On Friday night, my rabbi handed out a printout of this page during the Shabbat evening service, and we spent some time talking about it. I think it's a pretty good--though obviously not comprehensive--rundown.https://hartman.org.il/Blogs_View.asp?Article_Id=1493# …
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And a comment she made stuck with me. She was talking about how much of the dialogue about the liberation of Auschwitz (of which today is the anniversary) focuses on the accounts of soldiers who liberated concentration camps. Their shock, their horror, their incomprehension.
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And unspoken in that was the idea of Auschwitz and other concentration camps as hallowed ground, made sacred by suffering. I've always been deeply uneasy with the idea of concentration camps as sacred ground, but was unable to articulate why until I read "Constantine's Sword."
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In the intro, the author, a Christian, talks about the crosses at Auschwitz, there to honor Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan priest killed there. There's another discussion to be had here, one that may never be resolved, about what it means to put a cross at Auschwitz.
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Certainly Christians murdered there deserve recognition. At the same time, the cross has a far longer history as a symbol under which Jews were persecuted and murdered than the swastika, and Hitler was building on millennia of Christian hatred for Jews.
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Jewish groups protested the presence of a cross at Auschwitz, and pretty soon Polish Catholics were screaming "Christ-killer!" at Jews who protested, putting up more crosses, and even planting explosive devices there.
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Whether it's ok to have a cross at Auschwitz seems to me a problem without a clean answer--whatever the decision, people will be legitimately hurt. I don't know what the "right" answer is, or if there is one. Teiku, I guess.
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But the author asks what I think are questions more crucial to answer: do Christian narratives about martyrdom and redemption at Auschwitz "Christianize" the Jewish dead?
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The concept of martyrdom, of dying for a *reason*, isn't absent in Judaism, but it doesn't hold the same pride of place as it does in Christianity. Judaism is a life-affirming religion--it would rather see its people live to keep fighting than die for a principle.
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If one has no choice, of course, one should die proudly as a Jew with the Shema on one's lips, but that's not the same as seeking out martyrdom. The victims of the Shoah, of course, didn't have a choice. The Catholic nun born to Jewish parents was Jewish in the Nazis' eyes.
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Renouncing one's Jewish identity wouldn't save one. This was racial persecution, not religious persecution.
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But the desire to find meaning in the Holocaust has caused a lot of Christians to cast it as a narrative of Jewish martyrdom. Jewish suffering as punishment for rejecting Jesus seemed declasse, confronted with the horrors of Nazi genocide, so the story changed.
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And instead of Jews suffering for rejecting Jesus, the suffering and death of Jews at the Nazis' hands became, for some Christians, a *parallel* to Jesus's suffering and death.
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And it became popular to point out that had Jesus lived in Nazi Germany, he would have suffered and died along with his Jewish kindred. The Jews of Europe, then, in this imagining, are subsumed into Jesus himself, rather than into Christianity, becoming a sacrificial offering.
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That is philosophically/ethically troubling, of course--one more way in which Christians will not allow us to exist as *people*, but only as props in the Christian story, to be opposed as enemies of Jesus or to die with him as echoes of him.
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But it's also troubling in a much less abstract way: in Christianity, Jesus HAD to suffer and die as part of the divine plan. If the suffering and death of real, living Jews is merged into that narrative, does it become necessary that *we* suffer and die?
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This gets teeth when, in the wake of synagogue shootings and other anti-Jewish violence, we need Christians to help make sure the violence is *stopped,* not to tear up like it's a sad scene in a TV show.
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And therein lies an even more troubling question, given the necessity of putting things into a narrative to even understand them--do narrative tropes create a sense of inevitability about real-world events? And does it all, at some level, become entertainment?
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And if we *must* have a narrative, if these events must be fit into one, who has the right to decide into which preset narrative shape they must be placed?
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And this tension plays out even in terminology. The term "holocaust" itself refers to a burnt offering. (A sacrifice--possibly a good thing.) The term "Shoah" refers to a catastrophe. Constantine's Sword actually has one of the better explanations I've seen of the difference.pic.twitter.com/YD0ULMx07u
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So, anyway, in discussions of the Holocaust, while Jews as characters, and even Jewish voices, might be centered, Jewish *meaning-making*--or refusal to make meaning--about the Shoah is rarely centered.
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And so when my rabbi brought up whether Auschwitz is sacred, I sighed internally and braced myself for another paean to suffering as sacred. (I should have known better--that's not who she is, but I'm so used to tropes about how suffering hallowed that ground.)
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Her point was very different, however. Has there ever been a greater *concentration of intentional, conscious Jewishness* than at Auschwitz and the other camps? All those prayers, all that defiant assertion of peoplehood, all that refusal to be reduced, reshaped, rewritten?
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For her, it wasn't Jewish suffering that hallowed Auschwitz--it was that in a place designed to erase humanity, the victims continued to insist on remaining not just human, but Jewishly human.
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In a place where no one behaves like a human being, you must strive to be human! Hillel, in Pirke Avot 2.6
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So, back to the original point, then we talked about spiritual/religious/philosophical Jewish responses to the Holocaust. Because it's not reflected in our ritual. While we might reference it in liturgy about death, about suffering, the liturgy itself doesn't include it.
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Which is strange, if you think about it--the Shoah is, to a large extent, inseparable from 20th and 21st century conceptions of Jewishness, yet our liturgy ignores it.
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The article, originally from the Washington Jewish Week, attempts to sum up religious responses by personifying them.
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The Theodicist says we can't judge the survivors, and some of them believe the Shoah was divine judgment. (I see this mostly from Orthodox writers.) The author notes that the survivors are the only ones who can justify God after the Shoah. The rest of us have no right.
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The Atheist says that Auschwitz and God can't coexist. (Famously, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen ruled that, "If there is Auschwitz, there is no God.") One hears frequently of survivors who go to shul "to pray to the God I don't believe in," which is very Jewish.
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