Encore Archive

Welcome to Encore, the place where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on topics of the moment. Each week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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[Last week we reprinted a controversial piece on the Holocaust and forgiveness by Stanley Hauerwas, a Protestant theologian. This week we reprint a response to Hauerwas; next week we will reprint the latter's reply.]

The Duty to Do Justice

Trude Weiss-Rosmarin (Sh'ma 11/202, November 28, 1980)

Dr. Stanley Hauerwas's sermon on "the duty to forgive" those who committed the mass murders and the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust fails to distinguish between sin and crime - capital crime. Indeed, capital crime is sin, but all societies bring those guilty of crimes to justice, in duly constituted courts, because civilization is grounded in (and cannot endure) without law. As all human institutions, the laws by which societies live are far from being perfect. But, as Talmudic insight has it, "if not for laws, humans would destroy one another" (literally, "swallowing one another alive").

The issue in connection with capital crime, that is murder, is bringing the criminal to trial - before a jury of his peers - so that the laws by which society lives be protected and upheld. Would Dr. Hauerwas say that there is "the duty to forgive" those who commit murder in our cities and towns? Is the vicarious atonement, implicit in the Cross and the Resurrection, the mandate not to exact lawful punishment from those guilty of capital crimes?

If one can speak of an authoritative Jewish attitude to the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust it is expressed in the title of Gideon Hausner's report on the Eichmann Trial: JUSTICE IN JERUSALEM. Adolph Eichmann was tried before a duly constituted court for "capital crimes against the Jewish people." The question was: "Guilty or not guilty," as in every court trial. And as required by justice, Eichmann had lawyers to defend him, although his guilt was a fact attested by hundreds of witnesses, before the trial.

Only some of those who committed the mass murders - killing eleven million defenseless children, women and men, including six million Jews - were brought to trial. And to the extent that it is possible, they are being tried for murder now. At the major trials of the leading Nazis - and the trials of those who followed the Leader and murdered - the courts, as in Nuremberg and in Frankfurt am Main (the Auschwitz trials), acted as jurists - not as theologians. Dr. Hauerwas' proclamation of "the duty to forgive" the Holocaust is the conclusion of a theologian who theologizes a reality of human action which as all human actions, good and bad, are freely chosen, as Judaism sees it. Jewish belief is rooted in the conviction that humans are free and unfettered to choose good or evil. There is no original sin and no inherited sin transmitted from parents to children. Jews praise God and proclaim thanks because "the soul which you have given me is pure." It is we who make it impure with impure actions of our choice.

We must act as if God did not exist Dr. Hauerwas writes that "all those who used to celebrate the absence of God as providing the space arena for human freedom have run aground on this reality" (the reality of the Holocaust) -Judaism does not "celebrate the absence of God." It celebrates the incommensurability of God. Judaism teaches that reliance upon God in situations calling for human action is courting disaster. "The earth was given to mankind." We must take charge. Asking, "where was God in Auschwitz?" or concluding as Dr. Hauerwas does, that we cannot "blame God for exiting from this kind of world," that is, the world where the Holocaust was perpetrated, is not different from asking, as those who think of God in human terms ask, "Where was God when my son's car went out of control and he was killed?"

The Jewish belief in God does not justify relying upon God "to act" for us or to protect us against accidents and sickness. Judaism does not expect God to interfere in the affairs of men and the laws of nature. This is why Jewish law legislates for life-sustaining and life-saving actions even though they desecrate the Sabbath and set aside the Law. "One does not rely upon a miracle to happen," is a Jewish watchword. God will not "act" so as to save us from evils we cause and from evils we are capable of preventing.

Leaving too much to God is not Jewish piety. Rather, we should act as if God did not exist, so as to comply with the divine mandate of "choosing life."

Authentic Jewish responses to the Holocaust are those which focus on human responsibility. In this context, to forgive or not to forgive the mass murderers of the Nazi death factories does not arise. It is a question of Justice and Law. And, after the Law has spoken, of mercy. Such as the mercy shown to Eichmann who was not tortured to death, as were his victims, but executed mercifully, as the sentence of JUSTICE required, in the presence of a clergyman, whom he derided, and who prayed, although Eichmann refused to join in prayer, that God have mercy on his soul.