Encountering the Jewish Future

With Wiesel, Buber, Heschel, Arendt, Levinas

Marc H. Ellis

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780800697938
• eBook ISBN: 9781451413427
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

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Encountering the Holocaust

Elie Wiesel

Elie (Eliezar) Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania. Along with his family, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 where he lost his mother and sister. Wiesel and his father were forced to march to Buchenwald, where his father died months before the camp was liberated. After the war, Wiesel lived in France and Israel before settling permanently in the United States. It was at this time that he wrote his autobiographical Night, which in many ways established the Holocaust as a formative event in the twentieth century. Wiesel is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University and founder of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. He served as chairman for the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust, which initiated the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1986 Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing to the world’s attention the importance of the Holocaust and for speaking out against violence, repression, and discrimination.

On First Hearing the Holocaust Named

I first encountered Elie Wiesel in 1971 in the classroom of Professor Richard Rubenstein. I arrived at my university in Florida the previous year and, for quite different reasons, so had Rubenstein. I went to Tallahassee for financial reasons and to get away from what I had known growing up. I needed to explore a new geographic and intellectual landscape. But moving from a Jewish neighborhood to the racially segregated Protestant enclave in Tallahassee in 1970 was like entering a different world.

Rubenstein arrived at Florida State having just published his groundbreaking and controversial book After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. This book gained notoriety, not all of it positive. Indeed, as After Auschwitz gained a wider readership, Rubenstein was on the run. Travelling from a Hillel appointment at a university in the Northeastern U.S. where Jews abounded, Rubenstein landed in Tallahassee, part of the deep South, where Jews were few in number.¹

In Tallahassee, Rubenstein was far from the mainstream of American Jewish life. In those days the city center was dominated by established Protestant churches. As in most cities in the deep South, the color divide was noticeable. One of the first bus boycotts in the South was held in Tallahassee, and those in Black leadership positions had been coworkers of Martin Luther King Jr. Though the civil rights movement had moved Tallahassee toward integration, the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow were very much alive.

Today there are thousands of Jews at the university, and Tallahassee is much more cosmopolitan. Back then there were less than a hundred Jews at the university, and probably not many more in the city itself. Yet the university was on the move, with one of the most interesting religious studies departments in the nation, one that had asked Rubenstein to join their faculty.

During the years I studied with him, Rubenstein named the mass destruction of Europe’s Jews during the Nazi period as the Holocaust (or in Hebrew, Shoah). Though years had passed since the end of World War II, for the most part the Holocaust had remained unnamed. In my childhood, we knew that something terrible had happened to the Jews of Europe—I had Hebrew School teachers in the 1950s who had arrived in America only some years earlier—but could a catastrophe of such magnitude be named?

World War II had claimed so many lives, and many of my friend’s fathers had served in the war. Having been part of the American occupying forces in Germany as the war came to a close, for the rest of his life my father harbored deep suspicions about Germany. As many Jews of his generation, he felt that Germany was prone to militarism and, when given the chance, would remilitarize and embark on still more wars of conquest. Yet even as we flipped through my father’s army scrapbook and listened to his commentary on where he had been and what he had done, the emphasis was on World War II—not on the particular suffering of Jews.

Naming the Holocaust was just beginning to occur during my teenage years, and Rubenstein was on the cutting edge of that naming. It was during one of Rubenstein’s lectures that I heard the term Holocaust for the first time. At that moment a deep darkness surfaced within me. I was stunned and somehow energized, but I had no idea where it would lead. His naming of the Holocaust made immediate sense to me and seemed to have significance beyond me. Rubenstein named the Holocaust as a formative experience for the Jewish people, one that, though past, was part of the Jewish future.

Rubenstein became my model of a professor who was willing to state the issues on his mind without regard for the personal consequences. Nothing of importance seemed off limits. He lectured on various themes and personalities, from Max Weber’s view of the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant ethic to the existential search of Saint Paul. Not only was his naming of the Holocaust controversial, he also named Paul, seen historically as the great divider of Jews and Christians, as his brother. Both had come to the end of normative Judaism as a religion that could sustain and nourish them.

In naming the Holocaust, Rubenstein saw the end of the Judaism he had inherited and known. This compounded his negative credentials with the Jewish establishment, even as his boldness endeared him to many of his students. I was fascinated by his wide-ranging intellect and his “take no prisoners” approach to the intellectual life.

Rubenstein was prickly and distant, some would say arrogant. Though he allowed everyone their say in class, he announced his conclusions with authority. Even as a freshman I saw that Rubenstein was embattled. In asides during his lectures, other prominent names in Jewish life were discussed and they all, even in Rubenstein’s accounting, seemed opposed to his views. There I first glimpsed a battle on the Jewish front, perhaps even a civil war, over thoughts Rubenstein was articulating. Little did I know that years later I would be drawn into a similar struggle.

Over the years, I maintained contact with Rubenstein and, though he has mellowed to some extent, he remains as he was then—defiant. Over the years he has negotiated Jewish life, on the one hand being exiled from the Jewish community and on the other making peace with it. Time has smoothed the rough edges of his thought, and the subversive challenges he posed seem less important now than his overall contribution to Jewish life in naming the Holocaust. As an increasingly conservative political thinker and a strong supporter of the state of Israel, the Jewish community values his holding the line on Israel over his controversial past. It seems that the Jewish community forgives all if Israel is supported uncritically.

Yet unlike some others, Rubenstein’s support of Israel and its policies flows from his Machiavellian realpolitik. Though I disagree with aspects of Rubenstein’s support for Israeli policies, I admire that he has never sugarcoated them with a liberal gloss. After the Holocaust, in this dog-eat-dog world, Rubenstein believes that Jews need power, pure and simple, and Israel is that power.

Today the Holocaust is mentioned often and evokes a cascade of associations. Back in 1970, the Holocaust was just being named as an event much broader than its parts. There were few images attached to this event other than the sheer horror of the slaughter of innocent Jews. Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz changed that.

The very naming of the Holocaust was controversial because many Jews did not want the event named at all. They feared that in naming the Holocaust it would become definitive of Jewish identity and the trajectory of Jews and Judaism would change. Where would that change take Jews individually and as a community? It could be a reckoning with Jewish history and with the majority populations surrounding Jews. After the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities, could Jews afford yet another reckoning with history?

Experiences of destruction are horrible beyond words. In the wake of destruction, survivors pick themselves up and try to rebuild their lives. For a minority the process of rebuilding is complicated, especially when the majority population is of the same stock and religion as those who caused the destruction. Jews in America lived among descendants from Europe who are Christian in belief, the same population and religion of Germans and Europeans who were hostile to Jews and had murdered them. It might be better to rebuild what was left of the Jewish world, keep silent so as not to antagonize the majority population, and hope for the best.

Naming the experience of mass death was complex. Jews could name the experience of the Holocaust within the community, keeping the discussions limited and among Jews only. Or Jews could name the event of mass death as important for Jews and others. The first option would be respected by others and contained within. The second option could be seen as intrusive, since the hostility toward Jews that led to the Holocaust had deep religious roots. If Jews named the murder of millions of Jews as the Holocaust, then Jews had to name anti-Semitism as part of Christianity. In doing so, Jews would have to call for revisions in Christianity itself. Throughout their history, Christians had resented Jews precisely because, from their perspective, Jews “intruded” on their beliefs and life of faith. Should Jews intrude once again on Christianity? Could Jews do this without suffering the consequences evident throughout history?

Naming and speaking about the Holocaust are two different matters. If the murder of six million Jews was named but not spoken, the possible consequences would be lessened, the future of Jews less uncertain. To name the Holocaust was to go on the offensive, asserting the value of Jewish life against those who had demeaned it. Though Jewish life in America was far better than it had been in Europe, anti-Semitism existed here as well. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were still quotas for Jewish students in Ivy League universities. Unheard of was the notion of a politically engaged and active Jewish life, with Jewish political candidates and office holders at the national level. When presidential candidate Al Gore chose Senator Joseph Lieberman as his vice-presidential candidate in 2000, the dream of a Jew becoming a high official in the nation was greeted with enthusiasm by many. When I studied with Rubenstein, few Jews had thought of such a possibility.

Rubenstein was also troubling to the Jewish establishment because he was an ordained rabbi. Through his studies at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, a seminary of the Reform movement, and Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, a seminary of the Conservative movement, Rubenstein earned his rabbinical degree and subsequently served as a rabbi for several congregations. His writings on the Holocaust made rabbinic service and paid employment in the Jewish community difficult. With criticism of him coming from within the Jewish community, his days with the Jewish establishment were numbered. As a rabbi and a trained theologian, Rubenstein challenged the community from within the Jewish religious tradition. In questioning what it meant to be a Jew after Auschwitz, he directly criticized Jewish leadership, including those who employed him, for their lack of leadership on this most crucial question. Rubenstein accused them of being cowardly and perhaps complicit, as had been other Jewish leaders throughout Jewish history who had not faced the central questions before their people.

Whereas previous Jewish leaders failed to recognize the annihilationist policies of the Nazis before it was too late, contemporary Jewish leaders did not want the Holocaust named. Rubenstein broke the rabbinic wall of silence. He aired the community’s dirty laundry in public. Before and after the publication of After Auschwitz, Rubenstein’s words were broadcast widely. Rubenstein was an “up and coming,” “go-to” Jew for the media. From the vantage point of the Jewish establishment, there could only be more trouble ahead.

Published in 1966, After Auschwitz was comprised of essays previously published in relatively obscure Jewish publications. The book reached a much broader public, partly because of its timing. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, with Israel’s swift and decisive victory, Israel was also named as formative for Jewish life. With After Auschwitz and in the wake of the 1967 war, Holocaust consciousness was born.²

Holocaust consciousness—or in its religious form, Holocaust Theology—is a way of viewing Jewish history through the lens of anti-Semitism, the Nazis, and historic Jewish vulnerability. For many Jews, Jewish survival and flourishing can be insured only through Jewish empowerment. Jewish empowerment is viewed as embracing and defending the state of Israel. It also means arguing against those who criticize Israel and its policies toward Palestinians.

With the passing years, the Holocaust and the state of Israel have come to define what it means to be an authentic Jew. When Rubenstein began writing, the sense of the Holocaust and Israel as central to Jewish identity was foreign. Today, the only accepted definition of what it means to be Jewish revolves around remembering the Holocaust and support for Israel.

The questions posed by both the Holocaust and the state of Israel were already present in 1970 and remain so today. In the Holocaust, theological questions are as prominent if not more so than political questions. How the Holocaust could be perpetrated on the Jews of Europe is a question addressed externally to the broader European community and to Christianity in particular. Internally, there are questions about Jewish political leadership and how Jews could be so weak and vulnerable that it left the entire the European Jewish community exposed. Yet the further troubling question about God is obvious: Where was God at Auschwitz?

The subject of political culpability and the absence of God in the Holocaust begged for answers retrospectively, partly out of historical curiosity. More important, however, were answers for the future. What did Jews need to do to alter their weak and vulnerable situation? What could Jews say about God after the Holocaust had ended and Israel had been created?

Rubenstein’s inquiries about Jewish life and the human predicament after the Holocaust focused on Auschwitz, a major Nazi death camp located in Poland where almost a million European Jews were murdered. Partially because of his book, Auschwitz eventually came to symbolize the killing of six million European Jews. Today, Auschwitz as a signifier of the Holocaust is central to Jewish identity and is a rallying call for Jewish survival—after. The word after contains layer after layer of soul searching, political queries, and religious examination. What can Jews say about humanity, Christianity, Judaism, the Jewish community, politics, and God after Auschwitz?

With the almost complete elimination of Jews an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Encountering the Holocaust
• Chapter 2: Encountering the Bible
• Chapter 3: Encountering God After
• Chapter 4: Encountering Jewish Politics
• Chapter 5: Encountering the Jewish Prophetic
• Epilogue: Encountering the Jewish Future
• Notes
• Index