Focus on Issues and then There Are None

The Jewish people faces a calamitous situation brought on not by its traditional enemies but by a segment within Jewry itself which divides the world first into "them" and "us" and invariably rejects "them" and ends with "us" alone.

This "dichotomous thinking", as Rabbi Harold Schulweis termed it, is dangerous because "it will rip us apart until there is only the solipsistic cult of one."

The consequence of "the acrimony, the biting rhetoric, the incivility that threatens the delegitimation of persons, the disenfranchisement of movements" was sounded by Schulweis, the spiritual leader of Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles, at the 55th General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations.

Addressing a plenary session of the GA, which was attended by more than 3,000 Jewish communal leaders from North America and abroad, Schulweis, who was the scholar-in-residence at he GA which ended Sunday, pinpointed the source of the "dichotomous thinking" as the "anger in us: a cumulative anger which has broken loose of its traditional constraints, a long-festering rage against Jewish impotence which has reached its breaking point; a resentment not against specific targets but generalized against a whole range of things. The anger, long repressed, strikes out against any accessible target, including ourselves."

‘MASSIVE PSYCHIC TRAUMA’

Focusing on this anger, Schulweis observed that it has been engendered by a world which has brutally terrorized and relentlessly assaulted Jews to a point where it has produced a "massive psychic trauma." The twin elements in the traumatic process are the Holocaust and the betrayal and abandonment of the Jews by the world at large in the time of their greatest need.

"Now, forty years after the volcanic earthquake that shook the foundation of Jewish trust, the tremblors continue to explode," Schulweis said.

"But now they reveal more than Nazi-fascist atrocity. In recent years, documents record the betrayal of allies, the callousness, the abandonment of the Jews by prelates, princes, presidents; by putative allies in Foreign Offices, Parliaments, Congress — even by the ‘great Jewish hope’ of those years, the apotheosis of non-Jewish friendship, Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

WESTERN CIVILIZATION AS THE CULPRIT

Jewish anger, Schulweis continued, "spreads out not only against Nazism or fascism. Post-Holocaust anger is against the whole of Western civilization–liberalism, rationalism, universalism, pluralism, humanism, democracy, the gods that failed at Auschwitz."

Gentile history has bequeathed to the Jewish people "blood libel," "ghetto" "pogrom," "deicide" and "genocide," he observed. And the Jewish response by some Jews to Western civilization, Schulweis said, is: "We have nothing to learn from you and your ethos. How dare you lecture to us about morality, freedom of conscience, the treatment of minorities, the mandate of pluralism — after Dachau, after Treblinka, after the White Paper, after the Bermuda Conference, after the Struma and the St. Louis? After Buchenwald and Birkenau, Western civilization has forfeited all claims to moral credibility. We are exempt from your hypocritical double standards for us."

‘DENOMINATIONAL APARTHEID’

More and more Jews view Westernization as betrayal and those who accept its values as collaborators in the destruction of Judaic tradition, Schulweis said. This leads to exclusivism of "them" versus "us" and is eventually internalized as "some of us." But which "some" now begins to fester as suspicion of fellow Jews who do not adhere to the cultist "us."

Schulweis pointed out that this erosive and corrosive process leads Hebrew schools, yeshivot, day schools, summer camps, youth programs, nurseries and toddler programs to be denominationally segregated. The denominations do not fraternize, he noted.

"They do not sing, or dance or play and certainly do not pray together," he said. The denominations claim common festivals and fasts but do not celebrate them in common. The end result, Schulweis declared, is "denominational apartheid."

Jewish anger has its place if it is a catharsis to unite, he said. But excessive and obsessive anger threatens to tear the Jewish people apart. Finding the proper target for anger mobilizes psychic and physical energies to combat the forces which menace and threaten the survival of the Jewish people. But generalized anger, indiscriminate anger is impotence turned inward against "some of us." It leads to the abandonment of the world and to self-proclaimed cultist purity, Schulweis declared.

This, however, he said, is a sterile form of existence. "How we define ourselves and others, whom we include and exclude, with whom we choose to relate and whom we choose to ignore, determines our agenda and our future," he said. "The post-Holocaust question before us is not who is a Jew or who is a rabbi or who is my neighbor or who is my brother or sister, but what shall be the character of Judaism."

To live in the world "is to live in a multiethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious universe. To live with Egyptians and Syrians, with Blacks and Chicanos. The world is our place, even as God is the place of the world," Schulweis said. To be engaged in the world "means to related to non-Jews — Christians, Moslems, gentiles, nations, churches — and with a vision and wisdom to turn a new leaf in Jewish history."

CHANGES IN ATTITUDES

There are changes in attitudes, statements and conciliar declarations of the churches and "We must take advantage of these changes." he stated. "Something new is happening among leading theologians… We and our children must read and hear new voices in old institutions."

Schulweis referred to the churches’ position on the conversion of the Jews, the understanding of the spiritual and emotional meaning of Israel, the internal questioning of Christian prejudices, the change of teaching texts in Christian schools, the respect and relevance of Jewish tradition and contemporaneity.

"I am more interested in the changing attitudes and teachings of the churches’ contemporary leaders than in their ancestors’ failings; more in the churches’ descendants than in the churches’ ancestors…I am more interested in gaining new friends than in fixating on old enemies," he said.

Schulweis said that for too long a time Jews have spoken about "the conspiracy of evil." It is now time to begin speaking about "the conspiracy of good."

In an impassioned plea to the assembled Jewish leaders at the General Assembly, Schulweis called attention to "a muted part of contemporary Jewish history," to the "tragic neglect of uncounted, unknown, unsung, unbefriended gentiles who risked their lives and the lives of their families to shelter, feed and protect our hounded people during the Nazi era."

Schulweis referred to "zechor," the Jewish imperative to remember. This imperative, he pointed out, refers not only to the evil but also to the good. It is not fair that the goodness of the gentiles who helped be forgotten, he said.

"We properly hunt down the predatory criminals and their collaborators and bring them to the bar of justice. We need — our people needs — a Simon Wiesenthal to search out the rescuers, record their lives in our history, help them and raise them to high honor."

He pointed out that few young Jews know about the Christian families who hid Anne Frank; the heroism of Mother Maria of Paris, Father Bernard Lichtenberg, and the villagers of Le Chambon who were responsible for the rescue of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied France; the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who refused to deport Jews to the Nazis; the Portuguese Consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes who saved thousands of Jews from death and deportation; the Italian army’s rescue of thousands of Croatian and Yugoslav Jews; and the sewer workers of Lvov who protected 17 Jews for 14 months living in the sewers of Lvov, infested with vermin, rats and cold.

Why, Schulweis declared, "should Jewish children know only the killer of the dream and not the heart and hand of gentile rescuers?" Knowing this, he concluded, would permit mercy to control anger and offer a more hopeful vision and heritage to the next generation.