HISTORY, METAHISTORY, AND EVIL JEWISH THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST BARBARA K RAWCOW I CZ 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 press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com 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 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. xviii Introduction 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. Introduction xix 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 4 5 6 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). 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. “The State of Jewish Belief ” at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/thestate-of-jewish-belief/ (accessed on February 15, 2020). Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 70–71. Hereafter quoted as GPH. xx Introduction 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 8 Emil L. Fackenheim, What Is Judaism: An Interpretation for the Present Age (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 11. 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). Introduction xxi 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 9 10 11 12 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). Freiberger, Considering Comparison, 156. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine. On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 51. Ralph Weber, “Comparative Philosophy and the Tertium: Comparing What with What, and in What Respect?” Dao 13 (2014): 163–165. xxii Introduction 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 14 15 16 17 18 19 Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 28. Weber, “Comparative Philosophy”: 165. See Bruce Lincoln, Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 4. John H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 176. Caroline W. Bynum, “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; Or Why Compare?” History of Religions 53, no. 4 (2014): 345. Smith, Drudgery Divine, 51, emphasis added. 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: Introduction xxiii 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 20 21 22 Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 300–302. Doniger, The Implied Spider, 37. 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. 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. xxiv Introduction 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 24 Smith, Drudgery Divine, 51. 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. Introduction xxv 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 26 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). Neusner, The Idea of History, 3. xxvi Introduction 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’s 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 28 Yosef Haiym Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 48–51. Tanhuma, ed. Buber, Lekh Lekha 12. Introduction xxvii 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. xxviii Introduction 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 31 32 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. 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. 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. Introduction xxix 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 34 35 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.” 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. 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. xxx Introduction 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 Introduction xxxi 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). xxxii Introduction 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 Introduction xxxiii 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 38 39 Smith, Relating Religion, 198. Idem, “Dayyeinu,” in Redescribing Christian Origins, ed. Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004), 483–484. 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. xxxiv Introduction 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.