The Human Being in Pre- and Post-Holocaust Jewish Theology

By Trey Palmisano

The concept of the human in modern Jewish thought was

largely rounded out and affected by one major event. If at any

other time in history there was doubt that the religious ideal of

the human being was complicated by events on the ground, the

Holocaust proved a dramatic reminder that the human capacity for

destruction and murder was a powerful force, and that the Jews

remained a target of this malice.

In the following paper I would like to look at some of the

way’s the human has been conceived within a Jewish context

immediately preceding and both following the events of the

Holocaust to examine the overall influence of the Holocaust on

Jewish thinking. To do this, I will briefly highlight some of the

major themes taken up by Jewish thinkers on the question of the

human, in both a secular and religious context.

Philosophy Prior to the Holocaust

Jewish philosophy and religious thinking just prior to the

Holocaust was largely a product of European imagination and

intuition. Though exceptions could be found, it was largely a

conversation that was meaningful only insofar as it remained in

dialogue with the intellectual ferment in places like Germany,

Austria, France, and England. The European world that bred such

figures as Martin Heidegger, G.W.F. Hegel, and Immanuel Kant,

also bore Jewish thinkers of notable distinction who appropriated

the energy of European culture to answer age-old religious

questions. Martin Buber, whose influence in the German

intelligentsia was large, was a central figure in the development

of thinking at this time, primarily because his more famous works

had a tendency to address themes that resonated universally.

Buber projected his wide learning through intimate engagement

with his Christian neighbors, e.g., Søren Kierkegaard’s ethics,

which challenged the presiding Hegelian universalism,

corresponded to Buber’s own ethical compass.1

1 For example, in I and Thou, Buber writes “the ‘religious’ man is supposed tohave transcended this tension between world and God; the commandment for him is to leave behind the restlessness of responsibility and of making demands onhimself.” Martin Buber. I and Thou (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1970), 156. Compare with Kierkegaard’s famous “teleological suspension of ethical” inwhich he attacks Hegelian universalism by arguing that the individual cannot be one in the same as the universal for it deprives him of faith, which would

Buber’s own thoughts on the human being depend much more on

philosophy than theology as his centering point, and his basic

approach was molded through the development of human

relationships. Like many in his day, Buber was concerned that the

industrial revolution was having an altogether deleterious effect

on the physical and psychical realms of human behavior. Buber’s

affirmed that the industrial revolution stole human dignity and

replaced it with mechanistic worth. Despite this, it was not G-d

who would swoop in and save his creature. Instead, Buber points

out that the recovery of humanity begins through intimacy with

one another.

When we turn our eyes from the leaders to the led and consider the fashion of modern work and possession, don’t wefind that modern developments have expunged almost every trace of life in which human beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships?2

This secular religiousness does not reject G-d, but sees

humanity as the key to bringing G-d to us. This view offered a

powerful reproof against those who found themselves toiling in

have turned Abraham from the father of faith into a murderer. (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, edited by Stephen C. Evans and Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge University Press, 2006) 46-47.2 Buber, I and Thou, 96-97.

the world, but feeling not a part of it. It was indeed a form of

an approach that called for the mending of ,םםםם םםםם

relationships. In this way, Jewish mysticism, for Buber, was

decisively opposite and acted as a means to cut “oneself off from

the world, and the attempt to undermine the image of man as an

existential illness.”3 Despite his criticisms of the industrial

age, Buber was also sympathetic to its purposes, and found it an

unavoidable reality that was necessary to keep up with the

exploding population increases that continued to burgeon was

society’s progress.

Buber’s own approach to humanity is best summarized by the

formulation of I-Thou, a dynamic relationship which was the title

of his most famous work published in 1923. On this view, Buber

saw humanity stretched between two possibilities: On the one

hand, what distinguished humans from other beings was their

ability to enter into relationship with each other.

What is peculiarly characteristic of the human world is above all that something takes place between one being and another the like of which can be found nowhere in nature….Itis rooted in one being turning to another as another, as

3 Israel Koren. The Mystery of the Earth: Mysticism and Hasidism in the Thought of Martin Buber (Brill, 2010), 124.

this particular other being, in order to communicate with itin a sphere which is common to them but which reaches out beyond the special sphere of each.4

Buber went on to call this notion the sphere of “between.”

It is the occupied ground of relationship and it domesticates

relationship with G-d through relationship with others. Two

characteristics that specifically connect us to the human

condition are our need to be confirmed by others and our ability

to confirm others.5

The other side of this formulation was the I-It. Here, the

human was irrecoverably a part of his world where as the vehicle

of interpretation interactions were objectified under his

control. The I is forced to embrace his life in this world out of

necessity. This meant that in his relationships with others, he

was often tempted to see the Other as a means to an end or

someone whose essential worth was wrapped up in his functionality

or utility. The I-It world is then the world of sensory

experience and essence. It derives its power from the discreet

4 Donald J. Moore. Martin Buber, Prophet of Religious Secularism (Fordham University Press, 1996), 98.5 Ibid 98-99.

boundaries created by the individuals and the subjects with which

he comes into contact.

It should be noted that essence, as a formal philosophical

category, was once referred to in Aristotelian and Platonic terms

as the epistemic building blocks of our knowledge concerning

humanity, but by the time of the mid-century and with the volume

of critiques by existentialist thinkers, philosophies attempting

to demonstrate ontological agreeability had become viewed with

increasing disdain as an unsubstantiated means of generalizing

and abstracting humanity and were found to be based largely on

presumption. With the dawn of existentialist thinking, this

epistemological model was virtually dropped. Instead, self-

creation, freedom, and self-imagination were the types of

activities associated with existentialist thinking, which

eschewed boundaries and limitations, and where it did acknowledge

some boundary, the latter was given no quarter to be the dominant

feature. In fact, for thinkers like Sartre the language was

dropped and substituted with concepts such as facticity. This

movement made possible the world of Thou.6 Where essence continued

in the philosophical nomenclature, it was often transformed to

project new meaning, such as in Levinas’ idea that denotes

essence as a happening of being rather than a rigid formalization

of meaning.

True to its existential emphasis on the individual, I-Thou

is imagined in terms of the individual’s frame of reference.

This, in turn, is also a rejection of the mystic notion of self-

abandonment. One cannot evacuate the world when the world is

given to us. Any claim by the human to divine favor exists only

when he finds G-d in others. The claim is of course a difficult

one, and becomes increasingly suspect once the Holocaust

approaches, as it requires the victim to humanize his oppressor,

though Buber himself allows him to think in such terms,

especially with concern to Adolf Eichmann.

The tendency to universalize the human experience by

speaking in existential language that had a broad intellectual

appeal was not to move away from Judaism – certainly Buber

6 It is probably better translated as Du, per Walter Kaufmann, since the German here indicates a stronger sense of familiarity and intimacy then Thou or certainly better than Sein.

continued to consider himself a Jew – but to show that a Jewish

thinker could think beyond halakcha to something with which all

men could relate. The inveterate claim of Judaism as a universal

religion that did not proselytize could be validated in such

instances where it could appropriate the language of the secular

age and demonstrate harmonies within itself. Such efforts kept

Judaism safe from the charge of myopic tribalism, and showed that

universalism is not simply about ideological conquest but might

instead demonstrate exemplary morality as the key to harmony

rather than dissonance with its religious neighbors. By firmly

planting oneself in the world of humans, and not in this or that

world, the life of G-d is made manifest. As Buber writes,

“Looking away from the world is no help toward God; staring at

the world is no help either; but whoever beholds the world in him

stands in his presence.7

Though Buber’s theology is ultimately criticized in the

post-Holocaust climate by Emil Fackenheim who suggested that the

former’s relational dynamics did not adequately address true

evil, Buber’s support for a two-state solution at least

7 Buber, I and Thou, 127.

demonstrates the consistency with which he was willing to grant

the Other his own claim, dignity, and stake in the world without

being intimidated or influenced by the Holocaust into a Jewish

state system that might further entrench the Jew as the Other in

ways not yet realized.

Buber’s own philosophy seems also to have grown out of the

consequences of a newly formed industrial world. It is little

wonder that he saw the boundaries of work and utility ever

encroaching on the possibilities of real relationships.

Franz Rosenzweig was a close companion of Buber, and his own

examination of humanity led him away from halakhic Judaism as

well, and into the domain of free will, determinism, and

compatibilism. Speaking on the science of man in his book The Star

of Redemption, Rosenzweig begins:

“The question for Jews is clogged up not sociologically, but

with regard to the question of ideas.”8 It was a way of saying

that the question of the Jew must not first be thought of

halakhically, but in the realm of philosophy.

8 Franz Rosenzweig. God, Man, and the World: Lectures and Essays (Syracuse University Press, 1998), 63.

Rosenzweig’s own appeal to Buber’s formulation of the I-Thou

dynamic is also a detour from it. Rosenzweig sees Otherness, in

particular the It, not as a creation of the I who is not able to

comprehend the value of the It except in what he alone sees, but

in the place of the It, who always gives the I value. In this

way, the source of meaning does not reside with the individual

but with the subject.

“How can my action be mine,” Rosenzweig asks, “when I am

only insofar as I am yours? Where does my individuality remain?

And how can my action be free if it is mine only insofar as I am

not mine. Where is my own individuality mine?”9

The suggestion that individuals are free while at the same

marginalized into I-It relationships seemed to take away the

necessity of free will. For Rosenzsweig, Buber’s critique of the

I-It was not simply a matter of perception, but a true relational

dynamic that devalued the Other’s own right as a source and

channel of meaning.

9 Ibid. 68.

Rosenzweig explains this further in the notion of election.

Election is not a Jewish adage; nor is it the outcome of

Christian supercessionism. Election is the knowledge that whatever

this other does with what is mine, it derives from the “us” that is at present the

community of humanity. This much needed critique of Buber’s notion

of free will that failed to grant free will to the Other suggests

a soft compatibilism.

I am only what we all are. My freedom, if I look back now, is not my freedom from time, but rather fully temporal; I can gather it, its moment, its hour from the destiny, the destiny of the election of the We. If the moment did not belong to me, it nevertheless certainly belonged to us. Andyet the temporality is swallowed up into the victorious eternity (from and to eternity) of the We.10

Freedom is a temporary participation that nevertheless

signals one’s participation in the unbound election of humanity

that continues in eternity. It is important to recognize here,

that Rosenzweig is not speaking exclusively of the Jewish people.

Furthermore, freedom to be a part of the elect means that

the election is just as much a part of me as I am of it, in all

our actions. In making these observations, Rosenzweig departs

10 Ibid. 79.

from Buber and seeks to diffuse the tension between those who

encroach upon the freedom of the other by suggesting that it is

the latter in their own freedom who make the actions of the

former meaningful.

What thinkers like Buber and Rosenzweig have in common is

that while they are Jews, their philosophies are not preoccupied

with Jewish material. This does not mean that they are not

halakhic thinkers or interested Jewish identity, but for them the

call to Judaism as a call to universalism cannot be confused with

meaningless overtures towards their Gentile neighbors. It is a

very serious charge whose implications already see the connection

of any Jewish philosophy with the world around them.

Universalism, while an important staple in Jewish thought,

was interpreted in different ways prior to the Holocaust. As Alan

Brill points out, “Kook’s universalism is about the potentials of

the infinite divine known by all. He seeks a universal peace and

a harmony of religions, without any need to appreciate the actual

diversity of religions.”11

11 Alan Brill. Judaism and Other Religions: Models of Understanding (Palgrave MacMillan), 127.

For Kook, Jews were the bearers of Judaism. Judaism was a

character and quality of life and not necessarily an intrinsic

biological identity, although he would certain not deny this.

Kook wrote, “there are many peoples who excel the Jewish people

in certain talents, but the Jewish people as the microcosm of all

humanity integrates within itself the unique qualities of all

peoples, in an ideal, holy form, in an exalted form of unity.”12

But unique to Kook’s view was the place of the nation-state.

To be human was to be tied to the fate of Israel. The communal

bound between the individual Jew and haeretz Is’rael was not simply

the reminiscence for the restoration of an age long past. Unlike

the German Jews who thought of communal structures in greater

abstraction, Kook imagined the structure of human existence as a

feature of the land itself. “When [his nation] takes hold of

selfhood, [it] will gather within it the entire soul of man. It

will banish death itself from the world.” To have land, in this

Zionist tradition, then was not simply an act of political

capital but spoke to a more sublime understanding of the

12 Abraham Isaac Kook. The Lights of Penitence, Lights of Holiness, The Moral Principles, Essays, Letters, and Poems (Paulist Press, 1978) 271-272.

connection between people and place. The land was the embodiment

of the people, and not just the Jewish people, but all people.

Zionism may not immediately be seen as movement towards

understanding the place of the human in Jewish philosophy. But it

must be understood, that like Kook, there were Jews that saw the

tie between the land of Israel and the Jewish people one of

theological import, and that to be a good Jew meant one must be

fully engaged in the establishment of the Jewish state. Prior to

the Holocaust, there was ample debate surrounding a return to the

Holy Land. The Pittsburgh Platform of the Reform movement:

Clearly indicated that “we recognize in this in the modern era of

universal culture of heart and intellect the approach of the

realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the

establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among

all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious

community, and therefore except neither a return to Palestine,

nor a sacrificial worship under the administration of the Jewish

state.”13

13 Sherwin T. Wine. A Provocative People: A Secular History of the Jews (IISHJ-NA, 2012), 357.

It was not until the Holocaust, that Kook’s vision of

Zionism was realized in the nation-state. “The creation of the

state of Israel which resulted made academic the whole Zionist

question.”14 Nation and people became part of the same equation.

The idea of immortality in the world was certainly a unique

feature of Judaism. Kook was not simply making a cheap ploy to

aggrandize the role of an Israeli state for his people. Rather,

his words encourage the individual to give himself over to the

state so that he continues on even when his nature faculties

expire. With the state’s place firmly established, death is

vanquished. The deathlessness of Israel is not a new idea. In

fact, one can trace its importance back to the idea of becoming

like gods in Psalm 82 when the Torah was presented on Mount Sinai

to the people.15

14 Louis Jacobs, A Jewish Theology (Behrman House, 1973), 280.15 Within midrashic literature, there are four interpretations attested to thedeathlessness of Israel in the formation of the people as a nation. Among these four: angels, Melchizedeik, judges, and Israel at Sinai, the last offersa possible understanding of Rav Kook’s interpretation. In the interpretation of Psalm 82:6-7, it is suggested that Israel becomes a new creation as Sinai. As Jerome H. Neyrey comments: “Something else, then, is operative here which suggests that receiving God's word (Torah) makes one holy, and if holy, then sinless, and if sinless, then deathless.” Jerome H. Neyrey, SJ. “I Said: You are Gods: Psalm 82:6 and John 10.” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 647-63.

Without the redemption of the land, there was no redemption

of the individual – a message that was in stark contrast to those

who made their livelihoods in the German academia and gave

special significance to the human will.16 The power of the

individual to change the world around him, despite the call to

Tikkum Olam, among Jews was interpretatively pressing.

All of this being said, Kook picks up on a problem that

precedes the formation of the nation of Israel as a people in

1948. His insights appear almost prophetic given the turn of the

events by mid-century, but more importantly suggest that the

identification of the individual Jew with the community was not

prompted by an historical event.

Hannah Arendt and Adolf Eichmann

One of the more surprisingly responses coming out of the

Holocaust had to do with the events surrounding the trial of

Adolf Eichmann. There was a genuine hopefulness that the picture

of Adolf Eichmann as a hideous, morally bankrupt monster would

win the hearts of the people through his much publicized trial.

16 Yehudah Mirsky. Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2014), 101.

Hannah Arendt, who was given close access to the trial and was

considered a trustworthy source for reporting back what Jews

around the world thought they already knew, likely disappointed

more than a few people when she explained that Eichmann was as

human as anyone else, including the Jews. The idea that a human

who committed such atrocities against the Jews could have the

same moral compass as the Jews was a thought that was as

controversial then as it is today, and a thought which Abraham

Heschel, in the spirit of Ecclesiastes, reiterated: “The sun

spends its rays upon the just and the wicked, upon flowers and

snakes alike. The heart beats normally within those who torture

and kill.”17 Arendt, called this the banality of evil, and in

popular Judaism, any species identification with Eichmann had to

be rejected as part of the Jewish healing process. Yet, perhaps

more importantly what Arendt’s work brought out, and an insight

brought forward by Bernard Bergen years later, was that the real

point of the banality of evil was the way in which Eichmann could

not see beyond his own identity as an SS officer, that what he

did was not as important as who he was, what Bergen called “an

17 Abraham Joshua Heschel. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (MacMillan, 1976), 101.

inability to think.”18 “The banality of evil does not refer to

the Final Solution as just one more commonplace evil in human

history, but to an unprecedented evil that arose from the

commonplace in the sense of “the ordinary.”19

This was precisely the opposite of the conclusion Emil

Fackenheim came to when he objectified as theological prohibition

a mitzvah (known as the 614th commandment) that would be forever

linked to a historical event. “Thou shalt not hand Hitler

posthumous victories. To despair of the God of Israel is to

continue Hitler’s work for him.” Wrapped up in this short truism

were a number of things. It was a theological imperative,

according to Fackenheim, that the nation of Israel and the people

continue and so procreation was the most practical way of

ensuring Jewish survival. To bring a Jew into the world was deal

a defeat to Hitler. Secondly, to keep the mitzvah was to

understand that Hitler’s influence was not simply a manifestation

of his lifetime. He represented something more insidious to

Jewish identity and its ongoing struggle in the world. The third

18 Bernard J. Bergen The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and the Final Solution (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), xiii.19 Ibid. xiii – xiv.

thing was that the G-d of Israel would maintain his place at the

center of Jewish life, and no external force could displace him

by causing the Jewish people to abandon or give up on him. And

because Hitler had attempted to blot out the Jewish people and

their G-d to do anything but draw closer to one’s Jewish identity

and worship was to in essence concede defeat. For a Jew to be

considered as participating in the destruction of his own people

was an unthinkable reality.

On the other hand, Fackenheim’s challenge had the effect of

turning Hitler into something greater than his historical

accidentalism demanded, and thereby turned the Jewish people into

something other than fallible. It perpetuated the idea of

absolute evil and absolute righteousness. The concept of the Jews

was upheld as something divine, their chosenness maintained,

while the concept of evil remained a torment.

The concern that the Jew was once again being idealized

after the lessons of Auschwitz would be a concern taken up by

Richard L. Rubenstein, a leading Jewish theologian of his time

whose views were also considered too radical for lay Jewish

consumption. I will return to him later.

The Religious Life of the Human

The Religious dimension of thinking, specific to the

question of the individual and his connection to G-d, remained a

question with various answers in post-Holocaust Jewish thought.

If one theme persisted, it was the idea that Jewish universalism

was not about to retract into itself for self-understanding.

Religion was a demand on all peoples and it had to be expressed

as something universally communicable.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the most important rabbinical

thinkers of the past century, considered the question of the

human in the context of Judaism:

Life arranged according to halakha looks like a mosaic of external deeds, and a superficial view may lead one to thinkthat a person is judged exclusively by how many rituals or deeds of kindness he performs, by how strictly he observes the minutiae of the law, rather than by qualities of inwardness and devotion.20

20 Heschel, God in Search of Man, 306.

Heschel’s answer is that Judaism is not a matter of external

performance and so neither is the life of the individual who

inhabits his activity. Man is a receptacle of G-d’s revelation,

not merely a stenographer of halakha. Unlike Buber whose strata

are interrupted by the distance between G-d and man, the Thou

apart from the I, transcendence apart from immanence, Heschel

condemns the sweeping judgment of modernity against prophetic

motion. While the biblical narratives seem incredible, he writes

“but to us, living in this horribly beautiful world, God’s thick

silence is incomparably more staggering and totally

incredible.”21 The human, being a receptacle of revelation,

therefore, does not hear G-d as the prophets, but “a syllable at

a time.”

If revelation were only a psycho-physical act, then it wouldbe little more than a human experience, an event in the lifeof man. Yet just as a work of sculpture is more than the stone in which it is carved, so is revelation more than a human experience. True, a revelation that did not become known by experience would be like a figure carved in the air. Still its being a human experience is but a part of what really happened in revelation, and we must, therefore, not equate the event of revelation with man’s experience of revelation.22

21 Ibid. 174.22 Ibid. 184.

One might argue that in statements like these, the question

of humanity’s participation in G-d as a revelator who receives

his instruction from G-d and is conceived of in almost poetic

language ignores every lesson from the Holocaust in which the

pain of six million Jews was met with deafening silence, both

from humanity and G-d. This is one reason why some suggest that

Holocaust theology, as a focused and disciplined movement does

not begin with people like Heschel. More like the pre-Holocaust

Kook than the post-Holocaust Fackenheim, Heschel is concerned

with universalism as a way of speaking across religions, without

speaking to the peculiar nuances of individual religions, and as

is typical, he rejects pluralism for an alternative view he calls

depth theology, in which pre-theological yearnings expressed by

humanity are not exclusive to Judaism even when Judaism appears

as its most matriculated model.23 So Heschel, who could speak to

Jew and Christian alike writes:

Every human being is a reminder of God (Shiviti), and all things are like traces of God's footprints in a barren desert. Through all the things in the world it is possible to come close to the Source. It is incumbent upon us, as

23 Ibid. 297.

Jews, to imitate the footprints, and remove the veil from God, who is masked in the costume of the world.24

  Heschel understood that to understand humanity as a Jewish

quality was first not to deny humanity to others. Jews were

humans who exemplified humanness because the heart of humanity is

a religious existence that is optimally expressed in and as

Judaism. In his positive affirmation of revelation, it seems

only logical that Heschel made the following statement:

The question about Auschwitz to be asked is not "Where was God?" but rather "Where was man?" The God of Abraham has never promised always to hold back Cain's hand from killing his brother. To equate God and history is idolatry. God is present when man's heart is alive. When the heart turns to stone, when man is absent, God is banished, and history, disengaged, is distress.25

Far from the notion of u-mi-penei-hata’einu, Heschel sees mass

murder, though strangely in the murder of Abel, as a condition of

being human. When G-d is removed, punishment is not the result.

Rather, the natural order itself is distressed. Why might this

be? Following Heschel’s logic here, he might be inferring that if

we assume G-d’s punishment we likewise assume a special acuity in

the ability of man to understand and learn from his mistakes

24 Ibid. 57.25 Ibid.291.

i.e., to capture the entire purpose of suffering. Yet we know

this is not the case and that humanity continues to stumble

blindly. Heschel confirms this when he writes, "The human soul is

too limited to experience dismay in proportion to what has

happened in Auschwitz, in Hiroshima."26 Likewise, the lessons we

claim to learn from history are inadequate, and so just as

humanity does not know itself, it cannot understand its own

history any better. Heschel tells us that to think G-d acts in

history is to make an idol out of the latter. "This world is more

frequently subject to the power of men than to the love of

God.”27

This of course does not mean that history is completely

closed off to us, just that it remains unfaithful to employ G-d

so closely to history that any understanding of history seems to

reflect poorly on G-d. Therefore, writes Heschel, “Religion

cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Its teachings

must be pondered not only in the halls of learning but also in

26 Ibid. 262.27 Ibid. 332.

the presence of inmates in extermination camps, and in the sight

of the mushroom of a nuclear explosion.”28

The end of the matter is clear. For Heschel, what it means

to be human can be summarized as religious duty:

The ultimate standards of living, according to Jewish teaching, are Kiddush Hashem and Hillul Hashem. The one means everything within one's power should be done to glorify the name of God before the world, the other that everything should be avoided to reflect dishonor upon the religion and thereby desecrate the name of God.29

The human is a species that continues to seek after meaning—

and not just any meaning, but absolute meaning. Heschel summons

some old tropes about the unsurvivability of life without this

meaning, how “the difference between affirmation and negation,

would be meaningless.” Heschel goes on to make the statement that

a preconceptual faculty is bound to the human in his spiritual life.

And while he is unable to give it meaning, it holds him to

transcendent being.30

28 Ibid. 292.29 Ibid. 292.30 Ibid. 108.

The modern quest to determine what it means to be Jewish no

doubt was influenced by such incidents as the Holocaust. With

pre-Holocaust thinkers like Buber and Rosenzweig speaking so

emphatically about the reality of universalism, Jews found

themselves confronted by another reality of a Holocaust in which

the call to universalism fell on deaf ears for many, both the

persecutors and those who might have come to the aid of the

Jewish people. Now the Jewish people were forced to take up the

question to what it means to be human, not just as a

philosophical one, but some felt the only way to answer it was in

a peculiarly Jewish way as well since they had suffered a greater

betrayal.

Soloveitchik and the dual nature of the human

Among his numerous works, Joseph Soloveitchik’s seminal

essay “The Lonely Man of Faith,” (1965) is part of the tapestry

of theology weaved by Jewish theologians immediately following

the Holocaust. Commenting on its influence, David Shatz writes,

“references to Judaism and Jewish sources crop up in the essay

almost exclusively in footnotes, while the text is cast,

predominantly, in universal terms.”31 Soloveitchik is someone who

is completely comfortable working within the medium of

existential language, even when it does not always seem to bring

in every element functionally.

Soloveitchik’s essay casts the biblical figure of Adam in

two separate roles to demonstrate the way that the modern human

irreconcilably vacillates between two identities. Despite

existentialist tendencies that would shun human dualism as a

fight between one’s yearning to be authentic and his flight into

inauthenticity, Soloveitchik argues that this duality is

completely G-d ordained. “God bids the human being to live in

dialectical fashion, oscillating between creative, victory-bent

man and humble, submissive man. A person cannot throw off either

part of his or her personality.”32 What some existentialist

therefore would call the battle between authenticity and bad

faith, Soloveitchik rejects the temptation to reunite dualistic

man or discard one part. This splitting of the human, is not

simply a sociological or historical phenomenon, like the

31 Joseph Soloveitchik. The Lonely Man of Faith (Random House LLC, 2009),viii; DavidShatz foreword.32 Ibid. x-xi.

splitting of an atom, but a pre- or transhistorical one. He

writes:

It is, of course, true that the two creation accounts of mandiffer considerably. This incongruity was not discovered by the Bible critics. Our sages of old were aware of it. However, the answer lies not in an alleged dual tradition but in dual man, not in an imaginary contradiction between two versions but in a real contradiction in the nature of man. The two accounts deal with two Adams, two men, two fathers of mankind, two types, two representatives of humanity, and it is no wonder that they are not identical.33

Dualism, however, is not the reason for human loneliness.

Humanity is lonely because it operates in the realm of faith. “To

be means to believe” writes Soloveitchik. Yet, despite the impact

of the Holocaust, man’s loneliness is not a rebellion against a

G-d who hid his face from the Jewish people. It is not a problem

of theodicy, or why there is evil in the world. Soloveitchik

returns to the pre-Holocaust examination of Buber; namely, that

the power of technology and its ever-increasing impress on human

life dislocates us from ourselves.34 Secularism not ideology is

the challenge that takes up Soloveitchik’s attention in this

essay as the means by which the human feels himself abandoned to

himself. 33 Ibid. 10.34 Ibid. 6.

Wiesel and Rubenstein – Theologies of Accusation

Perhaps the most anticipated and at first glance visceral

responses to the Holocaust in Jewish philosophy came from Elie

Wiesel and Richard L. Rubenstein. That is because both men

expressed indignation and contempt to the traditional notions of

G-d as הההההה ההההההה.

Wiesel, a prisoner at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald

extermination camps, came to international attention with the

publication of his autobiography Night. The visions of the

execution camp drew the condemnation of world, and he is

attributed with writing one of the most poignant reflections on

the experience of the camp:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.Never shall I forget that smoke.Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and

my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to liveas long as God Himself.Never.

Following the events of the Holocaust, Weisel professed

himself an agnostic, but the understanding of his Jewish identity

as an agnostic was in no way invalidated.35 Weisel own

anthropological inquiry suggests that the meaning of humanity is

one of lost direction and purpose and is primarily unlocked in

the relationships of one person to another.

“In Auschwitz it was man and the idea of man,” speaks

Weisel, “that died, at least for the moment, for that epoch of

history…Death became the new idol, the new divinity, the new

god.”36

And so while Auschwitz killed both men and the ideal of

humanity, Weisel was quick to point out that humanity is always a

“state of being.” Ideals were perhaps the real losers in the

Holocaust, and he admits with some concern that people like

35 Elie Weisel. And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969-. Random House Digital, Inc., 2000.: "Some of the questions: God? “I'm an agnostic.” A strange agnostic, fascinated by mysticism."36 Elie Weisel: Conversations from “Elie Wiesel Speaks” Interview with Ekkehard Schuster and Boschert-Kimmig, 1993), 157.

Eichmann who lost their humanity were no doubt good fathers or

unimpeachable in other circumstances.

It must be said that for Weisel, the human being is first

and foremost an ethical being. “Any human being is a sanctuary…

Any person, by virtue of being a son or daughter of humanity, is

a living sanctuary whom nobody has the right to invade.”37 The

post-Holocaust world that opened up for Elie Weisel is a response

to the Holocaust. It is not simply a continual somber remembrance

of a great tragedy, but an opportunity to stire us into our

humanity. Sternlicht puts it best: “the key to human survival now

is for all people not to give in to despair but to embrace life.

Sorrow is a contagious disease. If we live for others, our sorrow

diminishes, and in that way, we live for ourselves. The post-

Holocaust world is a world stunned, shaken, and rudderless. In

commitment, we may find purpose and peace, if not happiness.”38

While this seems like a general act of contrition, Wiesel spoke

to Jews as well on what it means to be Jewish.

37 Chmiel, Mark. Elie Weisel and the Politics of Moral Leadership Temple University Press, 73.38 Sternlicht, Sanford V. Student Companion to Elie Weisel (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 87-88.

“To be a Jew is to work for the survival of a people—your

own—whose legacy to you is its collective memory in its

entirety.” Weisel links this call to particularism to a greater

universalism. “Only by accepting his Jewishness can he attain

universality. The Jew who repudiates himself, claiming to do so

for the sake of humanity, will inevitable repudiate humanity in

the end.” So that “by working for his own people a Jew does not

renounce his loyalty to mankind; on the contrary, he thereby

makes his most valuable contribution.” Frederick Downing suggests

this means that when a Jew seeks to free his people from

persecution he does so as a microcosm of all mankind.39 If the

Jew is to hate his Jewishness or give up on his whole Jew

identity (G-d included), then the concern is that ultimately a

tragedy as great or greater will eventually allow him to lose his

faith in humanity as well. The Jew cannot give up his Jewishness,

but he must decided for himself what this means.

Of the two figures, Rubenstein is certainly the theologian

and philosopher par excellence, but also the more controversial

39 Frederick L. Downing. Elie Wiesel: A Religious Biography (Mercer University Press, 2008), 212.

due to deconstruction of the concept of chosenness and the unique

mission of Jews in the world. Indeed where Fackenheim exercised

considerable influence over the Jewish community of his day,

Rubenstein was the one he had warned about, a theological

dissenter in a community where debate about the meaning of the

Holocaust was largely quashed.40 It was this concept of

chosenness, according to Rubenstein, that stirred the collective

Gentile soul into an ambiguous relationship with the Jew, for it

both romanticized the Jewish people because of their chosenness

before G-d, and yet at the same time it set them up for

abominable acts of aggression. As Rubenstein noted, the Jew was

the greatest saint and worst sinner in English literature but

never just a human being.

Chosenness as the call to Jewish humanity, concluded

Rubenstein, was a curse (arar) confused as a blessing. It was, in

essence, comparable to the manuscript problem found in Job, in

which his wife admonishes him to curse G-d and die, despite the

fact that some versions rendered the same instruction as “bless

40 Richard L. Rubenstein. After Auschwitz:History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 181.

(berek) G-d and die.” With the Holocaust, Rubenstein could agree

with Fackenheim that everything changed. As a result, Rubenstein

argued “Jews are not, nor are they obliged to be, paragons of

virtue or models of holiness. To expect us to be more than other

men, to pay us the unwanted and unasked for-compliment of

asserting that we are, is an unintended cruelty but a cruelty

nonetheless.”41 Rubenstein believed that just as the Philo-Semitism

of Christians towards Jews bubbles up throughout the ages,

especially in their sacred doctrine, when the Jews begin to

effectively compete with the larger segments of the non-Jewish

population where they reside as outsiders trying to fit in, a

Judas complex arises, and the Jew are once again depicted in the

gospel narrative as betrayers of Jesus. “Normally this image does

its subtle work without becoming manifest,” writes Rubenstein.

“However, in times of stress, the power of the image is greatly

enhanced. In place of rational, reality-oriented modes of

relationship, men and communities tend to regress to irrational

images in which people cease to be flesh-and-blood persons,

mixtures of virtues and vice, and become ambiguous embodiments of

41 Ibid. 21.

principles that are never found in the real world in an undiluted

state.”42

In this very important way, the Jew is not unlike any other

human being. And while many Jewish thinkers have affirmed this in

one degree or another, there had always been a modicum of

separation, a holy calling that Jews believed to have set them

apart from all other people, a calling which also resonates in

the theology of the very people that at times rose up to

persecute them. Unlike Fackenheim who saw the Jewish struggle for

survival by means of mitzvoth and procreation, so Rubenstein saw

survival in an attitude of marginality. As the Holocaust left an

indelible mark on Jewish theology, recent debates have focused on

the question of the Holocaust as one type of genocide among many,

and with the United States Holocaust Museum seeing more non-

Jewish visitors each year than Jews visiting its corridors, the

unique treasure and pain of the Holocaust has truly become a

universal phenomenon. It is too early to tell what this means for

Jewish identity. But as Jewish theology struggles with selfhood

and passes on its life force and its blessing to all of humanity,

42 Ibid. 22.

it may not be in its power to forever define the boundaries of

what they will and will not give. As Rosenzweig observed, it is

left to the It or the Other also to have a say an opinion.

In all of this, Judaism provides a rich tapestry of opinions

on what it means to be human, whether it is with direct reference

to its own people as exemplars and harbingers of moral and

spiritual worth, or without reference and integrated into the

larger cast of humanity.

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