THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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Does it really matter who is guilty, God or Man? It certainly does not preoccupy thevictims, and it is doubtful if it matters at all to the survivors, both the spectators andthe rest of God’s children. The old God undoubtedly encountered many problemsdue to the Shoah and its aftermath, but man too, his creation, does not come outclean from the steppes of Poland and Europe’s camps and railway stations. This isnow our responsibility, and it matters much more.From the beginning, many paradoxes lay in the definition and understanding ofGod. In retrospect, these paradoxes became most acute in the middle of the lastcentury. All hypotheses of man and God were tested in the Third Reich and failed.Believers always presumed the trilogy of omnipotence, benevolence, andcomprehensibility of God. It means that God can do everything, is good, merciful andcompassionate, and can be understood by us, at least partially. This last conceptneeds a short explanation. Judaism is a religion of revelation; the meeting that tookplace between God and the nation on Mount Sinai produced a certain understandingof the divine act, his commandments, and logic. When Moses explained the Torah,he revealed a radical element of Judaism. The Torah is overt, not covert and nothidden in the heavens, and exists in us. “Surely, this commandment that I amcommanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not inheaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us sothat we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say,‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we mayhear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and inyour heart for you to observe.” 3 Moses’ Torah was stretched even beyond that by thesages of the Second Temple, who determined that the “Torah speaks in the languageof humans.” 4 Namely, God’s Torah speaks in the language of humans, and assumes,for working purposes, the comprehensibility of God and his significance in the humanenvironment.How then are we to understand God’s intention when humans in his image woreNazi uniforms and swastikas and did what they did? Then and there God’scomprehensibility ceased, as these were acts that cannot be understood by humans.Also his omnipotence was put to a severe test, and his benevolence was doubted. Todefine precisely the Shoah’s theological dilemma, I need to use the wisdom of HansJonas, one of the twentieth century’s greatest theologists, who was banned by theZionist establishment. He was born in Germany in 1903 to an industrialist father; his
mother was descended from a rabbinical family. He was a Jewish researcher ofreligion who, like many of his peers, was educated in a Zionist youth movement andwas prepared to emigrate to the Land of Israel.Like my father and many other German Jews, Jonas arrived here in the early1930s. He served several years in the British army and fought in Italy as a combatsoldier in the Jewish brigade. He joined the IDF at the advanced age of forty-fiveand served in the artillery corps. He then turned down a position at the HebrewUniversity, preferring a late academic career in North America. In the spirit of thosedays, he was targeted for academic boycott, and since then very few in Israel haveheard his name. This is how the new Israeli spirit lost one of the unique, importantcontributions of the man who would become one of the most influential intellectualsfor the European environmental movements. His book was published in Hebrew onlyrecently. One of his significant works is his contemplation on the meaning of the post-Shoah God:Only an absolutely incomprehensible God can be described asabsolutely benevolent, genera lly . . . Absolute benevolence,omnipotence and comprehensibility are so related that anycombination of two invalidates the third...If God is said to besomehow and somewhat comprehensible—and we must adhere to this—then his benevolence must coexist with evils, and this can be only ifhe is not omnipotent. Only thus can co-exist his comprehensibility andbenevolence, as well as the existence of evils in the world.With great emotional force, probably caused by his mother’s death in Auschwitz andhis years in the British army fighting the Nazis, he wrote one of the cornerstones ofpost-Shoah theology immediately after the Six-Day War. Jonas did not questionGod’s failure in the Shoah. He accepted it as fact and tried to understand the qualitiesof the God who allowed the Holocaust to take place under his watchful—or closed—eye.Jonas was among the first to read the new map of faith. He understood that it isthe duty of each Jewish believer to abandon his faith in the historical God and adoptnew paradigms. Ephraim Meir, in his book Memory Act, Society Man and GodAfter Auschwitz, explains Jonas.
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUSTRISE
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUST RISE
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In loving memory of my late parents
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Notes 243Index 247
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none of this could have happened.An
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word “former” is attached to yo
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This is how I explain the fierce pu
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eternal renewal of the world. But n
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CHAPTER 1
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I WAS BORN IN JANUARY 1955 IN GERMA
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When I finished writing my first bo
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I had heard her say that more than
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of my late father. We traveled far
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CHAPTER 2THE HOLOCAUST, EVER-PRESEN
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youngest son, Noam, did not join th
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Bank; New Age and Buddhist experime
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CHAPTER 3
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WHERE TO BEGIN? HOW DO YOU START CL
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ight, and Eban, if the 1967 boundar
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CHAPTER 4
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MY NEIGHBOR RAMI’S PARENTS CAME F
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When he woke up, he continued the c
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power. The local leadership of Ben
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How could it be that everything “
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As the Zionist movement aspired to
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everything changed dramatically and
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“Masada will not fall again” be
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So, three traumatized communities c
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CHAPTER 5
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WHAT COLOR WAS THE HOLOCAUST? PROBA
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seemed to side with me and my frien
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into ploughshares and wait patientl
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When my initial courtship of Yael c
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only during the long incubation per
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liked to compare the Palestinian Na
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Fanon is an expert witness worth li
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prevention.” How targeted could i
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themselves to speak words that shou
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followed the war? If not, how did h
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war, therefore they should not know
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CHAPTER 6LESSONS FROM THE HOLOCAUST
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“nationhood,” including its int
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in anger over the Dreyfus Affair, b
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1943, upon hearing of the Warsaw gh
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is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed b
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ad fortune, to express anger, to re
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e the cause of constant political f
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use the refugee problem to denounce
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Almost everywhere the Shoah serves
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with the moral parity among the chi
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CHAPTER 7
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THE HIGH POINT OF MY SEVENTH GRADE
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at least, before the Warsaw ghetto
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than a million Jews who had walked
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ebels and the disciples of the yout
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exterminated. A group of Jewish you
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grenade. Natan Rapoport, the sculpt
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we will not respond. We will sacrif
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against Us.” It is self-evident,
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of now we got lost. We need to retu
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CHAPTER 8
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BECAUSE OF ADOLF EICHMANN, I CAN’
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discussion about garbage technology
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gap between my father’s world and
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independent Jewish Commonwealth, th
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Eichmann harmony at the right pitch
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the victors at Nuremberg presented,
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the highest order. Without people l
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The landlady did not lie, and never
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of whom only one was a non-Jew, a g
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The Grunwald trial had become the K
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Canaanite left, and the yearling of
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to shape a new Israeli generation t
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trial . . . he would use expression
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light to humanity. But they continu
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suspended daily, and not just to ev
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minister who came from “there,”
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CHAPTER 9
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“WHO REMEMBERS THE ARMENIAN HOLOC
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. . . an ideologue with firm belief
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Page 168 and 169: and Romanians. We would have shut o
Page 170 and 171: It turned out that the Dalai Lama,
Page 172 and 173: War II, an estimated half a million
Page 174 and 175: An empire without colonies launched
Page 176 and 177: So familiar and yet so far removed
Page 178 and 179: was the first governor of southwest
Page 180 and 181: mention other states, the Jewish wo
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Page 184 and 185: peoples’ holocausts. In a world i
Page 186 and 187: we raise our guests and force-feed
Page 188 and 189: CHAPTER 10
Page 190 and 191: JUDAISM IS A CIVILIZATION THAT IS T
Page 192 and 193: the Jewish Pantheon, namely in the
Page 194 and 195: dogma are the most dangerously viol
Page 196 and 197: His words express no condolences an
Page 198 and 199: most meaningful clash to take place
Page 200 and 201: Korah’s racism lacks the mechanis
Page 202 and 203: aka HaRambam. All of them belong to
Page 204 and 205: lecture, a professor stood up.“I
Page 206 and 207: The revolution that did not happen
Page 208 and 209: the deceitful war in Lebanon, for t
Page 210 and 211: and not in Le Monde, in French? His
Page 212 and 213: a new prayer book, a Siddur, in whi
Page 214 and 215: CHAPTER 11MAKE GOD SMILE AGAIN
Page 218 and 219: Divine intervention did not come to
Page 220 and 221: enemy-brethren? My Shoah question i
Page 222 and 223: wept, and kept watch; but when the
Page 224 and 225: acceptance of those who were discri
Page 226 and 227: and impatient beliefs win over many
Page 228 and 229: Chinese tyranny.The sum total point
Page 230 and 231: —Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund
Page 232 and 233: and outlooks. It was not just a dif
Page 234 and 235: CHAPTER 12
Page 236 and 237: HOW MANY TIMES SHOULD A MAN DIE? H
Page 238 and 239: Israelis made a motion. So I starte
Page 240 and 241: innovation that included my sister
Page 242 and 243: heard this melody at any other home
Page 244 and 245: nations that do not know you and on
Page 246 and 247: I never made secret of my opinion t
Page 248 and 249: admissible. I am sorry, but this do
Page 250 and 251: prime minister with Germany’s pre
Page 252 and 253: only synagogue where the cantor Mei
Page 254 and 255: 3. An official press release by Net
Page 256 and 257: 6. Yehuda Elkana, “In Defense of
Page 258 and 259: INDEXAbraham, 107, 158, 178, 184, 2
Page 260 and 261: British Mandate of Palestine, 99-10
Page 262 and 263: faith, 206-9, 211, 213, 240Finkielk
Page 264 and 265: 198, 203-16, 226, 231-3, 239; color
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Jonas, Hans, 205-6Jordan, 67, 82-3,
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Namibia, 161-5, 174Napoleon III, 52
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Rwanda, 86, 144, 151-2, 155, 158, 1
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Ukraine, 29, 32, 36, 74United Natio
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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