One of the great personalities at the Jewish Theological Seminary when I was a student there in the late seventies was a professor named David Weiss Halivni who grew up in Hungary and was a holocaust survivor, he was a Talmud professor there and then he left the seminary, went to Columbia, where he continued teaching and then he made aliyah recently, that is some years ago and last year he won the Israel prize for Talmud, one of the most distinguished prize that Israel offers. Truly one of the great teachers and Jewish scholars of the last century, brilliant mind and a beautiful soul.
He has grand children in a local school and he came to visit and they talked him into giving a lecture on Holocaust Theology which I just returned from. Bought his book which I highly recommend ‘Breaking the Tablets’, paperback David Weiss Halivni and I just wanted to give you of course I hope I got it right some of the basic points that he was making.
He began by saying that religious Jews mourned for Tisha B’Av, the day that we mourned on the destruction of the first temple destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the second temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE which were destroyed on the same day, a night of the B’Av we call it Tisha B’Av we mourn, sit on the ground, and these are the remembrances of his grandfather sitting on a ground and crying that something might have happened 2000 years ago and supposedly Napoleon saw once a Tisha B’Av service and said these Jewish people mourn and cry if something happened 2000 years ago, they have a future.
So he said but I don’t see people so engaged emotionally in remembering the holocaust and I wonder a thousand years from now will the Jewish people remember holocaust in the same way? And then his next point was that the destruction of the temple, one in two is nothing compared to the holocaust, it wasn’t – it’s nothing, it’s significant, but compared to the holocaust it wasn’t, it was in kind a very different thing and he gave many examples and many arguments.
But for example, he said the Babylonians were racist, they were interested in destroying the Jewish people, the seed of Judaism, they fought the rebels and then they took the Jewish back to Babylon and he said – Professor Victor made us demonstrate that Jews lived very well in Babylon, they lived in nice houses.
So true with the romans who destroyed the second temple in 70, then they continued to fight Jewish rebellions and quashed the rebellion in 132 and 136, the common era, again they weren’t racist, they weren’t out to destroy the seed of Judaism, they fought the rebels, they basically wanted money and soldiers. They went out to destroy Judaism, the Nazis were out to destroy Judaism and the difference between gassing 1.4 million children and the destruction of the temples just doesn’t compare.
It’s not the same. Now he talked about – he had many conversations of Rabbi Eliezer Berkowitz who was a teacher of mine here in Chicago, l learned in Chicago Jewish Heights, when I went to high school Jewish studies in Chicago when I was in high school. Now Rabbi Berkowitz wrote a book called ‘Faith After the Holocaust’ and if I remember correctly, in that book, he talked about how Jews having a stark way of dealing with destruction to the temples, they were destroyed and the holocaust is similar. And I think this is a very sharp contrast if I remember that correctly with his point of view. Still they are good friends, they talk all the time.
Point number two he made is that he does not believe in anyway -- you can say the holocaust is a result of sin, since it’s obscene to say that. He is responding to for example, Satmar Chasidim who say, “Well there was the Zionists who caused the holocaust because God was punishing the Jews for Zionism.” Or the others who say, “Well it was the Haskalah, the Enlightenment where Jews were abandoning Jewish rituals.” He said, “When you study it theologically, you see that doctrine of punishment for sin is related to individual sin, not the collective Jewish people.” And so you can’t say that this
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services