THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

holiness means being constantly self-critical and self-guarded so as not to desecratethe name of God, in whose image you were created. This is totally unlike Korah’sconcept of holiness, which allows you to do all you wish, as God “is always withyou” anyway. I am with Moses. I am a Jew of the Tikkun belief, meaning the belief inrepairing the world and oneself in the world. I grew out of the earth and am notwilling to be swallowed by it—the fate that met Korah and his faction—for the crimesof some trendy extremists.I became aware of these differences by accident. On the day my favorite writer,the novelist Saul Bellow, died, I took a trip abroad. On the spur of the moment Idecided to take one of his books with me. I pulled a book from the bottom shelf,where the older books are, thinking it was Bellow’s, and packed it in my bag. Afterboarding the plane, I felt like holding a private memorial to the great Jewish writer.But alas, the book I had taken was not Bellow’s, but by the novelist Heinrich Böll,the German humanist and Nobel laureate. The book, A Soldier’s Legacy, had beenon the shelf for years and somehow I never read it. It seemed that the book had beenwaiting its turn, for that opportunity on the plane. It is a short story on a moralGerman soldier, Lieutenant Schelling, and his relationship with his corrupt superiorofficer, including their worlds and experiences in Germany during World War II andits aftermath. Böll and Bellow looked similar enough to confuse me. I wasdisappointed and looked at the cover without reading. Suddenly I noticed thephotograph of a Wehrmacht soldier, wearing a wide leather belt with a metal buckleetched with writing. I asked my neighbor, a nice Shoah survivor from Miami, to lendme the magnifying glass with which she read a newspaper. The buckle read Gott mitUns, God is with us. German soldiers went to battle with God very close to theirbellies. The soldiers of the regime of race theory believed that God was always withthem. The meaning of the ancient controversy of Moses and Korah suddenlydawned on me. The Nazis, like Korah, claimed automatic holiness. According toboth, people without moral judgment can be a chosen people, born to the masterrace.The assumption of responsibility-free genetic superiority has probably been apsychological need of individuals, communities, ethnic groups and nations since thedawn of civilization. My Judaism, however, is a constant struggle against racism,religious arrogance and the self-appointed emissaries of God who believe that God isalways with them and with them only.