Mati Kirschenbaum
A large part of this week’s Torah portion, parashat Tazria-Metzora, deals with ways of diagnosing tzaraat, a disease which makes people, garments and houses ritually unclean. I have a hard time linking this section of the Torah to our modern-day life – at times it seems as though one was leafing through an ancient atlas of skin diseases. On this Shabbat, which falls on April 13th/14th (29th Nissan) I find it especially difficult to understand why a skin disease should serve as grounds to temporary exclude someone from the community. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – on this Shabbat which falls between Yom HaShoah – the Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day (April 12th/Nissan 27th) and the anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19th) I’m more inclined to think of the camp numbers tattooed on people’s skin, which were intended to strip the prisoners of Katzets not only of their place within society, but also to deprive them of their humanity. I also ask myself how did the murderers view the Eternal as they gave themselves the right first to discriminate against, then to isolate, and finally to murder those who were different from them. I am afraid that their understanding of the Eternal could have been influenced by certain Biblical verses, which – if read literally – seem to give readers the right to treat others with cruelty.
When it comes to murdering Jews – who were perceived as the perennial and invariable enemy of the German people – the Nazi perpetrators could have found inspiration in passages such as the one in I Samuel 15:2-3, where the Israelites are encouraged to slaughter an entire nation in revenge for an atrocity committed by the ancestors of that people four hundred years earlier:
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“I am exacting the penalty for what Amalek did to Israel, for the assault he made upon them on the road, on their way up from Egypt. Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”[/perfectpullquote]
The concept of the necessity to secure Lebensraum at the expense of other nations, whose inferior cultures were perceived as a moral and political threat, can be found in Deuteronomy 20:16-17,
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“In the towns of the latter peoples, however, which the [Eternal] your God is giving you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive. No, you must proscribe them — the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites — as the [Eternal] your God has commanded you.”[/perfectpullquote]
And a Biblical justification for persecuting homosexuals in the Third Reich could have been derived from a passage in Leviticus 20:13,
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death — their bloodguilt is upon them.”[/perfectpullquote]
In our tradition all the above mentioned verses have been interpreted from a standpoint emphasizing the need of ancient Israelites to protect their own beliefs from foreign cultural influences. Modern-day Rabbis, including those representing Orthodox Judaism, tend to narrow down their interpretation of such verses, claiming for example that the command to slaughter other nations applied only to our nation’s past – to times when all of humanity was at a different level of development. Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, the first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi in the British Mandate of Palestine, can serve as an example of such a stance, insofar as he opposed resorting to violence in the process of establishing Jewish settlements in Palestine.
Unfortunately, sometimes these verses have been understood in a different way. Both early Christians as well as Muslims had interpreted the passages referring to the so called “Curse of Ham” (whose descendants – the Canaanites – were supposed to be servants of the descendants of Shem and Japheth) as a justification for the enslavement of black Americans. In medieval and early modern Europe the above mentioned verses were used to legitimize serfdom, whereas in America they provided a theological justification for slavery. In modern times the Dutch Reform Church in South Africa treated them as a theological legitimization of the apartheid system. Even today evangelical Christians in Africa use the verse from Leviticus to justify the persecution of homosexuals.
At this point you might ask: Why should we be held responsible for how others choose to exploit passages from our Holy Scriptures? And of course you’d be right to express such doubts – we are not responsible for their actions. However, as Jews we have the responsibility to perpetuate the memory about Shoah and we fulfill this obligation by organizing ceremonies commemorating its victims. These ceremonies play an important role in the life of our community and they are viewed as essential by all those who ascribe fundamental importance to the concept of universal humanity and human rights. Unfortunately, not all the members of our society embrace these values. Moreover, some of them are actively undermining these ideas, viewing the discrimination and oppression of minorities as justified from a social, political and theological perspective. We must oppose such voices in order to prevent a repetition of the traumatic experiences of Shoah.
Therefore on this Shabbat, in the week which falls between the Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day and the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, I encourage you to think of how you could commemorate the victims of Shoah everyday by undertaking actions aimed at ensuring that this horrific experience shall never happen again. I wish you all a peaceful, reflective Shabbat. Shabbat Shalom!
Translated from Polish by: Marzena Szymańska-Błotnicka
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