Menachem Mirski
Thoughts on Parashat Re’eh
11 years ago, in the second year of my doctoral studies in philosophy, during the early stage of writing my dissertation (which concerned Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust) I decided to spend several months studying the history of Western antisemitism as well as another several months studying the reality of the concentration and extermination camps. Almost every day I read books by Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Ellie Wiesel as well as other writers who thoroughly and vividly described the most horrible and terrifying nightmare that humanity has ever seen.
It wasn’t easy to read these books and then to work on weekends as a hazzan and lead the entire community of Beit Warszawa in prayer. Well, yes, just to recall everything I did over the week – mostly readings about the death camps – and then to lead the people in V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha, MiChamocha? Or any other Jewish prayer, still having in mind the images of children burned alive or men and women starved to death? How can you have proper kavanah in that context? Or even, to whom are you going to pray?
Interestingly, spiritual help came soon. First, I got more acquainted with Mordechai Kaplan’s philosophy and theology, which spoke to me profoundly at that time. Even if God is just a projection of human ideals and an ordering force of the universe that helps us achieve them – that means something. That’s enough to believe that our Jewish religious practices are meaningful and worth being involved in. That’s enough to have kavanah. Around the same time I met with Rabbi Allen Maller who once, during our High Holidays’ services in Poland said: We Jews believe in One God – at the most. It really corresponded to the fact that around half of Jewish Israelis were declaring themselves agnostics or atheists at that time, which I learned during one of the seminars in Jerusalem I attended a year before. Then, reading the Hebrew Bible I encountered Deuteronomy 11:26-28, which happen to be the verses of our parasha for this week:
See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of your God that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.
These verses resonated with me throughout all the years of my PhD program. That was because they are at the core of Jewish theodicy (a theological defense of God) and a basis for the argument that it is human free will that is a primary cause of evil in the world. And because these verses speak about fundamental human responsibility for everything that happens around us, both good and evil, this led me to the conclusion that the more power we, human beings, obtain, the more responsibility is put on our shoulders instead of the Divine ones. God, like a good parent, gives us instructions to follow and controls us only until we, as humanity, become ‘adults’. If we violate these instructions, we are cursed, which, translated into modern language, means that first our culture, and then our society, is sinking into gradual decay. Following the instructions, however, empowers us and our societies over time, makes our societies more just, and therefore less prone to evil. This philosophy, in my opinion, is one of the answers to the Divine silence during the time of the Shoah, especially if it’s all understood collectively, namely, we all – Jews and non-Jews alike – partake in this whole human-Divine venture of following the Divine instructions. From this point we are very close to what the Lubavitcher Rebbe said once about the Holocaust:
To those who argue that the Holocaust disproves the existence of G‑d or His providence over our lives, the Rebbe said: On the contrary — the Holocaust has decisively disproven any possible faith in a human-based morality. In pre-war Europe, it was the German people who epitomized culture, scientific advance and philosophic morality. And these very same people perpetrated the most vile atrocities known to human history! If nothing else, the Holocaust has taught us that a moral and civilized existence is possible only through the belief in and the acceptance of the Divine authority.
But my point is not to delve into the depths of evil and horror in the human world, or to argue about whose response to it is correct, especially since I promised to take a little break from it. 🙂Thus, the positive thing is that: Judaism doesn’t have one single theology, nor vision of the afterlife, that we all must believe in, and that’s a great blessing for us. To make all our religious practices meaningful it is enough to believe that there is one, ideal system of justice for all human beings and there is wisdom that helps us to implement this system; and it is all contained in the Torah. What fundamentally unites us is not our beliefs, but our religious rituals. We have the entire spectrum of theological beliefs, from agnosticism to traditional theism, and we need to have all of these answers. Why? So that each one of us can relate to the Eternal Source of Life in their own way, differently at different stages of our lives, depending on our life experience and understanding of the world.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Menachem Mirski
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