THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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wept, and kept watch; but when the child was dead you rose up andate bread, and drank.” And David said, “While the child yet lived, Ifasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who knows if the Lord will pity me, andthe child should live?’ But now the child is dead, why should I fastthus? Shall I be able to bring him back again? I shall go to him, but heshall not return to me.”Then the happy ending:And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and he went in to her, andlay with her; and she conceived and bore a son, and he called hisname Solomon, and the Lord loved him. 7The Shoah happened. The child is dead. More precisely, many children and manyparents and very many traditions, customs, and national insights went up in smoke.They are dead and gone forever, never to return. Individuals will continue to mournthem until their last day, but we, the collective, the commonwealth, and the nationmust rise from the floor of mourning and the heaps of ashes and return to life fully,not just partially. It is time to leave Auschwitz behind and to build a healthy Israel. Weare no longer there, in the barracks, forests and death marches. We should notcontinue to be just a mirage of normalcy, an Auschwitz country. It is our duty to risefrom the ashes, as our King David, the poet, said: “But now he is dead and whatshould I fast for? Can I bring him back?” They will never return, and we have to becomforted and bring to the world a new culture, a new nation. Because Hitler tookmore than our lives; he robbed us of culture, heritage, and faith. We must conceivethem again and give birth to them, again. Renaissance means rebirth, and this is whatwe should do. In short, to remember forever, yes; to wear sack and ashes for the restof our lives, no. It is unbecoming of a state, a commonwealth; it serves no purpose.The Holocaust is over; it is time for us to rise from its ashes.The Jewish people will find it difficult to rise from the seven days of mourning theShoah without resolving their issues with God. Faith and traditions are integral to theiraction and identity. Our national code requires faith and legacy as part of its operatingsystem. In order to leap forward out of mourning and self-pity, we need to leavebehind great portions of our old belief system and lay new foundations for our newfaith of revival. The twentieth century and its Shoah must be a lesson to humanity, not
to God. It is the lesson of man that failed his mission.The new legacy must embark on a new path with the belief that there is not a Godof minute details, of private guidance and of inventory-like accounting of reward andpunishment: I pray and he saves me; I follow the rules and wallow in righteousnessand he responds in kind. The new practice of faith must be much more sophisticated:God has given us the Earth, the whole universe (“And the Earth he gave toMankind”). 8 If there is God, then, his unseen being relinquished control and gave Manrule over the world. The meaning of faith is to take responsibility over all that thediminished omnipotence has vacated. This is not secular arrogance or fundamentalistdetachment from reality, neither ultra-Orthodox phobia nor rebellion nor blindobedience. This is mere responsibility, the meaning and the understanding that whenthe Earth is in disorder, it is the failure of man, of my flesh and blood. This is not thefailure of God, who, if he exists, is merely delegating his authority from the heavens.Until the modern age, when the secular alternative entered the minds of individualsand communities, man’s spiritual reality was binary: yes or no, believer or nonbeliever,observant or agnostic. All three monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—deliberated whether to enforce beliefs, not just deeds. This is what the infamousSpanish Inquisition attempted to do. This is also the source of bans andexcommunications within Jewish communities, as against doubters of Judaism, whoinclude Elisha Ben Avuya (dubbed Aher, “Other”) of Mishna times and BenedictBaruch Spinoza. You either believed or were excommunicated, without middleground. Today you can be more than all or nothing. You can observe thecommandments without believing in God; and you can believe in God withoutobserving the commandments. Such disputes, when they occurred among us severalgenerations ago, would end in total splits, schisms, and open wounds. Such were thedisputes between the Jews who returned from Babel and the Samaritans who hadremained in the land, between the Sadducees and Pharisees, between the Karaitesand the Rabbinites, and between the Messianic and the Halakha rationalists. Timeshave changed, and with them also our capacity to contain others whose beliefs ordisbeliefs are contradictory to ours.Perhaps because of the Shoah, or the liberation of slaves and their equal rights ashumans in the modern West, or perhaps because of the mass immigration of excolonialnatives to Western capitals, the West is committed to accept the other, thealien, and the foreigner. Many today fight against xenophobia and rally for the full
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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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Today we are armed to the teeth, be
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and Romanians. We would have shut o
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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
Page 182 and 183: square and deserted the universal h
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 216 and 217: Does it really matter who is guilty
Page 218 and 219: Divine intervention did not come to
Page 220 and 221: enemy-brethren? My Shoah question i
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
Page 266 and 267: Jonas, Hans, 205-6Jordan, 67, 82-3,
Page 268 and 269: Namibia, 161-5, 174Napoleon III, 52
Page 270 and 271: Rwanda, 86, 144, 151-2, 155, 158, 1
Page 272 and 273:
Ukraine, 29, 32, 36, 74United Natio
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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