Why Should Jews Survive? Looking Past the Holocaust toward a Jewish Future.

Jeremiads have an honored place at the table of Jewish literature and Rabbi Michael Goldberg's Why Should Jews Survive has all the attributes of the genre: it is passionate, didactic, iconoclastic. It diagnoses a malaise in the communal body and, with the guidance of Scripture, prescribes a cure. Like all such polemics it stages a cast of false idols, errant shepherds, and a wayward flock. Goldberg argues that modern American Jewry has replaced observance of the Mosaic Law with the Passion of the Holocaust--literally replacing the Tree of Life with the culture of death. He suggests that pilgrimage to such secular shrines as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Yad Vashem in Israel, and observance of Yom Hashoah (Remembrance Day) is little better than the ancient Hebrews flirting with the gods of Baal on the hilltop altars of Canaan. God has been banished from the exercise.

Goldberg paints the post-Holocaust Jewish world as a society which, for the most part, has survived to no purpose--certainly not to do the bidding of God, which is its only valid enterprise. The result is a pale of atomized individuals who console themselves with fund-raising and lavish bar mitzvahs rather than a true community of faith dedicated to the observance of God's commandments. Goldberg asserts that the hollowness of "consumer Judaism" has led to the well-documented defections of large numbers of young Jews, and he calls for a regeneration of purpose along the lines of his own covenantal Judaism--renewing the observances prescribed in the covenant at Sinai. Few in the jewish mainstream would take issue with much of this.

The author, however, insists on marshaling arguments to justify his position, and it is here that he drifts into turbulent, and murky, waters. He has a penchant for creating polarities and arbitrarily consigning people to the inner light of one or the outer darkness of the other. He offers two "master stories" by which people define themselves: the Exodus, which deals with ethics and ideals, and the Holocaust, which deals with mere existence. He portrays the post-Holocaust generation as having no purpose other than simple survival. That American Jewry in its variety, versatility, and complexity is simply "surviving" with little or no spiritual engagement is an assertion upon which the author brings virtually no evidence to bear except his personal convictions and anecdotal information, neither of which can bear the weight of his pronouncements.

In a similar vein, Goldberg lauds the Exodus master story at the expense of Purim. Now to compare the Exodus events--the central organizing drama of Judaism--with anything else in the Scriptures is, from a Jewish point of view, loading the dice. That each particular theme in Scripture has its special purpose, place, and time is brushed aside by the author who notes of Purim that "it is told each year (ad nauseam)." The problem with Purim--in which the Jews of ancient Persia are saved from destruction at the hands of Haman by the efforts of Mordecai and his ward, Esther--is that God, in Goldberg's view, "is notably absent from the story." As opposed to the Exodus master story, where the jews were saved by "the mighty hand of God," here they saved themselves. Succor that "runs along a Purim/Holocaust axis" is mere rescue, whereas the salvation from Pharaoh in Exodus is about redemption. But not to worry. Goldberg informs us that "the paradigmatic telling of the Purim story enjoins Jews not to take the story seriously ... Jewish tradition requires them instead to take it as a joke." Maimonides, in his introduction to Mishneh Torah, seems to hold differently, observing that we are commanded by God through his prophets to hear the Scroll of Esther to "recount the salvation that he wrought for us, and that he was ever near when we cried to him."

In essence, Goldberg laments that the establishment of the Holocaust as a rival "faith" is responsible for the diminution of interest in the Exodus tale and its precepts. He inveighs against an array of post-Holocaust thinkers, charging Harold Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People) with the sin of randomness, Emil Fackenheim (God's Presence in History) with the sin of spite, and Richard Rubenstein (After Auschwitz) with the sin of nihilism. He dismisses all these attempts to struggle with the meaning of the Holocaust as thin gruel for the needy spirit. Whatever the virtue of his critique, Goldberg has put the cart before the horse.

The death of God is, of course, not a Jewish idea, but a universal one which has engaged theologians of all faiths since Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx. The Jew as alienated from his culture is not a product of the Holocaust, but has plenty of gentile company in the existential philosophies that spanned the war. And that Jews in great numbers no longer fulfill their part of the covenant at Sinai is not the fault of the Holocaust but of modernity, which significantly predates the shoah. Secularism was infectious in the pre-Hitler Eastern Europe whose devoutness Goldberg extols. By the interwar period the Enlightenment had made great inroads in the East and the faiths of socialism, Zionism, and yes, capitalism, had captured the imagination of the young. It was modem Jewry thoroughly secularized that sought a secular response to the Holocaust.

Goldberg writes that while God didn't directly cause the Holocaust, he is at some level ultimately responsible for it. Got that? But it is not for us to question his ways. Goldberg rebukes Job for trying to understand the grounds for his suffering: "In presuming that he could be in a position to speak truly about God's motives, Job was in essence presuming to be God and not man." The question for Goldberg is not why the Jews bear with God but why God bears with the Jews. And here Goldberg confides God's motives in doing so: His concern for his good name--he made a wager on Israel as his own redeemer and his reputation would suffer if he welshed on the bet. From God's mouth into Goldberg's ear. And what is the proof of God's love and the seal of his promise? Why the fact that, despite the vicissitudes of history, the Jews are still here fulfilling the covenant, at least some of them? Goldberg writes that God has never let the oppressor destroy the Jewish People, a term he uses as a symbol of the nation incarnate that transcends the individuals who compose it. In that sense, the Jewish People has survived its tribulations,, but in our own generation, 6 million of those individual people, plus as many gentile victims, went to their death in the most horrible way and God did not come to their aid. Make no mistake: The Nazis achieved their goal in Europe. To talk about God's beneficence in this context honor's neither God nor the truth. There is now a vast literature on God and the Holocaust and the best of these books approach the subject with great trepidation and humility. Goldberg's intrusive, abrasive, confrontational style on this most sensitive, rending subject, says more about his moral authority to discuss it than all the footnotes he throws at us. Those interested in an instructive discussion of the issue should read Faith after the Holocaust (KTAV), a valuable contribution by the theologian Eliezer Berkovits. Observing that one dare speak only with great hesitation and trembling on the subject, he writes that confronting Auschwitz one faces ultimate evil, but also the ultimate goodness, that if the evil was unnatural, the good was supernatural, if the humiliation was inhuman, the preservation of man's dignity was super-human. Berkovits does not arbitrarily contrast the Commandments and Auschwitz; he places them, and God, inside it. It is a mystery that of all of us, including Rabbi Goldberg, might dwell on.

Jack Schwartz was formerly book editor of Newsday.