B’shalach 2009

Those of you who have been following the news may have heard about a little problem going on in the Catholic Church. In 1970, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, unhappy with the liberalizing and pro-Jewish reforms of Vatican II, founded the Society of St. Pius the 10th. In 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre appointed four hardline Bishops without permission from the Vatican. All four Bishops were excommunicated. 

The new Pope, Benedict 16th, fairly hardline himself, in an effort to remove schism, welcomed the four Bishops back to the Catholic fold. Fairly unremarkable, except that one of the Bishops, an Englishman named Richard Williamson, has stated in public that the Holocaust never happened, and that not one Jew perished in the gas chambers of the Nazis, ימך שמכם. He admits that the camps existed, and that some small number of Jews perished in the camps, but from disease or overwork.

How can an intelligent, religious man, and I must assume that Bishop Williamson is both of those, deny that the Holocaust happened? I can understand how an ignorant person might think so. It is true that there are those who hate Jews so much that they are blinded to the truth. I hope that Bishop Williamson is not one of these people. 

We have come to accept the fact that there are people who say the Shoah never happened,  and we accept it without surprise. If a person stood up and said that Black people had never been enslaved in this country, if someone said that the Civil War had never occurred, we would be astonished. We would wonder if the person had a mental illness.

And yet, there are people who say that the Shoah never happened. The tens of thousands of stories are lies, the pictures are faked, the records that the Nazis themselves kept so meticulously are forgeries. And these are not homeless people ranting on the street corner. A Catholic Bishop! The president of Iran! The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, received a doctorate on the basis of a dissertation denying the Shoah. A quote from this dissertation: “Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” 

To be fair, Abbas has since stated that “The Holocaust was a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind.” But the real question is who were those professors that accepted his dissertation and gave him his doctorate?

Part of me does not blame those who deny that the Holocaust happened. If you are like me, you do not remember when you first heard about the Holocaust. But some people here might remember. Some might have heard about it while it was still happening. If you were one of those people, try to remember what you thought when you first heard. Could you believe it? If the person who told you was knowledgeable, was truthful, was not given to wild statements--- even then, could you fully comprehend what you were hearing? Even some of the European Jews who were victims of the Holocaust could not believe it, until they saw it with their own eyes. The head of more than one ghetto firmly believed that as long as the Nazis were making money from slave labor, they would not kill the Jews.

Unfortunately, the Shoah is not the only atrocity of humankind which is difficult to believe. Since the beginning of history there have been deeds that make one ashamed to be human. Is our reluctance to believe in them a good thing or a bad thing? Perhaps it is bad, in that we are unable to learn from the mistakes of the past. We say ‘Never again,’ and then stand idly by while atrocities take place in Rwanda, or in Darfur.

But perhaps it is a good thing. Perhaps we always think of people as being a little better than they actually are. Perhaps it is our belief in people as basically compassionate that makes them compassionate, our refusal to accept cruelty that leads us towards a better society.

In parasha B’Shalach, we have the beautiful Song of the Sea, in which the Israelites sing with joy at being saved from destruction, and at the death of their enemies. Two weeks ago, I mentioned the midrash in which the angels sing joyously when the Egyptian army is drowning. The Holy One reprimands them, saying “The work of my hands is drowning in the sea, and you are singing?”

The Torah states that you must love your fellow as yourself, and you must give your enemies a chance to make peace. It does not require us to have mercy on our enemies, or to think twice about killing those who would kill us. In all ancient societies, enemies were not considered fully human. They were not treated with compassion. By the time the Talmud was written, somewhere around 600 C.E., Jewish attitudes had changed. The midrash of Gd reprimanding the angels does not deny the necessity of war, but it states that all of us, friend, enemy, and stranger, are children of Gd. There is a direct connection between this concept and the dropping of leaflets to warn the enemy that you are going to attack.

Through World War Two, it was common to demonize your enemy, to make him seem not quite human. If we can say the world has learned anything from the Holocaust, it is that your enemy is also human, also a child of Gd. That is what has made all wars since difficult. And they should be difficult. 

Unfortunately, there are two kinds of people who are still holding out against this idea. One group is the terrorists, who target civilians, try to destabilize society, and hide their weapons in hospitals, schools, and places of worship. I fervently believe they are on the loosing side of history.

The other kind are those who deny the Holocaust. They realize that it was the Holocaust that revealed the tragedy of demonization, and they want to turn the clock back to when it was okay. They are the most insidious and despicable of people, the more so in that they deny their anti-semitism and pretend to be impartial scientists. Perhaps they are not anti-semitic, but they are anti-human.

We must not allow terrorists and deniers a victory. No matter how we are treated by others, no matter what the opinion of the rest of the world is, we as Jewish Americans must continue to support compassionate and humane treatment of our enemies. Both in Israel and the United States, we must continue to uphold the highest standards of humanity and decency. The Israeli army in particular has been accused of terrible behavior, even as its soldiers risk their own lives to treat their enemies well. 

As of yesterday, the Vatican made the decision to demand a retraction from Bishop Williamson. The weight of history is truly on the side of compassion, not on the side of the deniers or the terrorists. However, there are no guarantees. As those who originated the idea of one Gd for all and all equal under Gd, we must continue to stand up for humanity and compassion. There is nothing we can do that is more likely to bring the messianic era.