The Most Important Thing - To Do Something Good for Someone Else

I want to begin where I left off at a talk I gave on Wednesday – on the eve of Yom HaShaoh, the day in the year when we, as Jewish communities across the world, recognise and memorialise the genocidal murder of our people under Nazi rule only a blink of an eye ago. I ended my talk with a tale told by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Carlebach’s a complex figure, but I think it’s a really important story, especially for today.

Carlebach tells his story that he was wandering through the streets of Tel Aviv and he sees a man, bent over, a hunchback, sweeping the streets. And he wonders what there might be to learn from such a person. So he goes over, and he gets closer to the man he sees on his forearm the tattoos of a man who was imprisoned in a concentration camp by the Nazis. So he asks the man, where are you from,.

And the man responds, From Piaseczno.

Now for Carlebach – for me also, there is a certain magic in the name of this small Shtetl about 16 km South of Warsaw. It’s the home of one of the greatest inspirations for me, especially in a week like this, when I want to find a way to remember, to mourn and find a way to go on in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Piaseczno was the home of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira – the Piaseczno Rebbe. Now before the Nazis invaded Poland, before all the awfulness that was to come, the Piaseczno Rebbe was already known as a great teacher and scholar and specifically a great teacher of younger children. And the Nazis invaded Poland, and the Piaseczno Rebbe, like so many others, was driven into the Warsaw Ghetto. And here is where he becomes more than a great teacher and scholar and specifically a great teacher of younger children. It’s here that the Piaseczno Rebbe becomes a hero.

In the Ghetto Reb Kalonymous serves as a Rabbi – he’s better known as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto  - and he teaches, week in and week out in circumstances that are, for me, for all of us, beyond belief. He had to get up and give a sermon that gave people hope, and comfort in a place that seemed empty of hope and was certainly empty of comfort. Eventually the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe was deported and taken to his the death, but amazingly his teachings, these brave, beautiful words that he hurled against the wickedness of his time, somehow escaped the clutches of the Nazis. In the aftermath of World War Two, when Warsaw was being rebuilt a construction worker came across a container buried in the earth. Inside were manuscripts in Hebrew letters. So the worker took the container to the Jewish Historical where the following was read;

Attention – Aufmeerkzam

By the grace of God, I respectfully request the honoured individual that find my following writings – sermons on the weekly portion given between 1939-1942 to be as so kind to take the trouble to forward them to the land of Israel at the following address, Rabbi Isaiah Shapira, Tel Aviv, Palestine. Please send this letter as well. When, with God’s compassion I and the remaining Jews will survive the war, I request that everything be returned to me or to the Warsaw Rabbinate. May God have mercy on us, the remnanet of Israel, wherever we may be. May God spare us, grant us life and save us in the twinkling of an eye.
With thanks from the depths of my heart,

Kalonymous.

And, after the war, after the establishment of the State of Isarel, the teachings are collected, translated into Hebrew, and published. I love this collection. It contains some of the powerful attempts to speak to people in places of pain and suffering that it is possible to imagine.

And Shlomo Carlebach knew these teachings and that’s why hearing the name of the town, where the street-cleaner grew up struck him so.

Did you, perhaps, Shlomo asked the man, Did you, when growing up in Piaseczna ever know Reb Kalonymous Kalman Shapira?

Of course I knew him, came the response. I was one of his students, before the war, before all this. Before the war I was a strong young man, so strong that the Nazi beat and beat me, and that is why I am now so bent over, and broken.

And can you, what might you be able to tell me about the Torah you learnt the Rebbe, was there anything he taught you that you could pass on to me?

I don’t remember much, said the street-cleaner. I remember the atmosphere, how wonderful it was, and his kindness, how special he made us all feel. But I don’t remember much of the content. Only this. There was one thing the Rebbe would always say at the end of his teachings. He would always end by saying this,

Hadavar Hachi Gadol BaOlam Laasot Tovah L’Mishehu Acher.

The very greatest thing in the world is to do something good for another person.

He would always end his teaching with this.

And the streetcleaner continued to tell his story. He had been deported from Piasescna and taken to Auschwitz, and one night had felt so desperate about his lot, that he thought of taking his own life. And as he stood and looked out at the barbed wire of the camp he remembered the teaching of his Rebbe.

Hadavar Hachi Gadol BaOlam Laasot Tovah L’Mishehu Acher.

The very greatest thing in the world is to do something good for another person.

And he decided to find someone for whom to perform at Tovah – a good thing, a kindness.

Do you know, he said, how many ways there are to do something good for another person in Auschwitz?

So many people who wanted someone to talk to, someone to share in their pain.

And it’s still true, the man continued.

Do you know, he said, how many ways there are to do something good for another person while sweeping the streets of Tel Aviv?

There’s something very special for me to be able to share this story today, on a Shabbat when we mark Yom HaShoah, and when we mark, William, the contribution of your family to the rescue, from the Nazis of the extraordinary Czech Memorial Scrolls.

Scrolls whose every letter teaches us

Hadavar Hachi Gadol BaOlam Laasot Tovah L’Mishehu Acher.

The very greatest thing in the world is to do something good for another person.

VeAhavta L’Reacha Camocha – we’ll read that verse next week.

You shall love your fellow as you love yourself. Rabbi Akiva said that that verse was the very essence of the entire Torah.

It’s all about how you treat other people.

Now William, you are a younger sibling, so I know you know exactly how annoying other people can be. Actually we all know how annoying other people can be. And I don’t just mean your sister. But here’s a thing.

What if the other people we meet in our lives, even the very annoying ones, were opportunities for us to the most important thing in the world?

I mean, the remarkable thing about this piece of Torah that comes fluttering down through time, the remarkable thing about this teaching of Reb Kalonymous is that it’ actually not hard.

Let me say something about that Hebrew word, Tovah – the most important thing is to do a Tovah for someone else.

The word comes from the word – Tov – good. You can’t really translate it perfectly – to do a Tovah is to give a moment to see what the other person needs, and find a way to be the response to that need – what do most of us need? A chance to feel connection, to feel listened to, to feel appreciated.

It’s an amazing thing to do a Tovah for someone else. It changes them, it changes you. And on the other side of something even as simple as a Tovah the world is a better place.

Made incrementally better each time one person performs a Tovah for another person.

A Tovah might sound like a small, inconsequential action, but it’s not – it’s the most powerful way in which we can mend the world, improve the world, and make a world more fit for our future.

The most important thing in the world is to do do a  Tovah for someone. Reb Kalonymous didn’t say the most important thing to do in the world was solve the problems of Brexit, or Climate Change. He didn’t say that you had to make someone else’s problems disappear in a puff of smoke. He didn’t say that you need to be able to cure every disease. He said that you need to do a Tovah.

Because here’s the problem.

We’ve forgotten the most important thing. We’ve forgotten that we need to lead in doing good in the world. Most of the time, most of us are waiting around for someone to do something good for us before we do something good for them. Or we spend our time looking out at everyone else criticism them, pointing out their shortfallings and failures and, well seen like that we’ll watch out and keep waiting and waiting. And in the meantime the world gets more and more broken. If we want to live in a kinder, more peaceful and happier society it’s not going to be enough to wait for other people to do good things for us, before we do good things back to them.

That kind of life has got us into a place where we are continually judging other people as not worth the effort.

And the message that somehow, miraculously, was saved from the Holocaust, is that we need to go first.

Hadavar Hachi Gadol BaOlam Laasot Tovah L’Mishehu Acher.

The very greatest thing in the world is to do something good for another person.

If we go out into the world, whether it be the streets of Tel Aviv, or St Johns Wood, and look for opportunities to do these acts of Tovah we will build a future for ourselves and our children that, please God, will never know the destruction of the century now passed. If we go out into the world and look for opportunities to do these acts of Tovah, we can build a world of kindness and goodness. A world we would all wish to live in,

Shabbat Shalom

The Female Face of God in Auschwitz - A Yom HaShoah Address

In the run up to Yom Hashoah I look over my bookshelf and search desperately for something to help me articulate a religious relationship with this awful event in human history.

I’ve some great writers to turn to; 
There is the Warsaw Ghetto Rebbe, Reb Kalonymous Shapiro Epstein, who offered comfort to those in the Ghetto. I have great works written by survivors; Primo Levi, Eli Weisel and Viktor Frankl among them. These are brave thinkers who have wrestled with the awfulness of their personal experiences. 

There are those who were spared the worst of the horrors; Emil Fackenheim – who was ‘merely’ – and I use the word advisedly – held for three months concentration in the aftermath of Kristallnacht and Emanuel Levinas, ‘merely’ held, despite his Jewish status as a Prisoner of War, by the Nazis from 1940-45.

Then there are those whose bravery in engagement with this issue owes nothing to their personal narrative – Yitz Greenberg, Richard Rubenstein, and the list continues. Members of this community and others, who have heard me speak on the previous anniversaries of this sacred and awful day will know how much these writers and thinkers have inspired influenced, provoked and even at times comforted me.

But the thing that struck me, this year, was that all these thinkers, brave as they are – they are all men. I know, of course, I know of brilliant women who have written memoirs, spoken of their experiences, inspired and educated – and I salute them all – and particularly Hannah Lewis, who is here today. I know, of course of brilliant women historians, Lucy Davidowocz and Deborah Lipstadt among them who have documented with care and skill the horrors that took place. But when I look for a religious response to the Holocaust – and I’m a Rabbi and we are all at a Synagogue – I had to ask around for help.

And from a number of sources I was recommended to a book, a writer, and an approach to the Holocaust that I have found hugely powerful and inspiring, even on this dark day. With your permission, I would like to share it with you.

Dr Melissa Raphael teaches at the University of Gloucester and her most important work on the Holocaust, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, was shortlisted for the Koret Jewish Book Awards. Raphael suggests that most of the time we - by which she means the male Jewish theologians who engage with the Holocaust – ask the wrong question. We ask the question, ‘where was God in the Holocaust?’ And what we should be asking is ‘Who was God in the Holocaust?’

The answers to the first question – the male question – where was God? - are fundamentally bleak. For Buber, God was in eclipse. For Weisel, God was hanging on the scaffold. For Rubenstein, God is dead. For untold numbers of those who survived or those who have come after the Holocaust asking the first question, where was God, results in a denial of any kind of God at all. If this could happen, so many of us have responded, then there is no God. There is no judge, there is no justice.

But Raphael’s point is that those bleak answers to that bleak question are predicated on the wrong notion of what God might be, they are predicated on a male notion of God that was the wrong notion to have in the first place.

Raphael goes about her investigation of God in Auschwitz very, it seems, inspired by Fackenheim’s work, To Mend the World. She starts by collecting stories, by collecting truths. She’s not interested in looking away, downplaying or belittling the awfulness of what happened in Auschwitz. But when she looks at the behaviour, in particular, of the women in that place of darkness and horror, she sees something remarkable. She sees acts of love.

In a review essay on Raphael’s work the Christian theologian, Christopher Pramuk records the following;

Raphael tells the story of a woman who, torn from her husband and children by SS guards immediately after arriving at the camp, falls weeping on the frozen ground “with the flaming crematoria before her,” when she suddenly feels two hands lay a garment around her shoulders. An old Frenchwoman had stepped forward, wrapping her in her own cloak, whispering [words of comfort] She recalls another now-iconic story of an old woman who is remembered “for holding in her arms a motherless 1-year-old child as she stood at the edge of the communal pit, about to be shot with the rest of her village by Nazi troops. The old woman sang to the child and tickled him under the chin until he laughed with joy. Then they were shot.”[1]

For Raphael these, and there are countless other, tales of tiny acts of kindness and comfort in the midst of awful tragedy, acts performed by men as well as women, non-Jews as well as Jews and even, it should be admitted, Germans as well. For Raphael there is something godly in these acts, and the god they define is a god of kindness, and bravery in the face of great contrary powers of chaos and cruelty. God is defined relationally – in relation to human beings. God is not some aloof distant deity lurking all-mighty behind an eclipsing shadow, but rather found and experienced in the most tiny of acts. God arises and is shaped by us, relationally.

It’s an important and fascinating way of reframing the entire theological endeavour. No longer are we to start with the classic propositions of a masculine-framed theology; God is the first cause, the unmoved mover and so on. But rather God is a dwelling of mercy and kindness in a fractured shattered world. God is created as women, and men, make themselves visible to one another as human beings –Levinas is a major influence. If one of the goals of the Nazi oppressors was to dehumanise Jews, strip us of our names, our clothes, our bodies, our lives even – we were to be turned into a factory output; instead Raphael recounts and records the acts of visibility of humans acting humanely.

Here is Raphael expressing this idea in her own words;

God could hardly find her way through the darkness—but the darkness was not her disappearance. However momentarily, the spark generated between the seeing and seen face was analogous to a Sabbath candle inviting God’s presence—Shekhinah—into Auschwitz. Even the most infinitesimal spark of light was enough to illuminate—if only momentarily—the grey face of the other and so refract God into the toppling world.[2]

As she says, ‘God, in Auschwitz, was knowable in the moment of being seen in the face of the seen other.’[3]

One of the most remarkable stories Raphael uses to make her case is a war-time diary, by the Dutch woman Etty Hillesum who was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 29. Like Anne Frank her writings survived, but she is that much older, and her voice deserves to be heard far more than is the case.

Two weeks before her arrest and deportation, Hillesum wrote the following,

Sunday morning prayer. “Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing, God, just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with cares about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. . . . You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.”

Let me do that last sentence again, ‘You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.’

Raphael isn’t interested in the classic games of theodicy – justifying God’s omnipotence and beneficence. Like Rubenstein and Fackenheim, she thinks there is simply no point in such (male?) pursuits. Rather she wants us to think of a God that only exists as we help God. We become partners. Abraham Joshua Heschel, who considered himself a brand that escaped the fire of the Holocaust when he escaped Nazi Germany, spoke of "God in Search of Man." Raphael articulates a God who is formed by the response of Woman – and man.

For Raphael, the God to whom Hillesum prays “is a God who does not rescue the lives of the victims, but one who sustains the sufferers in their struggle to maintain, as long as possible, a life of dignity and self-respect.”[4]

Hilllesum’s last known writings were scribbled on a postcard thrown from the train that delivered her from some awful staging post to an even more awful Auschwitz. ‘We left the camp singing’ she wrote. She wasn’t stupid. She knew. But she still sung. Adorno – another man – who said that could be no more poetry after Auschwitz is proved wrong by a poet who sung her way into Auschwitz.

As Raphael puts it;

Even more than her diary, this textual fragment that is delivered to us over on the “safe” other side of the Holocaust, is the means by which Hillesum sends the ineradicable humanity of that “we” back to us. As the Torah does for God, Hillesum’s text—her inked words on paper—establish both her eternal presence and, as a surrogate for presence, her absence. Essentially, if not materially, her presence, like her postcard, will forever flutter toward us like a butterfly on the fresh breeze of a Dutch field in early autumn somewhere near Westerbork. And it is when the theologian kneels in the grass to retrieve that card that history and theology begin to unite—a process already underway in Hillesum’s own writing.

It’s not over. The Holocaust was awful. We stand today mourning. But God isn’t gone. I’m not sure I believe in the God that could ever be gone. Rather, God is there in the acts of kindness done by one human to another, in the face of the evil. God is formed by our witnessing that human beings are creatures of decency and kindness. The power of evil is overwhelmed when we stand and celebrate such acts, even through our tears.

Shlomo Carlebach tells a story of meeting a road sweeper on the streets of Tel Aviv with the tattoo of a camp survivor on his arm. He pleads with the man to tell him where he came from before the horrors of the Holocaust, and the man admits to having studied with the man who became the Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto - the Piasescna Rebbe, the Rabbi I first spoke of at the beginning of this talk. What did he tell you? Carlebach wants to know, what was the Torah taught by such a pivotally important person? Simply this, the man replies,’ The most important thing is to do something kind for another human being.’ Even there. Even today. And in this way, we not only make the world kinder, but we also make the world a little more godly.

---

[1] https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/scjr/article/download/10144/8841/  I’m very grateful to Pramuk for his direction in allowing me access to this important work.

[2] P. 61

[3] P. 88

[4] P.117

On Squirrel Hill and Kristallnacht - Memory and Plurality

Shabbat Shalom

Partic warm welcome to guests; family and friends of Felix in particular.

Usually, if there is a BM, I like to give a sermon that is a little warm and fuzzy and can have everyone going on their way with a spring in their step.

But this isn’t a normal weekend.

And I’m too angry, and too sacred and too in pain to give a warm and fuzzy sermon.

I’m still angry and scared and in pain from the news now two weeks old about the attack on the Synagogue in Squirrel Hill Pittsburgh - no longer the most recent atrocity perpetrated in the United States.
And, frankly, I’m still angry and scared and in pain on this Shabbat marking the 80^th Anniversary of Kristallnacht - a night of destruction of Jewish life and property from the darkest ages of our people - 1938 Germany.

I think I would be less angry and less scared about the attacks from two weeks ago and 80 years ago if I didn’t feel what I do about the world of politics.

There would still be pain. Of course, there would still be pain, about the lives lost, and the simple barbarity of destruction.

But I can deal with pain. The pain thing is somehow assimilatable.

It’s the fact that the destruction of 80 years ago and the destruction of two weeks ago resonate off one another, like some wave of energy bouncing between the past and present and threatening to bounce off again into the future.

That’s the thing that makes me so scared, and so angry.

How come we are here?

How come 80 years after we thought we would never again slide into a world of fascist intolerance, a fascism that stirs up and explicitly or implicitly gives a Heter to racist violence and offence, how come we seem to be back here?

How come instead of having reasoned debate and disagreement about the facts that before us we have - country after country - society after society - adopted as argumentative strategies personal abuse and humiliation, dehumanisation and deceit.

How come it’s acceptable to attack a person for their very existence when the thing they say makes us feel uncomfortable.

Yes, of course, I’m talking about President Trump, and Putin in Russia and Orban in Hungary and ah this list is too long.

And, forgive me, but somewhere on this list of political leaders who are prepared to inflame or permit societal hate to secure their own approval and treat opposition as something to be crushed, not something with which to engage, belongs politicians in this country also. And even politicians in the State of Israel.

And here’s the really bad news - imagine you are a political consultant looking to advise someone on how to get power in these febrile times what advice are you going to give? Actually, these wannabe-politicians don’t need consultants to tell them which way to go. They’ve got the message already.

And if it looked, in those hopeful days of the aftermath of Holocaust as if the UN with it Human Rights’ convention and the whole apparatus of international commitments to “never again” were going to work. It doesn’t feel that way today.

And if it looked, in those 8 years in which Obama served as President of the United States, and I don’t care if you are Democrat or a Republican, if it looked for those eight years as though the most powerful country the world has ever seen, had embraced Hope not Hate, it doesn’t feel that way now.

This week I’ve been reading and listening to Sarah Churchwell, author of a new book, Behold America. She points out how triumphalist nationalism, don’t mess with us patriotism and a racism that lurks only just below the surface has never really gone away in America.
American has always thought of itself as the land of the free and home of the brave, and it’s always behaved as a bully taking the lives and the land of whoever came in the way of those who had the might to enforce their sense of right.

I did warn that this was going to be a political sermon.

But the thing that really struck me about America - and America is Ground Zero for this international horror - is how surprised it gets at the same thing happening again. I lived in New York for the five years surrounding 9/11. I saw the stunned amazement of Americans at 9/11. They couldn’t believe they would be attacked. But what was Pearl Harbour? They couldn’t believe it would be so hard to destroy what George Bush called the Axis of Evil. But what was Vietnam?

And the same thing goes for my dear friends in the Jewish community. They couldn’t believe that a Synagogue could be the target of a raging wicked act of antisemitic murder. American Jews feel so at home in America, they can’t imagine themselves as victims of anti-Jewish hatred. They’ve forgotten that General Grant expelled the Jews from the States in 1862. They’ve forgotten the Klu Klux Klan’s invidious Jew-hatred - they should go and watch Spike Lee’s new movie - BlackkKlansman, we all should. I warmly recommend Philip Roth’s Plot Against the Jews. It’s a fiction only a hairs breath away from an entirely plausible past. And today it feels less like some apocalyptic horror show and more like reportage.

Back when I was at Seminary, in New York, we had a class on Mediaeval Jewish History, and the first class of semester was the expulsion of the Jews from England, and the second was the expulsion of the Jews from France, and the third was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and one of my nice Americal fellow students said something witty about how great it was to be American. And the professor, Dr Benjy Gampel, with the withering scorn of someone who actually knows about history looked down on my colleague and said, ‘If you really think you are so safe in America, you have no understanding of the nature of history.’   

But it’s not just the Americans and not just the Jews.

Anyone else here remembers Gordon Brown announcing the end of the boom-bust cycle?

There is, in us all, a kind of willful amnesia. We don’t want to live in a world where hatred exists, so we imagine we don’t. We don’t want to imagine that it could get worse, so we suppress the knowledge that it ever did.

So what to do?

I want to share two things, two thing I commit myself to, and two things I need your assistance with.

The first thing is we must never forget, we must always memorialise, even as the names are too many and the eyewitnesses too few.

Last week I recited the 11 names of those murdered in the Tree of Life Synagogue. This week I want to recite the names of the 2,000 who were murdered, and the 1,000 synagogues destroyed.

I want to count aloud every Mark’s worth of damage that Nazi acolytes caused and Jews had to pay for, on that awful night 80 years ago.

I want to hold up and hand around photos of this destruction from 80 years ago this very weekend,

Together with photos of what German Jewry used to look like, back in the days when German Jews couldn’t imagine anyone othering them - so at home did they feel as full and equal members of German society.

I want to that term, ‘Never Again’ to sound like a question, a fearful and un-easy gnawing in the gut. Because for the term ‘never again’ to sound confident and secure shows, in that phrase of my Jewish history professor, no understanding of the nature of history.

That’s the first thing.

We need to remember and recount and retell so we don’t fall into selective amnesia.

The second thing we all need to do is make the case for the principle of decent society most under threat in this unstable world.

We need to make a much better case for the principle of plurality; the plurality of people and the plurality of ideas.

Too much of the proto-facism of contemporary society is based on an erroneous idea that there are proper members of society and then there are others. And the others don’t really count as full human beings and we would do well to make their life as tough as possible.

And that idea turns my stomach.

It should turn all our stomachs even if we aren’t Jewish ourselves, even if we can trace our ancestry on these isles back to the days of Angles and Saxons and Celts, because if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t respect otherness - the plurality of people,  if we allow ourselves to drift into becoming a society which doesn’t recognise that all human beings are equally made in the image of God, and all human beings deserve the same opportunities and chance for a decent life they will eventually come for us.

Eventually, we will all fall foul of being too dark-haired, or too blond or too tall or too short, or too fat or too thin, for we are all too much one thing or not enough another.

Pastor Niemoller wrote in the 1930s

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

It’s that time already.

If we allow ourselves to slide into a society where difference is not celebrated and protected and promoted, they’ll come for us all.

That’s we plurality of people is so important.

The same thing goes for how we talk, how we debate, how we disagree. Debate, disagreement is good.

It’s how we learn, it’s how we discover things we don’t know. Disagreement isn’t to be disparaged. We need a plurality of ideas. People who take positions that are outside the mainstream are the people who most deserve our respect - they are the most important people in society. They aren’t to be threatened, abused, locked up. They certainly aren’t to be strangled, chopped up and boiled in acid in an Embassy in some foreign land. In what kind of world are we living?

So, do something to promote difference. Give some money to our Drop In Centre for Asylum Seekers, talk to me about getting involved in Citizens UK. Do something.

Promote disagreement, listen harder to those who disagree with you in the hope of learning something you don’t already know. Tell others also to see debate as a good thing.

A belief in plurality isn’t just being nice. It isn’t just a belief in human rights, it’s self-interest - it’s the thing that might, just, save us.

Just don’t forget, and don’t just watch on as decency slides away.

Here’s another thing we learnt 80 years ago.

It’s the bystanders who were, in the end, the people who made the difference.

Don’t be a victim, wrote the great Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, Don’t be a perpetrator, but, above all, Don’t be a bystander.” — Yehuda Bauer

For as Simon Wiesenthal, camp survivor and Nazi hunter put it

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

Shabbat Shalom

In Memory of Kristallnacht

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. We will be hosting a commemorative dinner this evening and I will be speaking on the subject tomorrow. Memorial prayers will be shared at our Shabbat Services. Our commemoration of Remembrance Sunday will be next week and on 25^th November.

Speaking about Kristallnacht Simon Schama, shared “You can’t really overstate it’s importance; not because a thousand synagogues were burned or 90 people were killed or twenty thousand people taken off to what were then concentration camps but because it was a theatre for the public.  And once people were humiliated and defiled, and their property was looted and synagogues were burned down and nothing happened except the sound of applause, there was a kind of aha! moment in the core of the Nazi party itself after which … the Final Solution.” These are the spectators watching on as the furnishings of the Mosbach synagogue are burned in the town square.

Treating the burning of Jewish artefacts as a kind of gruesome entertainment, of course, is several steps beyond habituation to the suffering of others. But it is only a matter of steps. First we don’t trust the other. Then we feel bad for their suffering, but fail to protest. Then we no longer feel bad. Then we feel they must deserve their penury. Then we watch on with a sense of falsely placed righteousness. And then ...

There is too much disaster in the news. I know. There is too much suffering. I know. And we are, quite rightly, afraid for our own safety - the memories of last week’s attack in Pittsburgh remain deeply painful. But we dare not, we must not, become habituated to the dehumanisation of humanity, in any form. And we certainly must never gloat at the distress of others.

In a remarkable blog I found this awful article from the Daily Mail of the late 1930s - stateless Jews are “pouring in,” it warned. Taking pride in its vigilance, the un-named ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ takes pride  in pointing out the risks and the possibilities for rebutting and rejecting these “aliens.”

But outrage and opposition to fascism and the trail of human disaster fascism leaves in its wake isn’t enough without a call to action. The New Synagogue in Berlin (saved from destruction on Kristallnacht by a heroic single police officer, Lieutenant Otto Bellgard,) recently hosted an exhibition entitled From the Inside to the Outside: The 1938 November Pogroms in Diplomatic Reports.

“What is noteworthy about the documents,” the curators wrote, “is what they do not contain. The diplomats almost unanimously condemned the murders and acts of violence and destructions. The British described the pogrom as ‘Medieval barbarism’, the Brazilians called it a ‘disgusting spectacle’, and French diplomats wrote that the ‘scope of brutality’ was only ‘exceeded by the massacres of the Armenians’, referring to the Turkish genocide of 1915-1916.  Nevertheless, no country broke off diplomatic relations with Berlin or imposed sanctions, and only Washington recalled its ambassador. Most of all, however, the borders of almost all countries remained largely closed for the roughly 400,000 Jewish Germans.”

Last Shabbat I shared some possible responses to the challenges we face healing contemporary societal fracture and human suffering. I’m proud of the work of our destitute asylum seeker drop in. Every month we provide those who have fled countries under fear of persecution for who they are as human beings, with food, clothing and a small amount of financial support. We stand with them as humans should stand with other humans. To volunteer; to offer time or money or skill, please contact thenlsdropin@gmail.com.

I also spoke about Citizens UK, the organisation behind the Living Wage Campaign and other campaigns designed to heal our society and bring together the diverse centres of engagement in our great city - so many of which are hidden from us, or even feel threatening. I’m proud to be a co-signatory of this letter on the subject, which appeared in last week’s Sunday Times. If you are interested in hearing more about Citizens UK and possibly attending a London Assembly to put questions to Mayor Saddiq Khan, please let me know.

May this never happen again,

(With thanks and appreciation to  Gerry - author of

https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2013/11/09/kristallnacht-the-nazis-aha-moment/

 

Fackenhiem and Kristallnacht - Talk Given at the opening of the Weiner Library Exhibition 'Shattered'

I was invited to speak at the opening of the new Weiner Library exhibition - Shattered - on Kristallnacht.

Following some initial remarks, this is the body of my talk.

I want to talk about the survivor of Kristallnacht who has had the most powerful impact on how I think about the Holocaust - actually how I think about pretty well everything.

Emil Fackenheim was a post-doctoral student in philosophy in Halle at the time - Halle - the birthplace of Hayden - he writes in his memoirs - also the birthplace of Heydrich - the architect of the Final Solution.

In the afterword to a Festschrift in his honour - published in the 1990s he writes -

On 9^th November, 1938 synagogues were set on fire all over Germany. Among the thousands of Jews carried off to concentration camps were my father, my younger brought and I: [Emil was taken to Sachenhausen for three months until he was released and managed to escape first to Scotland, then Canada]: in the big house in Halle, my mother was alone. Our family’s best friends, the Lewins, suggested that she move in with them, and this she did. Why, alone of all Halle’s Jewish males, aged 16 and over, was Curt Lewin untouched? He was protected by his neighbour, none other than [Rudolf] Heydrich, so that for several weeks, my mother lived under the same roof with the coldest, most ruthless, most systematic of all the destroyers.’[1]

I wanted to know more about  Fackenheim’s memories of that fateful night - and where better to come than the Weiner Library. Happily, you have a copy of his memoir - An Epitaph for German Judaism - on your catalogue. Rather unhappily the copy seems to have been lost. In a sad way, it’s a little typical. Fackenheim is remembered - if remembered at all for only one idea, in a book published in 1978. He felt that a book published 16 years later, about a much more powerful idea was the true distillation of over 50 years grappling with the thought-challenge of the Holocaust.

Here’s the problem.

Millions were brutally murdered, babies were thrown, alive, into burning pits. Kristallnacht, in its awfulness, was merely a taste of things to come. The list of horrors is unremitting and uncompromising in its awfulness, and if we - as human beings reveal ourselves of capable of such awfulness - and we have - what is the point of everything.

In this later and pivotal book, To Mend the World, Fackenheim quotes twice this passage from the great Christian existentialist, Soren Kiekergaard. He uses the same the passage again as the epigram in his reply to the articles published in his honour in the Festschrift.

Should we say, ‘There have elapsed now nearly two thousand years since those days, such a horror the world never saw before and never again will see; we thank God that we live in peace and security, that the screams of anguish from those days reach us only very faintly; we will hope and believe that our days and those of our children may pass in quietness unaffected by the storms of existence? We do not feel strong enough to reflect on such things, but are ready to thank God that we are not subjected to such trials.’ Can anything be imagined more cowardly and more disconsolate than such talk? Is then the inexplicable explained by that that it occurred only once in the world? Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur? And has not this fact, that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events.[2]

This is the problem of the Holocaust. If small babies were thrown, alive, into the furnace - and they were[3]... If the awfulness of Kristallnacht was only the precursor of what was to come - and it was... then what is the point? What is the point of any of it all? What’s the point of a Chanukiyah lit to remind Jews of their triumph in a military campaign some 2000 years earlier. What, frankly, is the point of a library to document quite how bad it was and whether it was Franz or Heinz who died on this day or that. Doesn’t everything, Fackenheim is tormented by the notion, lapse into in-authenticity when facing the Holocaust?

That’s a question to make you swallow hard.

Fackenheim suggests his problem is the ‘brute facticity,’[4] of the Holocaust - ‘A spectre haunts my thoughts [he writes] - the spectre of historicism.’[5]

Over there, in that corner, is a scrap of a report from a clandestine resistance organisation, smuggled out of Germany in a shampoo sachet. Does it matter - it didn’t help?

Over there, are the reports of the JCIO, carefully detailing the testimony of those who were there and personally witnessed the destruction of the Holocaust. Does it matter?

If Fackenheim’s first foray in post-Holocaust thought began with the question;

In the face of the Holocaust what should the authentic Jew do and why?[6]

Over the decades that followed his interests shifted to the more inchoate and more universal problem;

Can there ever be an authentic response, in the face of the Holocaust?[7]

To Mend the World is full of historical excurses into the Holocaust. But Fackenheim finds something truly precious in the rubble of the destruction of European Jewry. He finds the very building blocks of a response. Auschwitz brings us all to a halt. But it is not the end of our tale, rather, its beginning. As Fackenheim says;

It is at this point that our going-to-school-with-life … begins in earnest…And only in [the] context of [engaging with the destruction of the Holocaust] can the “central question” of our whole inquiry be both asked and answered.[8]

History provides not only the ‘Q’, but also the ‘A’.

Central to Fackenheim’s commitment to look to the dark places of history until the darkness becomes its own source of possibility. It brings, if not a downright epiphany, then at least its own reward. We have his record of the moment.

[While studying the story of Pelagia Lewinska[9]] I made what to me was, and still is, a momentous discovery: that while religious thinkers were vainly struggling for a response to Auschwitz, Jews throughout the world had been responding all along … with an unexpected will to live – with under the circumstances, an incredible commitment to Jewish group survival.[10]

The answer, claims Fackenheim, was there all along, waiting in history for someone to come and find it.

The evil of the Holocaust world is philosophically intelligible after Auschwitz in the exact sense in which it was already understood in Auschwitz – and Buchenwald, Lublin and the Warsaw Ghetto – by the resisting victims themselves… No deeper or more ultimate grasp is possible for philosophical thought that comes … after the event. This grasp – their grasp – is epistemologically ultimate.[11]

Lewinska, who discovered that in the face of Nazi de-humanisation she felt commanded never to surrender her humanity, becomes the model for the possibility of choosing a path of ‘faithfulness unto death.’[12] The Buchenwald Hasidim, who swapped FOUR rations of bread for a pair of tefilin, become the paradigm for the possibility of retaining categories of commandedness[13] in a post-Auschwitz world. Shimon Dubnov was the greatest historian of hasidism, at the time of the Holocaust. This is Professor Ismar Schorsch, former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary where I received my Rabbinic education,

No Jewish historian ever had a greater impact on his time than Simon Dubnov. He died at the hands of the Nazis in Riga in December 1941 at the age of 81. Because he was too frail and infirm to deport, they shot him in the ghetto. Those who witnessed the murder reported that Dubnov's last words were, "Jews, write it down." And they did, in Kovno, Warsaw, Lodz and elsewhere. In his spirit, Jews organized collective and clandestine efforts to record the terrifying faces of the Final Solution. Unarmed and unaided, they found solace in assembling the evidence that would one day convict their mass murderers in the court of human history. Dubnov died as he had lived, devoted to the power of historical consciousness.[14]

Fackenheim would say Dubnow - and those unnamed heroes who dedicated their lives, sometimes quite literally, to documenting the Holocaust from within the Holocaust - within the thing itself - did something else, they justified documentation as an authentic response to the brute facticity of the Shoah.

It’s not that these heroes of research and record thought that they could undo the horrors of the Holocaust, and certainly not that they didn’t know exactly what was going on. They knew the futility of their action and were aware of their all-but-certain-death; ‘they knew it, but they did it.’[15] This, claims Fackenheim, was holy, authentic and meaningful. And whereas before this epiphany we feared there could be no authentic response in the face of the rupture of such horror, once an archetypal reaction is discovered to be authentic the path is open for other possible responses. Notwithstanding the futility of life and the failure of piety and the certainty of death in our contemporary existence, we too are capable of achieving holiness, authenticity – even meaning.

My heart was struck by the wonderful testimonies, over there, and collected in that wonderful volume - honour to recognise the work of Ruth Levitt and so many others associated with the Library in its production.

Fackenheim uses a very Jewish term for the category of an authentic response to the utter catastrophe of the Holocaust. The term is Tikkun - it means to mend or repair, but he means it very specifically in the context of Lurianic Kabbalah

Tikkun follows Shvirah.

Brokenness - I wonder - and if you can find the copy of Fackenheims Epitaph to German Jewry, I would love to come back and check - I wonder if the brokenness of that awful night of broken glass close on 80 years ago may be more integral to the thought of this bravest of thinkers on the Holocaust than has been so far realised.

That brings me back to this wonderful Chanukiayh - the point about a flame is that it is fragile. We don’t light a flame at Chanukah - and the family of Helen especially - don’t light a flame because we know it is always going to be OK in the end. We light it, authentically, because we know of the fragility and the brokenness. And we still believe in the light that can be shed. For that authentic refusal to surrender to the awfulness of the darkness, of the darkness of that night - and the darkness of everything that followed - I gain huge succour. So to you all, thank you.

---

[1] P.254-255

[2] P. 251, attributed to Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1959) II pp 344 ff

[3] Cited in Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken, 1982), hereafter MW, p. 212. Op cit p.340 n. 15 offers a fuller bibliographic citation for this testimony.

[4] F. German Philosophy & Jewish Thought ed Greenspan & Nicholson, A Reply to My Critics p.276

[5] p.274

[6] The driving question of Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (New York, Harper & Row, 1970), hereafter GPH.

[7] The driving question of MW. This framework is based on Morgan’s “The Central Problem of Fackenheim’s To Mend The World” Journal of Jewish Thought (1996) 5:297-312 at p. 299.

[8] MW 23-24.

[9] Auschwitz survivor and author of Twenty Months At Auschwitz (London, Lyle Stuart Inc., 1968)

[10] Emil Fackenheim, The Quest for Past and Future (Bloomington, IN, Beacon, 1968) pp. 19-20

[11] MW p. 248.

[12] GPH p. 74, see discussion of Lewinska in MW pp25, 217, 219, 223, 229, 248, 302.

[13] Though the notion of commandedness is clearly central for Fackenheim he does not advocate the wholesale importation of pre-Modern Halachic norms into a post-Holocaust world. The notion that the ‘religious Jew who has stayed with his God may be forced into new, possibly revolutionary relationships with Him’ is a central tenant of Fackenheim’s self-claimed canonical statement of the Commanding Voice of Auschwitz, GPH p. 84. See discussion of the Buchenwald Hasidim in MW pp.218, 223, 229, 254 & 303.

[14]  http://www.jtsa.edu/the-power-of-jewish-history

[15] MW 266-267.