NJ Jewish News | Shoa remembrance: Culture of life, or cult of death?

by Ahad La’am
the pen name of a Jewish and Zionist thinker who writes from the Arava Desert. This column is reprinted with permission from the April 2006 issue of Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility.

The column is underwritten by a grant from the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture. A response to this article appears in the Editor's Column.

The essence of the Jewish people is the embodiment of the value of life wrapped in the tallit of hope. The enemies of the idea of an ethical God, and the enemies of the Jewish people, are those individuals, groups, countries, and civilizations whose ideas and actions deny human dignity and serve a cult of death. In seeking to affirm the value of memory around the Shoa, the Jewish people have crossed inadvertently over the line separating life-affirming civilizations from cults of death.

From the very beginning, our spiritual DNA was encoded to affirm life. Abraham, the first Jew, challenged God’s morality and sense of justice in seeking amnesty for Sodom and Gomorrah. Later he played chicken with God over child sacrifice. The tension of their partnership drew a line in history that child sacrifice is a moral crime. Our ability to confront this moral crossroads in history and either choose life or help others choose life was stitched into the fabric of our people’s mission.

After our Exodus from Egypt, God is explicit: Our priests may not touch the dead (Leviticus 21:1-4), for we are a civilization of life in contradistinction to the priests in Egypt, who serviced death. Rabbi David Gedzelman teaches that the Jewish people are the “anti-Egypt.” Indeed, we are the antidote to cults of death in every generation — which is why, in part, we have been despised by some of the most morally despicable elements in history.

Yet the most powerful and pervasive message today’s Jewish world sends to the next generation is that we are obsessed with death, not life. The world’s failure to understand the dangers of silence and inaction — witness Darfur — is not adequate justification for the unhealthy reliance on the Holocaust to fill the vacuum in Jewish values and mission education for our children. We have taught our children hauntingly well to peer into the pits of Gehenna again and again while denying them the gift of learning to gaze upwards and dream Jewishly. Before Abraham had the chutzpa to challenge God, he was taken outside of his tent to marvel at the lights in the heavens and the optimism those lights represented for the future of the Jewish people.

In studies of unaffiliated Jewish teens, the Holocaust is the leading point of reference for their Jewish identities. There are more Jewish young adult books on the Shoa than on any other topic. Yes, remembrance is a Jewish value. But Jewish education has universally failed to develop and distribute a more emotionally evocative set of messages and materials that build identity and teach values without focusing on those relating to the Shoa.

Yad Vashem’s education director recently told a gathering of Kol Dor, a New York-based social action group, about plans to not only distribute Shoa materials for Yom Hashoa, but to Holocaustize Jewish holidays and life-cycle ceremonies for children. They want to transform Judaism’s key moments of life affirmation for the next generation into extensions of obsession with death. This must be rejected.

Jewish groups should refrain from visiting centers that focus on death until we reestablish a proper equilibrium that replaces the narrative of death with a living narrative of Jewish values and visions. Jewish tradition teaches that the study of Kabala should not begin until the age of 40 so that an individual will first be grounded in the main holy books of our people. Such should be the model with learning about the Holocaust. Only after a better and longer grounding in Jewish values and community should our children be exposed in Jewish educational settings to this terrible moment in our history.

The general public’s appetite for more materials about the Shoa — which the world needs until it finally internalizes the dangers of apathy — fuels the acceptability of the Shoa as a defining aspect of being Jewish. Yet we must stand against this rising tide; we must be countercultural and reject the distortion of our people’s values that empowers the Shoa narrative to displace the Exodus and Sinai narratives.

Yom Hashoa should be the day when we commemorate the Shoa and do so tactfully and in age-appropriate ways. We should then teach our children to turn their gaze upward, away from the Holocaust, and live joyful, enriched, value-based, mission-oriented, full, and diverse Jewish lives. It is the only true victory over Pharaoh and the tyrants who followed him in our 4,000-year history. We need a moratorium on Shoa education, on new Shoa exhibits and museums, and we must scale back what already exists in order to make room for the true essence of Judaism and the Jewish people to shine.