Auschwitz revisited

In the week we have been commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz I have been trying to understand why I am so weary and wary of the Holocaust. Despite the undoubted emotional pull of the survivors' testimonies, is there any lasting meaning be found in the ashes at Auschwitz? Should it even be looked for?

I didn't always feel this way.

We recently moved house and a few weeks ago my older son and I were unpacking boxes of books and finding new homes for them. I noticed just how much reading I had done on the subject of the Holocaust, mostly more than twenty years ago.

I had straight histories like 'The War Against the Jews' by Lucy Dawidowicz and 'Holocaust' by Martin Gilbert. I'd read 'Last Waltz in Vienna' by George Clare, Elie Wiesel's 'Night', 'Europa, Europa' by Solomon Perel and Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man', and 'The Drowned and the Saved'. There were Art Spiegelman's graphic novels 'Maus', where Nazis and Jews become cats and mice. Ghetto accounts such as 'A Cup of Tears' by Abraham Lewin and Marek Edelman's 'The Ghetto Fights'. I remembered being completely absorbed by Theo Richmond's detailed account of the destruction of one tiny shtetl village 'Konin'. I had the complete transcript of Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah. Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the 1950s. And of course, Anne Frank's diary, the fully annotated critical edition.

My reading had been a search for meaning - historical, political and theological. I had been trying to make sense of something I knew was shaping my adult Jewish identity.

Last weekend I visited my 88 year old father and asked him to recall for me the visit he made to Auschwitz in the late 1960s while on a business trip to Poland. Perhaps his account could restore my faith in the possibility of finding a purpose in the week's commemorations beyond honouring the memory of the dead.

My father's visit to the death camp took place in a very different world from today. For the first two decades after the war the mood had been for moving on, for forgetting not remembering. The Holocaust was very far from being the defining event of the Second World War it has now become.

While he was on his trip, my father and three work colleagues found themselves with time on their hands when a public holiday was announced to coincide with a Soviet Russian State visit. Their local client, the factory manager of a smelt works in Katowice, suggested they visited Auschwitz, which he explained now ran as a museum.

Although my father was familiar with the name Auschwitz, he told me his knowledge of the how the Nazi's had implemented their killing was vague and sketchy at the time of his visit to Poland. Two of his colleagues had served in the army during the war but their understanding was even less than my father's. So the four British businessmen hired a driver and set off for the day with little or no expectation of what they were about to see.

They reached Auschwitz less than an hour after leaving Katowice and found the camp/museum almost deserted despite the public holiday. In fact, my father and his colleagues seemed to be the only visitors there and were rewarded with a personal tour by one of the senior officials.

They were taken to long wooden huts sectioned off into large glass fronted display cases. Inside the first display were bails of material that my father could not identify. "What is this?" He asked. "Human hair" came the reply, "shaved from the heads of those about to be exterminated." Nothing went to waste, it was explained, "The hair could be weaved into cloth and used for insulation". Next came a display of walking sticks and crutches neatly stacked in huge piles. Then shoes, all sizes, suitcases still with name and home address labels attached, spectacles and false teeth. Apparently, it all had revenue potential for the Third Reich.

After three hours of the tour my father was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the attitude of their guide. "He was more interested in the Nazis' attention to detail, administrative diligence and mechanical ingenuity than in the morality of what had taken place there." Finally, they were taken to see the furnaces that burned day and night, fueled by human corpses.

But what had been new and revelatory to my father nearly fifty years ago has become burdensome and problematic to me. When I look at all the books on my shelves relating to just 12 years out of three thousand years of Jewish history, I have no desire to revisit them or even flick through the pages.

As a student I had thought there were lessons to be learnt and meaning to be divined from what had happened. But now it feels as if the event has been used, abused and politicised, and, from a moral perspective, largely ignored.

As time has passed I have become increasingly pessimistic about our ability to take something meaningful and positive from the horror that is now summed up by the single word 'Auschwitz'.

Some, especially the remaining survivors, see denial and forgetfulness of the Holocaust as the biggest concern we should have. But I think these are the least of our Holocaust problems.

Holocaust denial will remain a fringe issue. The documentation is secure in its veracity and overwhelming in its volume. If anything, today's school children are in danger of thinking that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin went to war against Hitler because of what was happening to the Jews.

And we have become very good at remembering. We do it with great care and respect and afford enormous dignity to the survivors and their testimonies. This week's marking of the Russian army's liberation of Auschwitz proved this once again. So, we remember with no difficulty. It's acting on the remembrance that defeats us.

Since the end of the Second World War we have had Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. All of which suggest that despite the creation of so much international law on human rights and genocide, humankind has not progressed an iota as a result of Auschwitz.

I can now see that my own long-term reaction to the Holocaust has led me not to focus on anti-Semitism and Jewish security (although neither can be ignored) but on the values and teaching that I see as central to Judaism. Justice, Compassion, Humility, individual and collective Responsibility. These are not new lessons but very old ones. As a Jew, I choose to apply these to our relationship with the Palestinian people because this is the issue on which we must judge ourselves. In the 21st century this is 'the Jewish question'.

While a growing number of Jews both in Israel and around the world share this perspective, it is still a minority opinion.

When it comes to the Palestinian people, the Holocaust has hardened our hearts and closed our minds. The scale of our own suffering has made us blind to their suffering - which we see as all of their own making.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Why should a people abused and broken become saints? The opposite result is more often the outcome. I am asking for too much. Expecting something that no group is capable of.

And so I have become both weary and wary of trying to take meaning or lessons from the Holocaust. Yes we must continue to teach it as an appalling stain on humanity. And an exercise in empathy is never wasted. But we must not expect it to unlock the human heart.

Maybe all we have are the stories of bureaucratised murder, random survival, and unexpected acts of kindness that Primo Levi called 'Moments of Reprieve'.

My father and his colleagues had planned to eat a meal together that night back at the hotel in Katowice. But after the visit nobody was hungry.

On the return journey my father asked their driver if he had known about the camp during the war. "Oh, yes", he replied. "We knew something was happening. We could smell it." My father asked him whether anyone at the time felt they could do anything about it? The driver replied "Yes, we would wind up the windows tight, so we couldn't smell the stink".

See also: A Letter to Anne Frank

When will there be a Jewish Kairos moment for Palestine?

'Kairos Britain' has been published and I believe this could be the game changing intervention that pushes the Israel/Palestine debate into a significant new phase in the United Kingdom.

It also has the potential, as the Kairos Britain authors are well aware, of causing division and argument not only between Christian grass roots communities and the Christian hierarchy, but between local churches and their neighbouring synagogue communities.

The 35 page document is a direct response, from a Christian British perspective, to the 'call from the heart of Palestinian suffering' made by Palestinian Christians in their 2009 Kairos. The word 'Kairos' is Greek and refers to a critical moment in time when urgent action is required. The Palestinian Church denominations that came together unanimously to endorse the 2009 document, firmly rooted their call to the world in faith, hope, love and non-violence. The British Kairos does the same.

In short, carefully researched chapters, Kairos Britain sets out the the condition of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. It summarises Britain's specific involvement in the history of Palestine between 1917 and 1948, examines interfaith issues, sets out a theological position, based on human dignity, and finally makes the case for action.

But what form should that action take?

The writers of Kairos Britain say it is up to individuals and communities to decide exactly how to respond. But they believe we must take seriously those Palestinians and Israelis who call for the boycott of, divestment from, and economic sanctions against everything produced by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

This is the point at which Kairos Britain parts company with moderate, liberal opinion on Israel. The implication of supporting the BDS campaign is that you have no confidence in the long running 'peace process' or the political dynamics that govern its parameters. It means you do not believe the United States can be an 'honest broker' or that Israel is at all serious about allowing the creation of a viable, contiguous, independent Palestinian state. Not until politicians believe that their constituents no longer find the status quo of daily oppression of Palestinians acceptable will things change. BDS aims to builds things up from the grass roots until the political weather begins to change. Remember, Thatcher and Reagan were the last, not the first, to change their minds on South Africa.

Such an approach will set Kairos Britain on a collision course with the current Church leadership in the UK and most certainly with the mainstream Jewish community.

But is that really such a bad thing?

Has the moment come when we put an end to compromising on justice for the sake of ecumenical peace? Is this the moment when interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews is forced to confront current injustices as well as past iniquities? Within the UK, could we be edging, slowly, towards the tipping-point in the Israel/Palestine debate? Is this the moment of truth when Christians learn of the depth of injustice in the occupied Palestinian territories and recognise that campaigning against it has nothing to do with being anti-Semitic and everything to do with being faithful to the values of Christianity - and for that matter Judaism as well.

A Jewish sensibility

At this point, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should declare an interest. I was approached in the spring (along with many others from Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions) to read and comment on advanced drafts of the Kairos Britain document. I was happy to bring a Jewish sensibility when reading the text and suggested some small revisions that I thought would bring even more emphasis to an understanding of Jewish attitudes to the Land of Israel - historically, religiously and culturally. What was gratifying to discover was that the Kairos Britain writers were already immensely mindful of the likely criticism the document would attract and wanted a final text that fully acknowledged Jewish suffering, Christian responsibility for it, and the central position that Israel has in post Holocaust Jewish identity.

At this year's Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham (24-27 Aug) I had the opportunity to meet some of the leading figures behind the Kairos Britain initiative at the launch event for the document. I can tell their Christian and Jewish critics (and there are many) that the writers of Kairos Britain are not bleeding heart liberals, nor misguided dupes and they are certainly not anti-Semites. They do care about discrimination, oppression and institutionalised injustice and want to bring peace and security to all those who call the Holy Land their home.

They have learnt their history and their politics and developed a coherent and compassionate theology based on the equality of God's creation. In short, they know their stuff and have chosen to make a stand.

A Jewish Kairos?

All of this makes me wonder how long it will be before we reach a Jewish Kairos moment for Palestine?

What is abundantly clear is that a Kairos moment will never come from the Jewish establishment. In the last 70 years, Zionism has become the dominant ideology within the Jewish community. Indeed it has become the new Jewish theology as well, which is what allows accusations of anti-Semitism to be made against anyone who calls into question the behaviour of the State of Israel.

A Jewish Kairos moment will begin on the margins of the Jewish community as more and more Jews begin to recognise that our relationship with the Palestinians will define our present and determine our future as much as it will theirs. It will come from Jews who begin to understand that the Occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, and the institutional discrimination of Israeli Palestinians is doing untold damage to the Jewish soul and to Judaism itself. The Jewish Kairos moment will come when we rediscover our Hebrew prophetic theology of justice and choose to take it seriously. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Micah were talking to us...and they still are.

The Jewish Kairos will only come when we see the Zionist understanding of Jewish history and the nationalist solution to Jewish salvation as an aberration rather than a continuum of Jewish values. It will be a painful moment and require a new construction of the Jewish narrative, one that can incorporate the Palestinian narrative too.

Palestinians will need to understand our pain and our trauma, as well as their own, if open hearted dialogue is to be possible. But this is not a conflict of equals. We hold the power. We have the superpower backing. The onus is on us.

I see little sign of a tipping-point being reached on Israel/Palestine anytime soon within the Jewish community. But the seeds are being sown and I like to think that this blog is one of those seeds.

Like minded 'Micah Jews', like those that support the actions of Jews for Justice for Palestinians or follow news feeds from Mondoweiss and +972, and support Jewish Israeli groups like B'Tselem and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, are creating the movement that will eventually shift the ground and shake our diaspora leadership from their belief that the status quo is both moral and sustainable.

I look forward the day when the first synagogue council in Britain passes a motion condemning the Occupation and the expansion of Settlement building. That will be a moment when Judaism begins a 21st century renaissance.

In the meantime, Jews who wish to stand in the Jewish tradition of universal justice will find their friends outside of the Jewish community. Our opportunity to influence events will be through our support of projects such as Kairos Britain. If nothing else, it will demonstrate to local church communities that Jews may be monotheistic but they are not monolithic when it comes to Israel. There is a Jewish diversity of opinion that makes a nonsense of anti-Semitic accusations.

So I would urge my Christian and Jewish readers to look closely at Kairos Britain and the original Palestine Kairos. These are important documents with the power to move people to action.

This week (4 September) sees us welcome in the Jewish New Year of 5774. It is the beginning of a 10-day period of atonement that reaches its liturgical and emotional heights on Yom Kippur. The issues raised in Kairos Britain will certainly be at the forefront of my thoughts and prayers in the coming days.

“Leshanah tovah tikateiv v’teichateim" - May you be inscribed for a good year!