Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Axel Springer is a German, the owner and publisher of the largest chain of newspapers in post-war Germany, a man with a compelling conscience. He takes his son to Bergen Belsen to place flowers at the grave of Anne Frank, and before they leave he whispers to his son: "Dig the earth with your fingers until you find some bones of human bodies. Take one of these bones with you and place it where you can always see it, where you will never be able to forget what we have done to the Jewish people."

Can I do less with my own son? Yet, when it comes to telling the story of the years of atrocity (and tell it I must) to my children, to my congregation, to the community at large, I am torn by ambivalence. On the one hand, I feel compelled to tell the terrible truth that we were witness to a nightmare of civilized criminality, to man's awful capacity to hurt and to destroy. On the other hand, I grow steadily uncertain -- not over the psychological need and moral obligation to remember those black years, but whether it is enough to stop there; whether it is sufficient to relate the disaster and end it there.

As a father who must tell his children why and what and how this unspeakable outrage was visited upon his people, I find myself wondering: "What am I doing to their morale, to their will to live as Jews in this world, to their trust and belief in God and man, to their moral strength?" For, after the lesson is over, the nightmare reviewed each year with greater detail and more evidence, I remain perplexed. "Do I lay a terror upon their hearts, a stone of fear; do I unwittingly cast the shadow of the 'undelivered punch' across their destiny?" I grow uneasy with the suspicion that I may myself be leading my people to succumb to a view of history raised to the heights of metaphysical fatalism. "This is the way of the world. This is the way it was, and is and will always be. "We and "they". We who suffer and they who persecute." Against my every intention, I seem to endow hatred of the Jew with an immortality and ubiquity, and prepare the ground for acceptance of the Jew as the world's eternal victim. My teachings boomerang upon me. I am haunted by the moral wisdom of the Rabbi of Ger: "...whatever one thinks, therein one is; one's soul is utterly and completely in what one thinks; and so much a man dwells in baseness. He will certainly not be able to turn, for his spirit will grow coarse and his heart stubborn, and to this he may be overcome by gloom. What would you? Rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way -- it will always be muck. Have I sinned, or have I not sinned -- what does Heaven get out of it? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven...."

Memory is an ambiguous energy; it can liberate or enslave, heal or destroy. The use of memory carries with it a responsibility for the future. How we interpret the Holocaust holds serious consequences for the character and morale of our children, not only for the Jewish child but for the non-Jewish child as well. I am, therefore, concerned with the reaction of Jews and non_jews to the revelations of the Holocaust. How effective, how constructive has been our way of relating the atrocity?

I am distressed by two sorts of Jewish reaction to the telling of the tragedy -- both of which compel me to re-examine the method of my instruction. The one reaction I have already mentioned: the passive resignation to the Jewish "schicksal" (fate). Servatius, Eichmann's lawyer, employs it in his exchange with the Jewish historian, Salo Baron: "Do you not believe that irrational factors transcending human understanding are responsible for the fate of the Jewish people?" In the mouth of Dr. Servatius the argument sounds outrageous. But the Jewish acceptance of this "leidensgeschichte" as somehow normal for the Jew is even more unnerving. "My delight in Jewish history," Albert Memmi reveals in his Portrait of a Jew, "has never been more than a gloomy delight, the reminder of an endless succession of disasters, flights, pogroms, emigrations, humiliations, injustices. This is not merely an impression: I have only to open a book of Jewish history, a Dubnow or Graetz. What is called Jewish history is but one long contemplation of Jewish misfortune." To be a Jew is to suffer, and suffering is the badge of Jewish identity. Whether this fatalism is uttered in the name of God or history, it is not the lesson I had hoped to transmit to my people in keeping alive the memory of the Nazi era.

Sometimes the Jew's reaction goes beyond passive acceptance of his "lot"; sometimes he breaks both with his "fate" and with his people. It is a natural enough response to the myth of Jewish fate. It seeks to break the "curse" through passive acts of non-identification. Who wants to inherit the genes of malediction? Therefore, to break the genealogical chain, one may try to change his name, location, appearance, and marry out of the fold of the condemned. And, if the futility of such a flight from fate grows more certain, there are subtler forms of disengagement. We know the phenomenon of the non-sectarian Jew seeking to melt into the anonymity of universal causes, hoping to be lost in the crowd. Universalism, humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism are often the cloaks of protective coloration for this kind of Jew. "Call me man, not Jew," is the strategy, conscious or not, of one who would escape his people's destiny. And while we debate with him the compatibility of Jewish particularism with universalism, we will lose the argument. Fright is impatient with evidence and logic. For it is really not against ethnocentrism that this "emancipated" Jew rails, but against anti-semitism. He will defend the patriotism and self-dependence of non-Jewish nativism, but attack as "chauvinistic" and parochial the same aspirations among his people. His problem is psychological, not ideological.

Yet another form of reaction is found among some Jewish intellectuals. They are drawn to study the Jews with objectivity; they are resolved to analyze the Jews as victims with a disinterest more severe than that applied to the persecutors (one thinks of Hannah Arnedt and Bruno Bettelheim). Their criticism is neither sadistic nor masochistic. It is an attempt by a scientific act od detachment to detach themselves from the leprous circle of the victim. To be objective in analyzing Jews is to see them as objects, not as members of a class to which one belongs.

We know too the mind of those well-positioned Jews who "associate only with Jews who don't associate with Jews". These are the accepted few who think themselves excepted from the ethnic masses. They would dwell on the outer borderline of the circle which embraces the people. Their salvation lies in the discriminate discrimination of the anti-Semite and their frustration in the latter's refusal to draw proper distinctions.

It is tempting to mock these techniques of avoidance. But more important than chastising those who use them is our courage to examine the moral wisdom of our traditional interpretation of our past in terms of its building morale and a will-to-live; a confidence in life and in the future. It may be that we have unintentionally transmitted a morale-breaking pessimism in rehearsing the tragic past alone.

This then is part of our dilemma in knowing how to react to the Nazi catastrophe. We must not declare a moratorium upon the memory of those traumatic years -- but we cannot allow it to crush our morale. We dare not feign amnesia, but how are we to remember without destroying hope?

And how, in this new era of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, are moral educators of all faiths to speak of the atrocity to the general public, let alone to Jews? Are we not in common caught again in a double bind, which accomplishes precisely that which we sought to avoid? Our first temptation may be to condemn the conspiracy of silence which insulated the ghettos and crematoria from the conscience of men, to implicate the nations of the world. For who indeed is guiltless? But consider both the wisdom and morality of such an attack. Consider the psychological principle enunciated in the Talmud: "A man does not condemn himself as wicked"; to which we may add, nor will he normally allow himself to be condemned as such by others. If you violate my image of my self, if you accuse me, I will find a variety of ways to defend my ego. Accused, I may seek a scapegoat, some external cause of justify my guilt of commission or of omission. Or surrounded by mirrors of the Hall of Horror, reflecting fingers of insistent accusation, I may absorb the image inward. Rather than struggle against your verdict of me, I amy adopt it and live up to the reputation you place upon me. It is one form of introjection. I internalize your view of me as mine. Such resignation, however, leads to no constructive repentance, only to a brooding guilt.

Is this mechanism so strange? Is it uncommon in the education of our children? Choose only to point out his failings, his errors, faults, inadequacies, and a child will learn to see himself through your eyes. Consciously or not, he will surrender to your judgment, and it will become his image of himself. Have we not learned the wisdom of praise, even of exaggerated praise of his lesser virtues in the moral training of our young?

The most typical form of defensive reaction against persistent accusation is to cultivate a deaf ear. I am simply not listening. There is no communication. I am safe with my unconscious technique of auditory insulation. Wisdom calls for a moral ontology: how to make one hear the unpleasant truth without destroying his sensitivity to the still, small voice of conscience and hope.

There is yet one added strain placed upon the Jewish leader telling of the holocaust to Jew and non-Jew alike. For Jewish religious disposition favors man with moral competence and freedom; the temper of its theology raises his dignity to heights "but little lower than God Himself." Hebraic literature abounds with analogies of intimacy and interdependence between God and man. God and man are seen as partners, as twin souls, as bride and groom wedded to the redemption of this world. "Man abides in the shadow of the Almighty." A Chasidic comment on this Psalm suggests that this means that God is as man's shadow. When man stoops low, God grows smaller; but when man stands upright, God is lifted on high. "If ye are My witnesses, says God, then I am He, the first One, neither shall any be after Me. But if ye are not My witnesses, I am, as it were, not God." (Pesikta deRav Kahana)

In Jewish tradition, belittling man does not raise the dignity of God. We do not turn toward God by turning our backs upon man. We find no joy in God through the signs of man's depravity. Quite the contrary. In the Hallel praise of God, we confess faithlessness in man to be our sin: "Only in haste did I declare 'all men are deceitful.'" In our faith, God is not elevated by lowering men -- but is Himself thereby reduced.

It is not easy these days to speak for man. It is easier to believe in God than to believe that man is in His image. Our contemporary problem is not with the justification of God's ways but with the justification of man's. Our faith, like that of the prophet, calls for us not to defend God by accusing man, nor to defend man by accusing God -- but "Tava chvod ha-av u'chvod haben", to defend the honor of the father together with the honor of the son.

It is to the moral act of remembering that this paper is dedicated. How are we, as moral educators, to make memory the father of conscience and of constructive repentance? It is not enough to quote biblical, rabbinic or Chassidic texts to sustain our faith in man. Morality needs evidence, hard data, facts in our time and in our place to nourish our faith in man's capacity for decency. Villainy has ample empirical evidence on its side. But in this period of impenetrable darkness, was there no spark of human decency, of human concern? Wasn't there anyone who cared enough to move, to act, to speak out, to help?

There was -- and the full significance of that reality and its potentiality for moral education has been tragically ignored. While yet in its embryonic stages, the evidence steadily mounts of an unknown number of silent heroes who risked their lives and jeopardized the lives of their families to save our people. Beside the significant accounts of Philip Friedman and Kurt Grossman, I have read the letters and heard from Jews who were rescued by non-Jews: atheists, agnostics, Christians, peasants, farmers, businessmen, priests and ministers, women, maid servants. These were human beings who protected, fed and clothed and hid Jews, hiding them in bunkers, attics, cellars, ovens, couches, cowsheds, stables, pigsties, cemetery graves, open fields. These were men and women, some raised in hostile anti-semitic environments, who lived in fear of their informing neighbors and the merciless Nazi hunters. There were people who forged documents, identification papers, visas, who helped Jews escape to freedom, who smuggled small arms to the ghetto fighters.

How do you, hiding Jews, buy provisions for extra mouths to feed without arousing the suspicion of neighbors or the Nazis? How do you find clothing for them or dispose of their refuse without detection? How do you keep a little one from crying -- when every cry means discovery and death? The late Philip Friedman in his pioneering work Their Brother's Keepers, informs us that, in 1946, the Jewish Committee of Bialystok aided one hundred eighty Christian families who were being persecuted by Rightist groups because of their generosity to Jews during the evil time of Hitler. The Polish beggar, Karol Kicinski, bidding good-bye to two Jews he had hidden in his place, pleads with them: "Please don't tell anyone I saved you; I fear for my life."

Alexander Roslan, his wife and daughter, were a Christian Polish family who his a Jewish child, Jacob Gilat, ten years of age, for three terrifying years. When German soldiers searched their home, the Roslans served them wine and whiskey, making them drunk enough to forget the reason for their search. Out of fear of informers, they moved from place to place; and, in moving, hid young Jacob in a divan, a couch which they punctured with holes to help him breathe. At the end of the war, Jacob Gilat was sent to Israel and the Roslan family to a camp for the displaced in Frankfurt, Germany. Twenty years elapsed and all contact between the two had been lost. Last year, Jacob Gilat, now an atomic scientist, was sent to Oak Ridge by the Israeli government to do some research. Here, after endless inquiries, he found the Roslans living in Queens, Long Island. Alexander Roslan and his family cried with pride -- his hidden son, Jacob, had become a leading scientist.

Hermann Graebe lived in San Francisco. As a German civilian contractor, he followed the German forces in Russia building railroads, round-houses and other structures. He learned of a pogrom in Rovno where five thousand people were rounded up and murdered, and he tells of his concern for what his son might one day ask him: "What did you do in that time when people were in danger?" He knew what he had to do then and there to be able to answer his son tomorrow. He requisitioned Jews for work details, and then established an underground escape route fashioned around a fictional branch office in Poltava, in the Ukraine. He was as much in jeopardy as those he rescued.

These are two examples of unnumbered episodes of self-sacrificing rescue behavior. The acts of righteousness I have in mind are not impulsive, solitary gestures, but ones involving commitment over long periods of time and entailing incredible risks. We shall raise the question of the number and the motivation of these acts later. For the moment, I wish only to point out that in every country contaminated by the Nazis, there were events of such godliness to be found. The philosopher Woodbridge wrote, "There are times when a man ought to be more afraid of living than of dying." Some of these heroes possessed the heroism of that fear.

But how does this knowledge help us? How can this knowledge contribute to the moral repair of man, Jew and non-Jew? For the Jew who feels the mandate to recount the Holocaust years to his child, the record of non-Jewish self-sacrifices is of utmost importance. The acts of these "hasidai umot ha-olam", these righteous non-Jews, lend a needed dimension to the revelations of atrocity. The purpose of the telling is neither to sadden, nor frighten, nor embitter the young, but to strengthen them with a mature understanding of man: his limitations and his potentialities. The tale of barbarism should not end there. The child and his parents must come to know the names and faces of these valiant non-Jews. Both the child and his parents are susceptible to the mythic curse of an eternal hatred for an eternal people, and I would break the malediction with the acts of righteousness. There is no sweeping disjunction in the world -- "them and us" -- us against the whole world. Gentile is not a synonym for German; nor, as the late president of Israel, Ben Zvi, taught, is German synonymous with Nazi.

It is not alone for the sake of history, but for morality and for morale, that I refrain from painting the past in colors of black and white. We must make use of history to restore a sense of balance: there is a moral symmetry in man. Memory can be a healing art but it requires skillful uses of materials at hand. On the festival eve of Passover, we eat the bitter taste of the "maror" herbs but we touch it with the sweet mixture of "haroses". The hard bread of affliction is not avoided but made at once more palatable and more meaningful when accompanied by the wine which maketh the heart of man to rejoice.

For the non-Jew, knowledge of the conduct and behavior of his contemporaries who rescued is equally vital. He who may be deaf to the sound of accusation or to the awesome noise of villainy is more apt to pay attention to the voice of heroism. He will be justifiably proud of such nobility of character in rescue behavior as we are proud of Jewish heroism. He may even seek to identify himself with such heroes and such acts. Once that happens, significant interplay will be noted. Once he acknowledges the existence of heroism, he must admit to the existence of atrocity. There is no hero without a villain. The evidence of moral heroism may render more receptive minds shut tight to condemnation. "Open for me a door the size of a needle and I will broaden it so that carriages can go through." (T. Berachoth)

The world is hungry for moral heroes. For it has seen strength in villains alone. The world needs heroes of flesh and blood, human heroes of our time and in our circumstance, not of an ancient period remote from us. The world needs heroes whose altruism is lived out in action; models of exemplary behavior who realize our abstract ideals, human beings to be emulated.

But will these discoveries and documentation of heroic episodes not serve to exonerate the guilt of those who stood idly by? Will it not function as an apologia for acquiescence to evil? Quite the contrary. By their risks of life and limb, these rescuers offer the most persuasive refutation of those who hide behind the "I-was-just-a-cog-in-the-wheel" argument. Here is not theoretical preaching or hypothetical morality but hard evidence of real acts. There was and always is an alternative to passive complicity with evil. Here are case histories of human beings who could find ample rationale to avert their eyes and plead impotence but who could not live the lie.

Wisdom, faith and truth urge our search to know, record and hallow these acts of the righteous. Which code of ethics argues that evil be allowed to eclipse the good? Which perverse logic holds that we obliterate the memory of man's nobility so as to preserve the memory of his degeneracy? In unearthing the crimes of villainy, the virtues of humanity must not be buried.

Do the number of non-Jewish heroes involved in such rescue behavior during the Nazi period warrant such documentation and study? No one knows or will ever know the extent of rescue activity of this nature unless the search is made. Altruism, courage, moral heroism are, by definition, rare. For the sake of thirty six righteous the world is sustained; for the sake of thirty righteous non-Jews, the Talmud declares, the nations of the world continue to exist; for the sake of ten good men, Sodom and Gomorrah would be spared; for the sake of two righteous women -- Naomi and Ruth -- the Rabbis say the nations of Moab and Ammon were spared. Who measures righteousness by number?

What of the purity of the motives? Do we know the motivations of the altruistic personality? The behavioral sciences have long studied the bigot, the twisted soul filled with hostility, the authoritarian personality, the anti-Semite, anti-Negro, anti-Catholic. But no comparable empirical study has been done for the altruistic personality. And what a tragic oversight! In study of rescue behavior lies a unique opportunity to understand the altruistic conscience expressed in action in every European country contaminated by Nazi conquest. What factors -- psychological, social, political, economic, moral, religious -- entered into the making of their self-sacrificing decisions? Is there a typology of the altruistic personality to be discovered here? Who knows, a priori, what mine of information about human relationships may be found by such a study? And who knows what material such an inter-disciplinary scientific investigation can furnish moral educators, theologians, writers and artists concerned with the creation of a new moral atmosphere in which men can live? What knowledge can be derived from such a scientific investigation for the training of moral character and the transmission of positive moral traits?

But the question of the motivations of altruistic behavior conceals a secondary query: Why, indeed, need such a study of altruistic behavior be justified in the first place? Why is evil behavior considered legitimate for scientific study and not benevolent conduct? I suggest that its omission is, consciously or not, an inheritance of the bias against man, a bias whose roots are found in many traditions -- among the Greek sophists (e.g. Callicles, Thrasymachus); in the Augustinian view of man "foul and crooked, sordid, bespotted and ulcerous"; in the counsel of Machiavelli; in the suspicion of Hobbes to whom man in his natural state remains "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short..."; in the savage optimism of Nietzsche and in the chronic pessimism of Schopenhauer.

In more recent times, it is Freud to whom appeal is made for this pessimistic account of man's essential nature. For while there are many moods in Freud, theologians and philosophers have seized hold of his grim side as supporting "a secular view of the inevitability of the egoistic corruptions of creativity" (Niebuhr) or as re-enforcing the "Jewish-Christian conviction of the dubiousness of all human virtue and the ambiguity of all human achievements" (Will Herberg). In Freud's genetic thinking, the predatory origins of man's personality are taken as truly natural, native instincts while all benevolence is contrived and artificial. In his Civilization and its Discontents he writes, "The bit of truth behind all this -- one so eagerly denied -- is that men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love...but that a powerful desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. The result is that their neighbor is to them not only a possible helper or sexual object, but also a temptation to them to gratify their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without recompense, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus -- who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history?"

According to Freud, hostile and aggressive behavior flow from man's natural instincts; love, compassion, self-sacrifice, altruism are so many masks of repression, forms of cultural hypocrisy. All moral aspirations are regarded a s duplicitous diversions of the original instincts of man. Those who wish to draw moral conclusion from this Freudian analysis employ a genetic fallacy: the chronologically earlier features of man are regarded as revealing his true nature. But we believe that the line between nature and "second nature" is wrongly drawn when the social character of man's being is rendered out of bounds of his real nature. It is as if we are shown a snapshot of a baby and then are informed that "this is the man", this and no more. This sort of interpretation of Freud, carried into the field of morality, introduces a gratuitous suspicion of his very generous impulse. Scratch and altruistic act and you will find lurking there a coarse and base motive. But this bias is as legitimate as its converse form: Scratch an evil act and you will soon find love frustrated as its motive. Both are reductive fallacies which seek one monolithic cause for all the varieties of human behavior.

Both the metapsychology of pessimism and of optimism err alike by obliterating real, moral distinctions. A totalitarian egoism allows no intelligible opposite to selfish acts. Saint and sinner -- Ann Simiate, the rescuer and Eichmann, the hunter -- are ultimately of one ilk. An omnivorous altruism may similarly destroy all distinctions of right and wrong, assimilating every act into one basic core of motivation. Egoism and altruism are not contradictories, though they are intelligible opposites.

We need a study of the altruistic personality. It need not deny that motives are mixed, that egoistic and altruistic acts and motives may prove quite compatible.

As Hume observed in criticism of Hobbes' "odious and malignant philosophy": "Where is the difficulty in conceiving, that...from the original frame of our temper, we may feel a desire for another's happiness or good which, by means of that affection, becomes our own good and is afterwards pursued, from the combined motives of benevolence and self-enjoyment?" Hillel, in his brilliant aphorism grasped the import of man's ambidextrous ego: "If I am not for myself" co-exists with "but if I am for myself alone, what am I?"

The study of rescue behavior in the Nazi era confronts us with prima facie acts of altruism: overt, public conduct in the face of great risks. It should be examined without bias. And no matter what the results, moral educators will be provided with knowledge of human behavior which can only help them in their efforts to cultivate the moral character of man. Moral educators of all faiths will profit.

One of the rabbinic sages teaches that "any affliction in which Israel and the nations of the world are partners is a genuine affliction." The despair with man is a universal pathology crippling every effort to rehabilitate traumatized conscience. Hitler has taken the heart out of man. Zarathrustra announced God's death; and the Nazi, that man is dead. Both heresies must be overcome with evidence of the divine viability in our lives. We who are caught "wandering between tow worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born" are called upon to give the breath of hope to a new life.

It is not strange at all that Jews should be concerned with lifting up the lot of all men. For we believe that the particularism of Judaism not only proves itself compatible with the ideal of universalism but that it is from out of the intense and concrete matrix of our own people's experience that we are energized to think the pray and act for man. We are today called upon to tap the moral energy of Judaism for the sake of the world. We, who know man's capacity to destroy, bear witness to his capacity to save; we, who know the sadness of the disillusioned heart, know too that man must struggle to overcome that melancholy with himself. We, who have seen such horror, have in the darkness caught a glimpse of man's humanity.

Tikun olam, the improvement of this world, expresses the theistic humanism and activism of our tradition. As men and women of faith, we cannot enjoy the luxury of passive judgment upon history. We are not cameras recording the past. We are children of prophets, creating conditions for a better future. We are not slaves of history. We use history to break the bonds of historic fatalism. With moral perception, we select and assign moral weight upon events which may be lost in the record of quantitative history. For our faith is not in what has happened, but in what may yet be. We approach our task with no simplistic innocence but with the temper of mature meliorism. The moral imagination of man can be excited. For man is both creature and creator. He can help change the world and himself as well.

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