By Hananel (Harry) W. Weber
April 30, 2008
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The purpose of this article is to explore the Holocaust in the context of prior tragedies which befell the Jewish people, in an effort to find a common thread, and hopefully a way of understanding the way of God for those who believe in Him, for no event, except that unique event -- the creation of the universe -- can ever be proof of God's existence.
This generation's most traumatic experience is, undoubtedly, the Holocaust. Although its aftershocks reached the ends of the earth, its trauma reverberates to this day, firstly on a national level, for it affects, first and foremost, the Jewish people, its primary intended victim. The rivers of Jewish blood spilled in its wake stain the earth in every country on the European continent, and the cries of its victims will be heard 'round the globe forever!
There were two enormous tragedies related to the Holocaust for the Jewish people: first, its occurrence, and second, the refusal of most Jews -- laymen and leaders alike -- from drawing all the requisite conclusions from its occurrence. This is true especially regarding the painful conclusions related to our fault -- as Jews -- in bringing about the Holocaust. It is precisely this stiff-necked refusal to learn any moral lessons vis-à-vis our shortcomings that will, God forbid, make the Holocaust even more tragic as time passes, for new events will occur that will demand that we face them with the full knowledge of the Holocaust firmly in our intellectual grasp.
Not only did the Nazi Holocaust cause the mass murder of six million Jews, but it also led the survivors and many others to question their most basic belief -- does God exist? And even if He does, what kind of God can allow such a horrific tragedy to be committed? Unfortunately, many Jews, and non-Jews as well, used the Holocaust as "proof" that He does not exist.
The key to understanding the Holocaust, and all of Jewish history for that matter, is understanding the meaning of the sentence found in the Talmud -- in Sanhedrin 90a -- "all of the attributes of the Holy One Blessed Be He are measure for measure." What does that mean? God has many attributes -- most of which are beyond our comprehension and unrevealed to us. Yet those attributes that are revealed to us in this world are expressed in the fashion of "measure for measure". Two examples will illustrate the point. When Jacob took from Esau, by deception, the blessing of the first born, the Sages say that God, in his attribute of justice, repaid him "measure for measure". How? Laban deceived Jacob by switching Leah for Rachel, changed his salary tens of times -- measure for measure. As a result of that deception Jacob left his parents' home for twenty-two years, thus unable to fulfill the commandment of honoring his parents. Again, God in his attribute of justice, deprived Jacob of his beloved son, Joseph, for an equal period. For twenty-two years Jacob mourned the death of his son, who, too, was unable to honor his father -- measure for measure.
Let us begin at the beginning of Jewish history and explore each of the major tragedies that befell the Jewish people. Only then will the Holocaust find its proper historical and theological place -- and most importantly -- serve as a moral landmark to guide Jews and Gentiles for all time.
The first Jew was Abraham. At the age of seventy-five God appeared to him and commanded him to leave his homeland, his birthplace, and go to a land that He would show him. That land turned out to be Israel. The Lord promised to make Abraham the father of a great nation and to give to his descendants the land in which he was a stranger. Soon after this great promise, God tested Abraham and caused a famine in Canaan. According to Nachmanides, Abraham's decision to go down to Egypt -- without first asking the Lord's permission -- was a great sin, so great that it caused the going down of his grandson Jacob, and the consequent enslavement of the Jewish people in Egypt for two hundred and ten years.
Assuming that Nachmanides was correct, why did God punish millions of Jews for the single sin of their forefather? The answer lies in the question. Abraham was not just another individual. As the first Jew, he was the father of all Jews, and his error of leaving the land just bequeathed to him was in effect committing the sin of ungratefulness to God. As indicated earlier, the Lord operates, say the Sages, according to the principle of measure for measure. In other words, if a person sins in a particular way, the motivating cause of the sin will also be the motivating cause of the punishment meted out by God as retribution for the sin. In the case at hand, after the death of Joseph, who saved Egypt from a great famine, a new Pharoah came to the throne who did not know, or more likely, refused to acknowledge, Joseph's saving of Egypt. He set about enslaving Joseph's people. Pharoah's ungratefulness to Israel is the means through which God punished Israel for the very same sin their forefather committed several hundred years earlier.
Incredibly, for all their horrors in Egypt, something worse was about to befall the Jews just prior to their Exodus. There is a widely held opinion -- as revealed by Rashi -- that only one fifth of the Jews in Egypt left with Moses. Since six hundred thousand males over the age of twenty left Egypt, the total population that left was roughly two and one half million. That was one fifth of the Jews living in Egypt. Therefore, about ten million Jews -- men, women and children -- died just prior to the Exodus. Why and when did they die? The Sages say that those ten million, like Pharoah, hardened their hearts and closed them from accepting the Lord, despite the eight great miracles- plagues they witnessed. Again, in a repeat sin of unbelievable ungratefulness to God they chose to remain forever slaves to Pharoah in Egypt. They hardened their hearts and closed their eyes, and were not moved by God and the future He held for them. So He hardened their hearts even more and blinded them even more, and immobilized them completely -- causing their death in the plague of Darkness, in which all of Egypt was paralyzed in total darkness for three days. Again the Lord worked his deeds, measure for measure.
The next major catastrophe to befall the Jews was the destruction of the First Temple and their exile to Babylon for seventy years. The Sages decreed that the exile was caused as punishment by God for the people's widespread indulgence in the three severest sins: idol worship, prohibited sexual relations and murder. And how did God exact His punishment, measure for measure, for these grave sins? The Book of
Esther has the answer. The book describes the near annihilation of the Jews by Haman, the prime minister of Ahashverus, the Persian King. Haman, an Amalekite, in blind pursuit of his wicked people's raison d'etre, sought nothing more than to bring about the murder of every Jew in the world -- the ultimate mass murder. Esther saved her people, but at great personal sacrifice, for, according to the Talmud, she was married to Mordechai, her uncle, yet was forced to become the illicit wife of the gentile King Ahashverus. Thus, God saved his people through Esther's coerced engagement in a prohibited sexual relationship with the king. Mordechai, her husband, suffered too, for in addition to losing his wife, God tested his love for Him in the most difficult manner. Mordechai heroically refused to bow to Haman who wore on his person a symbol of idol worship, thus triggering Haman's wrath toward the Jews and a national crisis of virtual annihilation.
The Jews' recommitment to God, expressed in their three-day Fast on Passover, led to God's invisible intervention on their behalf, leading to their ultimate triumph over Haman and his people. Yet the three major sins of the Jews in Israel which led to their exile were visited upon them again in Persia -- via Haman's intention to murder them all, via Esther's coercion into an illicit sexual relation with the King, and via Mordechai's great test with idol worship on the body of Haman. Thus, God punished Israel, through its leaders, measure for measure for the sins they committed in their homeland. He was not satisfied with their exile alone. Their triumph over these travails led directly to their return home a mere seventy years later. Only seventy years? One for every year of the Sabbatical years in which the Jews did not allow the land to rest. The land needed seventy years to recover, and got it, as the stiff-necked tenants working it were evicted.
The Jews were granted the right to return to Israel by King Koresh, whereupon they built the Second Temple. Four hundred twenty years after its construction, the Jews were again in a catastrophic predicament. The Romans took over their land, crushed the two Jewish revolts, killed over a million Jews, sold hundreds of thousands into slavery, and exiled almost everyone who was not killed -- out of Israel and into the four corners of the Roman Empire. Why did this great Holocaust occur? And why did the exile last such a long time -- for almost two thousand years?
The Sages say that the reason for this tragedy was causeless hatred among the Jews -- that despite the great amount of Torah learning in the second Temple period, Jews did not follow the Torah edict: "And Thou shalt love thy fellow Jew as thyself, I am God" (Leviticus 19:18). Punishment this time came via the same divine rule -- measure for measure, since for no apparent reason -- for causeless hatred -- Rome came from far off for the purpose of destroying the independent state of Israel, and dispersing its citizens throughout the ancient world. And thus, causeless hatred was the cause of Israel's sin, as well as the cause of its punishment for that sin.
With the rise of the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries, Jews throughout Europe experienced an era of emancipation. The granting of equal rights to Jews led to a mass effort to "make up for lost time" -- to become better French than the French and better Germans than the Germans. Abandonment of the Jewish religion and way of life became the rage for anyone wanting to be accepted by the host nation. Thus, from Germans of the "Mosaic persuasion" millions of Jews became gentiles of the Christian persuasion.
Simultaneous to the great economic and intellectual successes of the Jews throughout Europe, and largely because of them, the clouds of racism, hatred and rejection began brewing. No one took note of them more than a Jewish Viennese journalist in Paris who reported on the Dreyfus Affair. That trial of the French Jewish officer on trumped up charges of treason led Theodore Herzl to realize that it's impossible for Jews to remain Jews except in Israel. He set up the organizational structure and the beginnings of the great post-Biblical Zionist movement, only to die a mere nine years after he began to work to fulfill his dream and that of a small minority of European Jews. His efforts are similar, only more incredible, than those of Ezra and Nechemia over two millenia earlier. They founded the Second Temple Israel. Herzl founded modern secular Israel.
For forty years from 1898 to 1938 Jews were confronted with two forces beckoning them to choose between them: return to Zion and fulfill the age-old dream of their forefathers, or stay in Europe and hope that the gathering storms of hatred, anti-Semitism and Nazism sweeping the continent will go away.
Very few leaders saw the Holocaust coming before the crucial date of November 9, 1938 -- Kristallnacht. Herzl and his associates and Zev Jabotinsky come to mind among those few. Unfortunately no religious leaders are in this select group. Why? Why did the rabbis betray their flocks so badly? Why didn't they cajole, urge, shout and push the Jews out of the ovens before they were lit?
For forty years -- from 1898 to 1938 -- God waited for his children to stir. It's worthwhile to digress here and recall the divine significance of forty, and of forty years in particular. Throughout the Book of Judges we see God's forty years' patience with His children. But not always does God wait a mere forty years. When He decides in His mercy to suspend His wrath, He waits a multiple of forty years for us to repent. When He finally punishes, the longer His wait the greater our punishment. So, for example, the Flood in which God destroyed all mankind with the exception of Noah and his family occurred in the year 1656, essentially forty times forty years. In the Covenant of the Pieces (Genesis XV), the Lord revealed to Abraham that for four hundred years -- forty times ten -- his descendants will live in a land not their own. Moses was ready to begin to save the Jews when he killed the Egyptian, yet his mission -- the redemption of the Jews-- was delayed by forty years due to the two evil Jewish informers -- Datan and Aviram -- who revealed the deed to Pharaoh. For the sin of the spies the Israelites were punished by having to remain in the desert for forty years. For four hundred ten years God waited for the Jews to return to Him in the First Temple period -- forty times ten and "change". Likewise the Second Temple period lasted four hundred twenty years, till the Lord could stand the Jews' sins no longer.
The time elapsed from the first Zionist Congress in 1898 to Kristallnacht is exactly 40 years. In those crucial forty years of final reckoning, the secularized Jews of Western Europe rejected their God and their Torah, opting either to "reform" themselves or convert themselves. On the other hand, the religious Jews chose to ignore the pleadings of emissaries from Israel to come home to their old-new land. They rejected God's beckoning Holy land for forty years. So, it appears, the Lord again dealt with them/us in the way He always had -- measure for measure. They rejected Him, so He caused the gentiles to reject them. Why? Precisely for being Jewish, something most of them did not want to be. All they wanted to be was Germans, French and Danes! Oh, the irony of it all -- measure for measure!
Even if one accepts the answer of "measure for measure", one may rightly protest: why did God allow the Nazi murder of over one and a half million children? The answer may be found in the first Holocaust, the one in Egypt. Eighty percent of the adults of that generation had corrupted their souls, and worse, those of their offspring. They refused to fulfill their national and personal destiny. When that happens to a whole generation -- a lost generation -- the Lord destroys all of it, the children along with their parents. So it was at the Flood, so it was in Egypt, and so it was at every period in which the nation sinned a great sin.
The discussion heretofore may lead one to the conclusion that the Holocaust was God's will, and as such, Hitler was simply God's sword in carrying out His will, so that any blame on Hitler is unwarranted. The Sages addressed that issue in the Torah commandment to build a railing around one's rooftop porch. They declared that even though the person who would have fallen off from an unrailed porch is fated to die, it's your obligation to make sure that you are not the cause of his death (Deuteronomy 22:8). It is your moral task to make sure that the Lord finds a way to punish him that does not involve you. Therefore, Hitler's satanic relish in killing six million Jews will be forever his sin, even though God willed it that the Jews be punished. Hitler and Pharaoh fully earned their eternal hell, for instead of building a moral railing, they removed it -- hoping to kill as many Jews as possible.
Let us learn that lesson once and for all, and remember as well that the first Intifada started in December 1987, forty years after the birth of Israel on May 14, 1948. That's why it is so urgent that we return to our Father in Heaven, now today, to avoid another national catastrophe of untold consequences. The Oslo fiasco, the ongoing wars from Gaza, from Judea and Sammaria, from Lebanon, the threats of annihilation from Iran, are all part of the process of punishment -- God leaving us for our leaving Him -- measure for measure. Even the unprecedented massive expulsion of roughly half the population of the Galilee by Hizbollah's katyusha rockets should be seen as God's measure for measure punishment -- for the equally unprecedented sin of Jews expelling their brethren precisely a year earlier out of Gush Katif and northern Sammaria.
Measure for measure is also how God rewards those who love Him, return to Him and emulate Him in all their deeds. It's time to see the light, the divine light of Torah. It's time to learn it and live it, so that we will merit His grace, His love, His kindness -- measure for measure.
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