Beyond Holocaust Theology:
Extending a Hand Across the Abyss
copyright ©1998 by Laura Duhan Kaplan
This essay is dedicated to my brother David who unknowingly taught me the concrete meaning of the term “holocaust theology.” When asked several years ago what being Jewish meant to him, he replied quite honestly, “It means that if someone makes an antisemitic remark, I hit him.”
For many contemporary middle-aged Jews like myself, envisioning an alternative to holocaust theology is not easy. As the generation that knows of the holocaust mainly through oral history, photographs, movies and books, we have been trying to gain some inkling of the enormity of the slaughter and the behaviors that made it possible. Without any clear focus, we consume images of the holocaust and find ourselves riveted to the emotions of horror they incite. We feel wounded, scarred, slashed through and through by the antisemitism that moved millions of Europeans to collaborate in the murders of our family members. Temporarily safe ourselves from such a massacre, we bask in the luxury of a justified but unfocused anger and reject the possibility of relationship with other ethnic or religious groups. Consciously or unconsciously we view all other groups as actual or potential oppressors of Israel, who deserve neither our understanding nor our aid even in their own times of suffering. Many of our generation extend this same attitude towards God. Because we rightly cannot understand how a God pledged to us by covenant could allow our destruction, we renege on our pledge to God without qualms. We view our covenant with God as an artifact of mere historical interest, dismissing out of hand any possibility of a personal relationship with a living God.
In some ways, we speak and act as though we are suffering from a collective personality disorder. Traumatized in our youth by betrayal and abandonment at the hands of a significant other, we are now unable to form any relationships with others except those based on self-interest. If this were an individual problem, the psychological task would be to find a way of understanding our loss that contains within it the seeds of moving beyond it. That is exactly what I try to do in this essay as i sort through my own experiences, guided by a therapist in the form of Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenology of relationship.
Relationship with History
In the summer of 1987 I visited Germany, studying German during the week and touring the country on weekends. Early in the trip, I visited the concentration camp at Dachau. Its proximity to residential neighborhoods shocked me. The story told by a man who walked with me from the train station, an American army veteran who had been among the first to liberate the camp, moved me. The wrought iron slogan on the gates, “Arbeit macht Frei” chilled me. But the camp and museum themselves did not unseat me, as I had hoped they would. Instead, they reinforced how much I had already crystallized the holocaust into a well-packaged event. I had seen the film “The Sorrow and the Pity” when I was nine, read a good share of holocaust literature in my preteen and teenage years, and stared at endless gritty photographs of ghettos, concentration camps, and mass graves on the Russian front. By the time I got to Dachau, the photos, the bunkers, even the monastery seemed familiar. There was nothing more they could teach me, I thought. The existence of an entity called “the holocaust” had become a vague node on my choppy timeline of history, taking its place in a long line of by now unsurprising anti-human and anti-semitic atrocities.
The holocaust functioned for me as an example of what Levinas calls the “il y a,” the “there is,” the “phenomenon of impersonal being.” This impersonal being stands apart from any possibility of human relationship. Its enormity and untouchability evoke only horror. People may try to escape this horror through various “nourishments,” that is, diversions, or through “knowledge,” the attempt to make the “there is” conform to our representations of it. But none of these attempts can tame the “there is.” Its impersonality always returns to confront us. It is a sort of “deafening silence,” always making noise, but never saying anything that we find coherent (Levinas, Ethics 57-60).
So the holocaust appeared to me, until several weeks after my visit to Dachau ...
... when I visited Worms. My traveling companion, a Christian Ph.D. student in religious studies, was as eager as I was to see the small room in which the great Biblical scholar Raschi taught. After a long long walk from the train station along narrow cobblestoned streets, we arrived at the site. A small stone building, two rooms wide, sat atop a tall ziggurat of steps, crowning the former Jewish Quarter of Worms. A group of Israeli tourists was visiting and we listened to their guide translate the docent's lecture into Hebrew. We learned that the building had been rebuilt many times after its destruction by fires, both accidental and intentional. After the tourists left, we visited the small basement museum downstairs. We spent considerable time studying lists of holocaust victims, and maps tracing the dispersion of survivors to North and South America. We chatted with the museum volunteers, who explained with bittersweet smiles that a few Jews chose to live in Worms to maintain the Raschihaus site. After buying some souvenirs, we emerged, half-blind, into the summer sunlight ...
... and into silence. I did not hear a single car, a single shout, a single ball bouncing, a single child crying or laughing. The Jewish Quarter of Worms was dead. Emptied. Silenced. The names we studied downstairs were not mere names. They were people, families, mothers, teachers, grocers, athletes, once upon a time teeming with life, spilling out in joy and sorrow over the narrow streets of Worms. I sat down on the steps of Raschihaus and cried.
For Levinas, there is only one way to escape the impersonality of the “there is”: social relationship with the Other. In an ideal social relationship, each person responds to the Other without appropriating or reducing the identity of the Other. Each person recognizes that the Other offers a continual confrontation with mystery. This mystery has nothing in common with the impersonality of the “there is.” It is, instead, a human mystery, calling out for ethical responses to its surprises. Committing oneself to the realm of the ethical enables an overcoming of the horror of impersonal being. At Raschihaus, the ghosts of Worms showed me the possibility of an ethical relationship with the holocaust. A mysterious Other confronted me, an Other who was not alive, but who teemed with life; an Other who as yet had no particular face, yet who I could imagine by analogy to my own.
Later that same day, close to sunset, my friend and I visited the Jewish cemetery in Worms. Viewed by the Nazis as another historical reminder of the barbarism of their enemies, the cemetery had not been destroyed in the holocaust. My friend and I wandered its rough hills, squinted at its gravestones spanning hundreds of years, strained to read the Yiddish names, half rubbed out by time and weather, and added to the piles of stones at some sites. We marveled at the good fortune these few corpses had enjoyed. Each had a marker, declaring, “I was here!!”, a marker noting each person in her or his unique singularity. No longer did I need to imagine the particularity of the ghosts who called to me. Here was solid evidence that the vision I had seen was not a mere fantasy. Without that vision, I doubt the cemetery would have appeared so alive to me. Without the cemetery, I might have been unable to confirm my vision.
I recalled Worms, recently, after a funeral, while wandering through the Hebrew Cemetery in my own Southern Bible Belt city of Charlotte. Our cemetery is a rather bleak affair, on a shadeless plot of land, located in a neighborhood of old warehouses on the outskirts of downtown. It is only marginally maintained. In the cemetery, I saw headstones erected seventy years ago marking the graves of babies and young children. One headstone had a little granite kitten atop it, its face rubbed smooth, its cracks carpeted with soft downy moss. Yet many of these tiny graves lacked the encircling comfort of their parents' graves by their sides, lacked a small pile of stones to indicate their memories were still held dear. Obviously their families moved out of town. Just as obviously, I like to imagine, they have not been forgotten, for a child's death marks a parent forever, transfiguring the future in previously unimaginable ways. I am moved by the analogy between my own fierce love for my babies and the love I imagine was directed at these babies. Standing beside these small graves, I can comprehend the infinite suffering produced by even a single death, an infinity that can hide within statistics reporting millions of deaths.
For Levinas, the connection between parent and child is a particularly close one. He calls that relationship “paternity,” not having had the opportunity to learn through experience that the dynamic relationship he identifies also lies at the heart of mothering a growing child. “Paternity,” says Levinas, “is a relationship with a stranger who, entirely while being Other, is me” (Levinas, Ethics 71). Paternity/maternity complicates Levinas's claim that social relationship offers human beings the possibility of time, of transcending the stagnation of the “there is.” “The other,” says Levinas, “is the future” (Levinas, “Time” 44). In the case of paternity/maternity, I might add, the other is not only the future, but also the personal present and the link to the human past. Parents find themselves standing between the traditional, which they hope to transmit, and the unknown, as yet unlived future of their children's lives. They attempt to anchor their children's lives in the past, while preparing them for a surprising future. Parents commit themselves to a project whose end they hope never to see.
Applying the phenomenology of paternity/maternity to the possibility of relating personally to the holocaust, I might add that the relationship of paternity/maternity need not be understood only in its literal sense, as obtaining between a single generation of parent and child. The relationship of paternity/maternity offers a model for understanding cross-generational connections between human beings, for understanding concepts such as “the human family” or “the Jewish people.” We need only interpret the first commandment in the Torah, “Be fruitful and multiply” as a reminder that all humans are connected in an unbroken chain of paternity/maternity. In taking this chain seriously, perhaps I cannot, in good faith, imagine myself a casualty of the holocaust, wading in filth or awaiting execution. But I certainly can imagine myself a victim of the holocaust, having all webs of family connection ripped away from me. And I can imagine grief over the rupture of my own chain deepening as I contemplate a rupture in the great chain of human being.
My discussion so far has referred only to awakening a sense of responsibility in the face of the holocaust by finding a point of connection for those who shrink from its enormity. I have said nothing about gathering knowledge of the holocaust, getting clear on the basic facts, learning details that might also make it possible to see human faces among the facts. Following Levinas's line of thinking, knowledge is metaphysically less important than ethical response. Knowledge cannot offer an alternative to the impersonality of the “there is.” The project of knowing is an attempt to understand the world according to a predetermined “scale.” The purpose of knowledge is precisely to destroy the alterity of the other, to put an end to a phenomenon's existence as a mystery offering continuous surprises. And this is precisely what my childhood knowledge of the holocaust accomplished for me. I became convinced that the few representative representations I was familiar with had laid out the basic outline of the event. There was nothing new for me to learn, I believed, and so was unmoved when I stood on the very same earth where so many murders, so much torture, and so much distortion had taken place. It took confrontation in the form of relationship with Others whom I recognized as both me and not me to wake me to the cold indifference of my position. Truly there is much to learn about and from the holocaust, in terms of both facts and values. But without recognition of an ethical commitment born of relationship, I would have no motivation to learn it.
I think I shall advise my own chavurah, my own religious collective, to gather this year at the Hebrew Cemetery. The continued existence of our impoverished, simple cemetery will remind us of the strength of the links that connect us with the past. The personal names on the headstones and the list of relationships the deceased left behind will remind us of the infinite suffering a single death can cause. The graves of our own members and their families will remind us of our own experiences of that suffering. I shall stand next to my own beloved husband, father of my children, whose Hebrew name Yishaya Yehezkel, Isaiah Ezekiel, recalls an ancient prophet whose vision steadied the Israelites during a difficult time of passage. With his own hands and fine carpentry skills, my husband has built the simple coffins in which members of our community rest. Paternity/maternity, infinity, suffering, and the practical need to respond to the dead will converge. Perhaps my husband and I and the rest of our community will echo the words of my husband's namesake, the prophet Ezekiel, and say,
“Let these bones live!”
Relationship with the Living
But, spoken to in this fashion, these bones will not live. So far I have spoken only of relationship with the dead, and not of relationship with the living. Grieving for the victims of the holocaust through the stance of a parent who has lost a child gives us a language but not a solution. As I know from observing my own parents' bereavement after the death of my four-year-old brother, such grief can easily trap parents in the past, paralyzing any movement towards a creative future. They may lose their grasp on one side of the paradox of parenting: while they are still anchored in the past, they are no longer preparing for the unlived future. Their consciousness of possibility, which Jean-Paul Sartre identifies as the foundation for the human capacity to create meaning, may be extinguished. For these parents, and those who identify with them, still face the il y a, the “there is,” impersonal being. These parents, and those who feel with them, hear the “deafening silence,” always making noise, but never saying anything coherent. Consider a song I learned in an Orthodox religious school when I was ten years old:
Struck, beset with fierce emotion
Walking on, a legend to become
Stripped of all yirat shamayim [fear of heaven],
The rebbe lost, a living outcast won.
Once in fields of golden array,
This passer-by heard a father say,
“Go my son, for shilooach hakan [sending away the mother bird before taking her eggs]
will bring you joy, and length to your day.”
Struck, with warmth and deep devotion
Anxious to fulfill his father's plea
The young lad climbed
Up to the velvet tree.
His hand outstretched, the bird flew away
And in his heart, content began to swell
All at once, he stumbled and fell
Dead and cold, near his father he lay.
Struck, beset with fierce emotion
walking on, a legend to become...
Stripped of all yirat shamayim [fear of heaven]
the rebbe lost, a living outcast won.
His faith was shattered,
gone was his yirah,
“Hashem yisborach [Blessed God], how could you let him go?”
Could you not guide him,
maintain his yirah,
Hashem yisborach, how could you let him go?”
Oh no my children, I cannot help him,
For fear of the Lord must come from within.
Struck, beset with fierce emotion
Walking on, a legend to become
Stripped of all yirat shamayim [fear of heaven],
The rebbe lost, a living outcast won.The rebbe had lost his capacity for awe. God had outlined an agreement with human beings, and God had completely failed to play the divine part. A transcendentally brilliant God, speaking in person as well as through learned interpreters, had charged humanity with ethical duties. But this same God, now morally callous, had forgotten the duties allocated to Itself. Long ago, God's voice had drowned out the thunder, the lightning and the incessant bleating of the shofar at Mount Sinai, declaring, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you (Exodus 20: 12).” And God's detailed elaboration of duties that followed the original ethical revelation included the rule, “If a bird's nest is before you, you shall not take the mother with the young; you shall let her go, that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days (Deuteronomy 22: 6-7).”
The boy the rebbe saw had obeyed both commandments, honoring his father by sending away the mother bird. And his life had been cut short. God's agreements, God's words, meant nothing. No wonder the rebbe's faith was shattered. Instantly, he withdrew from God, suddenly feeling God shrinking away from him at the speed of light. The rebbe found himself in a world bereft of relationship. Foundation, ceiling, sheltering walls were gone. This impersonal world offered no hospitality, extended no hand of help, no hand of meaning.
Yet the song's conclusion does not fault God. God had not abandoned (the rebbe; the rebbe had withdrawn his faith. The conclusion leaves it up to the rebbe to extend the hand of meaning to win back a relationship with God. But the rebbe lost, walking on, holding his formerly extended hand close to his body. He became a living outcast, cast out of relationship with God, through the failure of his own hand. The rebbe was no longer naive; he knew how to protect himself. By walking out on the relationship he would not be fooled again. But anguish, forlornness, and despair, to use Sartre's words, would be his lot.... I am, we are, my generation is, like the rebbe, bystanders to the holocaust in empirical fact, participants by existential choice, withdrawn from relationship by way of response. Yes, these are the hard cases: a god who condones the senseless suffering of good people, and beings, human, divine or diabolical, who bring it about. Perhaps it is best to withdraw from relationship and avoid the risk of betrayal. If we do not extend our hand, we will not be lured into a false sense of security about our position. But then the world becomes once again an il y a, a “there is,” impersonal being.
Relationship with God is but one way of taking the risk that is the leap into meaning. It is but one of the relationships in which meaning can be obliterated through betrayal, betrayal in which expressions of commitment seem to turn into lies, in which the words of those commitments, perhaps all words in general, come to mean nothing. After all, the concrete betrayal of the Jewish people was carried out not by God, but by our neighbors. Fraught with risk are relationships with persons of other nations, those marked with differences in culture and power. Some contemporary writers on culture and power have recognized the two edges of this risk, betrayal and meaning. For example, bell hooks has described the experience of betrayal many women of color felt in the feminist movement. Early multicultural feminists rightly accused white middle class feminists of ignoring the impoverished women of color whose labor made it possible for white women to seek liberation, and therefore of crafting theories that speak only to the experiences of the white theorizers. Initially the white feminists replied that their theories described basic realities common to all women's lives, and therefore all were welcome to join the cause of women's liberation as they themselves defined it. But, said some multicultural feminists, if that is the case, then very little in your experiences as women finds parallels in our experiences; perhaps we do not even use the word “woman” in the same sense. An unbridgeable abyss of meaning lies between your feminism and ours; we cannot even talk. But, exploring the other edge of the risk, the creation of meaning, Maria Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman argue that women must talk with one another, reaching out across the genuine abyss of difference and the very real history of oppression that separate us from one another. Becoming friends, traveling to one another's worlds, are the first steps. Only after that will women be able to create common meanings and theorize together.
The stance many contemporary Jews take towards other nations is precisely that of early multicultural feminist authors: you betrayed us, therefore there is no possibility of meaningful dialogue, no connection, no relationship. But this withdrawal from friendship, if taken too far, amounts to a withdrawal from the realm of the ethical, leading in practice to abandoning the ideals of an ethical state, a universal care for the oppressed, an openness to healing the world, and a covenant with a living God. Without extending our hand in risk, we lose our grasp on the very commitments that some thinkers see as foundational to Judaism. A philosophy like Levinas's ought not to be applied selectively, its harsh duties avoided out of fear of risk, or, worse, out of the self-indulgence of prolonged grief. To apply it selectively would be to misunderstand his phenomenology of relationship by expecting relationships to rest on an already established ground of meaning. On the contrary, according to Levinas's thought, relationships create a ground of meaning where previously there was none.
My Christian friend took a risk when he traveled with me to Worms. The condition he had originally laid down as the only possible foundation for meaningful dialogue, my acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Lord, had not been satisfied. Yet when we grieved together at Worms, he came to see that I, though entirely Other, was also, in some ways, him. I do not know how my friend would have behaved had he lived in Europe during the war. But for now, we are not in Europe, we are not at war, and we are friends. Here is a place to start. We have both come to recognize that, in the wake of the holocaust, we need more than just new theologies. We also need new sociologies.
Withdrawal from relationship recreates the il y a, impersonal being. Yet relationship is fraught with risk of betrayal, of the terrifying loss of meaning that once again recalls the il y a, and seems to make relationship impossible. The only solution I can see to this dilemma is to take the risk and work towards friendship. As Annie Dillard, who sees the living God of the Hebrew Bible everywhere in nature, reminds us, in the risks lie the riches. She writes:
“Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have `not gone up into the gaps.' The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery” (Dillard 268-269).
Relationships are journeys into the gaps of mystery; clearly they are risks; and their paths are not predictable. But in order to break the cycle of withdrawing from the ethical, someone must take a deliberate leap across the abyss in order to form the relationships that will create new meanings. These meanings, both theological and sociological, are needed if the Jewish people are to rise from the ashes of the holocaust, and finally speak credibly, as we repeat the words of the ancient prophet Ezekiel:
“Let these bones live!”
Works CitedDillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper, 1974.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985.
Levinas, Emmanuel. "Time and the Other." The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 37-58.
Other Works ConsultedArendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1963.
Cohen, Richard A. Elevations : The Height of the Good in Levinas and Rosensweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Cohen, Richard A. "Translator's Introduction." Time and The Other. By Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. 1-27.
Cohen, Richard A. "Introduction," Face to Face with Levinas. Ed. Richard A. Cohen. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986). 1-10.
Ellis, Marc H. “Solidarity with the Palestinian People: The Challenge to Jewish Theology.” Beyond Occupation: American Jewish, Christian, and Palestinian Voices for Peace. Ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marc H. Ellis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. 285-288.
Greenberg, Irving. “The Ethics of Jewish Power.” Beyond Occupation: American Jewish, Christian, and Palestinian Voices for Peace. Ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marc H. Ellis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. 22-74.
The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1955.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.Lerner, Michael. Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing And Transformation. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.
Lugones, Maria. “Playfulness, `World'-Traveling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia 2.2 (1987): 3-19.
Lugones, Maria and Elizabeth V. Spelman. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for `The Woman's Voice.'” Women and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy. Ed. Marilyn Pearsall. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 1986. 19-32.
A Passover Haggadah. Commented Upon by Elie Wiesel and Illustrated by Mark Podwal. English commentaries edited by Marion Wiesel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Roth, John K. and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. New York: Paragon, 1989.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism. Trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947.
Ward, Miriam. “The Theological and Ethical Context for Palestinian-Israeli Peace.” Beyond Occupation: American Jewish, Christian, and Palestinian Voices for Peace. Ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marc H. Ellis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. 171-182.
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