Alone among peoples, the Jews have justified their national existence by a universalist goal, however distant or deferred: the gathering of the nations in worship on Mount Zion, a divine redemption not confined to the spiritually gifted but amplified publicly, embracing all humanity.
To effect this universalist vision, the Jewish people was, paradoxically set apart - as a testing ground for the possibility of redemptive interaction between humanity and God. For, as a people, the Jews are a random cross-section of humanity. And if this people could be transformed into a instrument for divine intimacy, then the hope of a realised transcendence could be extended, eventually, to all peoples.
The Jewish nation was inducted into its task in a mass exodus and revelation, history’s first experiment in egalitarian redemption. A handmaiden at the Red Sea, says the midrash, received greater revelation than Ezekiel in his vision of the chariot (Mekh. 110). The Jewish calendar reinforced this message by celebrating miracles experienced by the collective, and, in order to impress upon Jews the redemptive capacity of the world they were given mizvot, commandments, which manifest the potentional holiness in everything material.
The Nazi assault on Jewry was, in essence, an attempt to defeat its egalitarian messianic vision. For Adolf Hitler, that vision threatened to enervate brute man’s struggle for mastery by imposing upon him a responsibility for his weaker fellow. In seeking to free the world of Jewish messianism and replace it with a radical social Darwinism, Nazism defined its own role as messianic. Hitler envisioned an apocalyptic end-war between evenly matched protagonists: ‘’The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented be the Jew.’’ (1). And the outcome of their struggle would determine the fate of humanity: ‘’If … the Jew is victorious over the peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity, and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.’’ (2).
To defeat the Jewish messianic threat required the discrediting of history as sacred process. The Jews had had the profound audacity to offer their own tortured history as proof of this world’s promise, a challenge the Nazis accepted. If Jewish history could be aborted, then Marxists, liberal democrats, and all other adherents of ‘’Judaic ideological derivatives,’’ whom Hitler so despised, would not again dare to imagine a just culmination to history.
Parodying God, the Nazis chose the Jewish people as their testing ground to prove the absence of a historical plan. ‘’Where is your God now?’’ SS officers taunted Jews before the mass graves. The rhetorical question was directed not only to Orthodox believers but to all of European Jewry. No Jewry at any time had devised so many varied and practical strategies for hastening redemption as the Jewish communities of Europe. Jewish Marxists, Zionists, and Reform rabbis all agreed on one point: Theirs was the time of messianic fulfilment. Hitler feared the Jews of Europe and their messianic relentlessness, attributing to them the most awesome conspiracies for a world domination - a fear that was justifiable in the sense that Europe’s Jews were actively conspiring to remake the world in their image. By revealing the importance of Israel’s God, the Nazis were really striking at the redeemer of history in all his modern guises.
Antithetical to the religion of redemption, Nazism often debatably timed its attacks for Jewish holidays, celebrations of sacred history. The final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto began on the first night of Passover, 1943. On Purim, 1942, ten Jews were hanged in Zdunska-Wola to avenge the hanging of Haman’s ten sons, a retroactive undoing of the Purim miracle. The following year in Zdunska-Wola, another ten Jews were hanged on Shavuot, festival of Sanai, in revenge for the Ten Commandments.
Unconsciously, perhaps, but no less precisely, the Nazis subverted the traditional prophetic imagery of redemption. The prophets had envisioned an ingathering of scattered exiles, and the Nazis ingathered from Tunisia to the Ukraine. The prophets had promised that the Gentiles would acknowledge Jewish chosenness centrality in history, and Nazi ideology obliged. The prophets had imagined a rational heaven on earth, and the Nazis created death camps that were a perfectly rationalized hell.
Having actualized, in reverse, the myth of redemption, the Nazis achieved their greatest success, poisoning the very motive for Jewish survival.
The Jews in the Diaspora did not merely await redemption, but repeatedly rebelled against exile, through ecstatic movements initiated by false messiahs and, more subtly, through apocalyptic speculation. Yet after every failure to conjure redemption, the Jewish people resumed its historic pattern of cautious persistence, transplanting from one exile to another and rebuilding the ruins. For however great the disappointment or disaster, Jewish survival and the messianic vision on which its legitimacy depended remained unquestioned.
After the Holocaust, however, most survivors instinctively realised that if they accepted history’s slow progression toward redemption Jewry would not long endure. If the Jews failed now to emulate the Nazis and impose their vision on history, if they failed to summon a divine revelation as awesome as Auschwitz, they would concede redemption, the justification for Jewish existence, to the demonic. Most Jews, already removed from tradition, would then find the notion of redemptive history and, consequently, of a positive Jewish identity an unbearable irony. Surely some Jews would maintain the faith. But their impetus would no longer be vision but spite, or inertia; and only by exiling Judaism into otherworldliness could they uphold a religion whose antagonist had been far more successful, however perversely, at implementing the messianic vision.
When, in 1945, after decades of divisiveness and ambivalence, a majority of Jewry finally embraced the idea of return to Zion, it determined that group survival now depended on a leap into metahistory. While most Jews, perhaps, would have denied their Zionism to be anything more than political strategy for survival, they were nevertheless conceding that survival was now possible only through the realization of the central event in Judaism’s eschatology: the return of exiles to erez Yisrael (the land of Israel), metaphor as well as catalyst for the return of the exiled world top its source.
By ingathering the exiles into erez Yisrael and restoring the redemptive direction of history, Zionism reappropriated messianic imagery and could therefore challenge, if not negate, the Nazi counterredemption. Those religious Jews who remained unmoved by Zionism even after the Holocaust became proponents of an untenable paradox, a Judaism that deferred redemption into oblivion. Europe’s shattered yeshivah and Hasidic worlds heroically rebuilt their ruins, but by retaining their pre-war hostility to Zionism isolated themselves from the Jewish consensus that demanded a post-Holocaust departure from mere reconstruction. In rejecting Zionism, fundamentalist Orthodoxy denied the dialectic upon which post-Holocaust Jewry was founded: that modernity, having created literal hell, had now become the arena of myth fulfilment, thereby making redemption, too, possible for the first time.
Auschwitz is the rationable for the nuclear age. If man at his most civilized can now effect the global final solution, his motive for self-annihilation was acquired in the planned, dispassionate genocide of the Holocaust. For the Nazis appropriate rationalism, the foundation of civilization, as the functional basis for mass murder. Turned against itself, civilization flirts with suicide.
Gradually, the nuclear world awakens to the same choice that faced the Jews in 1945: transcend or perish. Old patterns of survival have become untenable. If the nations continue to stagger from conflict to conflict, they must one day blunder into nuclear war. World survival now depends on the nations transcending their differences, humbled by the vision of extinction.
The nuclear world needs the State of Israel not only because its mere existence is proof that modernity can yield redemption, but because Israel, whose society has ingathered the most concentrated microcosm of the nations, is the incubator for a new world consciousness. Israel is the world’s only truly modern society, its people having tasted modernity’s potentional for both annihilation and redemption; it is in those polar experiences that he illusion of human separateness dissolves. When, in moments of extremity, Israeli society has laid aside its multiple differences, humanity has glimpsed the possibility of its own survival through transcendence.
Describing the Jews assembled before Sinai, the Torah says, “And there Israel camped’’ (Ex. 19). The singular form, notes Rashi in his commentary on this verse, describes the unity of the tribes “as one man, as one heart.” Only when they had merged their separate selves into a monotheism of peoplehood could the Jews connect with the One. Thirty-five hundred years later, in the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Jewish people reenacted that unity, perhaps not since Sinai so focused on a single even and emotion – culminating in the revelation of return to Jerusalem.
Christianity and Islam, as each came into being, proclaimed the Jewish vision of human solidarity and then turned against the Jews for persisting in their separateness. Yet the Jews refused to relinquish either their premesianic exclusivity or their universalist vision, deferring a resolution of the paradox to a distant future.
With the onset of the Enlightenment, however, the ability to sustain that paradox collapsed, and the Jewish people dived into rival camps of particularists and universalists. Artificially severed from one another, means and end become distorted. Particularists saw in redemption a private Jewish affair, and universalists denied requirements for self-preservation.
But with the creation of Israel in the nuclear era, both camps must know they are working toward the same goal, because Jewish cohesion is now a universalist imperative. The Jewish people will become a model for world harmony when its particularists concede that Jewish survival is ultimately for the sake of all humanity and when its universalists perceive in unity among the Jews the most helpful step toward world reconciliation. When Jewish cohesion is no longer a passing response to crisis but the basis of national existence, the Jews will be positioned for a revelation of oneness, toward which all spiritual striving aspires. The prophets linked the return to Zion with world redemption, and only now is a possible connection between the two discernible. “For My House shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus declares the Lord God who gathers the dispersed of Israel’’(Isa. 56:7-8).
REFERENCES
(1) Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1971),300.
(2) Ibid.,65.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell (1979).
Emil L. Fackenheim, God's Presence in History (1972).
Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot ha-Kodesh (1985).
Abraham Issac Kook, Lights of Holiness, Lights of Penitence: The Moral Principles, Essays, Letters, Poems, Ben Zion Bokser, tr. (1978)