'Fat People Aren't Unstable' -- For This We Needed a Study?

JEWISH RENEWAL AND THE HOLOCAUST

One could argue that all post-war Jewish theology is post-Holocaust theology. Without taking a stand on the historical debate as to whether or not the Holocaust is a unique event in general or in Jewish history, the existential impact of this catastrophe was such that Jewish thinking after the war was by necessity thinking through the war. Elie Weisel once said that he understood how someone who was a believer before the Holocaust could become an atheist afterward, and how someone who was an atheist before the Holocaust could later become a believer. What was incomprehensible to him was someone whose theological worldview was the same before and after the Holocaust.

Understanding Jewish Renewal as a post-Holocaust phenomenon requires us to understand the role the Holocaust played in its development.

Turning toward the Holocaust
Jewish renewal's founder and architect, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (b. 1924), was born into a Hasidic but semi-enlightened family. A refugee of internment camps in France who immigrated to the United States after the war, he became a disciple of the sixth and then seventh Lubavitcher Rebbes and later forged his own spiritual alternative, known today as Jewish Renewal. Surprisingly, Reb Zalman wrote little about the Holocaust. However, there are references (though sometimes oblique ones) to the Holocaust and its impact on Jewish Renewal throughout his writings.

As a spiritualist (not identical to a theologian) Reb Zalman seems to have little interest in dwelling on the anti-Semitism that fueled the Holocaust, although he surely acknowledges the centrality of that anti-Semitism in coming to terms with the Holocaust. His approach, and that of Jewish Renewal more generally, seem to be more forward looking - not dwelling on the hurt caused by the Holocaust or the culpability of its perpetrators as much as on the opportunity it presents for the future of the Jewish people and humanity. This model is, to some extent, aligned with the prophetic approach to Jewish disaster - the prophetic call to respond to tragedy by looking inward and forward in a practice called teshuvah. This word is often translated as "repentance," but literally means turning inward, or an act of introspection. For the prophets, Jews are called to turn inward because any disaster, and according to Reb Zalman even the Holocaust, must be understood within God's covenantal relationship to the Jews. One could argue that in a spiritual sense - and only in a spiritual sense - if the Jews are blameless for any disaster that befalls them, then the covenant is broken.

For many traditional Jews, the Holocaust did present the terrifying possibility that either Jews had broken the covenant or God had. For example, the late Satmar Rebbe (Grand Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum), invoking the liturgical formula "for our sins we are punished," argued that the Jews, and particularly the secular Zionists, were to blame for the Holocaust due to their unabashed sacrilege. Others argued that the Holocaust was an illustration of an act of divine concealment (hester panim), a temporary effacement of covenantal reciprocity (Eliezer Berkovitz), or worse, that God had left us entirely (as Richard Rubenstein argued in his "Death of God" post-Holocaust theology).

Reb Zalman and Jewish Renewal, however, posit what may be a more radical answer, one that holds the possibility of a constructive, and covenantal, response. Perhaps the covenant was not irrevocably broken, but rather a part of it was destroyed, resulting in a seismic shift. Others have experimented with a theology along these lines. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, for example, has argued that what has shifted is Israel's attitude toward the covenant or the nature of covenantal obligation. For Reb Zalman, however, the shift was on a grander scale. The entire world has shifted and the Jews are situated on the fault line. This view suggests a drastic altering of the world's spiritual terrain. It means that for the covenant to survive, the Torah must be renewed, if not radically altered, in order to remain a banner for Israel's universal purpose.

Holocaust as Covenantal Opportunity
I once heard another informal founder of Jewish Renewal, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, frame the Jewish Renewal attitude to the Holocaust. Very close to his untimely death, Shlomo was teaching in Boston. As it was late summer, after Tisha B'Av, his words turned to the destruction of the Second Temple and Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai's courageous (yet problematic) decision to abandon the Temple and take his disciples to Yavneh to build an institute of Torah that would become the backbone of rabbinic Judaism, a new direction for Judaism that is arguably what saved the Jewish people from obscurity. It is significant that the context of this discourse revolved around Shlomo's soulful rendition of the verse in Psalms "Sing to God a new song." "How could it be," Shlomo asked, "that with all the Torah that was being studied and all the great luminaries in Europe, this tragic event [the Holocaust] could have occurred?" After a long pause, he answered his own question softly, as if to himself. "Perhaps," he said, "the Torah being studied there was not good enough, perhaps we need a new Torah." He then launched into "Sing to God a new song."

It was the Torah itself and not the Jewish people, implied Shlomo, that could not avert the harsh decree. Reb Zalman extends this point to argue that in some sense the pre-war Torah needed to be effaced to make way for something new, just as the Temple had to be destroyed to pave the way for the rabbinic interpretation of the Torah. Reb Zalman believed that the pre-war Torah was a product of arrested development that stunted the necessary growth of the Jewish people and prevented the Torah's universal message from contributing to a new world. The project of Jewish Renewal is thus about constructing a radically new Torah emerging out of, but not confined by, the old. Disaster is therefore not a result of sin or unfettered evil, but a purging of something that no longer serves its intended purpose. In this sense, the Holocaust becomes a kind of covenantal opportunity—not to recover what was lost and rebuild what once was, but to construct something that has never been. I want to be clear that this theological hypothesis does not at all address the cause of the Holocaust. Rather, we are talking about making sense of it, making it "usable," to look at how such an event could be viewed as changing the Jews, the Torah, the world, and the Jewish mission. Reb Shlomo and Reb Zalman's comments are not philosophical interpretations, nor are they logical or metaphysical claims. They are theological speculations uttered within a particular posture of faith - a position which holds that the Jews qua individuals, whatever they may have done, are not to blame for the Holocaust and that the Torah as the constitution that binds the Jews to God can remain intact even as it is radically altered.

One "lesson of the Holocaust" (and in Paradigm Shift, Reb Zalman, in opposition to many others, explicitly argues that the Holocaust can and must teach "lessons" to Jews and the world) is implied in Shlomo's teaching: perhaps the Holocaust wasn't averted because the Torah being studied and lived by Jews simply wasn't good enough. This suggests that the destruction wrought by the Holocaust calls for a new Torah, because the old Torah, in a sense, was also its victim. This shift of emphasis, while morally problematic to some, may bear some constructive fruit. If a transformation of Torah was required, those studying that Torah were its innocent victims, just as the practitioners of the cultic rites were innocent victims of the Temple's destruction. If this is so, according to Jewish Renewal, the only theologically correct way for Judaism to recover from the Holocaust is to attempt to produce a new Yavneh, a goal Reb Zalman makes explicit in his writings (for example in Paradigm Shift). Yavneh here is not viewed as a compromise in the face of loss but as a progressive extension of God's covenantal program. Yavneh was necessary and the destruction was the prerequisite of its existence.

As audacious as this sounds (isn't audacity required to make any sense of the Holocaust?) this theology implies that the Holocaust was God's way of liquidating one Torah to make room for another. In true apostolic fashion, Reb Zalman argues that this new Torah is one that always existed, it is the one that first existed but was buried beneath centuries of pain and anguish that produced a xenophobic Torah espoused by so many righteous followers. The argument is that this new Torah, this Torah of Renewal, is simultaneously new and ancient, a turn of phrase used by Jews from the Zohar ("new-ancient words") to Herzl (in the title of his book Old New Land, Altneuland). Like Kabbalah and Zionism, Jewish Renewal is an openly non-normative approach to Jewish tradition, arguing that its deviance and its innovation have their own genealogy.

The Torah of the Non-Jew
There are at least two questions that need to be addressed in order to better understand Jewish Renewal's relationship to the Holocaust. First, what was the deficiency of the pre-war Torah that did not cause the Holocaust but, in a spiritualist sense, could not avert it? Second, what lessons are to be learned by Jews from the Holocaust? That is, in what ways has the Holocaust changed the ways Jews should relate to the world? In 1968, just as post-Holocaust theology was taking root in America, Reb Zalman wrote the following in "Holocaust and Homeland":

There has been much refinement in Jewish law. Prior to the Holocaust, the Torah of the Jew had proliferated into the most minute levels of life. But the Jewish Torah of goy, by and large, did not have any specific action directives. We who were charged with the responsibility of reproving our neighbor when we saw him involved in a sinful act had excluded the goy from our reproach. The goy was given the same consideration as the compulsive beast; no amount of rational reeducation could possibly help him. At best we sought only the application of subtle pressure: "You are such a nice minister of the interior; please stop the pogrom…." Our theology will continue to fail us as long as our halakha…has not come to grips with our relations with goyim….

So I say they are a people of a confused heart (Psalm 95).

According to this, the Holocaust revealed that the Jews were too inward looking, too parochial. The problem with the (traditional rendering of the) Torah of the pre-Holocaust world was that it could not be a vehicle for universal salvation because it had abandoned the world - it offered nothing to the non-Jew, the "goy" - and thus could not be a vehicle for salvation. A corollary was that the Holocaust should not be a tool to confirm that Jews are the most victimized victims; it should not be a justification for distancing oneself from the world, or even a justification for the State of Israel. (In Paradigm Shift, Reb Zalman called for the internationalization of Jerusalem in 1967 immediately after the six-day war.) This turns one traditional argument on its head. Some traditionalists argue that

The liberalization of Judaism - its universalization or modernization - was the root-cause of the Holocaust. Reb Zalman argues that it was precisely the Torah of the “old” paradigm that needed to be replaced. The pre-war move toward a Jewish humanism represented the birth-pangs of a new era that fully emerged through this tragic purge. He suggests that the Holocaust is, in retrospect, an opportunity, if not an obligation, for Jews to be emissaries against oppression and injustice. As the “most victimized victims,” Jews now have the covenantal responsibility to speak to the rest of the world for all victims.

In this reading, Jewish Renewal’s response to the Holocaust is the inverse of that of American Jewry. To some degree, American Jews integrate the Holocaust by inwardly focusing on Jewish identity and continuity as the lesson Jews need to learn and outwardly focusing on anti-Semitism as the lesson the world needs to learn. Reb Zalman inverts this equation. He looks inward by trying to identify and correct the deficiency of Jews living inside Torah before the Holocaust and outward by understanding the Holocaust as a call toward renewing Judaism’s universal mission for the future.

Understanding introversion and parochialism as a lack of maturity of Torah was not only a lesson learned from the Holocaust. In his recent study of Hasidic masters, Reb Zalman suggests that the recognition of this parochialism was noted by some ultra-traditional Jews even before the Holocaust, specifically by one its victims. In a short essay about Hillel Zeitlin (1871-1929) that appeared in Wrapped in a Holy Flame, Reb Zalman acknowledges that Zeitlin was an important resource for his conceptualization of Jewish Renewal. Zeitlin was part of a small cadre of ultra-traditional free-thinking Jews in Warsaw in the inter-war period. Taken by the passion and mysticism of Hasidism, yet deeply immersed in secular life and thought, Zeitlin and his circle may be the true European precursors to Jewish Renewal in America. Zeitlin did not write much but was a charismatic presence in Jewish Warsaw, as attested to by the young Abraham Joshua Heschel, who recounts meeting him when Heschel was an impressionable teenager. Zeitlin was bothered by the parochial nature of the Jews in Poland and explored the pathways of Judaism to find a new paradigm, to construct a new Yavneh, including the reinstitution of Jewish universalism. In Wrapped in a Holy Flame, Reb Zalman writes:

Well, between the two world wars, Reb Hillel Zeitlin was trying to say something to people who had sanctified the high degree of surface tension between us and non-Jews. In so many stories on both sides of the divide, the other people were expendable. For non-Jews, for Christians, Jews were expendable. For Jews, Christians were expendable. Often they were seen only as useful expedients, as Shabbos Goyim, and the rest were superfluous. That was the attitude that they took. We are finally emerging from that attitude. But there he was in his time, and how was he going to say that? ... Zeitlin reached into what people have called Second Isaiah and that universal vision, and he realized that nobody can become fully aware of that without everybody else being redeemed. When a person becomes aware of that, he ushers in a new way of thinking…But the time wasn’t quite ripe. Zeitlin’s visions were daring and profound; unfortunately they were also ahead of their time.

The time was surely not ripe. On September 2, 1942 wrapped in his prayer shawl and tefillin, Zeitlin was killed by the Nazis on his way to Treblinka, murdered on his way to being murdered. But his dream of a new Yavneh, of a traditional Judaism that was unafraid, impassioned, and open to the world lived on in the work of Reb Zalman and later Jewish Renewal. After the war, Reb Zalman took that message to America, a stable and open society changed by the war, and began to incorporate Zeitlin’s dream of a new Yavneh in the early institutions of Jewish Renewal, particularly Bnei, later Pnei, Or in Philadelphia, Havurat Shalom in Boston, and the Aquarian Minyan in Berkeley.

This new program required much more than institution building; it required a radical re-visioning of Jewish theological thinking and activism. In the next segment I will explore post-monotheistic (Jewish) theology as a template for how Reb Zalman believed Judaism can become an integral part of a global spirituality renaissance.

Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of Hasidism on the Margin (2004), and editor of God’s Voice from the Void (2002). note: This essay is the second in a three-part series exploring Jewish Renewal and American Judaism.