THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

with the moral parity among the children of Abraham our father, Esau our uncle, andJacob, our father and thief of his brother’s birthright. “The voice is of Jacob and thehands are of Esau,” we like to quote, as if to say that the voice of prayer andrighteousness is ours, but the hairy hands fit for hunting and killing are not, as they areof the “non-Jews,” those who are as evil as Esau. Therefore we must turn to theMidrash or comparative interpretation, which contrasts the qualities of the voice withthose of the hands.The voice is the voice of Jacob: There is no beneficial prayer that doesnot have something of Jacob’s seed; and the hands are the hands ofEsau: There is no war that wins that does not have something ofEsau’s seed. 8In other words, the meaning of Jewish war ethics is critical: The more we fight andwin, the more our hands become like Esau’s and our voice less like Jacob’s. So itwas in the ancient Talmudic times and much more so today. What is that moral voicethat is disappearing? It is Jacob’s inner voice on his way to his last confrontation withhis brother Esau. “And Jacob was very afraid and he was distressed.” 9 The versetells us of human anxiety, so familiar to us, of the soldier on his way to battle. But theMidrash searches further, as it often does, for something beyond and between thewords afraid and distressed to expand the meaning: “Afraid lest he is killed anddistressed lest he kills the others.” The Jacobean fighter, the historic Jew, bearsresponsibility not just to himself and his fears; his responsibility extends to the lives ofhis enemies and rivals. Do we still feel this responsibility?Again we have a paradox. We fight to break the vicious cycle, which was ourportion since Esau, Pharaoh, Goliath, Adrian, Vespasian, Khmelnytsky, Hitler, and therest of the supervillains. But the more we fight them, the more we feel heavy handed,like them, like Esau. We have forgotten the obligations that our earlier generationstook upon themselves. We treat “them” as if we have never vowed in Hillel theElder’s brilliant summation of the Torah: Do not do onto others what is hateful to you.We hated it, and we are doing it, sometimes much too joyously. Is it any wonder noone wants to be our friend anymore when we practice expropriations, injustice in themilitary courts, abuse, roadblocks, food shortages, and, worst of all, contempt forArab life.We were so adamant in demanding that the Shoah never happen again that we did