “Precisely insofar as it holds fast to history, Jewish faith risks falsification by history.”114 In the end, however, the risk turns out not to be real and Fackenheim hints at that early in the essay by asking: “If it is true that Judaism has a unique empirical vulnerability, is it not conceivable that it may also have found unique ways of responding to this vulnerability?”115 First of all, Jewish faith, according to Fackenheim, cannot be properly treated as a mere empirical hypothesis similar in its nature to those formulated by scientists. Describing it as such betrays a misunderstanding of faith which should rather be conceived of as a way of “life and experience” which Fackenheim calls “believing openness.”116 An empiricist philosopher can claim to have refuted faith or proved its meaninglessness only because from the beginning she attempts to apply to the biblical faith the categories that are alien to it. Ultimately, the problem with the empiricist critique of religious faith is not so much that it is unconvincing but rather that it completely misses the target. Fackenheim presents also another argument against empirical refutation of Jewish belief, specifically the belief regarding the Messianic future. In what might be described as a thought experiment he presents a hypothetical situation in which only a small group of Jews survives a nuclear devastation of the world: the history has ended and their eschatological 112 Fackenheim, Encounters, 11. 113 Ibid., 20–21. 114 Ibid., 21. 115 Ibid., 12. 116 Ibid., 25.

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hopes remained unfulfilled. The Messianic promise “would be falsified by a catastrophic end of human history.”117 Or would it? Not according to Fackenheim: The authentic Jewish believer would take a different course. He has in any case spent his life working for the coming of the divine kingdom, as well as waiting for it. He would now cite the divine commandment to do this work against God Himself, would refuse to abandon what God either chose to abandon or could not help abandoning, and spend his last hours on earth beating swords into plowshares.118

Neither the existence of God nor the doctrine of divine love are undermined by the nuclear destruction scenario. Jewish faith never claimed that the world has been redeemed already and hence the existence of evil cannot refute the belief in God. In Fackenheim’s understanding, as long as the Messianic promise does not appear entirely implausible, Judaism cannot be falsified. As Steven Katz observed, Fackenheim’s defense of the plausibility of the belief in the Messianic promise in this essay is not convincing.119 In “Elijah and the Empiricists” the challenge posed by empiricist philosophy is not met but rather sidestepped. Unlike Katz, however, I do not consider it a weakness in Fackenheim’s reasoning: his aim in the essay is not to present a consistent and convincing defense of Jewish faith against empiricism but to show that empiricist approach can undermine Judaism only because it begins with a misguided understanding of it. Contrary to the proponents of this approach, Judaism is not merely an empirical hypothesis. It is, to use Katz’s formulation, “a transhistorical faith that is impervious to the actual happenings of the world historical.”120 In his early period Fackenheim defended revelation and religious faith by situating them beyond the reach of scientific critique and by making them immune to the occurrences in the historical realm. This “radical fideism,”121 however, contained an inner tension linked to the Buber-Rosenzweig understanding of revelation adopted by Fackenheim. In Fackenheim’s interpretation of Buber-Rosenzweig account of the revelation, revelation 117 Ibid., 21. 118 Ibid., 22. 119 Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 229. 120 Ibid. 121 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 138.

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is an event of encounter between a divine presence and a human recipient. Everything apart from the encounter itself, all verbal traces of the revelation constitute human response to it.122 In “Can There Be Judaism Without Revelation?” Fackenheim describes the matter as follows: Revelation  .  .  .  remains a mystery even while it is revealed; and every single word spoken by any prophet is inexorably shot through with human interpretation. Franz Rosenzweig observed: “Revelation is not identical with legislation; it is, in itself, nothing but the act of revelation itself. Immediately, it is its own sole content; properly speaking, it is completed with the word vayyered (‘and He descended’); even vayyedabber (‘and He spoke’) is already human interpretation.” . . . All interpretation of revelation is human. . . . Revelation must pass into human interpretation, else it does not become accessible at all.123

If, however, revelation is necessarily accompanied by human interpretation, how can Judaism not be historical? How can a human response to the divine-human encounter be immune to history if it occurs in history and is received by beings that not only live in history but are at least partially shaped by it? In the first chapter of Quest for Past and Future, written especially for the volume and at a time when he had already undergone the “greatest doctrinal change” referred to earlier, Fackenheim presented a different understanding of the consequences of his understanding of the revelation: God of Israel speaks into the historical here-and-now, and hence, potentially, into any here-and-now. Hence Jewish theological thought, however firmly rooted in past revelatory events, has always remained open to present and future, and this openness includes vulnerability to radical surprise. . . . The Midrashic framework is an open framework. The Torah was given at Sinai, yet it is given whenever a man receives it. . . . Such openness is necessary if history is to be serious.124

122 On Buber-Rosenzweig understanding of revelation see Morgan, Dilemmas, 138– 139, 127–132; Peter Eli Gordon, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Philosophy of Jewish Existence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Michael L. Morgan and Peter Eli Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 122– 146 and Fackenheim, “Martin Buber’s Concept of Revelation.” 123 QPF, 80–81. 124 Ibid., 16–17.

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There was no possibility of vulnerability or of a radical surprise in Fackenheim’s earlier understanding of Jewish faith. In this respect it was analogous to the framework of paradigmatic thinking that excludes theologically significant historical novelty. Nothing empirical can refute faith, argued Fackenheim. Nothing in history can alter the paradigm because it is the paradigm that decides what in fact qualifies as significant or meaningful. Michael Morgan points out that the existentialist critique of Hegel and idealism contributed to Fackenheim’s arrival at this position of “new historicism.”125 Fackenheim adopted an existential understanding of man as situated, as a being whose very humanity is defined by existential limitations. Such an understanding of man encompasses history as one of the factors that determine human condition and although it does not, as Fackenheim argued in “Metaphysics and Historicity,” necessarily lead to an absolute rejection of a possibility of attaining timeless knowledge, it does force a recognition of the historically embedded and determined character of most human beliefs. History, then, turns out not only to be an inescapable predicament for those who live in it but also a factor contributing to the shape of the structure of Jewish experience and of the religious expression of this experience. In 1968 Fackenheim published an essay “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment” that begins with a succinct admission of this fact: Within the past two centuries, three events have shaken and are still shaking Jewish religious experience—the Emancipation and its aftereffects, the Nazi Holocaust, and the rise of the first Jewish state in two thousand years—and of these, two have occurred in our generation.126

Confrontation with the Holocaust was the last element that contributed to Fackenheim’s rejection of his earlier understanding of Judaism and that made a realization of Judaism’s historical character unavoidable for him. This is evident in Fackenheim’s writings from 1966–1967 and confirmed by his own admission in the preface to the second edition of To Mend the World where Fackenheim described trepidation with which he accepted an invitation to participate—along Elie Wiesel—in a symposium “Jewish

125 Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 75–76. 126 Emil L. Fackenheim, The Jewish Return to History. Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 25. The essay was originally published in Commentary 46, no. 2 (August 1968): 30–36.

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Values in the Post-Holocaust Future” organized in 1967 by the editors of the journal Judaism.127 In 1966 Fackenheim—along Richard Rubenstein and others—was invited to contribute to Commentary’s symposium “The State of Jewish Belief.” In his response to the question regarding the notion of the death of God, Fackenheim described the 20th century as “the age of Auschwitz” and stated that “the Jew of the generation of Auschwitz” should not accept the idea that God is dead but rather “do what, since Abraham, Jeremiah, and Job, Jews have always done in times of darkness—contend with the silent God, and bear witness to Him by this very contention.”128 In this brief statement the importance of the Holocaust is acknowledged but at the same time its theological significance is minimized: Auschwitz here is understood as yet another “time of darkness,” yet another moment when God was hiding his face. Hence, there is no need, let alone a necessity, to formulate a radically new response to the Holocaust. In 1966 Fackenheim believed that it was possible to assimilate the Holocaust into the pre-existing theological framework. Before long, however, his position changed and in 1968 Fackenheim wrote: The events that are associated with the dread name of Auschwitz still pass human comprehension. But they have shaken Jewish existence to the core, even when they are uncomprehended. They call everything into question.  .  .  .  The Jew may not authentically think about religion  .  .  .  as though Auschwitz had not happened.129

In God’s Presence in History Fackenheim presented in a systematic fashion an understanding of Judaism no longer immune to history but on the contrary—born out of historical experiences described as “root experiences” and changing in response to “epoch-making events.”130 Some critics have found Fackenheim’s definitions of both of these categories wanting131 and pointed out that it remains unclear whether the Holocaust, according to Fackenheim’s own criteria, should be seen as a root experience, an epoch making event or both. For my purposes, however, this question is not as important as Fackenheim’s admission that there can be historical events of 127 TMW, xvi-xx. 128 QPF, 315. 129 Ibid., 281. 130 GPH, 3–34. 131 Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 225. Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 142.

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theological significance between Sinai and the Messianic days, events that prompt or even force “a confrontation in which the old faith [is] tested in the light of contemporary experience.”132 Among such events Fackenheim lists the end of prophecy, the destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem, the Maccabean revolt, and the expulsion from Spain. To this list one might presumably add the destruction brought on many Jewish communities during the Crusades or, to give a less tragic example, the Emancipation. Epoch-making events, as Fackenheim puts it, always make “a new claim upon the Jewish faith.”133 Their impact may be so powerful as to threaten the Jewish faith with total destruction: epoch-making events can disrupt the connection between the root experiences, i.e. the foundational events such as the Exodus and the revelation at Mount Sinai, and the present moment and by doing so they can make the present reenactment of the root experiences impossible. “Jewish history,” observes Fackenheim, “abounds with such confrontations between past and present.”134 Epoch-making events, in other words, although threatening and at least potentially transforming never destroyed Judaism, “never destroyed the past faith.”135 Never or rather, Fackenheim qualifies, “at least until the rise of the modern world.”136 The rise of the modern world and its impact on the ways in which Jews related to and conceived of Judaism occupies an important place in Fackenheim’s understanding of the changes within Jewish religious tradition. Specifically, the Emancipation, one of the most significant epoch-making events, has shaken, in his opinion, the Jewish religious experience and commitments: When Titus destroyed the renewed Temple, and Hadrian paganized Jerusalem, the rabbis adhered stubbornly to the root experiences of Judaism. No such stubbornness has been shown by their descendants after the Emancipation cast them into the modern world and exposed them to modern secularism. . . . The ancient rabbis remained within the Midrashic framework. Modern Jews have stepped outside the framework and called it into question.137

132 GPH, 8. 133 Ibid., 9 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., 45.

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Fackenheim does not explain why exactly has the Emancipation and the consequent exposure to the secular, modern world caused the Jew to move outside the traditional framework and question it from the outsider’s perspective but in his opinion it was the first of the epoch-making events in Jewish history that prompted such a fateful step. In the pre-modern era, the Midrashic framework proved resilient and flexible enough to absorb any historical development. The rise of modernity, however, marked the moment in which the strength and authority of the traditional discourse crumbled. The “abiding astonishment” with which the pre-modern religious man responded to the incursions of the divine into empirical reality was replaced by critical reflection fueled not by believing openness but rather by scientific and historical curiosity. And tradition could no longer defend itself by appealing to the power of authority alone because critical thinking demanded more than that to satisfy its doubts. In God’s Presence in History Fackenheim returns to his earlier description of subjectivist reductionism as the dominant intellectual attitude of the modern era. While modern secularism, in his opinion, can safely ignore religious faith, the latter cannot avoid a confrontation with the former. In Fackenheim’s own words: “in modern times, the secular world is ‘where the action is,’ and . . . a God of history must be where the action is. Yet self-exposure to secularity involves self-exposure to secularism—the critical dissipation of the very possibility of the presence of God.”138 The innocence was lost and it was lost irrevocably139: Religious immediacy must expose itself to threat of subjectivist-reductionist reflection, and modern Jewish faith can authentically preserve the Midrashic framework, thus calling it into question. Such a stance of faith was called by Søren Kierkegaard “immediacy after reflection.”140

For a modern Jew, as for a modern man in general, religious immediacy is no longer possible after the exposure to the modern world. That, however, does not mean the end of religious faith. Rather, this moment marks the beginning of a new faith, faith conceived of as immediacy after reflection 138 Ibid., 46. 139 “Pre-modern Jewish faith did not step outside the Midrashic framework even in times of catastrophe. . . . Modern Jewish faith has stepped outside the Midrashic framework, suffering a loss of innocence which remains even in times when the divine Presence is an unquestioned or unquestionable reality.” Ibid., 49. 140 Ibid., 47.

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born when the Jew recognizes that the threat of secularism is real and cannot be ignored and, simultaneously, that she does not want to leave the framework of religious faith completely behind: Nothing is possible except an immediacy after reflection which is and remains self-exposed to the possibility of total dissipation of every divine Presence, and yet confronts this possibility with a forever reenacted risk of commitment.141

It is faith as immediacy after reflection then, a faith that does not possess the self-assurance of religious immediacy, that confronts the Holocaust—a tragedy, according to Fackenheim, unlike any other Judaism has encountered before. The assumption of Holocaust uniqueness or unprecedented character constitute a fundamental part of Fackenheim’s reasoning. He categorically rejects any explanations of the Holocaust that would place it not only within a religious framework but even within broader borders of comprehensibility. The Holocaust defies all traditional categories: it cannot be understood either by reason or by reason augmented by revelation. Fackenheim’s answer to the question why the Holocaust is unique and hence incomprehensible evolved over time142 to find its definite expression in the fourth chapter of To Mend the World which in its entirety is an attempt to show the Holocaust as rapture, as radical discontinuity. In “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust” (1968) Fackenheim asserted that Auschwitz is “the rock on which throughout eternity all rational explanations will crash and break apart.”143 In God’s Presence in History he rejects all traditional religious interpretations of the event. The doctrine of divine retribution for sins applied in this case becomes an “absurdity” and a “sacriledge” because among victims were innocent children.144 The Holocaust cannot be understood in terms of martyrdom because martyrdom requires choice which was not given to the victims.145 Protest within faith is not acceptable due to the fact that in this particular situation the protest “threatens to escalate into a totally destructive conflict between the faith of the past 141 Ibid., 49. 142 Michael Morgan presents an exhaustive description of Fackenheim’s argument and its evolution in Beyond Auschwitz, 158–159, 167, 171–175, and 185–186. 143 Fackenheim, Jewish Return, 29. 144 GPH, 73. 145 Ibid., 74. It is interesting to compare Fackenheim’s rejection of the application of the concept of martyrdom to the Holocaust with Berkovits’s no less passionate defense of it in With God in Hell, 104–112.

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and faithfulness to the present.”146 Similarly, in Fackenheim’s opinion, the doctrines of the powerlessness of God and of the eclipse of God need to be rejected.147 Not only religious explanations but also rational ones fail to grasp the event: the Holocaust paralyzes any thought.148 Over time Fackenheim expanded his analysis of the unprecedented character of the Holocaust by accumulating new facts regarding both the victims and the perpetrators. His view, however, remained essentially unchanged. As Michael Morgan aptly summarized: The crucial point  .  .  .  is that Auschwitz is not just one of a collection of bad events; its special features—the role of technology and bureaucracy, the motives of the agents, the victims, and more—single it out. And this singularity is not mundane; it is significant, a fact that is expressed by the way traditional discourse cannot adequately incorporate it.149

While comprehension and explanations are impossible, says Fackenheim, a response is necessary.150 His later work, first and foremost To Mend the World, is an attempt to find such a response—a complex and daunting task made ever more difficult by the fact that due to the Holocaust’s unprecedented nature traditional patterns of response must remain unsatisfactory.151 Fackenheim’s thought unfolds from his early position where Judaism is presented as immune to empirical events and faith as confirmable by experience but impossible to falsify, through his recognition of Judaism’s historical character, postulating the Holocaust as a unique challenge to Jewish religious thought and life, to a vision of recovery. I agree with Fackenheim’s own admission that the second step constituted the most important and transforming part of his reflection—Fackenheim’s entire project rests upon the assumption that there can exist historical events that 146 Ibid., 76. 147 Ibid., 76–78. 148 TMW, 200. Zachary Braiterman notes in this context that Fackenheim felt compelled to declare the defeat of thought when confronted with the Holocaust partially because of his understanding of the nature of philosophy that was deeply influenced by Hegel and due to his interpretation of thought as “detached serenity.” (God) Beyond Auschwitz, 145–146. 149 Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 172. 150 See QPF, 18. 151 Numerous scholars described the shape of Fackenheim’s post-Holocaust Judaism. For the most comprehensive analysis see Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 69–70, 73–78, 155– 195 and idem, “Emil Fackenheim, the Holocaust, and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, 256–276.

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not only challenge Judaism’s theological commitments but also necessitate their revisions. The Holocaust occupies a special place among those epoch-making events because due to its unprecedented character it actually causes a radical rupture, a discontinuation between the past and present and hence also future. Positing the Holocaust as such an event is dependent upon logically prior recognition of Judaism’s historicity, of the fact that theologically significant events can occur between Sinai and the redemptive end of history. Paradigmatic thinking excludes such an understanding of Judaism.

Eliezer Berkovits In his essay about Eliezer Berkovits, Charles Raffel described him as a member of a new generation of liberal modern Orthodox thinkers whose work was met within his own community with a reaction not entirely unlike the one Rubenstein experienced.152 Both Zachary Braiterman and Michael Morgan take issues with the previous scholarship about Berkovits and argue that his position “proved more complicated”153 than critics in the past acknowledged. In the words of the latter: “Too often [Berkovits’s] work is viewed simply as a traditional, uncomplicated treatment of Jewish faith and Auschwitz. This assessment is itself unsympathetic and certainly too superficial.”154 Critics like Steven T. Katz and Eliezer Schweid focus on Berkovits’s assertion according to which the Holocaust does not present a unique theological challenge and on his employment of the free-will theodicy.155 Braiterman and Morgan, on the other hand, acknowledge the importance of these elements in Berkovits’s post-Holocaust reflection but emphasize, respectively, the role of antitheodicy and an innovative rewriting of tradition in his work and Berkovits’s recognition of both continuity and discontinuity that the post-Holocaust Judaism needs to wrestle with.156 In my reading of Berkovits’s post-Holocaust theology I choose to draw attention to yet another aspect of Berkovits’s thought. Agreeing with Morgan 152 Charles M. Raffel, “Eliezer Berkovits” in Interpreters of Judaism in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Steven T. Katz (Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Books, 1993), 1–15. 153 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 114. 154 Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 120. 155 Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 94–140. Eliezer Schweid, Wrestling until Daybreak: Searching for Meaning in the Thinking on the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 335–337, 349. 156 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 112–133. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 109–120.

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and Braiterman that Berkovits’s position cannot be fully appreciated if it is described primarily as a relatively non-original defense and application of the classical free-will theodicy, I submit that Berkovits’s response to the Holocaust can be understood as fundamentally determined by his understanding of the dynamics of the history of Jewish people. Berkovits’s emphasis on the Holocaust as historically but not theologically unique element of the continuum of this history that unfolds under God’s concealed providential guidance from Exodus and Sinai to redemption as well as his rejection of any naturalistic explanations of Israel’s survival across the ages reflect residual paradigmatic thinking. Berkovits rejects the idea of God’s evident presence in history or as he puts it any “simplistic theory of divine providence.”157 Divine presence, however, while “unconvincing” is manifested in the very fact of Israel’s survival and most importantly in the establishment of the State of Israel. Paradigmatic thinking appears in Berkovits’s reflection precisely at this point when he describes the history of the Jewish people not only as anomalous and inexplicable without reference to God but also as inexorably progressing toward redemption: In a human condition in which history is altogether man-made, the historical Israel is an impossibility. Yet, Israel is real. It can be real only because history is enacted on a two-fold level: it is man-made, the Kingdom is man’s responsibility; it is God-planned, because the Kingdom of God on earth is man’s responsiblity; it may be delayed by crematoria and death camps, yet come it must, come it will, a-coming it is.158

In the first sentences of With God in Hell159, his second book devoted to Judaism and the Holocaust, Berkovits remarks that after the publication of Faith after the Holocaust in 1973 and after delivering numerous lectures on the topic he came to realize that although the word “faith” appeared in the title of his first book, he never answered the question of what faith is. Zachary Braiterman notes that in his essay about Berkovits as well.160 Berkovits does not begin Faith after the Holocaust from an explication of the intended meaning of the term nor does he explain whether this 157 Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973), 93. Hereafter cited as FH. 158 Ibid., 153. 159 Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell. Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps (New York and London: Sanhedrin Press, 1979). 160 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 115.

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post-Holocaust faith is a faith in God or rather someone or something else. What he does instead is introducing a criterion of authentic response to the Holocaust. This criterion, however, contains more than a suggestion of what Berkovits imagines the post-Holocaust faith should be like. In his own words: “Those of us who were not there must, before anything else, heed the response of those who were, for theirs alone are the authentic ones.”161 And how those who were there responded? Many of them lost their faith. And many persevered in it until their deaths. Both responses are equally authentic by virtue of being the responses of those who were directly exposed to the devastating Nazi assault. A post-Holocaust Jew does not dare, in Berkovits’s view, privilege belief over disbelief or doubt and rebellion over faithfulness. In a moving passage Berkovits writes: Many who were there lost their faith. . . . Can I, therefore, adopt their attitude for myself and rebel and reject? I was not there myself. I am not Job. I am only his brother. I cannot reject because there were others, too . . . who were there and did not lose their faith. . . . I, who was not there, cannot reject, because to reject would be a desecration of the sacrifice of the myriads who accepted their lot in faith. How dare I reject, if they accepted? Neither can I accept. I who was not there, because I was not there, dare not accept, dare not submit, because my brothers . . . who did go through that hell, did rebel and did reject.162

Neither belief nor disbelief is an option for those who have not experienced the hell firsthand. Those who came after cannot, in Berkovits’s view, use the disbelief of the victims as an excuse for or a justification of their own lack of faith because there were those who believed to the end. Nor can they, however, allow their faith to remain untouched by the Holocaust because there were those whose faith was shattered. The post-Holocaust faith, then, has to be able to embrace and incorporate both the “holy faith” and the “holy disbelief ” of the victims: We must believe, because our brother Job believed; and we must question, because our brother Job so often could not believe any longer. This is not a comfortable situation; but it is our situation in this era after the holocaust.163

161 FH, 4. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid., 5.

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The post-Holocaust faith is a troubled faith. Berkovits rejects as unauthentic an unshaken, complacent belief that would quell any doubts by asserting that whatever happened it was God’s will and as such must be accepted without a word of protest—such a faith is “vulgarity.” Equally unauthentic, in his opinion, is a facile rejection of faith—Berkovits goes as far as to call it an “obscenity.”164 Job’s brother, a Jew who was spared the horrors of the Holocaust by the grace of late birth or geographical distance, must remain torn between belief and disbelief, his faith must include both trust and questioning.165 However, a faith it remains. The questioning belief remains a belief or to put it differently, doubting occurs within the circle of faith: Only the believer in the living God of Israel is involved in the crisis of faith after the death camps; only he can lose his faith on account of it. Undoubtedly, for our generation Auschwitz represents the supreme crisis of faith. It would be tantamount to a spiritual tragedy if it were otherwise. After the holocaust Israel’s first religious responsibility is to “reason” with God and—if need be—to wrestle with Him.166

Job’s brother is to wrestle with God in “believing rebellion and rebellious belief.”167 This is not a comfortable position, as Berkovits acknowledges, and would be precarious indeed had it been without precedent. Job’s brother, however, in his questioning faith, in his wrestling with God is following into the footsteps of his predecessors. This is so because the problem of faith the Holocaust presents a believer with “is not unique in the context of the entirety of Jewish experience.”168 Two important issues come to the fore in connection with this assertion. First, noted by scholars before, Berkovits’s denial of Holocaust uniqueness. Second, his understanding of the role of faithful rebellion within Jewish tradition. “From the point of view of the problem [of faith],” Berkovits asserts, “we have had innumerable Auschwitzes.”169 Steven T. Katz takes issue 164 Ibid. “Neither the authenticity of rebellion nor the authenticity of faith is available to those who are only Job’s brother.” Ibid., 69. 165 In this respect Berkovits’s post-Holocaust faith resembles the “dialectical faith” after the Holocaust described by Irving Greenberg in his essay “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: Ktav, 1977), 7–55. 166 FH., 68. 167 Ibid., 69. 168 Ibid., 89. 169 Ibid., 90.

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with this assessment arguing that “historically speaking, the Sho’ah does represent a novum in Jewish history.”170 I doubt, however, that Berkovits would disagree with this statement, because his argument is directed not against the historical but against theological uniqueness of the Holocaust. The question Berkovits asks is whether or not the Holocaust constitutes a unique theological challenge for Judaism. This question he answers in negative. Berkovits does not deny, however, that the Holocaust was historically unprecedented: While in absolute terms the horrors of the German death camps by far surpassed anything that preceded it, in terms of subjective experience the impact of the catastrophe on the major tragic occasions of Jewish history was no less intense that the impact of the horrors of our own experience. . . . It is for this reason that while the holocaust is unique in the objective magnitude of its inhumanity, it is not unique as a problem of faith resulting from Jewish historical experience.171

The Holocaust is historically unique, then, but historical uniqueness does not necessarily imply a presence of an unprecedented theological challenge. If in their long history the Jews did experience tragedies that had similar impact on their understanding of their religious commitments and the nature of their faith, then one can expect to find the traces of these past struggles with God in the classical Jewish sources. And this is precisely where Berkovits turns his attention in an attempt to show that the questioning or protesting faith of Job’s brother is not without precedent, that Job’s brother can find guidance in the spiritual struggles of his ancestors who—like he does—felt compelled to wrestle with the silent God. In Faith after the Holocaust and in With God in Hell Berkovits reaches for biblical and rabbinical examples of questioning faith. Jeremiah asked God why he allows evil to triumph (Jer. 12:1). Habakkuk could not help but wonder why the innocent suffer and accused God of being indifferent to their fate (Hab. 1:13). The Psalmist cried out to God who has forgotten and forsaken him (Ps. 44).172 That the biblical figure of Job is important for Berkovits’s consideration is evident already in his description of the post-Holocaust Jews as Job’s brothers. In Berkovits’s reading the Book of Job is “the last hopeless attempt in the Bible made on behalf of the simplistic 170 Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 269. 171 FH, 90. See also Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 114. 172 Ibid., 92–98.

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theory of divine providence, justice, and grace” summarized in the words Eliphaz the Temanite addresses to Job: “As I have seen, those who plow evil and sow mischief reap them” (Job 4:8). In the end, it is Job, however, with his protest and not Eliphaz, who is vindicated: “God rejects his would-be defenders and takes sides with the one who contended with him.”173 The rabbis, according to Berkovits, expressed similar sentiments. One of them in particular is granted a prominent position in Berkovits’s reflection: Elisha ben Abuyah, whom tradition depicts as the one who having struggled with the problem of evil lost his faith in God and in protest exclaimed “there is no judge and there is no judgment.”174 According to Berkovits, Elisha ben Abuyah “looms large in the pages of the Talmud”175 which testifies to the rabbinical appreciation of the problem of theodicy and of the place of protest and rebellion within faith. In With God in Hell Berkovits returned to the question regarding the nature of Jewish faith. The penultimate chapter of the book, Berkovits last exposition on the subject, bears the title “Emunah—Trust” which points to his understanding of the most important aspect of faith. Jewish faith, in his understanding, is not an intellectual assertion regarding the existence of God. Nor is it an acknowledgment of the experienced encounter with the divine or even an awareness of the divine presence. The essence of Jewish faith is constituted by an existential commitment of trust, trust which exists even without understanding. Berkovits uses the example of Abraham asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac to illuminate the point. In his interpretation of the Akedah, Søren Kierkegaard saw Abraham as the Knight of Faith who knew that he was to kill his son as a sacrifice and who simultaneously believed that God would keep his promise according to which “in Isaac will your seed be called” (Gen. 21:12).176 Abraham knew that his son was to die and knew that he would be given back to him. Berkovits categorically rejects Kierkegaard’s interpretation. In his own words: “Judaism does not accept Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum.”177 Abraham continued to believe in God’s promise given to him not because he was capable of a leap of faith but rather because he was able to trust God in spite of the fact that God 173 Ibid., 93. See also With God in Hell, 126. 174 Ibid., 97, 102–104. 175 Berkovits, With God in Hell, 118. 176 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. by Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 177 Berkovits, With God in Hell, 123.

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seemed to be contradicting himself. Such was the faith of the Job of the concentration camps: its essence was trust which “is not a leap of faith, but continuation of the life of the covenant”178 or to put it differently: an existential commitment to the covenantal agreement between Israel and God. Berkovits’s final words about faith do not come from himself but from an external source. The last pages of the chapter devoted to faith are occupied by a lengthy quotation from what Berkovits considered to be an authentic document from the Warsaw ghetto and what we know now to be a literary creation: the last words of Yossel Rakover.179 As Zachary Braiterman noted, the very placement of this citation in Berkovits’s work implies that in Rakover’s words he found the ultimate expression of religious faith of the victims of the Holocaust:180 I trust in God, the God of Israel, even though He does everything to destroy my trust. I have trust in His statutes, although I cannot justify His deeds . . . I bow my head before His greatness, but His staff with which He castigates me I shall not kiss.181

It is important to notice that Rakover’s faith does not include a justification of God’s ways. Neither, in Berkovits’s reading, did Abraham understand or justify God’s request to sacrifice Isaac: “The monstrosity remained monstrous; the inhumanity remained foul injustice tolerated by God.”182 Rakover acknowledges God’s greatness and providential presence behind historical events but refuses to justify what he perceives as injustice he was submitted to. He recognizes that he cannot possibly understand, justify, and accept and yet he perseveres in faith. In Emmanuel Levinas’s words, Yossel Rakover loves Torah more than God183 and to the Torah he remains faithful. In Berkovits’s description such was the faith of the victims of the Holocaust and thus this is the faith that Job’s brother received as his legacy. 178 Ibid., 124. 179 Zvi Kolitz, “Yossel Rakover Talks to God,” in Wrestling with God. Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 395–400. Zvi Kolitz published “Yossel Rakover’s Appeal to God” in a special issue of a Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires. For many years the text was considered to be an authentic document from the Warsaw Ghetto because initially it was published without the name of the author. 180 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 123. 181 Berkovits, With God in Hell, 130. 182 Ibid., 124–125. 183 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 142–145.

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In his study, Zachary Braiterman convincingly argues that Berkovits’s description of Jewish traditional sources as unequivocally and equally embracing belief and disbelief, assertion and dissent, acceptance and rebellion is, in fact, a remarkable exercise in exegesis and eisegesis.184 The canon of classical Jewish literature contains elements of positions other than unqualified or absolute theodicy. It is however equally true that the final word, as it were, belongs to the covenantal theodicy. Talmud describes Elisha ben Abuyah as Aher, as Other, not so much, as Berkovits presents it, because his spiritual struggle changed him185 but rather because his apostasy made him an alien. His voice was preserved in Jewish tradition but Aher certainly does not “loom large in the pages of the Talmud” and albeit not insignificant he does remain a marginal figure. By rearranging the elements present in the traditional texts Berkovits was able to portray the tradition in a way which supported his understanding of the post-Holocaust Jewish religious commitment. Berkovits’s reading of the Talmudic depictions of Elisha ben Abuyah differs from mainstream interpretations. Similarly, his affirmation of Job’s protest is made possible by ignoring those voices in the traditional sources that categorically reject it.186 As Braiterman observes, “rewriting and rereading lie at the very heart of what proves to be a profoundly revisionary approach to Jewish texts and thought.”187 This revision and reinterpretation of Jewish texts with respect to the place of the “rebellious belief and believing rebellion” in Jewish tradition is a necessary element of Berkovits’s theological project. It is so not only because of his adoption of the faith of the victims of the Holocaust as a criterion of an authentic response to the event but also because the depiction of Jewish religious experience and textual tradition as replete with voices of contention enables Berkovits to place both the Holocaust itself and the post-Holocaust faith in the continuum of Jewish history and responses to catastrophe. “The questioning of God’s providence in the death camps was taking place within the classical tradition of Judaism,” argues Berkovits. In other words, the death camps had their own Jobs, their own Ahers, Jeremiahs, Habakkuks, and Psalmists. The victims of the Holocaust were not alone in their spiritual struggles but followed a well-established path. 184 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 125. 185 Berkovits, With God in Hell, 118. FH, 97. 186 For example, in BT Baba Batra 16a Rab states that ”dust should be put in the mouth of Job.” See Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 126. 187 Ibid., 126.

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Likewise, Job’s brother who confronts the enormity of the Holocaust today can reach into the past to realize that the crisis of faith he experiences, however immense, is not entirely new and the past provides resources for coping with it: “The holocaust occurred after several millennia of Jewish history, and it cannot be considered independently either of that experience or of the teaching that accompanied that experience.”188 Post-Holocaust contentious faith belongs within the traditional framework as much as the questioning of God by Jeremiah or Job. While for Richard Rubenstein the Holocaust was the ultimate proof of the inadequacy of traditional Jewish theological vocabulary, for Berkovits, on the contrary, the Holocaust not only confirms its validity but also necessitates its further employment.189 That is not to say that for Berkovits the Holocaust does not present any challenge. It is not theologically unique but its historical uniqueness places a special burden on the post-Holocaust generation. The question Berkovits believes needs to be answered is “whether, after Auschwitz, the Jewish people may still be witness to God’s elusive presence in history as we understand the concept.”190 As Michael Morgan noted, the Holocaust, for Berkovits, “has psychological and historical implications for continued Jewish fidelity and survival.”191 In the first two chapters of Faith after the Holocaust Berkovits paints a disturbingly grim picture of the “moral bankruptcy of Christian civilization,” “the spiritual bankruptcy of Christian religion,” and of the “moral disintegration” of the West which because of the Holocaust “lost its every claim to dignity and respect.”192 The post-Holocaust world finds itself in a state of crisis deep and overwhelming enough to speak of the Holocaust as a rupture after which it is extremely difficult not to succumb to despair. For this reason, it is all the more important for Job’s brother to know that his struggle is not a lonely one and that the Holocaust, as Berkovits puts it, “does not preempt the entire course of Jewish history”193: There is a pre-holocaust past, a post-holocaust present, and there is also a future, which is, to a large extent, Israel’s own responsibility. Auschwitz does

188 FH, 88. 189 See Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 113. 190 FH, 131. See also FH, 86 191 Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 115. 192 FH, 41, 36, 18. 193 Ibid., 134.

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not contain the entire history of Israel; it is not the all-comprehensive Jewish experience.194

In the pre-Holocaust past one discovers tragedies but also triumphs. There was slavery in Egypt, but there was Exodus and Sinai. The Temple was destroyed, but there was also the return from Babylon. In Berkovits’s reading of it, Jewish history contains moments of divine concealment and of divine revelation. It is so also in the post-Holocaust present: For the Jew, for whom Jewish history neither begins with Auschwitz nor ends with it, Jewish survival through the ages and the ingathering of exiles into the land of their fathers after the holocaust proclaim God’s holy presence at the very heart of his inscrutable hiddenness.195

Berkovits insists that the Holocaust, despite its magnitude and unprecedented character, does not disrupt Jewish history but rather constitutes its part. And in this history the past is no more important than the present and future. Berkovits’s holistic understanding of Jewish history constitutes a crucial dimension of his post-Holocaust reflection. It is precisely in this aspect of his thought that one can discover a strong influence of paradigmatic thinking, of conceiving of the history of Jewish people as unfolding in accordance with metahistorical patterns. Berkovits describes Jewish history as “faith history” opposed to Hobbesian “power history.” All nations, states, and civilizations, except for the Jews, actively participate in the latter. Their successes and failures, victories and defeats as well as their mere existence can be accounted for in terms of fluctuations of political and military power. The rules of power history, however, claims Berkovits, fail to explain the survival of the Jews which he describes as “the great mystery of world history.”196 “The history of Israel alone is not self-explanatory,” he asserts.197 In Berkovits view, “in terms of exclusively man-made history, Israel’s existence is irregular—a people like that of the Jews is not supposed to exist.”198 According to this line of reasoning, Jews were always so powerless that the mills of the power history should have reduced them to dust long ago. The only way to explain the fact that they have not done just that is to refer to supernatural 194 Ibid. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid., 116. 197 Ibid., 111. 198 Ibid., 153.

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factors. God’s presence in history, according to Berkovits, has to remain unconvincing.199 It has to oscillate between revelation and concealment because God’s evident presence and control over history would destroy human beings as free and hence moral agents. Self-hiding is an attribute of the divine which guarantees the existence of humanity. Concealment, however, is not absence and God remains present in history: “Yet he is present in history. He reveals his presence in the survival of his people Israel. Therein lies his awesomeness. . . . How else could his powerless people have survived!”200 In Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History David Biale observes that although the view that Jewish life in the Diaspora was characterized by utter powerlessness is often considered a part of the Zionist interpretation of Jewish history, it is also “deeply ingrained in the popular Jewish consciousness” and shared by Zionists and critics of political Zionism alike.201 Arguing against this interpretation of Jewish history Biale analyzes various forms of political power exercised by diverse Jewish groups over the ages. He admits that “without an appreciation of the political acumen of the Jews in earlier times [i.e. before the establishment of the State of Israel—BK], their long history can only appear to be a miraculous accomplishment. If we wish to understand Jewish survival from a historical rather than a theological point of view, however, we must look for explanations from the world of power and politics.”202 The explanatory route recommended by Biale is precisely the one Berkovits rejects when he argues that the survival of the Jews “indicates the mysterious intrusion of a spiritual dimension into the history of man.”203 This understanding of Jewish history as unfolding simultaneously in two different albeit interconnected dimensions—natural and supernatural—reflects Berkovits’s rejection of the fundamental premise of historicism: the exclusion of extra-historical explanation of the events occurring in the realm of history. According to Berkovits the history of the Jewish people constitutes an exception to the rules of “power history” and is not entirely determined by its regulations. “Because of Israel,” Berkovits writes, “the Jew knows that history is messianism, that God’s 199 Ibid., 107. 200 Ibid., 109. 201 David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 5. 202 Ibid., 6. 203 Berkovits, With God in Hell, 83.

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guidance—however impenetrably wrapt in mystery—is never absent from the life of the nations.”204 The language Berkovits uses to describe God’s guidance in history is not entirely unequivocal. God’s presence remains “elusive” and “unconvincing.”205 Divine presence is “revealed” in the survival of Israel perceived as a “testimony” to and an “indication” of it.206 The clearest formulation of the relationship between human and divine agency in history occurs in the passage quoted earlier: human history is man-made but God-planned. This is where the traces of paradigmatic thinking can be discerned in Berkovits’s thought. Berkovits portrays Jewish history not only as an intrusion of the supernatural into the earthly realm but also as unfolding in accordance with a divine plan that leads the Jewish people from Exodus and Sinai, through Exile, and then back to the land of Israel: All through the ages Jews struggled, prayed, lived, and died in the allpervasive conviction that the meaning of their function in history would ultimately be revealed through their return to Zion.  .  .  .  In our own days myriads of Jews perished in the gas chambers finding their only sustenance in their “perfect faith” in the coming of the Messiah. . . . [Jewish messianism] is the faith in the inevitable triumph of the divine purpose in history that in the course of its unfolding would cause Israel to return to the holy land207

Jewish survival, albeit miraculous, has always been certain. In Berkovits’s description even the Job of the death camps never doubted the defeat of the

204 FH, 158. Elsewhere Berkovits wrote: “The messianic fulfillment of history is beyond any doubt. The most convincing indication of this is the survival of Israel. The survival of Judaism and of the Jewish people in all times, in conditions of utter political and material weakness, in spite of continuous persecution and in defiance of an endless series of the most barbarous attempts at their extermination, defies all explanation. It is the mystery of the ages. The return of Israel to its ancient homeland in our days, as Israel maintained for numberless generations that it would do, is incomparable in human history. . . . Israel’s survival is itself the proof that God’s purpose in history will not be defeated, and that the day of mankind’s reconciliation will yet dawn.” Berkovits, God, Man, and History, ed. David Hazony (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2004; first edition in 1959), 158. 205 FH, 107. 206 Ibid., 109, 114. Berkovits, With God in Hell, 83. 207 FH, 151.

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Nazis and the survival of Jewish people.208 Equally certain were redemption from exile and return to the land.209 The language in which Berkovits describes the establishment of the State of Israel and the military victory in the Six Day War is as poetic and emotional as it is parochial.210 It is understandable in the context of the atmosphere that surrounded the events of 1967. There is no disagreement among both scholars and people who lived through those days that the Six Day War has had a radically transforming impact on the Jewish community in the United States.211 In the foreword to Faith and the Holocaust Berkovits writes that “the main thesis of this volume was worked out during the critical weeks that led up to the Six Day War . . . and was completed during those drama-filled days. . . . It was written under almost unbearable tension, and against darkest fears and anxieties.”212 It is not surprising that some of these fears as well as a portion of the relief following the military success of the state of Israel in June of 1967 found their expression in Berkovits’s book. The establishment of the State in 1948 and its victory in 1967 play a prominent role in Berkovits’s reflection for reasons other than psychological, however. In his opinion, Jewish history has always been unfolding toward redemption. The State is not a complete realization of the redemptive promise but it certainly is a reality that, for Berkovits, is filled with messianic undertones. It is a “messianic moment” when “the unexpected fruits of human endeavor reveal themselves as the mysterious manifestation of divine guidance.”213 The State of Israel serves as the final argument in 208 Berkovits, With God in Hell, 92. See also ibid., 133. 209 FH, 152: “From the very beginning, Judaism contained within itself the likelihood of exile as well as the certainty of redemption from exile.” 210 Berkovits was much more sober in his description of the State and its problems few years after the publication of Faith after the Holocaust. “Nowhere has the crisis of the spirit in Judaism found more dramatic expression than in the State of Israel,” he wrote in one of the essays included in the volume Crisis and Faith (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1976), 131. 211 See Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 79–90; Steven Rosenthal, “Long-distance Zionism: American Jews, Zionism, and Israel,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Dana Evan Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 209–224; Joshua Michael Zeitz, “’If I am not for myself  .  .  .  : The American Jewish Establishment in the Aftermath of the Six Day War,” American Jewish History 88 (2000): 253–286; Deborah Dash Moore, “From David to Goliath: American Representations of Jews around the Six Day War,” in The Six-Day War and World Jewry, ed. Eli Lederhendler (Bethesda: University of Maryland Press, 2000), 69–80. 212 FH, 1. 213 Ibid., 156.

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Berkovits’s theological reflection because it provides him with an answer to the fundamental question he was asking: can Jews persevere in their faith, in their religious commitment? Can they still trust God? The answer to this question is a resounding yes. They can, because Israel survived and because “rising from one of its most calamitous defeats, it has emerged to new dignity and historic vindication in the state of Israel.”214 Berkovits’s post-Holocaust theology, I submit, is based upon his understanding of the dynamics of Jewish history. The following passage contains its excellent expression: In the past, after every hurban, we built anew something new and different. After every destruction we were led to new unfoldings in the history of Judaism. After the first destruction, we created the synagogue, which represented a new phase of Judaism. After the second destruction, we created the Judaism of the Talmud. In our generation we experienced another hurban, the third destruction, the destruction of Galut Judaism, the liquidation of the Exile. Having found our way back to Zion in a messianic moment, we know that God is doing “a new thing; Now shall it spring forth.”

Berkovits rejects as simplistic the idea according to which divine providence intervenes into history in a self-evident manner.215 As if echoing Richard Rubenstein, he finds it “obscene” to argue that the tragedies in Jewish history happened on account of the sins of Israel.216 In his description, the history of the Jewish people and the history of Jewish faith contain tragedy and triumph, exultation and despair, faithfulness and rebellion. The Holocaust falls within this pattern which ultimately rests on the paradigm of Exile and Return/Redemption. Only from this overreaching perspective “Jewish history does make sense: it is part of the cosmic drama of redemption.”217 214 Ibid., 133. 215 Ibid., 93. 216 Ibid., 94. 217 Ibid., 152. It is important to stress that Berkovits does not present the establishment of the state of Israel as connected to the Holocaust in a causal way. The state, for him, has not come about in consequence of the Holocaust; it does not constitute any form of divine repayment for the suffering experienced by the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Positing such a connection sometimes evokes negative responses. For instance, Amos Funkenstein wrote that “it may well be that the State of Israel too owes its establishment in part to the Holocaust; but this also is a terrible burden, not a sign of choseness or divine grace.” Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), 311. See also Alan Berger, “Holocaust and History: A Theological Reflection,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 25,

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What Zachary Braiterman described as Berkovits’s profound revisionism turns out to serve the goal of preserving a very traditional approach to Jewish history.

Conclusion Richard Rubenstein pointed to the Emancipation as a transformative moment in Jewish history. According to him, the theological foundations of Judaism were significantly undermined as a result of Jewish entrance into the secular society. Traditional Judaism, argued Rubenstein, was damaged beyond repair by modern biblical scholarship: it made it evident that the traditional understanding of the Torah as a unitary document faithfully reflecting the will of the divine was untenable. The crisis of authority of tradition fueled by the processes of modernization and secularization deeply affected the ways in which Jews related to their religion. Arguing from pragmatic and psychological perspective, Rubenstein asserted that traditional Judaism ceased to satisfactorily respond to the needs of a modern Jew. It was born as a “ghetto Judaism,” formed in the anomalous conditions of exile as a response to these conditions, has now outlived its purpose and should be left behind as no longer functional. The traditional image of God as the Lord of History, or to put it differently—the traditional understanding of history as ruled over by a providential deity and unfolding according to the stipulations of the covenantal pact—was a part of this “ghetto Judaism” and as such should be finally recognized as a fossil and placed in the dustbin of history. In addition to these factors, Rubenstein identified two theological problems he believed to present insurmountable difficulty to traditional Judaism: the questions of evil and of human freedom. Heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, existentialism, and Paul Tillich, Rubenstein argued that these two issues could not be solved unless the tenets of Judaism were no. 2 (Spring 1988): 194–211. As David Novak noted: “The theological problem of connecting the Holocaust and the reestablishment of the state of Israel is that it is very hard to see how it was the same God who was involved in both events. . . . Can the same God who seemed to have been so absent in the Holocaust suddenly become so present in the reestablishment of the state of Israel?” David Novak, “Is There a Theological Connection between the Holocaust and the Reestablishment if the State of Israel,” in The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), 251–252. Berkovits does not posit such a connection but rather is arguing that Jewish history in general unfolds according to a pattern that takes the Jewish people from exile to the return to the land.

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radically reconsidered and reformulated. The Holocaust undeniably had an important psychological effect on Rubenstein. His own words testify to that. However, his writings show as well that the Holocaust was incorporated into Rubenstein’s argument at a later stage. The Holocaust was not the primary cause of his rejection of the understanding of God as the Lord of History but rather a factor that enabled Rubenstein to formulate his position in particularly strong terms. Confronted with the enormity of the event covenantal theodicy appeared to him obscene. Like no other historical event, the Holocaust made it evident that “ghetto Judaism” had to be rejected. In my interpretation of Emil Fackenheim’s writing I have focused on what Fackenheim himself described as the greatest doctrinal change in his career because this change constituted a step logically necessary for the entirety of his project of post-Holocaust Judaism. The Holocaust occupies much more significant place in the development of his thought than in Rubenstein’s reflection. It was one of the factors contributing to the major shift in his understanding of Judaism. In the early period while struggling with the question of the relationship between history and transcendence, Fackenheim presented Judaism as immune to history, as a religion whose tenets could not be put in question by any empirical events. His immersion in the works of Hegel, the appreciation of existentialist critique of the Hegelian system, the existentialist understanding of man as situated as well as Buber-Rosenzweig concept of revelation led Fackenheim to a revision of this position. Confrontation with the Holocaust was the last element that prompted Fackenheim to reformulate his conception of Judaism. The description of Jewish religious experience presented in God’s Presence in History radically differs from the image of Judaism as ahistorical. Here it is presented as born in definite historical setting and evolving over time in response to the challenges posed by epoch-making events. Unlike other epoch-making events, the Holocaust not only threatens to disrupt the connection between the past and the present or between the root-experiences and their present day reenactment but actually causes such a disruption. Its uniqueness means that the Holocaust cannot be grasped in traditional categories. Escaping the force of rational explanation, the Holocaust proves for Fackenheim to elude religious explanations as well. In his opinion, it does and always will defy understanding. The radical discontinuity makes it impossible to rely on the past responses to catastrophe in an attempt to cope with the most recent tragedy. Reaching to the past is necessary for

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Judaism in order to withstand the crisis but no simple appropriation is possible. Any recovery will forever remain fragmentary as fragmentary and elusive must be God’s presence in history after the Holocaust. Fackenheim’s choice to reject the ahistorical understanding of Judaism and to allow the possibility of epoch-making events that challenge Judaism and require it to change reflects the absence of paradigmatic thinking in his thought. Paradigmatic thinking does not entirely exclude novelty but is always capable of assimilating new events into eternally valid metahistorical patterns. Faith that Fackenheim describes as immediacy after reflection is no longer capable of doing that. Like Rubenstein, Fackenheim points to Emancipation and the subsequent exposure to secularism as a decisive moment in Judaism’s development. This is when, in his opinion, the Jew stepped outside the Midrashic framework. This loss of innocence, as Fackenheim called it, was irreversible and deeply affected Jewish self-understanding and Jewish perception of reality. In this context Fackenheim spoke of secularism and subjective reductionism. Interestingly enough, he did not mention historicism with which he struggled in his early writings. Arguably, at least in the sphere of religious thought, historicism constituted one of the elements of secularism. It had an enormous impact on the ways in which modern Jews related to and understood their own history. The premise that all historical events can and should be explained exclusively by factors from within the natural or human domain meant that divine providence could serve neither as an explanation nor as a source of meaning. The causal logic of modern historicism excluded paradigmatic thinking as a mode of making sense of history. The establishment of the state of Israel plays an important role for all three thinkers considered in this chapter. Rubenstein saw in it a dawn of a new religion for the Jews—no longer a Judaism wed to the traditional ideas of election and of deity exercising providential control of history, but rather an “insightful paganism” in which God will be seen “as the source of life in nature” rather than as “the transcendent Lord of nature, controlling it as if it were a marionette at the end of a string.”218 According to Fackenheim, the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State will never find an explanation.219 However, while explanations are not available, it is necessary to perceive these two events as linked together 218 AA, 139. 219 See JRH, 281.

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by an unbreakable bond. Commitment to security of the state of Israel, declared Fackenheim, constitutes “the heart of every authentic response to the Holocaust—religious and secularist, Jewish and non-Jewish.”220 For Fackenheim, Israel is a successful union of the religious and the secular that stands firmly against the conditions that have made the Holocaust possible.221 For Eliezer Berkovits, both the establishment of the State in 1948 and its military victory in 1967 should be seen as “messianic moments” in which a divinely planned goal finds its realization through human effort. As I have argued, Berkovits’s understanding of the nature of these events reflects a residual paradigmatic thinking: Jewish history is “miraculous” and inexplicable without reference to extra-historical factors; it unfolds under God’s “unconvincing” guidance in an unbroken continuum from the Exodus and Sinai to the final redemption. By seeing Jewish history as unfolding simultaneously in two intertwined dimensions, natural and supernatural, Berkovits rejected the practice of modern critical history and was able to preserve the approach reflected in the writings of the Orthodox thinkers considered in the previous chapter: the history of the Jews constitutes a continuum the meaning of which ultimately derives from its being a part of the universal drama of redemption. The Holocaust, for Berkovits, is a part of this history and cannot be accurately understood outside of it. The Job of the Bible, the Job of Auschwitz, and Job’s brother living in the post-Holocaust world— each wrestling and contending with God—find their places in the totality of the history of Jewish people. By portraying the classical sources as equally embracing faithfulness and rebellion Berkovits was able to assert an unbroken continuity of Jewish religious experience that corresponds to the continuity of Jewish history. In this way Berkovits seems to be echoing Fackenheim’s early position according to which catastrophes never destroy but only test Jewish religious commitments. For Berkovits, the Holocaust is no different in this regard from other tragedies in Jewish history and the post-Holocaust crisis of theodicy is yet another expression of Jewish wrestling with God whose presence in history has to remain elusive because otherwise it would destroy human freedom and moral agency.

220 Ibid., 282. 221 See Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz, 178–179. Zachary Braiterman presents a more critical interpretation of Fackenheim’s views regarding the state of Israel in (God) After Auschwitz, 151–154.

Chapter 4

The End of Metahistory in the Warsaw Ghetto How can a man worship God properly when in pain. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Drashot

In the previous chapter I have argued that the post-war crisis of theodicy came about not because of the Holocaust itself but rather due to the gradual dismantling of theological modes of understanding history. The secularization of history, however, cannot be seen as the only reason behind the rejection of covenantal theodicy that accounts for the existence of evil by placing it on the metahistorical plane. It was not historicism but the scale of the destruction he witnessed that led Kalonymus Kalman Shapira—a Hassidic rabbi in the Warsaw ghetto—toward not only intellectual but also deeply existential realization that the covenant could no longer provide neither the consolation of meaning nor the comfort of ultimate salvation. Born in 1889 in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, a small town about 30 kilometers from Warsaw, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira was a scion of distinguished Hassidic families. Among his ancestors were such prominent figures as Rabbi Elimelekh of Lyzhansk, the Seer of Lublin, and the Maggid of Kozienice. Shapira’s father, Rabbi Elimelekh of Grodzisk, passed away when the boy was three years old and young Kalonymus was raised by his mother and a close relative, Rabbi Yerahmiel Moshe Hapstein. In 1913 Shapira became the community rabbi in Piaseczno and from 1917 he divided his

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time between Piaseczno and Warsaw where in 1923 he opened the Yeshiva Dat Moshe which was to become one of the largest Hasidic yeshivot in Warsaw before the World War II. Aware of the crisis of traditional religiosity, Shapira believed that the key to the future of Hasidism lay in providing the young with proper education his vision of which he described in Hovat Ha-Talmidim,1 the only work to be published during Shapira’s lifetime. The publication of Hovat Ha-Talmidim and Shapira’s leadership in the field of Hasidic education secured his position as a well-known figure of the Jewish Warsaw before the outbreak of the war. Today, he is best known as the author of a collection of sermons delivered in the Warsaw ghetto between September 1939 and July 1942. The manuscript was discovered in Warsaw in 1950 together with thousands of documents of the second recovered part of the Oneg Shabbat archive and published in Israel first in 1960 and then in 2007 under the editor-given title Esh Kodesh.2 Recent research by Daniel Reiser, who undertook a detailed study of the original kept in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, has resulted in a new critical edition of the sermons. In the course of his analysis, Reiser ascertained that the earlier edition of Esh Kodesh was not entirely reliable. Based on transcriptions made from low-quality photographs of the original pages of the manuscript, it contains mistakes ranging from alterations of individual words to omissions of entire sentences to inclusion of sermons Shapira had evidently rejected. Reiser’s second, and in his own opinion, the most important finding is that the sermons underwent a complex process of numerous revisions. As his own editorial markings on the manuscript indicate, Shapira not only wrote his sermons down but also 1 Hovat Ha-Talmidim (Jerusalem: Oraysch, 1990), English edition: A Student Obligation: Advice from the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. by Micha Oddenheimer (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991). 2 On the Oneg Shabbat (Ringelblum) archive see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). For the detailed history of the discovery and subsequent publication of Esh Kodesh see Reiser, “Esh Kodesh: A New Evaluation in Light of a Philological Examination of the Manuscript,” Yad Vashem Studies 44, no. 1 (2016): 74–83 as well as Reiser’s Introduction to A Critical and Annotated Edition of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Sermons during the Holocaust, 2 vols., ed. Daniel Reiser,. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Herzog Academic College, The World Union of Jewish Studies and the International Institute for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem, 2017). Reiser’s edition of Drashot consists of two volumes: volume 1 contains the text transcribed and edited according to the instructions left by Shapira, volume 2 contains facsimile of each page of the manuscript and corresponding transcription on the opposite page. The transcriptions in volume 2 mark all the alterations in the text made by Shapira.

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continually returned to and made changes in the earlier material. With two crucial exceptions, the changes Shapira made in his sermons are not dated. According to Reiser, “given the layered nature of the entire manuscript, it is virtually impossible to attempt to date each and every sermon.”3 This is true with respect to the final version of the sermons. Thanks to Reiser’s exemplary editorial work and the fact that in the new edition each page of the original manuscript has been reproduced, transcribed and carefully annotated, we can see both the original and dated text of each sermon as well as all revisions made by Shapira.4 In other words, even though we cannot say when the corrections were made, we know exactly what they consisted of. In great many cases, Shapira’s revisions of the first recorded versions of the sermons are relatively minor, that is to say, they do not radically alter the meaning of the text. As a result, many statements made about Shapira’s wartime sermons in the past remain valid despite being based on the earlier, deficient edition of Esh Kodesh.5 3 Reiser, “Esh Kodesh,” 97 4 All citations from Esh Kodesh—hereafter cited as Drashot—come from the 2017 edition. I give references to both the transcriptions in volume 1 and facsimile in volume 2. 5 The first scholar to write about Shapira was Mendel Piekarz, The Last Hasidic Literary Document on Polish Soil: Writings of the Rebbe of Piaseczno in the Warsaw Ghetto [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1979). Pesach Schindler discussed Esh Kodesh in his Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1990) and in 1994 Nehemia Polen published The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira: the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994). Esther Farbstein’s Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2007), 479–488, contains biographical details about Shapira with emphasis on the Holocaust era, based on testimonies and archive materials, as well as an interpretation of Esh Kodesh. See also Zvi Leshem, Between Messianism and Prophecy: Hasidism According to the Rebbe of Piaseczno [Hebrew] (PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2007); James A. Diamond, “The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe: Diverting God’s Gaze from a Utopian End to an Anguished Now,” Modern Judaism 30, no. 3 (October 2010): 299–331; Don Seeman, “Ritual Efficacy, Hasidic Mysticism and ‘Useless Suffering’ in the Warsaw Ghetto,” The Harvard Theological Review 101, no. 3/4, Centennial Issue (July - October 2008): 465–505; Avichai Zur, “’The Lord Hides in Inner Chambers’: The Doctrine of Suffering in the Theosophy of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno,” Dapim: Studies on the Shoah 25 (2011): 183–237; Shaul Magid, “The Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Tablet Magazine, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/228300/therebbe-of-the-warsaw-ghetto, accessed on April 22, 2017; Henry Abramson, Torah from the Years of Wrath 1939–1943. The Historical Context of Esh Kodesh (n.p. 2017); James Diamond, Jewish Theology Unbound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 211–234; James Diamond, “The Buried, Raging Sermons of the Warsaw Ghetto Rabbi,” Mosaic Magazine https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2018/04/ the-buried-raging-sermons-of-the-warsaw-ghetto-rabbi/.

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In his essay on Esh Kodesh, James Diamond has emphasized Shapira’s “theologically activist footing” and in particular the strategy “which diverts the divine mind from its own inner directed perspective to a human one” by “displacing God’s ideal metaphysical construct of history where all time collapses into a totality of divine beneficence for a lived human experience and memory of historical events.”6 What Diamond termed “God’s ideal construct of history” is roughly equivalent to what I described as metahistory shaped by covenantal theodicy. The covenantal relationship between God and Israel, as it unfolds through historical events, makes room for suffering understood primarily as punishment meted out for sin. Placed in this covenantal perspective, pain and affliction have not only an explanation but also a goal, not only the “why” but also the “what for”: they are designed to initiate repentance which, in turn, is connected to the ultimate redemption. That was Shapira’s own predominant interpretation of suffering in the prewar period. Already in his first war-time sermons, however, Shapira implicitly questioned this line of thought. Fissures appeared in the metahistorical theodicy edifice shaken by the enormity of pain and destruction the Jews of Warsaw had to endure. Like Unsdorfer, Ehrenreich, and Teichthal, Shapira believed in divine providence. Unlike them, he admitted the possibility that divine providence was operating against its own goals.7 If restoration of the covenantal relationship through repentance was what God wanted, he was resorting to wrong means because, as Shapira pointed out repeatedly, suffering was making it impossible for the Jews to fulfill their covenantal obligations. Shapira credited his father for the thought that proper worship was difficult amidst suffering.8 His own experience led him to believe that it was not only difficult but impossible. The emphasis on the role of emotional experience and its cosmological dimension, characteristic for Hasidism in general, is prominent in Shapira’s pre-war writings and helps to account for his sensitivity to the level of physical and mental devastation caused by the persecutions and to the impact he believed it had on the covenantal

6 Diamond, “The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe,” 1. See also Diamond, Jewish Theology Unbound, 223–229. 7 This important point was made by Eliezer Schweid and reiterated by James Diamond, “The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe,” 2 and Jewish Theology Unbound, 229; Eliezer Schweid, “The Bush is Aflame—But the Bush Was not Consumed?” in his From Ruin to Salvation [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1994), 132. 8 Drashot I:158, II:97

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relationship.9 Simultaneously, the recognition that God was acting against his own purposes combined with the role of the zaddik, conceived of in Hasidic tradition as the point of intersection between the earthly and heavenly dimensions of reality, led Shapira to repeated attempts at changing the divine decree.10 This kind of theological activism, aimed at bringing about a change in the way God’s agency in history was being realized is absent from the writings of Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer as well as Teichthal and constitutes a fundamental dimension of Shapira’s war-time sermons. Shapira was more preoccupied with affecting an alteration of the divine will than with formulating a justification for what he saw as its actions. It is for this reason that covenantal theodicy and paradigmatic thinking figure in Esh Kodesh less prominently than in Drashot Lehem Shlomo, Siftei Shlomo, and Em Ha-Banim Samekhah: both are subordinate to the primary goal of triggering a change in the phenomenal worlds of inner and outer experience. Another—and crucial for my considerations—element that distinguishes Shapira from Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer, and Teichthal is the former’s recognition of the unprecedented character of the events he had witnessed. It found its expression in two comments Shapira scribbled on the margins of his earlier sermons. Before turning to these fragments and their implications, however, I want to focus on the first five of Shapira’s war-time sermons as reflecting the elements outlined above. Three of these—the sermons for Rosh Hashanah 5700, Shabbat Shuvah, and Yom Kippur—were preserved in the handwriting of one of Shapira’s students.11 The other two—for the 9 This has been emphasized by Don Seeman who in his reading of Esh Kodesh focused on “ritual efficacy,” i.e. on Shapira’s sermons as ritual practices aimed predominantly at the management of embodied subjectivity as distinguished from theodicy or a search for meaning. While I agree that what Seeman describes does constitute an important aspect of Esh Kodesh, I find the rigid differentiation between ritual efficacy and the quest for meaning unhelpful. As Seeman himself noted, “for Rabbi Shapira, the problems of meaning and of practical efficacy in suffering were never parted” (467). In addition, I disagree with Seeman’s fundamental premise that Esh Kodesh reflects Shapira’s confrontation with what Emanuel Levinas described as “useless suffering,” i.e. suffering that cannot be assimilated by any theodicy. In my opinion, Shapira’s realization that the suffering he had witnessed and experienced might indeed be impossible to explain or describe meaningfully is implicit only in the very last comments he added to his earlier sermons. 10 See Arthur Green, “The Zaddiq as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3 (1977): 327–47. 11 The sermons from Rosh Hashanah 5700 to parshat Pekudei 5700 (September 14, 1939— March 9, 1940) except the sermons for the parshiot Chayey Sarah, Toldot, and Vayetze (all from Novemeber 1939).

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parshiot Chayey Sarah and Toldot—are preserved only in Shapira’s own handwriting. All five bear editorial marks but the alterations, with one exception, are minor. In his first recorded war-time sermon, for Rosh Hashanah 5700, September 14, 1939, Shapira focused on the recognition of God’s sovereignty and began from discussing the connection between forgiveness and the fear of God: R. Acha said, “Forgiveness is all readied and prepared at Rosh Hashanah, as it is written, ‘Forgiveness is with You, so that You be feared.’ So that fear be upon all Your creatures, God.” God created the universe so that it should fear Him, as it is written, “And God has made it, so that they should fear Him” (Ecc. 3:14). Even forgiveness exists so that we could fear God. For when a person is sullied by sins, because of which he suffers bitter and powerful torments, God spare us, it is difficult to experience the true fear of God, the awe of God’s greatness and exalted glory.12

Every Jewish soul experiences this fear, each according to its ability, Shapira continued. Someone may feel the awe of the greatness and holiness of God with an intensity that makes him tremble at the mere thought of committing a sin. Another person may be so focused on herself and her needs that instead of the sublime awe, she will experience merely the fear of punishment or of her needs not being met. In either case, however, a person’s ability or level of spiritual development by itself is not enough. The genuine awe of divine greatness, Shapira pointed out, cannot develop when “a person is sullied with sins and tormented by sufferings, God forbid, to the point when he collapses and falls, and is unable to feel even himself and his soul, let alone the awe of God and fear of His glory. And this is the meaning of the verse, ‘Forgiveness is with You, so that You be feared.’”13 True repentance, i.e. one that originates in the sublime awe of divine glory, is impossible amidst suffering and torment. The gates of genuine penitent return are closed for those who struggle with overwhelming afflictions. For this reason, forgiveness must come first. Suffering, occasioned either by sin itself or by the punishment coming in its wake, must disappear for an individual to regain a measure of subjectivity and agency that make repentance

12 Drashot I:83, II:19 13 Ibid. I: 83–4, II:19

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possible. In a surprising turn of thought, Shapira declared that repentance hinges on forgiveness and not the other way around. The topic of repentance returns in Shapira’s sermon for Shabbat Shuvah, September 16, 1939, and here it takes another interesting turn: rather than to remind his congregation of the need to repent and return to God, Shapira chose to speak of divine repentance. As God is said to observe all commandments, Shapira said, one can wonder how he observes the commandment to repent. Shapira responds: God fulfills this commandment when he repents of the evil that he has sent, God forbid, upon his people Israel, or that he decreed will befall them. This is God’s repentance, his teshuvah as it were, as it is written, “And God repented of the evil that he spoke of doing to his people” (Ex. 32:14). What is meant by the word “repent” here? It means that God, as it were, “regretted,” which is always the precursor of repentance.14

That, however, Shapira added, is not enough. It is not enough that God regrets what he has already done because that does not change things for the better and Jews remain in difficult situation. So the phrase “Satisfy us in the morning with Your kindness, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days” (Ps. 90:14) is added to the preceding verse of the psalm: “Return, O Lord! How long? Show mercy to your servants.” Only when God’s kindness toward Israel is manifested again in action, God’s repentance is complete. Such repentance, Shapira continued, is required also of the Jews. They need not only to leave their sins behind but also and even more importantly they need to turn toward God, to repent until they reach God, who needs to repent himself. In this short sermon, Shapira reversed the direction of the traditional concept of repentant return and instead of emphasizing evil that human beings perpetrate and from which they need to turn away not only through regret but also through proper action, he focused on the idea that God Himself had to meet the exact same requirement. In his sermon for Yom Kippur, September 23, 1939, Shapira spoke of martyrdom and suffering as a means of purification: The holy book Arvei Nahal, Parshas Masai, discusses an oral tradition from a responsum from the Maharam, stating that a person who is martyred does not feel any pain whatsoever. The author of Arvei Nahal explains that this is because the martyr is set ablaze with such an intense desire to be killed 14 Ibid. I: 88, II:25.

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for sanctifying the Divine Name that he elevates all his senses to the world of pure intellect, such that his entire being is clothed in intellect, and all his senses, sensations, and physicality are stripped from him. Thus he feels only pleasure. This is also the case with all the trials that a Jew endures—the trials are indeed difficult, and God should have mercy and remove them from us. When a person elevates them to the level of intellect, however, understanding them as a means to purge his sins and to purify himself to draw closer to God, then the more strongly he attaches himself to this thought, the lighter the difficulties become, and easier for him to bear.15

Shapira continued by citing the kabbalistic idea that the “arousal from below” is followed by the “arousal from above”: the martyr’s spiritual movement toward God elicits a reciprocal movement on the part of the divine. God binds himself to the martyrs to the point where his wrath against the Jewish people dissipates. “Rejoice, Israel! Before whom are you being purified? And who is it that purifies you? Your Father in heaven,” Shapira cited the words attributed to Rabbi Akiva, one of Judaism’s most celebrated martyrs.16 Shapira’s sermon from November 4, 1939, stands in a stark contrast to this attempt of presenting suffering in a positive light: It is written in the holy work Ma’or va-Shemesh, at the beginning of parshat Vaera, in the name of the holy rabbi . . . Menahem Mendel of Rimanov . . . , regarding the Talmudic passage: “a covenant is made with salt, and a covenant is made with afflictions. Just as salt makes meat palatable, so too afflictions purify the individual of sin.” Just as one cannot derive pleasure from meat that has been excessively salted, rather only if it was properly salted, so too afflictions should be meted out only in such measure that they can be tolerated, and with an admixture of mercy. Rashi explains that “the death of Sarah was juxtaposed to the binding of Isaac because with the news that her son was being bound and was about to be sacrificed, her soul burst forth from her and she died.” That is to say, Moshe our Teacher, the faithful shepherd, juxtaposed the death of Sarah to the binding of Isaac in order to advocate for us, indicating what results from excessive afflictions, Heaven forbid—“her soul burst forth and she died.” Moreover, if this happened to the righteous Sarah, who was as blameless at the age of 100 as a twenty-year-

15 Ibid. I: 89; II:25. 16 BT Yoma 8:9.

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old, and all of her years were equally good, yet despite this she was unable to withstand such horrible afflictions—how much less so can we.17

On the margin of the page Shapira added at some later date: One can also say that our mother Sarah. . . died for the good of the Jewish people. She died in order to show God that Israel cannot bear too much anguish. Even though a person, with the mercy of God, survives, part of his strength, his mind, and his spirit are broken and lost to him. What difference does it make, whether all of me or part of me is killed?18

What difference indeed. Rather than purify, suffering can crush and destroy. The pain Sarah experienced was not connected to her sins. Sarah was blameless and yet the suffering overwhelmed her, or she allowed the pain to overwhelm her so that she could stand before God and remind Him that even the most holy people could bear only as much or otherwise, even if they survived, they would be broken beyond repair. Moses knew that this lesson needed to be taught to God and to Israel.19 It is difficult not to read these words as conveying the sense that the tribulations endured by Jews have already reached the threshold behind which they could not be tolerated any longer. Shapira spoke of unbearable torment from his own experience. Among the victims of aerial raids and artillery bombardments was Shapira’s son, Elimelekh, mortally wounded on September 25. Shapira’s daughter-inlaw, Gitel, and his sister-in-law, Hannah Hapstein, were both killed by a bomb on the doorsteps of the hospital where Elimelekh lay on the following day. Elimelekh Shapira succumbed to his wounds on September 29 and Shapira’s mother died a few weeks later, on October 20, broken by grief. Within a month, Shapira lost nearly all his closest relatives.20 17 Drashot I:91; II:45. 18 Ibid. 19 In his interpretation of this sermon, Don Seeman makes an important point that “Sarah is available to Rabbi Shapira as an icon for Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto precisely because her death is not portrayed as a traditional martyr’s death, with all of the implications of spiritual grandeur and powerful agency such a death would imply” in traditional depictions of martyrdom, “Ritual Efficacy,” 485. James Diamond uses this sermon as one of the examples supporting his argument that “R. Shapira . . . reenacts Mosaic intercession with God on Israel’s behalf by his very exegetical engagement with the biblical narratives and by his oral articulation of in the sermon,” see “The Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe,” 13–17. 20 Shapira’s wife died before the war, on June 19, 1937.

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In the sermon for November 13, 1939, Shapira was expounding upon the first words of the blessing Isaac gave to his son Jacob: “And God will give you” (Ex. 27:28). In his commentary, Rashi explained the word “and” as meaning “He will give you, and then he will return and give you again.” Shapira offered the following explanation of Rashi’s remark: According to Rashi, first God will give, even if the Jew has not done anything and is not deserving. And thereafter, the Blessed One will return and give again, will return and reward a person for his worship. Because how can a man worship God properly when in suffering, God save us. Only when God gives first, even to the undeserving man, then giving can be on the level of giving in return.21

The thought contained in this passage is very similar to the idea expressed in the Rosh Hashanah, September 14, 1939, sermon: God needs to act first, to bring relief, and only then a human action is possible. Shapira continued in similar vein further emphasizing the need for divine action: Another explanation: “And then they will come, those who are lost in the land of Assyria and those who are dispersed in the land of Egypt” (Is. 28:13). We are dealing with two distinct categories, “the lost” and “the dispersed.” “The dispersed” refers to a person who is displaced to a distant locale, but he remains distinct and recognizable. This is contradistinction to “the lost”—he is lost, and is neither distinct nor recognizable. For when the hardships are presently so compounded that they even cut off the beards of Jews which make them outwardly recognizable, and due to unimaginable persecutions and unbearable afflictions, they are no longer recognizable internally as well—such a person loses himself, he ceases to recognize himself. How did he feel a year ago, on the Sabbath, or on a weekday prior to prayers, or during prayers, etc.? Now, however, he is trampled and crushed, such that he no longer senses if he is a Jew or not, or a human being or not, or an animal which has no capacity to feel. This is the nature of one who is lost, yet “they will come, those who are lost”. The Talmud states that the one who lost something seeks after his lost object. When he lost it, it was no longer perceptible nor recognizable, and thus the owner seeks to find it, to pick it up and bring it home. Are we not the lost possessions of God? . . . May the Owner of the lost return to find us, and give us all manner of goodness, and

21 Drashot I:92; II:45.

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return us to him, and redeem us with a physical and spiritual redemption, with tremendous mercy and acts of beneficial salvation.22

In this passage Shapira is referring to the well-documented practice of the Nazi soldiers who entertained themselves by tormenting Jews on the streets of Warsaw. Shaving, cutting and even tearing off beards of the more traditionally looking Jews quickly became a terrifying routine. Relentless physical and mental abuse overwhelmed many. The Jews of Warsaw, Shapira said, are now truly lost. It is hard for them not only to recognize themselves as Jews but even as human beings. Continuing afflictions have turned them into prey in constant, panicked, and futile search for shelter. We are the lost article and God is our owner, Shapira declared. It is the owner’s obligation to search for and to recover his lost possession. It is God’s turn to act. Read together, the first five of Shapira’s war-time sermons present the following picture: suffering, as traditional interpretations describe it, purifies from sin and may trigger repentance. However, suffering can also destroy. It can utterly overwhelm and break even the holiest person, Shapira pointed out in the Chayey Sarah sermon. When that happens, the very possibility of proper worship and genuine repentance disappears because neither can develop amidst overwhelming suffering. In such circumstances, the initiative belongs to God. It is God who needs to forgive first, Shapira said in the Rosh Hashanah sermon. Divine forgiveness means a revocation of judgment and retraction of punitive suffering. With afflictions gone—and only then—it is possible for an individual to rectify her relationship with God through authentic, i.e. not merely habitual, penitent return. Shapira returned to this thought in the sermon for Rosh Hashanah 5701, October 3, 1940. “Repentance performed as a consequence of retribution transforms intentional sins into unintentional sins, yet it is not ‘complete repentance’ because the sins remain unintentional sins,” he wrote. It is only repentance born of love that is complete and erases sin. “To return in complete repentance, however,” Shapira continued, “to make it complete is not in our power, for even if we repent, it would only be out of fear.” Therefore, in the words of Rosh Hashanah liturgy, they prayed, “Our Father, our King, return us in complete repentance before you.”23 In the Shabbat Shuvah, September 16, 1939 sermon Shapira went even further and indicated that not divine forgiveness but rather divine 22 Ibid. I: 92–93; II:47. 23 Ibid. I:158, II:97.

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repentance was necessary. God’s repentance could not be limited to regret because by itself regret would not improve the situation the Jews found themselves in. Rather than only regret the deeds past, God must turn—or return—and act charitably towards his people by granting them reprieve. It is only once the torment is over that the Jews will be able to worship God properly and genuinely repent. Hence the plea “Guarantee your servant’s well-being” (Ps. 119:22). As Shapira wrote in the fall of 1940, the intensity of affliction had made it impossible to meet the two conditions of genuine repentance. We can promise to turn away from evil, Shapira declared, but we have no strength left to commit to doing good.24 Salvation is the condition of repentance. Crushed under the weight of continuing abuse, the Jews are lost. Incapable of finding themselves, they need to be found and reclaimed by their covenantal partner. The drawbridge leading to a space where a proper covenantal relationship can be reestablished and lived can be opened from one side only: from the side of the divine rather than human partner. There is one element virtually and conspicuously absent in Shapira’s first sermons. Given his extensive discussion of repentance, it is striking how little space Shapira devoted to what makes repentance necessary, i.e. to sin. Twice in the Rosh Hashanah sermon Shapira spoke of “straying from the path.” First, he briefly noted connection between unspecified past transgressions and exilic suffering and then, he spoke of the young “who have renounced their faith and strayed from the proper path.” Even among those, however, Shapira hastened to add, “those influenced by their friends and peers are greater in number than those who are seduced by their own evil inclination,”25 as if implying that a sin like that does not deserve as harsh a retribution as the Jews of Warsaw and beyond have already experienced. Instead of encouraging his congregation to engage in collective and individual soul-searching in preparation for the Day of Atonement in September 1939, instead of elaborating on the necessity of penitent return, Shapira spoke of God’s forgiveness that makes repentance possible and then, in an even more radical step, of the fact that it is God who needs to repent for the evil he brought upon his people. Rather than portraying the suffering the Jews were enduring as a just punishment for covenantal treachery, Shapira presented it as an obstacle they were facing in their attempts to maintain 24 Ibid. I:157–158, II:97. 25 Ibid. I:87; II:23.

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their part of the covenantal agreement. Right at the start of Shapira’s war-time reflection we are far away from the Deuteronomic image of the “generation crooked and perverse” always in the wrong before the perfect judge. In his Yom Kippur 1939 sermon, Shapira asserted that, ultimately, everything that God does is for the good of Israel.26 His parshat Chayey Sarah sermon indicates that he came to doubt this fundamental supposition already during the first months of the war. In the process of editing his manuscript, on several pages Shapira put two parallel, vertical lines, crossing out entire sermons. Significantly, the sermon for May 4, 1940, parshat Kedoshim, where Shapira averred that God punishes in order to initiate repentance is among these.27 We do not know when Shapira decided to cross it out but it is possible that he did so when it became evident to him that the torments the Jews of Warsaw had to endure could not be seen as a divine incentive to penitent return. That is not to say that the retributive understanding of suffering is entirely absent from Shapira’s Drashot. In the sermon for parshat Re’eh, August 23, 1941, for example, Shapira directly invoked the pattern of sin-punishment-repentance-redemption. He did so, however, to point out a source of comfort rather than to provide an explanation: A Jew is required to believe and to see that everything comes from God’s hand and that the Holy One, blessed be he, does not execute judgment without justice. This is one of the thirteen principles of faith as it is written: “I believe with a perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be his name, rewards those who observe his commandments and punishes those who violate them.” This can also be a source of strength and joy in times of suffering, as it is written in the Tanya that if a person acknowledges his sins in the time of trouble, because everyone knows the blemishes of his own heart, and sees why the punishment has come to him, he will not complain, God forbid. He will trust in God that just as God punished him, so will he nurture and comfort him when he repents. This in itself is a source of strength and comfort. 28

Similar, pastoral rather than explanatory, use of a paradigm is found in the sermon for November 25, 1939: “So it had been through the ages, whatever victories had come unto Jacob’s hands had come to him only after Esau had trodden on them with his heel,” Shapira wrote. The story of the 26 Ibid. I:90; II:25. 27 Ibid. II:63. 28 Ibid. I:212; II:151.

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rivalry between the biblical brothers is not used here, however, to proclaim the ultimate victory of Jacob or to indicate that Jacob’s sinfulness allows Esau to triumph for the time being. Instead, Shapira indicated a source of a measure of comfort for the present. When the angel asked Jacob for his name, he was making a significant statement, Shapira wrote: “Even before the battle was decided you had already won, because even when you were in dire straits, you still ruled your spirit and never allowed it to fall. Even in those difficult times you were still, inside yourself, always a lord.”29 The figures of Jacob and Esau appear also in the sermon for Rosh Hashanah, September 22, 1941 where Shapira cites the midrash invoked by Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich and Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer: “So long as the voice of Jacob are heard in the synagogues and houses of study, the hands of Esau cannot prevail.” Ehrenreich cited the midrash to point out that the current oppression came as a consequence of the silencing of the voice of Jacob. Esau, serving as a vehicle of God’s judgment, was empowered, because Jews ceased to observe the commandment to devote their time to study the divine word. The neglect of a fundamental obligation, the silence in the synagogues and houses of study, brought about the oppression. Unsdorfer used the story of Jacob and Esau to argue that the latter’s hatred for Jacob is activated as a corrective measure whenever Jews cross the boundary distinguishing and separating them from the gentiles. Shapira’s treatment of the midrash is strikingly different. Before the war, the voice of Jacob—of Torah and prayer—resounded with such strength that it was able to reach the divine, Shapira wrote. It is silent now but not because Jews willfully neglect their covenantal obligation but rather because the state of oppression they find themselves in makes its fulfillment impossible. As long as Jacob remains enslaved, his voice cannot be more than a faint whisper. Ehrenreich and Unsdorfer used the paradigmatic story of Jacob and Esau to indicate sins that triggered punishment and to stress that penitent return was necessary to rectify the covenantal relationship undermined by sin. Shapira used it to point out that Israel needs to be redeemed in order to uphold its obligations.30 In the sermon for the first yahrzeit of his son, October 18, 1940, Shapira cited the words “the deeds of the Patriarchs are templates for the children” and reached for the image of the binding of Isaac. The Akedah, he 29 Ibid. I:95–6; II:27. 30 Ibid. I:217; II:153.

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wrote, was not only a test that Abraham and Isaac had to undergo. It was also a commencement of a new form of worship, one that “requires total self-sacrifice [mesirat nefesh] for God and the Jewish people.” The binding of Isaac was only the first step; the worship remained incomplete because Isaac did not die: Since the test of Avraham and Isaac was in the form of will and thought, which were not completely fulfilled in deed, because the angel said to Avraham, “do not send forth your hand upon the lad,” each time that the Jew is killed by a non-Jew, which is the opposite, deed without thought, this represents a completion of the binding of Isaac. The binding of Isaac was the beginning, in thought and will, and now is the completion in deed. The binding of Isaac and the subsequent murder of every Jew afterwards constitutes one event.31

It is all one, as Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller declared in reference to the great wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that accompanied the Cossack uprising against Polish rule in 1648. All Jews are killed in the Akedah and all become martyrs. Once the Akedah is complete, their martyrdom will turn God’s wrath away from the Jewish people. Before that happens, Shapira added, the martyrdom of the saints needs to be accompanied by the repentance of the living. And then “God, blessed be he, will save us. Even though we do not deserve to be saved, God forbid, he will do it for the sake of the holy sacrifices. For shall it have been in vain, God forbid, that their blood has been spilled like water?”32 Here Shapira combined paradigmatic thinking with an unambiguous attempt to trigger an alteration of the divine will. God will save us, because he himself will not want the sacrifice of the saints to be in vain, he declared. Significantly, describing the suffering of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto as a continuation of the binding of Isaac made it possible to avoid the connection between suffering and sin. The Akedah was a test and a beginning of a certain form of worship but it was not a punishment. It was an act of ultimate sacrifice that God had no choice but accept. Shapira made similar point in the sermon on April 27, 1940, where he claimed that God must accept penitent return, because otherwise it was not only a Jew who remained degraded by sin but also the part of him that was divine. Unless

31 Ibid. I:161–162; II:101. 32 Ibid. I:163; II:103.

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God accepts repentance, a part of his own divine being is sullied with sin.33 Again, God is prompted to act, and the topic of sin remains unexplored. Unlike Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer, and Teichthal, Shapira never pointed out any specific transgressions that would warrant a punishment of such drastic proportions. His references to sin are generalized and vague. Shapira did write about “the agony that God punishes us with”34 but similarly to the authors of the biblical book of Lamentations he appears to have been unable to conceive of any particular sin that deserved the retribution of annihilation. From the beginning reluctant to use the category of sin as an explanation of the events he was witnessing, in the end Shapira denied any connection between current afflictions and past transgressions. In the sermon for Hanukkah 1941, Shapira wrote: If only people would bear in mind that it is not because we robbed or did anything wrong to anyone that we are being persecuted, but because we are Jews—children of Israel, bound to God and to his Holy Torah . . . it would explain why our enemies are not satisfied with just killing us or extinguishing the divine spark inside us but feel they have to annihilate both body and soul of the Jew.35

Similar thought is present in the sermon for July 11, 1942, where Shapira considered Jewish oppression under the Greeks to conclude that “there is no need to ask what sin brought it about, because it was suffering for the sanctification of God’s name”36 “There are woes that we suffer on our own account, for our sins,” Shapira wrote, “or sufferings of love so as to purify and cleanse us, and blessed God only suffers with us. And there are woes that only his people suffer, as it were: woes of sanctification of his name . . . and in such suffering we become greater and more exalted, and perforce somewhat more able to marshal strength.” Although Shapira did not say that explicitly, the analogy between Jewish suffering under the Greeks and under the Nazis is clear. In both cases, the Jews might have been guilty of some unspecified transgressions against the covenant but in neither was their suffering a punishment. 33 Ibid. I: 124; II:57. See also the sermon for parshat Mishpatim 1940 where Shapira wrote that God bound himself to Israel and now has to save them regardless of Israel’s merit of lack thereof; Drashot I:106, II:35. 34 Ibid. I:133; II:67. 35 Ibid. I:243; II:175. 36 Ibid. I:311; II:254.

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The negation of the explanatory power of understanding suffering as a part of the sin-punishment-repentance-redemption pattern by itself does not necessarily lead to the rejection of the covenant. Jewish textual tradition provides enough examples of a refusal to describe suffering in terms of a just punishment that are not accompanied by simultaneous questioning of the existence of the covenantal bond between Jewish people and God. In fact, the very possibility of theological protest is grounded in the belief that such relationship continues to exist. Shapira’s growing awareness of the scale of devastation led him further, however. Not only covenantal theodicy, but the covenant itself was undermined by the destruction Shapira recognized as unprecedented, that is—as shattering all paradigms that until that moment made it possible to see divine agency behind historical occurrences. The depth of Shapira’s awareness of the scale of the destruction founds its sharpest expression in the sermon for August 16, 1941. The following fragment is worth of citing at length: Who is unmoved, seeing the extent of Jewish suffering today, both physical and spiritual? Who cannot become depressed, seeing that there are no primary schools, and no yeshivah, no places of Torah study and no gatherings of Torah study? This destruction of the houses of God not only affects our current situation but has dire meaning for the future. We will have lost the young men who study Torah. Some of them have been lost to horrific deaths and starvation, may the Merciful One rescue us, and some of them have been compelled to go out and search for food. . . . Will they not forget the Torah and Hasidic learning that they acquired over so many years in schools and yeshivot? Are these the boys who will one day return to the schools and yeshivot as in former times?

In the past, the temptations of secular world drew many young people outside the boundaries of Torah, Shapira continued. Simultaneously, however, there were always those who travelled in the opposite direction and joined the community of the pious. This was no longer the case: Today there are many boys who abandon tradition amidst great suffering and affliction, but not a single boy from humble origins returns to tradition, for the simple reason that there are no places of gathering for Torah study. There are no houses of study and prayer that formerly would have awakened an interest and drawn young men such as these to Torah study and

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Hasidic worship. The simple truth is, the underlying reason for the current abandonment of tradition is the tremendous, bitter suffering of the Jewish people, making life practically unbearable, may the Merciful One rescue us. Consequently, when God has mercy and saves us, who will be left? Heaven forbid, there will be no one to fill the classrooms, and there will not be a sufficient number of students to establish a yeshivah, and the ranks of those who are faithful to the word of God will be tremendously diminished. We will not only be missing the general population, with its youth and Torah students, rather the entire Jewish people will be devastated, losing even our Torah leaders.37

Not only the past and present of the Polish Jewry were being destroyed, Shapira realized, but also its future. Given Shapira’s pre-war dedication to the cause of revitalizing Hasidism, this recognition must have been particularly difficult for him. Despite the tragic circumstances he described, however, in this sermon Shapira included the following words of admonishment: “There are some people . . . who become overly preoccupied with their suffering, and idly waste their time speaking of foolish matters all day. Even if it is impossible for such a person to study in depth in these times, then let him at least recite Psalms.”38 The sermon for the festival of Hanukkah 1941 ends on a similar note. In a passage that appears to reflect Shapira’s own inner struggle, he noted that the faith of some people was weakened by the afflictions, “and out of their hardships they cry, ‘why have you abandoned us? Were these trials intended to bring us closer to Torah and divine worship? The opposite has occurred: the Torah and everything holy is destroyed,’ and so on.” This very point was brought up by Shapira himself in his earlier sermons. This time, however, he continued thus: In truth what place is there for our questions, Heaven forbid, and supplications, even though it is true that trials such as we are enduring now come only once every few centuries. . . . If we do not even understand a single blade of grass made by God, how much more so will we not understand a soul, and how much more so an angel, and how much more so the mind of the Blessed One, and how can this help our minds to understand that which the Blessed and Exalted One knows and understands, and why a person like this is hurt with these trials nowadays, more than the trials the Jews have

37 Ibid. I:209–210; II: 147–149. 38 Ibid. I:211; II:149.

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ever endured. Why, when one learns a verse, Talmud, or Midrash, and hears of the suffering of Jews from then until now, is his faith not damaged? But now it is damaged, for those people who say that trials such as these never existed in Jewish history are in error. What of the destruction of the Temple, Betar etc.?39

In both these sermons, the recognition of the scale physical and spiritual devastation is balanced by admonishment to persist in faith despite the dramatic circumstances. The Jews, however broken-hearted, Shapira wrote in August of 1941, should find the time to at least recite the psalms rather than indulge in spurious speculations. A few months later, on Hanukkah 1941, he argued not only that limited human perception was incapable of grasping the divine plans but also that the suffering the Jews of Warsaw were experiencing had parallels in the past. If the ancestors persisted in their faith despite terrible afflictions, so should the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. Despite all the differences in historical circumstance, the nature of the affliction was essentially identical. This fragment exemplifies paradigmatic thinking in its most explicit form as the Nazi persecution is described as yet another case of Jewish suffering, no different than the destruction of the Temple or the fall of Beitar. It is all the more significant that it was to this sermon that Shapira later added a comment expressing the realization that the reality of current oppression surpassed everything that Jews had experienced in the past. To the August 16, 1941 sermon, in August or early September 1942, Shapira added the following note: I said and recorded these words in 5701. At that time, even though there was much bitter suffering, some of which is apparent in my words, but at this time it was still possible to lament them and relate a small portion of them in words, to experience anguish over the survivors, to cry regarding the future, how will the schools and yeshivot be built once again, and so on, even to strengthen the survivors, and encourage them to study and fulfill Torah. This is no longer the case at the end of 5702, because the holy communities have been obliterated nearly to total extinction. Even the few who survive are overcome with this Egyptian servitude, crushed and living in mortal fear. They no longer have the ability to express lament over their troubles, and there is no one left to encourage, no heart to awaken to Divine Service 39 Ibid. I:241–242; II: 173–5.

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and Torah study. Prayers are only recited under difficult conditions, and the observance of the Sabbath, even for those who truly wish to observe it, is exceptionally onerous, and how much more so is it difficult to cry regarding the future, and regarding the establishments that have been devastated, at a time when (may God have mercy and save us) no spirit or heart remains. It is up to God alone, to have compassion and save us in the blink of an eye, and reestablish the devastated. Only with the final redemption and the resurrection of the dead will the Blessed One be able to rebuild and heal. I beseech you, God, have mercy and do not delay our salvation.40

To the Hanukah sermon 1941 Shapira added on the eve of November 27, 1942: Note: Only the suffering up to the end of 5702 had previously existed. The unusual suffering, the evil and grotesque murders that the wicked, twisted murderers innovated for us, the House of Israel, from the end of 5702, in my opinion, from the words of the Sages of blessed memory and the chronicles of the Jewish people in general, there never was anything like them, and God should have mercy upon us and rescue us from their hands in the blink of an eye. The eve of the holy Sabbath, 18 Kislev 5703. The author.41

Shapira wrote the first footnote during and the second after the Great Action in the Warsaw ghetto during which about two hundred fifty-five thousand Jews were transported to Treblinka and there killed on arrival, over eleven thousand deported to various labor camps and ten thousand murdered in the ghetto. The escapees from Treblinka reached Warsaw in mid- or late August and in September 1942. By the mid-October all remaining inhabitants of the ghetto knew about Treblinka. By the end of November, when he added the footnote, Shapira, who after the Great Deportation worked at one of the ghetto workshops, must have known what had happened to those who were deported to the death camp.42 The horrors of the Great Deportation prompted him to declare that the events he lived through had no parallel in Jewish history. Something radically new occurred. Thus far it was possible to discern a pattern in what was happening to the Jewish 40 Ibid. I: 212; II:149. 41 Ibid. I: 242; II:175. 42 In this light it is interesting to note that in the letter Shapira attached to his collected writings, he remarks on the unknown fate of his daughter who was deported to Treblinka during the summer. It is highly unlikely that Shapira, especially in January 1943, really did not know what had happened in Treblinka.

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people. Sin was followed by retribution. Even if the retribution seemed to exceed what the sin deserved, one knew that forgiveness and love would follow the explosion of divine wrath. And even if the explanatory framework of sin-punishment-repentance-redemption appeared to be failing, there were other paradigms one could resort to. One could, for example, follow in the footsteps of Aharon who stood silent when his sons were suddenly struck by fire or describe the silence of the faithful, as Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich did, as an act of imitatio Dei. Or one could describe the events as yet another chapter of the eternal rivalry between Jacob and Esau and derive comfort from God’s assurance that he rejected Esau. One could think of the Akedah, of martyrdom, of the breaking of the vessels or the birth pangs of the Messiah. And thus, history would always unfold according to eternally valid patterns. But no longer. What forgiveness could come after this show of divine anger? What salvation when there was no one left to be saved? Around the time when the great deportations from the ghetto began, Shapira co-authored the following prayer preserved in the Ringelblum Archive:43 Master of the World, listen to our weeping and the moans of our hearts and save us from our terrible distress. We, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are being persecuted, tormented, and led like sheep to the slaughter. . . . Our dear ones, wives and children, fathers and mothers . . . have been ripped from our midst; they were taken prisoner and their traces are unknown. . . . Merciful, compassionate God, act with kindness and mercy toward all those who call out to you wholeheartedly. Show compassion and pity for the surviving remnant of your people Israel. Say “enough” to our troubles.

But God did not answer and did not save what to Shapira might have very well appeared to be the surviving remnant, the very last of the living.44 With the destruction of the Jewish people not only covenantal theodicy, but the covenant itself was beginning to crumble. I agree with Shaul Magid who has 43 Shapira wrote it with Rabbi Shimshon Stockhammer and Rabbi Alexander Zusha Friedman. See Ester Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder, 484 and 418. 44 The post-war radicalization of the Orthodox interpretations of the Holocaust can be connected to the fact that from the post-war perspective God did intervene and did not allow for the total destruction of Jewish people thereby confirming the validity of metahistorical paradigms.

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argued that the November 27, 1942 note reflects Shapira’s “broken faith”: a faith in God who exists but who does not save. This God no longer appears to be bound by the covenant forged at Sinai.45 In his sermon for March 14, 1942, Shapira discussed two types of faith. One is “experienced as a certainty.”46 The other is so diminished that it is impossible even to experience it. It is still there, Shapira asserted, but barely. It is instinctual, inherited from the ancestors. To experience it, however, to actually feel it and to realize its existence, an added inspiration is necessary. Faith, Shapira wrote, is a manifestation of prophecy and as such it has joy as its basic prerequisite: “It is not, God forbid, that we have no faith, and to insinuate as much would be grossly reprehensible. All Jews believe in God, but at times they feel neither their faith nor the certainty it reveals.”47 After the Great Deportation, the faith was diminished even further. Not only its inner experience faded in believer’s own perception but also its content shrank to a belief in the existence but not in the saving presence of God. The covenant as it was traditionally envisioned was destroyed with the destruction of the Jewish people. In the last additions to his sermons, Shapira took a step outside the boundaries of covenantal theodicy and paradigmatic thinking. Was it in any way precipitated by an earlier crisis or weakening of this way of thinking? I must answer this question negatively. Nothing in Shapira’s earlier writings points even vaguely in a direction of any kind of significant influence of such ideas as historicism. In Shapira’s case, it was the scale and nature of the destruction itself—and Shapira saw only a very limited part of it—that proved too heavy a burden for the covenantal theodicy to carry. In other words, Shapira’s case proves that it would be incorrect to claim that post-Holocaust theology emerges exclusively out of the historicist and secular foundations of Jewish modernity. The impact of the scale of the tragedy cannot be dismissed. In his last full sermon, on July 18, 1942, Shabbat Chazon, mere four days before the Great Action, Shapira explored the topic of prophecy. “There are ten expressions of prophecy,” Shapira quoted a midrash, “but which is the harshest of all? R. Eliezer said. ‘A vision is the harshest,’ as it is written (Is. 21:1), ‘A cruel vision was told me.’” He continued thus: 45 Magid, “Covenantal Rupture.” 46 Drashot I:288, II:225. 47 Ibid. I:291, II:247.

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When we learned the words of the prophets and the Sages from the troubles of the destruction [of the Temple], we thought we understood these woes in some manner; sometimes we even cried. Now we see how great the distance is between hearing about woes and seeing them, and a fortiori suffering from them, Heaven forfend, up to almost nothing is in common. . . . No matter how much we talk about the woes we cannot imagine them as they really are, because knowing and talking about the woes does not resemble witnessing them.48

In Exodus God says to Moses: “I have truly seen the suffering of my people in Egypt . . . because I know his pain” (Ex. 3:7). God has seen the pain of Israel and now there is nothing else he can know, Shapira explains. Knowing about the pain is one thing, watching it another. Seeing the suffering of Israel makes God aware only of the pain and erases from his awareness any benefits that it might bring. Looking at Israel’s pain, blinds God to all else. Such is the power of vision and this is why this kind of prophecy is the harshest of all. Shapira did not extend this description to himself. He could have. The cruelty of the vision that Shapira experienced proved too much for the covenantal theodicy and the covenant itself to endure. Having witnessed the destruction he described as unprecedented, Shapira took a step outside the confines of faith in God conceived of as the Lord of History under whose providential control the fate of the Jewish people unfolds according to eternally valid patterns, inexorably, toward redemption.

48 Ibid. I:313–314; II:247.

Conclusion

Religious faith can be, and is, empirically verifiable; but nothing empirical can possibly refute it.1 Resisting rational explication, Auschwitz will forever after resist religious explanations as well.2

These two fragments, both taken from the writings of Emil Fackenheim, can be read as reflecting very different understandings of Judaism. According to the first one, nothing can refute faith. Every event and experience can be interpreted in such a way as to leave it intact. The interpretive framework of Judaism makes it possible to assimilate any occurrence, regardless of its dramatic nature, within its boundaries. The Holocaust, one can extrapolate, is one of such occurrences. Like the destruction of the Temple or the expulsion from Spain, it can be meaningfully explained in religious terms or at least interpreted in a way that does not undermine Judaism’s core theological assumptions. The second quotation offers a very different perspective. Here Auschwitz is presented as a historical event remaining forever beyond the limits of comprehension, religious or not. Judaism is no longer capable of assimilating every occurrence into a meaningful framework. Confronted with the Holocaust, Judaism encounters a boundary outside which no meaning can be found. If one agrees that construction of theodicy is one of the fundamental functions of the social formations we call religions, then in confrontation with the Holocaust Judaism failed. 1 QPF, 231. 2 Ibid., 18.

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The second passage expresses an approach characteristic of a significant segment of the post-Holocaust thought that argues that the Holocaust cannot be described by traditional religious vocabulary—that this vocabulary must be rejected if any discourse about Auschwitz is to be acceptable. Richard Rubenstein argued that to think about the Holocaust in terms of punishment and sin was obscene. According to Emil Fackenheim, the traditional theodicy shipwrecked on the rocks of the death camps. On the other hand, the first of the cited passages aptly captures the logic behind the writings discussed in chapter 2. While doubts and words of protest were not alien to Shlomo Zalman Ehrenreich, Yissakhar Shlomo Teichthal and Shlomo Zalman Unsdorfer, ultimately, their response to the persecutions they witnessed did not cross the boundaries of traditional discourse. By interpreting events through the lens of metahistorical paradigms, they managed to place them in an uninterrupted continuity of Jewish history even if occasionally they had a sense of the novel character of the events and even if at times they were reduced to silence. Covenantal theodicy functions in their writings as a master paradigm structuring all eternally valid models according to which history unfolds and as such it constitutes one of the unquestionable foundations of their reflection. No event could possibly undermine these foundations; they could only be empirically verified. The frightful and incomprehensible hand of God remained the hand of God and covenantal history still led toward redemption. The juxtaposition of and comparison between the variety of theological responses to the Holocaust that I proposed in this book has made it possible for me to posit a connection between theodicy and theological interpretation to history. The strength of covenantal theodicy and paradigmatic thinking hinge upon a particular understanding of history. To be possible, they require that history be seen as theophany, as a domain of divine moral judgment and action, as a scene of the unfolding covenantal relationship between God and Israel. Covenantal theodicy, with its fundaments erected by the biblical authors, constitutes a governing part of this interpretative framework. Paradigmatic thinking, inchoate already in the Bible, crystallized in response to the second destruction of the Temple, in response to the question of a seemingly inexplicable catastrophe happening again. Two singular events became a pattern opening the doors for other patterns to emerge. Paradigms began to scaffold the raw happenings of history into a theodic structure, to emplot history into metahistory with its covenantal dynamics of sin—retribution—forgiveness—redemption. As

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I have shown, this theodic metahistorical edifice could and did withstand the onslaught of the Holocaust, at least in some cases. An objection could be raised here that that Ehrenreich, Unsdorfer and Teichthal were not, in fact, confronting the Holocaust. Ehrenreich and Unsdorfer were killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Teichthal died in January of 1945 but we do not know the extent of his awareness of the scale of the destruction at the time when he was writing Em Ha-Banim Samekha. Their knowledge about the scale of the persecutions was, in other words, limited. They were responding to what they saw, knew, and suspected. One could speculate that their thought would have had a different shape, had they known as much as the post-war thinkers did. Such a possibility cannot be dismissed. It is just as plausible, however, that more comprehensive and detailed factual knowledge would not affect the basic structure of their responses. The post-war interpretations of the Holocaust coming from Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox circles are often more radical and more firmly assert the power of covenantal theodicy. In his book Vayoel Moshe, composed in the late 1950s, Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, unambiguously presented the Holocaust as a punishment for the sin of Zionism.3 Zvi Yehuda Kook described the Holocaust as a necessary surgery.4 In 3 “For their hands are stained with blood, and they are the reason for the terrible disaster of the killing of six million Jews,” he wrote. Yoel Teitelbaum, Vayoel Moshe (And Moses Agreed) (New York, 1959), 135. 4 In his words, the Holocaust was “a deeply hidden, internal, divine act of purification, [to rid us] of the impurity [of exile] . . . a cruel divine surgery aimed at bringing [the Jews] to the Land of Israel against their will.” Zvi Yehuda Kook, “Yom ha-Shoah 5727 (1967),” in Sihot ha-Rav Zvi Yehuda, ed. Shlomo Aviner (Jerusalem, 1982), 21. Gershon Greenberg wrote: “While Ultra-Orthodox thinkers after the war continued to use the metahistorical, mythical, metaphysical, and empirical language of their war time predecessors, there were distinctive characteristics: radicalized dualism, lessening of human power, and apocalyptism.” Gershon Greenberg, “Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Thought about the Holocaust since World War II,” in The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), 132–160. On this topic see also Dina Porat, “’Amalek’s Accomplices’ Blaming Zionism for the Holocaust: Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel during the 1980s,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 4 (October 1992): 695–729; Ruth Ebenstein, “Remembered Through Rejection: Yom Ha-Shoah in the Ashkenazi-Haredi Daily Press,” Journal of Israel Studies 8 (2003): 141–67; Kimmy Kaplan, “The Holocaust in Contemporary Israeli Haredi Popular Religion,” Modern Judaism 22 (2002). R. Shalom Noah Barzofsky of Slonim is an interesting case in this context as his interpretation of the Holocaust combines Orthodox adherence to covenantal framework with an innovative modification of its dominant template, see Shaul Magid, “The Holocaust as Inverted Miracle: Shalom Noah Barzofsky of Slonim on the Power and Divine Nature of

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addition and not less importantly, in the post-war years, Eliezer Berkovits described Jewish history as a mysterious, if not miraculous, interplay of the human and the divine. The knowledge of the scale of the Holocaust did not lead him to a rejection of the understanding of Jewish history as covenantal. Berkovits felt compelled to protest the explanatory framework of the sin–punishment dynamics and succeeded in preserving a seemingly traditional approach only by rereading and rewriting the canon of classical Jewish literature. This revisionism, however, did not extend to the fundamental assumption of God’s presence in history and the continuing validity of the covenant. In the end, for Unsdorfer, Ehrenreich, Teichthal, and Berkovits God’s presence in history remained, to borrow Fackenheim’s phrase, an existential aprori that the Holocaust could not destroy. In Die Entstehung des Historismus Friedrich Meinecke famously wrote that historicism was one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in Western thought.5 Karl Mannheim felt compelled to say that historicism became not only an intellectual attitude but rather a condition of human existence. Emil Fackenheim believed that “subjectivist reductionism” was a dominant cognitive attitude of modernity. In his understanding, this way of thinking followed the principle of Ockham’s razor. Historicism, with its categorical rejection of supernatural causes of historical occurrences, was a form of Ockham’s razor applied to history: whatever was happening in the historical realm had to be explained without a hypothesis of a transcendent being orchestrating events. History became a human and all-too-human affair: a field shaped by the complex interplay of human and natural causes and not a domain of divine judgment. In this context, the covenant could not serve as an explication of any historical event. It certainly could not endow the Holocaust with meaning, or rather, any attempts to construe such meaning were bound to show that they were not only doomed to failure but also blasphemous. For those who thought so, however, the traces of God understood as the lord of history had been erased from history well before the conflagration of the Holocaust. Radical Evil” in Spiritual Authority: Wrestling with Cultural Power in Jewish Thought, ed. Haim Kreisel and Boaz Huss (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2010), 33–63. On the topic of the pre-war anti-Zionism of ultra-Orthodox Jewry see, e.g., Allan L. Nadler, “The War on Modernity of R. Hayyim Elazar Shapira of Munkacz,” Modern Judaism 14 (1994): 233–264. 5 Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. by J. E. Anderson (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), liv.

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Rubenstein had arrived at the conclusion about the death of God before he added the impact of the Holocaust to his argument for the necessity of a radical transformation of Judaism. The idea of God as the omnipotent lord and judge of history as well as the idea of the covenant forged between this God and the Jewish people was unacceptable for Rubenstein and textual evidence of his early essays shows that it was the influence of Tillich and Dostoyevsky rather than the impact of the Holocaust that led him in this direction. For his part, Emil Fackenheim had admitted that historical event could alter religious beliefs before he moved on to address the question of theological implications of the Holocaust. For there to be such momentous theological implications as Fackenheim believed, one needed to assume first that it was possible for a historical event to undermine—as well as establish—the foundations of faith. In other words, the Holocaust could be seen as a radical rupture only once it was admitted that historical events in principle can disrupt rather than confirm the flow of covenantal metahistory. It was possible only once paradigmatic thinking and its fundamental premise of God’s presence in history had been rejected or at least rendered profoundly problematic. The secularization of history, however, cannot be seen as the only factor contributing to the rejection of traditional theodicy and the demise of covenantal metahistory. It was not historicism that led Kalonymus Kalman Shapira toward not only intellectual but also deeply existential realization that the covenant could no longer provide neither the consolation of meaning nor the comfort of ultimate salvation. This is, perhaps, where a fundamental difference between Kalonymus Kalman Shapira and all other authors analyzed in this book lies. Shapira alone expressed the premonition, bordering on certainty, that he was witnessing the complete destruction of Jewish life. Even if some Jews survived the slaughter, he felt, the scale of physical and spiritual devastation was such that it undermined the idea of the covenantal bound between Israel and God. Such dramatic realization is absent from the writings of Unsdorfer, Ehrenreich, and Teichthal. Rubenstein, Fackenheim, and Berkovits had a different—both existential and intellectual—relation to the Holocaust. Their knowledge about its scale was much more extensive. They were also deeply aware of a new factor they could not ignore: the emergence of the State of Israel. They were spared the immediate experience of the Holocaust, unlike Shapira who did see

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and witness what they could only hear and read about.6 Their experience of the Holocaust was expanded by their knowledge of the full scale of the destruction. Simultaneously, however, it was mitigated by the new political reality of the Jewish state and mediated through testimonies of witnesses and survivors as well as works of historians and novelists. Such mediated exposure to the near-total destruction of European Jewry, however harrowing, by itself was insufficient to disrupt covenantal metahistory. For those whose thinking about history remained theological and whose knowledge of the destruction was by blessed necessity limited to hearing, the Holocaust has not been a theological rupture. It was a much more demanding challenge for those who already stood outside the midrashic framework. Secularization and historicism undermined theological interpretations of history and rendered them questionable. Combined with this development, even a mediated exposure to the Holocaust was sufficient to trigger the final disruption of the entire interpretive framework. Even a mere attempt to explain the Holocaust in terms of covenantal dynamics became a blasphemy. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira stopped a few steps short of that point. He did not speak of blasphemy but from the very beginning of his war-time sermons was reluctant to explain the events in terms of punishment for sin. After Shapira had witnessed and experienced the magnitude of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, his faith was reduced to what he described as the most basic of its forms: one bereft of certainty and subsisting merely as a residual and barely perceptible sense of God’s existence. This God, however, might or might not be bound by the stipulations of the covenantal agreement. In Shapira’s case, the fundament of Jewish metahistory, the covenant, was shattered by the immensity of immediate experience.

6 Emil Fackenheim was arrested on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938 and released from Sachsenhausen in 1939. In 1940 he reached Canada through Great Britain.

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Index

2 Maccabees, 35 4 Maccabees, 35 Abrabanel, Isaac, 33 Abraham, xvii, xxvi, 7, 17, 23, 36-39, 41, 74-76, 80, 83-84, 97, 133, 143-144, 170, 176 Aggadah, 23, 119n70 Agudat Israel, 79, 81n136 Aharon, xxvi, 42, 68, 176 Akedah (binding of Isaac), 36-38, 68-69, 75-76, 143, 169-170, 176 Akiva, 35, 163 Alkalai, Yehudah, 91n171, 95 Amalek, xxv, 33 Amoraim, 33 Anselm of Canterbury, 71 anti-Semitism, 54, 77-78 Assmann, Jan, 10 Auschwitz, xviii-xix, xxx, 45, 63, 81, 104, 106-109, 112-113, 118n66, 121, 129, 133, 136-138, 141, 146-147, 155, 179181 Bar Kochba, 31-32 Barstad, Hans M. The Myth of the Empty Land, 1n1 Barzofsky, Shalom Noah of Slonim, 181n4 Baumel, Judith, xxvii-xxviii Beiser, Frederick, 103 Berger, Peter, 3, 113 Berkovitz, Eliezer, xiii-xv, xix-xx, xxiv, xxx-xxxiii, 100, 138-152, 155, 182-183 Faith after the Holocaust, 99, 139, 142, 146, 150n210 With God in Hell, 136n145, 139, 142143 Berlin, Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Shaar Israel, 54n41 Biale, David

Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, 148 Bible Genesis, xvii, xxvi, 24, 29-31, 37, 51, 53, 66, 71, 74-75, 143 Exodus, 12, 20, 26, 55-56, 60, 72-73, 87, 162, 165, 178 Leviticus, xxvi, 15, 24 Numbers, 29, 33, 47, 73, 90 Deuteronomy, xxiv, 4-9, 14-15, 22, 29, 50, 58, 64, 68n93, 92, 94, 115n57 Joshua, 4, 9, 114 Judges, 4, 9 1 Samuel, 4 2 Samuel, 4 1 Kings, 4, 7, 9, 21 2 Kings, 4-5, 7, 9-10, 21 Isaiah, xviii, 10, 26, 48, 94, 165, 177 Jeremiah, 11n18, 16, 18n33, 24-25, 29, 52, 90, 94, 127, 133, 142, 145-146 Ezekiel, 11-13, 26, 29, 94 Hosea, 24-25 Obadiah, 29, 32-33 Habakkuk, 142, 145 Zechariah, 19, 26 Malachi, 31, 69 Psalms, 29, 37, 67, 71-72, 75, 86, 127, 142, 145, 162, 167, 173-174 Proverbs, 36 Job, xix, xxx, 26, 61, 68, 110, 127, 133, 140-146, 149, 155 Song of Songs, 56, 86 Lamentations, 1-3, 5, 10, 13-15, 18-19, 25, 28n56, 30, 32, 36, 53, 67, 89, 171 Esther, 54 Ecclesiastes, 84, 161 Daniel, 24, 35, 83

Index

Book of Jubilees, 37 Boyarin, Daniel, 34n70 Braiterman, Zachary, 12, 106, 113, 117-118, 120-121, 137-139, 144-145, 152 (God) After Auschwitz, 155n221 Buber, Martin, 126, 130, 153 Buchenwald, xx Bynum, Caroline W., xxii Chaim ibn Attar (Or ha-Hayyim), 92 Chazan, Robert, 36 Christianity, xviii-xix, xxviiin32, 32, 36, 52, 112n48, 117-118, 120, 127, 146 Protestant, 106, 111 Cohen, Shaye, 15, 28n56 Commentary, xviii, xix, 105, 112, 133 comparison, xiv-xvi, xx-xxiv, xxxi, xxxiii, 136n145, 149n204, 180 Conan Doyle, Arthur, xxiii Cooper, Alan, 18n33 covenant, xiv-xvi, xx, xxiv-xxviii, xxx-xxxiv, 4-20, 22, 24, 30, 36, 39-42, 47, 50, 52, 54, 59-61, 64, 66-67, 69-70, 73-75, 77-78, 80, 84, 88-89, 92-93, 95, 97-98, 100, 103, 113, 116-118, 123, 144-145, 152-153, 156, 159-160, 163, 167-169, 171-172, 176-178, 180-184 Cox, Harvey, xxix Crusades, 34-36, 38, 134 David, 1, 7, 86 Dawidowicz, Lucy, xiii death of God, xix, 105-106, 108, 110-113, 116, 121, 133, 183 Deuteronomistic history, xxiv, 4-10, 12-13, 21-22, 64, 168 Diamond, James, 159, 164n19 Diner, Hasia We Remember with Reverence and Love, xiii Doniger, Wendy, xxiii Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 183 The Brothers Karamazov, 109 Eco, Umberto, xxii Ehrenreich, Shlomo Zalman, xviii, xx, xxvi, xxxii-xxxiv, 41-62, 70, 74, 76-77, 79-80, 96-98, 159-160, 169, 171, 176, 180-183 Drashot Lehem Shlomo, 45, 160 Kol Israel Saba, 55 Toldot Kol Aryeh, 43-44 Eibenschutz, David Solomon Arvei Nahal, 162

203

Elijah, 20, 60, 92 Elimelekh of Grodzisk (Maggid of Kozienice), 156 Elimelekh of Lyzhansk (Seer of Lublin), 156 Elisha ben Abuyah, 143, 145 Elliott, John H., xxii Emancipation, xxx, 100, 132, 134-135, 152, 154 Epstein, Kalonymus Kalman Halevi Maʼor va-Shemesh, 163 Esau, xviii, xxv, 29-33, 39-41, 50-54, 69-70, 76-78, 97, 168-169, 176 Eunomos of Gedera, 51 exile, 4, 10-15, 17-18, 20, 30, 33, 40, 42, 55, 58, 60, 71, 74, 85-89, 91-95, 97-98, 119, 121, 149-152, 181n4 existentialism, xxix, 107-108, 112-113, 115n57, 122, 132, 152-153 Fackenheim Emil, xiii-xv, xix-xx, xxiv, xxviii-xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, 99-100, 122-138, 153-155, 179-180, 182-184 God’s Presence in History, 133, 135-136, 153 Quest for Past and Future, 131 To Mend the World, 123, 132, 136-137 What is Judaism, xiii, xx Feiner, Shmuel, 101-102 Fishbane, Michael, 28n56 Freiberger, Oliver, xxi Freidenreich, David M., xxiii French Revolution, 117 Freud, Sigmund, 111, 113n48 Friedman, Alexander Zusha, 176n43 Fromm, Erich, 110-111 Funkenstein, Amos, 102, 151n217 Goldstein, Moshe Tikun Olam, 81 Greenberg, Gershon, xiv-xv, 45n10, 58, 61, 96-97, 181n4 Greenberg, Irving, xiii Gregerman, Adam 6n10 Gruber, Dean, 118, 120-121 Hacohen, Malachi, 31 Hadrian, 17-18, 32, 134 Hagar, 37 Haggadah, 48 Halberstam, Chaim, 43 Haman, xviii, 48-49, 54, 88, 93 Haninah ben Teradyon, 35 Hannah, 35, 75

204

Index

Hapstein, Yerahmiel Moshe, 156 Hasidism, xx, xxxiv, 43-44, 53, 62, 90, 156160, 172-173 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxix, 113n48, 132, 137n148, 153 Heidegger, Martin, 125n96 Henten, Jan Willem van, 34n70 historicism, xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, 103-104, 116117, 125-126, 132, 148, 154, 156, 177, 182-184 history, passim Hitler, Adolf, 88n156, 105, 118 Hobbes, Thomas, 147 Holdrege, Barbara A., xxxiii Howard, Thomas Albert Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 102

Kerler, Dov-Ber, xiii Kierkegaard, Søren, 113n48, 135, 143 Kochan, Lionel, 21 Kolitz, Zvi, 144n179 Kook, Avraham, 91n171 Kook, Zvi Yehuda, 181 Kraemer, David, 20 Krasznai, Laszlo, 45 Kristallnacht, 184n6

Iggers, Georg, 103 Isaac, xxvi, 17, 23, 30, 36-39, 51, 69, 75-76, 143-144, 163, 165, 169-170, 176 Ishmael, 37-38 Israel (State), 120n76, 132, 139, 148, 150152, 154-155, 183-184 issurim shel ahava (afflictions of love), 36

Maccabees, 35, 134 Magid, Shaul, xxviii, xxxi, 176-177 Maimonides Mishneh Torah, 93 86n150 Mainz Anonymous, 38 Mannheim, Karl, 182 martyrdom, xxvi, 34-36, 68-69, 80, 136, 162-164, 170, 176 Meinecke, Friedrich, 103 Die Entstehung des Historismus, 182 Melville, Herman, 113n48 Menahem Mendel of Rimanov, 163 mesirat nefesh, 76, 170 messianism, xxix, 20, 58, 60, 82-87, 94-95, 123, 129-130, 134, 148-151, 155, 176 metahistory, xxiv-xxv, 31, 39, 41, 50-51, 6970, 74, 82, 84, 94-97, 100, 147, 154, 156, 159, 176n44, 180-181, 183-184 Midrash Genesis Rabbah, 30-31, 37, 51 Exodus Rabbah, 86 Song of Songs Rabbah, 86, 88 Lamentations Rabbah, 13-16, 18, 24, 28n56, 32, 35, 89 Pesikta de Rav Kahana, 26-27 Pesikta Rabbati, 30 Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, 39 Sifrei, 40 Tanhuma, xxvi, 40, 52 Mintz, Alan, 11n18, 13, 15, 17, 28n56, 36 Hurban, 1 Mishnah Sotah, 82 Avot, 37, 66-67, 69, 72, 74, 78-79 modernity, xxxii, xxxiv, 101-102, 121, 135, 177, 182 modernization, xxx, 43n2, 100-101, 152

Jacob, xviii, xxv, 11, 17, 29-32, 40-41, 50-52, 54, 69-71, 76-77, 84, 97, 165, 168-169, 176 Jerusalem Temple, 1, 6, 15-16, 18, 28-30, 32, 58, 127, 134, 147, 174, 178-180 Judah ben Nehemiah, 89 Judah Loew ben Bezalel (Maharal of Prague) Netzah Yisrael, 85 Judaism “ghetto”, 119-122, 152-153 Orthodox, xx, xxvii, xxxi, xxxiii, 41, 43, 62, 79-80, 96, 116, 123, 138, 155, 176n44, 181 Reconstructionist, 100, 111, 121 ultra-Orthodox, xiii, xx, 44, 55, 62, 80, 181 Judaism, 133 Kabbalah, 82, 163 Kalisher, Zvi, 91n171, 95 Kaplan, Mordecai, 111 The Future of the American Jew, 118 Katz, Jacob, 79 Katz, Steven T., xiv-xv, 105-106, 113, 130, 138, 141-142 Kaufman, William, 107 Keren-Kratz, Menachem, 62

Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 101 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 3 Levinas, Emmanuel, 100, 144, 160n9 Lichtenstein, Hillel, 58 Linafelt, Tod, 18n34 Lipmann Heller, Yom-Tov, xxvi, 170

Index

Momigliano, Arnaldo, 21 Morgan, Michael, 107-108, 120n76, 122n86, 125-126, 132, 136-138, 146 Moses, xxvi, 4, 6-7, 12, 17, 23, 27, 56, 60, 84, 90, 114-115, 163-164, 178 Mroczek, Eva, 12n18 Myers, David, 104 Nachmanides, 33 Napoleon, 101 naturalism, xxix, 103, 107, 109, 139 Nebuchadnezzar, 18-19, 32, 35, 88n156 Neusner, Jacob, xiv-xv, xxv-xxvi, 15n27, 2425, 27-28, 31-32, 39-41, 96, 116 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 112-113, 122, 152 Noth, Martin, 4-5, 10 Novak, David, 152n217 Nuremberg Laws, 89 Oneg Shabbat, xx, 157 paradigm, xiv-xvi, xxv-xxviii, xxx, 11n18, 15, 25, 27, 31, 37-38, 40-42, 47, 50, 52, 61, 69-70, 74-77, 84, 91, 94-98, 116, 123-124, 132, 151, 154, 168-169, 172, 176, 180 paradigmatic thinking, xiv-xvi, xxv-xxvi, xxx-xxxi, xxxiii-xxxiv, 20-42, 47, 52, 79, 96, 98, 100, 103, 116-117, 123, 132, 138-139, 147, 149, 155, 160, 170, 174, 177, 180, 183 Polen, Nehemia The Holy Fire, xxxi psychoanalysis, xxix, 107, 119n70 Raffel, Charles, 138 Rakover, Yossel, 144 Rashi, 33, 51-52, 163, 165 Reconstructionist, 108-109, 115 redemption, xviii, xxv, xxxi-xxxiv, 6, 20, 4042, 49, 55-62, 70-71, 73, 82-89, 91, 93, 95-98, 139, 150-151, 155, 159, 166, 168, 172, 175-176, 178, 180 Reiser, Daniel, 157-158 repentance, xxv, xxxi, 6, 13, 16, 18, 41-42, 49-50, 53, 57-58, 67-68, 86-88, 91-92, 95-96, 98, 159, 161-162, 166-168, 170172, 176 See also teshuvah Römer, Thomas C., 8 The So-Called Deuteronomistic History, 4n5 Roos, Lena, 35

205

Rosenzweig, Franz, 23, 130-131, 153 Roskies, Alan, 28n56 Rubenstein, Richard, xiii-xv, xviii-xx, xxiv, xxviii-xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, 99-100, 104122, 128, 133, 138, 146, 151-154, 180, 183 After Auschwitz, xiii, 99, 108 The Religious Imagination, 99, 119n70 Russell, D.S., 28n56 Saadia Gaon, 20 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 113n48 Schecter, Jacob J., xxvii Schindler, Pesach, 88n156 Schwartz, Avraham Yehuda Hakohen (Kol Aryeh), 43-44 Schweid, Eliezer, xiv, 95n182, 138 secularization, xxx, xxxii, 100-102, 106, 113n48, 116, 121-122, 134-136, 152, 154-156, 183-184 Seeman, Don, 160n9, 164n19 Shapira, Chaim Elazar (Munkaczer Rebbe), 80-81 Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman (Piaseczner Rebbe), xiv, xvi, xx, xxiv, xxxi-xxxii, xxxiv, 156-178, 183-184 Drashot, 156-159, 168 Esh Kodesh, xiii, xxxii, 157-160 Hovat ha-Talmidim, 157 Sharma, Arvind, xxiiin22 Shneur Zalman of Liadi Tanya, 168 sin, xxiv, xxvii, xxx, 3, 6, 9-15, 17-20, 30, 32, 36-37, 41-42, 47, 53, 56, 58, 61, 64-69, 74, 78-79, 82, 87, 91, 95-99, 136, 151, 159, 161-164, 166-172, 176, 180-182, 184 Six Day War, 150, 155 Smith, Jonathan Z., xiv-xv, xxi-xxii, xxiv, xxxiii Sofer, Moses (Hatam Sofer), 43, 62 Spinoza, Baruch, 100, 104 Stern, Ephraim, 2n1 Stockhammer, Shimshon, 176n43 Strauss, Leo, 125n96 suffering, as punishment, as afflictions of love, as purification, xviii, xxiv-xxv, xxviii-xxix, xxxii-xxxiii, 9, 12-13, 18n34, 20, 33, 36-39, 42, 46, 48, 53, 57-61, 6769, 78, 99, 159, 161, 166-172, 176 Talmud Babylonian

206

Index

Berakhot, 35, 37, 53, 66-67 Shabbat, 47-48, 78 Pesachim, 94 Yoma, 163 Megillah, 48 Hagigah, 61 Ketubot, 57 Nedarim, 47 Gittin, xxvii, 31, 35, 60 Kiddushin, 70 Baba Kamma, 72 Baba Batra, 30, 145 Sanhedrin, 34, 37-38, 56, 59, 83 Avodah Zarah, 35 Avot, 114 Palestinian Taanit, 31 Targum Lamentations, 18, 25n49 Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, 38 Teichtal, Yissakhar Shlomo, xx, xxiv, xxvi, xxxi-xxxiv, 41-42, 80-98, 159-160, 171, 180-183 Em ha-Banim Samekha, xiv, 40, 80-81, 85, 88, 91n171, 95, 160, 181 Teitelbaum, Moshe of Ujhely, 43 Teitelbaum, Yoel (Satmar Rebbe) Vayoel Moshe, 181 Tertullian, 143 teshuvah, 58-59, 87, 91, 93, 95, 162 See also repentance theodicy, xxiii-xxv, xxvii-xxix, xxxiii, 3, 52, 59, 74, 99-100, 105, 108-110, 113, 115117, 121, 128, 138, 143, 145, 155-156, 159, 179-181, 183 anti-theodicy, xiv, 12, 121n82, 138 coventantal, xv, xxiv-xxv, xxvii-xxviii, xxx-xxxiv, 4-20, 41-42, 50, 59-61, 64,

67, 70, 80, 95, 98, 100, 103, 116, 123, 145, 153, 156, 159-160, 172, 176-178, 180-181 theophany, xxiv, 21, 117, 180 Tikkunei Zohar Hadash, 84 Tillich, Paul, 108, 110-113, 122, 152, 183 The Courage to Be, 110, 112 Systematic Theology, 111 Tosefta, 92 Treblinka, xxxii, 175 Unsdorfer, Shlomo, xvii-xviii, xx, xxiv, xxvi, xxxii-xxxiv, 41-42, 62-80, 96-98, 159160, 169, 171, 180-183 Siftei Shlomo, 63, 160 Unsdorfer, Simcha Bunem, 63 Veidlinger, Jeffrey, xiii Vico, Giambattista, 102 Warsaw ghetto, xx, xxxii, 144, 156-178, 184 Weber, Ralph, xxi-xxii Werblowsky, Zwi, 86 Wiesel, Elie, 132 William of Ockham, 127, 182 Wilson, Bryan R., 101n4 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 102 Wright, Ernest G., 21-22 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayyim, xv, 21, 23, 2728, 35-36, 39, 50, 102 Zakhor, xxvi, 24n48 Zionism, xiv, 53, 55, 57-58, 79, 81n136, 95, 148, 181 Zohar Hadash, 84