Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
Page 20
Nothing in this mystical theology would suggest a natural affinity for more activist forms of political resistance, although themes in Hasidic texts suggest that Zionism and Hasidic theology have affinities in common. ‘God,’ the theology proclaims, ‘will bring you together again from all peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you … . And the Lord your God will bring you to the land.’13 Rabbi Levi Yitzhak: ‘God took the Israelites out of Egypt in order for you to inherit the land. With your coming to the land, you will have achieved completeness.’14 But unlike the Zionists’ political position, the Hasidim believed prayer – not action – would make that union into a reality.
Mysticism and faith: action as belief
Hasidic tradition believes that, by fulfilling God’s will, the self joins with holiness. In striving for devekut, by merging with God, the community of believers sanctifies holiness. The self seeks the divine through prayer, which is active joyousness, a celebration to God. While all human souls have the capacity to serve God and be with Him, much Hasidic ritual is devoted to dissolving the self, as a way of reaching the divine state of Ayin or total submersion in God. In Hasidic religious practice, ritual, particularly singing and dancing, moves the self closer to the realization that God’s justice is absolute and unquestioned. For example, the Piasezner Rebbe proclaims: ‘Although nothing shall remain of me but bones, they will still continue to proclaim “Lord, who is like unto Thee!”’15 Moral law originates in heaven and emanates from God’s will; evil and suffering possess agency in God’s plan; suffering becomes purposive and reflective of God’s intent. Acceptance of God’s will, with bountiful love, no matter how obscure that will seems to be, serves as the prime requirement of faith. This relationship to God is not rational but a complete giving over of the self to God’s will. Emunah [belief] defines the intimate connection between man and God, an unflinching compact, absolute in its meaning and intent.
The historical and popular confusion over why Jews so ‘willingly’ went to their death overlooks this aspect of Hasidic theology practiced by millions of Central and East European Jews. The Belzer rabbi whose firstborn son was killed in a synagogue burned down by the Germans, expresses his loss in terms of religious belief: ‘It is indeed a kindness of the Almighty that I also offered a personal sacrifice.’16 The Hasidic self is literally ruled by an absolute commitment to God’s will and a horror at even the possibility of disobeying God’s injunctions regarding unquestioned faith: ‘Suffering glorifies the self, sanctifies the community and affirms the chosen people’s place in history … the greater the darkness and suffering on the eve of Sabbath, the more brilliant the light of the Sabbath.’17 It is a sign of religious sacrifice. ‘[I]f we truly conceive the ultimate purpose of all as is, we would most certainly accept all of suffering with longing and love, since it is by means of these beatings that the Name of our Creator will be magnified and sanctified.’18 Rabbi Yehezkiah Fisch, the Matislaker Rebbe in Hungary, asks on the eve of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz: ‘Is it not worth suffering prior to the coming of the Messiah?’19
Ministering to the flock occurred in many different ways in the Jewish spiritual sector; the following responsa, for example, indicates the desperate pressure the Jews faced. It is also curious why Hannah Arendt’s harsh condemnation of Jewish traditionalism in Eichmann in Jerusalem failed to acknowledge the effort of spiritual leaders to respond to human suffering.
In 1942, Rabbi Oshry was asked by a member of his congregation a question relating to forced labor. Labor brigades were proscribed from bringing any food into the camps; further, the Germans strip-searched all prisoners returning to the camps to make sure no food had been smuggled in. Because his children were starving, one man, on one of his work assignments, smuggled six pieces of bread in his pants. The Germans discovered the bread, then beat and mutilated his genitals. When the wounds healed, he consulted the rabbi and assured him he would still be attending morning and evening services, even though he was in a great deal of pain. His question to the rabbi involved the mutilation of his genitals; he believed this would preclude his being honored as a kohen, and therefore receiving ritual privileges. A passage in the Bible (Deuteronomy 23: 20) prohibits mutilated persons from participating in any official capacity in services. The rabbi assured him participation still was possible and yes, he could be included in the services as a kohen. Later, the petitioner was shot by the Germans.
This man’s wish to act with his congregation, to be spiritually alive in the face of his terrible physical trauma, shows a self actively moving away from passivity or acquiescence, even as he suffers the death of his children and the mutilation of his genitals. Such examples must be considered when making interpretations about spiritual resistance. This wish to be kohen is not ‘active’ in a strictly political sense, as Rabbi Zemba’s call for vengeance in the Warsaw of 1943 was. But the responsa shows a self struggling against spiritual death. Or in Berkovits’ words:
‘There were really two Jobs at Auschwitz: the one who belatedly accepted the advice of Job’s wife and turned his back on God, and the other, who kept his faith to the end, who affirmed it at the very doors of the gas chambers, who was able to walk to his death defiantly singing his Ani Mamin – I believe.’20
Yet, doubts remain about the truth of Berkovits’ assertion, ‘If God was not present for many, He was not lost to many more.’21 I put this proposition to a survivor of Auschwitz. Her response: ‘I never stopped being a Jew, but I hated God every minute of my stay in that place.’ When a starving inmate of Mauthausen, near death, eats human flesh to survive, God’s presence may be difficult to find. How does a child of seven or eight find ‘truth’ or ‘fulfillment’ in Kiddush haShem? Martyrdom is the furthest thing from the mind of the young girl who cries out outside the gas chamber, ‘Please God; let me live’; who bitterly laments never having experienced love or motherhood; the father who watches his four-year-old hauled away by the Germans thinks not about God’s sanctification but about his own powerlessness. For the mother who jumps from an upper floor after watching the last of her children die from starvation, God lacks immanence and refuge. If a Jew, Berkovits argues, ‘is able to accept his radical abandonment by God as a gift from God that enables him to love his God with all his soul, “even when He takes his soul from you,” he has achieved the highest form of Kiddush haShem.’22 For many, however, that was a very difficult proposition to accept.
Even Ringelblum’s admiration for orthodox Jews degraded by German soldiers becomes for Berkovits a sign of the ennobling effects of Kiddush haShem. But the theology paints only part of the picture; the diaries draw another, as with the father in Lodz who, forced to turn over his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to the Germans, can no longer bear to think of himself as a human being.23 A survivor, Miriam K., lost her entire family: ‘For me, God has no existence; He is neither alive nor dead; he just was not there.’ Ringelblum rarely speaks of religion in his diaries; for him, too, God remains hidden. Yet the surviving responsa apparently indicate terrible moral conflicts facing the Jewish community and the few remaining spiritual leaders attempting to adapt Jewish law to the circumstances. Law and prayer were all the rabbis had to offer.
Spiritual refuge or psychological disintegration: who can ever know?
A thirteen-year-old boy is whipped mercilessly by a guard in Auschwitz. Suffering scores of lashes, the boy utters nothing; no sound, no cries, just silence. The theology sees such resilience to pain as deriving from the child’s faith in Torah. For the rabbi, ‘they can take my body but not my soul. They have no authority over the soul.’ But it might not have been faith that allowed the boy to be whipped and left bleeding; it may have been a dead self produced by a deadly reality. Another explanation might argue that the numbness and dissociation literally annihilate the child’s emotional universe, making him impervious to pain. A survivor writes:
‘I knew that I had to act soon because once malnutrition set in, I would lose the will to fight. Nex
t would come the indifference to my surroundings, vacant eyes, swelling at the ankles, and the slow descent into oblivion. I had seen the pattern thousands of times in the ghetto and was seeing it again in people around me.’24
Massive assault and abuse do tremendous damage to the psyche; Joseph Horn: ‘I was in shambles. I felt less worthy than an animal. A stray dog could walk the streets unmolested, but the whole might of the Third Reich would be enlisted to hunt down me or any other Jew who didn’t cooperate in our own destruction. I began to realize that we are all destined to die.’25
This is not to diminish the effects of rabbinical compassion or adaptive law; but to idealize suffering as a testament to God, as well as to criticize Jews for not resisting more, misses the profound psychological reality of death that consumed the Jews long before they ever reached Auschwitz. For the orthodox, the issue was not questioning the action itself or even attempting to understand genocide and mass death. Whatever questions were addressed to God were directed to effects and His tactics. It violated faith to question God’s intent. Rabbis quoted the Bible: ‘It is a time of agony unto Jacob, but out of it he shall be saved’ (Jeremiah 30:7). Orthodox Jews never asked, ‘But at what cost?’ In the Maidanek memorial, in a barracks to the side of the camp, lie over 800,000 pairs of shoes taken from Jews; in a corner, piled high, one finds tens of thousands of children’s shoes. The mound of bones and ashes containing the remains of almost a million Jews standing at the top of Maidanek in a gigantic stone urn may represent not a martyrdom for Israel but a meaningless sinking into nothingness, not to be remembered as a sacred victory of the Lord, but a concrete reminder of what happened to six million. ‘A man must pronounce a blessing over evil just as he pronounces a blessing over good’ (Berakhot 9: 5); but the ashes and bones of Maidanek represent for many survivors a victory of evil – pure and simple. Was it ‘the rock, His work is perfect; all his ways are justice’ (Deuteronomy 32: 4)? Or was it, in the words of a survivor: ‘I cursed God when I watched my little girl die; I have yet to set foot in a synagogue again.’ Joseph Horn recounts the following conversation with a friend in the ghetto: ‘“This is a terrible time to be a parent,” Mrs. Psherover said. “When you can’t protect your child from such depravities, perhaps it is best to put an end to it.”’26 When Jews cried zaddik-ve-re-lo (why should the innocent suffer), did God send consolation to the soul or did the self’s inner being remain empty, uncomforted? I asked Abraham X, a survivor of Mauthausen:
‘Since liberation, life for me has been a waking death; all my family were killed. What I have done since then is to just walk through life. God means nothing to me. I can’t understand those who speak of having faith after Auschwitz; there is no God; where is God for my murdered sons and daughters; for my wife, my parents?’
And those who speak about the righteousness of suffering, or how it is ordained for Jews to suffer?
‘That means nothing to me; for years, after the war, I walked around thinking about how to kill and murder as many Germans as I could find. That hatred kept me going. There was no place for God inside my soul. Who was it, I don’t remember now, the survivor of the Warsaw uprising, who said, “If you lick my heart, it would poison you?” That’s how I felt and probably still do. I remember the line in Psalms [91: 15]; “I will be with you in distress.” I don’t believe in God. While we were in distress, God was somewhere else, maybe helping the Germans kill my children.’
Not all survivors believe in the sanctity of suffering and many would disagree with the ideas expressed in the following theological text:
‘They said to his wife: “It has been decreed on your husband that he is to be burned, and upon you to be killed.” She recited this scripture, “A faithful God, never false.”
They said to his daughter: “It has been decreed upon your father to be burned and upon your mother to be killed and upon you to perform labor.” She recited this scripture: “Wondrous in purpose and mighty indeed, whose eyes observe” [Jeremiah 32:19].’27
I read these selections to Abraham X; he was furious. ‘Tell that to me while I say Kaddish for my dead children, or while I think of the possibilities they might have had, the grandchildren that never were. Everything I am in my old age, everything that I was, lies inside my head, a photograph album as real as the very days when I had them, when all of us were alive.’ ‘God’s justice – His deeds are perfect … a faithful God … there is no perversity’ (Deuteronomy 32: 4) is not Abraham X’s justice.28
Abraham X’s bitterness moves against the most powerful strains of Midrashim thought: ‘Precious are sufferings [for] just as the covenant is established by virtue of the land, so too is the covenant established by virtue of suffering.’29 Precious, however, might not be the right word to describe those psychologically and physically decimated by German power. Joseph Horn: ‘Now, I could hardly bear to look at him [a former friend]. His cheekbones were sunken, and the suit he wore was dirty and crumpled. His eyes were bloodshot. He was incoherent as to the whereabouts of his family – I think he still believed the canard about tilling the land in the Ukraine.’30 Death quickly follows the loss of faith. ‘When [inmates in the camps] gave up hope, their eyes became vacant. Some would go on the electrified wire for a quick death. Most would lie down on the bunk for the night and expire without a whimper’ – a common occurrence, not only in the camps but in the ghettos.31
In Jewish theology, to study the commandments, the law, or its interpretations becomes, in a religious sense, equivalent to carrying out the practice of devotion, righteousness. The Jew by studying acts for God. It is a religious dialectic; self speaking with Other/God, where doing lies literally in the speaking (prayer and meditation). And while, for example, Aaron Bell admires this now, at the time the only action that mattered was the violence of retribution. For him and the other resistors I interviewed, the violence of their resistance communities constituted the only trustworthy form of prayer. But for those like Rabbis Shapira and Oshry study brought the self closer to God, to contact and intimacy with the Divine Will, a mystical joining, a coming together and coming apart, in the Law. Praxis is the actual study of the written and oral law. To act means to be ‘with’ God, to render respect to God and to be and become worthy as a Jew, a student of Torah. It is a state of ‘being’ and a way of life that places political ideology and political action not only in a secondary position but in a place that possesses no emotive or evaluative significance. Political action in this theology has no role in improving or demonstrating the worthiness of the self or one’s ethical place in the world. Worthiness and, therefore, value depend on how close study takes one to God. Perhaps this explains some of the political and ideological quietism of orthodox and Hasidic Jewry.
In the Torah divine justice is higher than compassion and certainly lies considerably higher than political action. Compassion signifies preference for one being over the other; it requires that God make a choice, discriminating between sufferings, granting compassion to some, but not to others. But in the theology, God makes no such discriminations amongst people. Divine justice affirms only God’s majesty; all are equal in God’s eyes; no one can claim preference, not even those who suffer, because compassion discriminates between ‘pains’ and judges some pain to be worthier than others. What matters to God are His Laws – nothing else; and His justice lies in the inviolability of His Laws. To be in a relation of faith to God is not to demand compassion but to obey, without question, His Laws, a fear of Heaven, to accept what is a manifestation of God’s justice. To demand compassion of God means that one asks God to explain; but the revelatory power of God lies not in explanation or rationalization but in the immanence of His Laws. If the believer knows the Law and accepts it, God’s justice is also immanent. God need not show compassion or explain its absence; nothing is required of God, since God’s authority and eternal righteousness guide the children of Israel.
What the partisan survivors consistently returned to was the notion that the Holocaust demanded a
set of actions taking even more seriously than God himself the suffering of the human body and especially the suffering of children. But to have asked for such sustained violent resistance from the Jewish community, they also argue, misses the point. It is not that more could be done. All that could be done was done. In the face of the German onslaught and the ruthless efficiency of starvation and extermination, to have retained any kind of faith was itself a victory and transcendence. To have sustained any kind of violent resistance took extraordinary courage and luck, and a willingness to construct an ethics that would facilitate survival itself.
Yet, essential to the existence of both violent and spiritual resistance was the capacity of the resistors to withstand the radical inversion of meaning and value imposed by the German occupation and German racist policies. Resistance occurred against a backdrop of madness. Group madness and individual madness are quite different, but there is one very frightening similarity: the power of perception to literally transform reality to conform with the projections of the subject. For the Jews, German brutality was mad, incomprehensible; but for the Germans, extermination possessed a logic, a significance, in protecting the nation’s public and biological health.
The resistor represents and affirms an historical sanity, a value embedded in history and the history of ethics, and in the case of the Jews, the word of the Torah; the resistor, whether the action be violent or spiritual, refuses the premises of mass murder and the murder of an identified and marked group simply because this group exists. That assumption – the Other must die because the Other exists – has no standing in an ethical history that grants dignity to human life. When the resistor denied either violently or spiritually the Germans’ view of reality, that refusal embraced an affirmation and sanity that German rage could not touch or destroy.