THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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