Purim Blues: Why Using Anti-Semitism to Inspire Jewish Identity is a Bad Idea

By Dr. Elliott Malamet

As the old--and by now endlessly recycled--joke would have it, the essence of Jewish history in one sentence is “They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat.” But increasingly in the last fifty years, Jewish education and communal priority has taken the joke to heart. Vast amounts of money and energy are focused on the bad news message - that we were hated and murdered in the Holocaust and through other monstrous acts of anti-Semitism. This is true to be sure, but it is a whole other story as to whether that means that a person should care about being or marrying Jewish and, even further, practicing Judaism. Is Jewish suffering a meaningful rationale for Jewish continuity? Read on…

“I do not think that Judaism can be given a new hold on life by means of Auschwitz… There is no salvation to be extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can be revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can be found in it.” Prof. Michael Wyschogrod, "Faith and the Holocaust".

The scholar Yaffa Eliach, in 1979, stated that American Jews had discovered the 'vast educational and financial potential of the Holocaust'. It was, she said, 'an instant Judaizer, shocking people back into their Jewishness. ... One may sadly reflect that 'there is no business like Shoah business.'" Eliach’s gruesome pun reflects an ongoing truth of the last number of years. The onset of the Purim holiday reminds us that a great deal of the way Jewish education is packaged today seems to revolve around the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in general. Almost as a last resort to lure disaffected Jews back from the brink of total assimilation when all other methods fail, we incessantly play the anti-Semitism card. This can lead to some very unfortunate consequences, as many Jews have come to define their identities more around the persecutions of Jewish history than the inspiration of Judaism itself. In the vast majority of cases, children do not grow up to light Shabbat candles or pray to God because they were taught that Hitler wanted to exterminate us. 

We brought some of the fundamental principles of morality to the world: The Ten Commandments; love your neighbour; do not oppress the stranger, all human beings are made in the image of God. We brought do not hate your brother in your heart; do not revenge yourself on your neighbour or hold a grudge. But at times, if one were to gauge the Jewish message by scanning our museums; trips; newspaper articles; our gala evenings and our communal gatherings, one might think that we are utterly defined by the remembrance of the Holocaust and the spectre of Anti-Semitism.

To dispense with the obvious - anti-Semitism exists and needs to be dealt with strongly and effectively wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head. But as an educational tactic meant to keep Jewish continuity thriving in the long run, I think it is a major mistake.  

Is there something to be learned from suffering? I don’t think there are objective answers to this. One popular response came from Professor Emil Fackenheim, who put forward a credo that became almost a mantra of Jewish continuity several decades ago: “We are, first, commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. We are commanded, secondly, to remember in our very guts and bones the martyrs of the Holocaust, lest their memory perish. We are forbidden, thirdly, to deny or despair of God, however much we may have to contend with him or with belief in him, lest Judaism perish. We are forbidden, finally, to despair of the world as the place which is to become the kingdom of God, lest we help make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories.”

I cannot conceive of a more wrongheaded means to create Jewish identity than Fackenheim’s so-called 614th Commandment. “Do not hand Hitler any posthumous victories” was a rallying cry linking Jewish assimilation and intermarriage directly to post-Holocaust guilt. After Auschwitz, one is commanded to maintain Jewish tradition and marry within the fold so as not to trivialize the sacrifice of six million martyrs or ironically help Hitler “finish the job” that he had started. Despite the initial appeal of Fackenheim’s concept, which exercised many people in the 60's and 70's, one cannot forge a continuous and positive Jewish identity simply as a refutation of heinous anti-Semitism. (Or as a secular student of mine once remarked, “the Holocaust makes me anti-Nazi, not pro-halacha.”)

Fortunately, there were articulate responses that drew out the inherent weakness of Fackenheim’s pitch for Jewish commitment. One such rejoinder came from R. Jonathan Sacks: “The Holocaust did not make Jewish survival a mitzvah. In the holocaust, for example, gypsies too were singled out, but that did not make it a command to be a gypsy. We can imagine a hypothetical Hitler who decreed a final solution against homosexuals, but that would not of itself sanctify homosexuality. Jewish survival has religious significance after the holocaust only because it had significance before the holocaust.”

The novelist Philip Roth once portrayed Jews as "people who are not what anti-Semites say they are." This playful definition captures something true about the current state of Jewish self-perception. Many of us, in loud aggressive tones, can tell you what we are not. But identity through negation, that is to say, "well I'm not like those Orthodox Jews, who are out of step with modernity" does not impart what kind of positive Jewish construction one has made in one's own life. And the reverse is equally true: to say "I'm not like those Reform Jews who dilute and destroy Judaism," again fails to articulate a coherent and relevant message about why Judaism is important for Jews of all ages at all times. So instead of character, we have caricature.

In Through the Looking Glass, the King asks Alice to look down the road and relate what she can see. "I see nobody on the road," Alice admits, to which the king ruefully replies, "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too?" In the Lewis Carroll world of contemporary Judaism, we cannot afford to construct our identities on the perceived void in someone else's Jewishness.

I do not mean to smugly suggest that there are easily available solutions to the dilemma or igniting our kids’ passion for Torah. On the contrary, it is a difficulty that is almost intractable. The attempt to break free from ancient codes of morality has given contemporary human beings a sense of liberation, but has also left us feeling profoundly confused as to our identities and lacking the comfort of traditional religious guidelines which, although rigorous and even punitive, provided certainty and a sense of belonging.

But just because this is a difficult issue does not mean we should shy away from it. I do not believe that the goal of a Jewish education is to “make kids feel comfortable with Judaism” at all costs. I do not set out to make kids uncomfortable, but I prefer a thoughtful uncomfortability to a happy passivity. As the philosopher Allan Bloom argues, "no real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice."

And it is tough to do that. These days, the idea of making any student unsettled—because of the simple fact that contrary ideas challenge our built-in comfort zones—is too often anathema in today’s educational universe. The plan is to “facilitate” and to “interact”, make sure that students are “at ease”, and “not stressed”. Avoid conflict, do not go down the road to confrontation. In a way, do anything but teach. And while I’m all for “progress” and “happiness”-can one say one is against these things?—there is a heavy price to pay for real growth if all interactions have to be comfortable. I can feel a certain irritation rising in consonance with my fear of offending. Why does everything have to be cozy?

Professor Mark Edmundson puts this very well in the Prologue to his memoir, Teacher, where he remarks on how cherished is the “Mr. Chips-Robin Williams myth” of the infinitely kind teacher, the one who knows everyone’s name and is a source of constant benevolence and “most of all he adores—and is adored by--his students.” But, as Edmundson also points out, “our mythologies make us forget that the great teacher is not always a bringer of sweetness and light...a great teacher is not necessarily a friend…He can be a spiritual antagonist and a goad as much as an ally.”

Naturally a hybrid of all of these qualities within one teacher would be desirable, but Edmundson’s remarks focus us in on a fundamental dimension of education, and certainly the communication of Judaism. Comfort may be a yearned for state amid the stresses of Western living, but it is the enemy of real learning because it works against what should be the ultimate telos of all teaching: transformation.

Good education works against comfort; it seeks to unravel buried ideas and challenge accepted dogmas. It cannot let the student rest happily if such tranquillity comes at the price of examining where the truth may lie and whether such truth can aid in reconstructing one’s purpose and path in life.

Instead of the challenge of real spiritual engagement, we too often reach for themes and messages to which no one could object, but which in many ways are a dead end. If our best pitch to the new generation is that the Holocaust and anti-Semitism are bad, “and don’t you forget it”—after all, would anyone ever deny this?—but with no further clue as to why one should actually want to practice Judaism, then we are on the slow road to nowhere. It is time to stress the positive in Judaism and Jewishness, and why immersion in a Jewish way of living can actually create the elusive element for which we all search - a life of meaning and purpose. As William Wordsworth so eloquently argued in Lyrical Ballads: ““What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how; instruct them how the mind of man becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.”