Adi Ophir, Tikkun Magazine's first Israel Editor, shows how the Holocaust has taken the place of God in the relilgion of many Israelis. We'd add that the same is true for Jews in the Diaspora.
On Sanctifying the Holocaust:
An Anti- Theological Treatise
Adi Ophir (Tikkun Magazine's Israel Editor, 1989)
In Israel today there are more than ten public institu-
tions specifically concerned with the Holocaust. There
are museums and research institutes that publish books
and organize conferences. There is a whole "memory
industry" which has its own high and low culture. On
the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day last year there
was an organized quiz for Jewish children on the topic of
Jewish heroism during the Shoah (Holocaust).
Almost every political dispute in Israel eventually
leads to each side trying to prove its point with reference
to "the lessons of the Holocaust." Professor Yishayahu
Leibowitz of the Hebrew University thinks that the
conquest of the West Bank may turn Israel into a Jwish-
Nazi state; while Menachern Begin claimed that the
alternative to fighting the PLO in Lebanon would be to
face Auschwitz again-the 15,000 PLO fighters suddenly
appearing to have the power and threat of the entire Nazi
apparatus of destruction. The attempt to remember the
Holocaust has already generated its share of distortions
in the political discourse of the State of Israel.
There are accumulating skns that the Holocaust may
become the core of Jewish identity in the future, over-
shadowing the role of traditional Judaism or of contem-
porary Zionism.
any years from now, decades, perhaps cen-
turies, when the stories have become inter-
twined and interwoven through the distilling
violence of forgetting, what form will the saga of the
destruction of European Jewry take? How will story-
tellers then nourish their legends of terror-if there
still remain story-tellers, if a nuclear holocaust does not
erase the signs of all the atrocities which preceded it.
Will the survivors be gathered in an ark of the righteous
people of their generation, will the destruction be seen
as the Jewish flood? Or perhaps those of the ghetto
revolt, the partisans, the few who took to arms, will be
seen as the sons of light against the sons of darkness.
Will their struggle be the first battle between Gog and
Magog? Perhaps a new story of sacrifice will be told,
Adi Ophir teaches philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is the
Israel Editor for Tikkun.
that an entire people was brought as a sacrifice, without
an angel and without a ram in the bushes?
Perhaps from that Holocaust altar, whose dimensions
are the dimensions of an ancient continent, a mighty
belief will spring forth, seven times greater for its
absurdity than the belief of Abraham, the first Hebrew
who, after all, continued in his innocence to believe-
because his God refrained from telling him that his
descendants, multiplied as the stars of the heavens,
would be slaughtered in the death camps of Europe.
A religious consciousness built around the Holocaust
may become the central aspect of a new religion, one
which has at its core a story of revelation that goes
something like this: "In the year five thousand seven
hundred since the creation of the world according to
the Jewish calendar, in central Europe, Absolute Evil
was revealed. The Absolute-that is, the Divine-is
Evil. Every act has a part, to a greater or lesser extent,
in this Absolute Evil, every act is an expression of it.
But until the emergence of the Absolute Evil no one
believed that there was a hidden lawfulness controlling
every appearance of evil in our world. Until then, no
one had placed his or her trust in the absolute, tran-
scendent, one and only Evil, which is the gound of our
lives and deaths, the logic of our finitude and suffering,
the rock of our destruction, and the promise of our
annihilation. Indeed, time has passed before the mean-
ing of this horrible event could be digested and under-
stood completely, but how is it possible that an event
of such dimensions of horror could have no meaning?
From a secure distance of time the individual acts of
extermination have been collected-particular pullings
of the trigger, particular and repeated acts of the open-
ing of gas-pipes, lighting of furnaces-and they have
woven together to form the infinite face of the Absolute.
The proper place of each atrocious act is in the infinity
of Evil, those six years can already be seen as a single
unique revelation of the Absolute."
The God described in this religion, revealed in the
furnaces, will be seen as a vengeful God, visiting the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third
and fourth generations. Their iniquity-that they did
not reject their Jewishness while there was still time,
their descent one hundred, one hundred and fifty years
before the calamity. Vengefulness requires bookkeeping,
listing and documentation. Absolute Evil is a perfect
bookkeeper, an all-documenting bureaucrat, supervisor
and detective; he is a beneficiary of Providence in the
full sense of the word. Every Jew was accounted for;
grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren were also
accounted for. After which the accounts of loading and
unloading were managed, dates were coordinated for
the travel of the trains, the rate of expiration was
discussed, the volume of the ashes was measured. The
face of Absolute Evil was revealed, or at least this is
how the myth will reconstruct it, as the face of a
bureaucrat (the Absolute, even the embodiment of
Evil, cannot be understood without a certain degree of
personification). The Holocaust is God. In a way we are
today already partners to this utterance. The ears of my
readers are ringing, I know. But the new religion is
already taking form today, and already there are few
who would reject the popular interpretation of its reve-
lation: the commandments which echo from within
that thick cloud which arose from the earth of iron to
the empty iron heaven of Europe (Deut. 28:23).
T
he four commandments of the new religion
(Exod. 203): Thou shah have no other
holocaust before the Holocaust of the Jews of
Europe; Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image or any likeness; Thou shalt not take the name of
the Holocaust in vain; Remember.
"Thou shalt have no other holocaust." There is no
holocaust like the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. To
what lengths Jewish historians, educators and politi-
cians go to remind us over and over of the difference
between the destruction of the Jews of Europe and all
other types of disasters, misfortunes and mass murders!
Biafra was only hunger; Cambodia was only a civil war;
the destruction of the Kurds was not systematic; death
in the Gulag lacked national identification marks. Even
those who are wary of a demonization of the Holocaust,
even those who take care to present the slaughterers as
human beings, soldiers, policemen and common clerks,
go on to claim: There was never before such an or-
ganized, comprehensive and horrifying outburst of evil
as in the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a collection of
human acts which has turned into a transcendent event.
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
or likeness." It is possible to draw another Guernica,
to sing the songs of the Partisans, to present "Ghetto,"
but the Holocaust itself cannot be represented. No
artistic-or literary representation can succeed. Whoever
tries to peek through the furnace of revelation and
describe what he saw with his own eyes, or in his mind's
cinema can only touch upon the margins of the atrocity,
document it through fragments of memories of those
still living-they do not dare be caught in the world of
the slaughtered, and anyone who actually tries to de-
scribe the hell is punished severely by the critics.
(Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, a movie that takes place in
the present, is an exception). What was then real is
beyond the capabilities of poetry, art and dramatic
reconstruction. Exactly as it is impossible to understand
the transcendental in the framework of a scientific
theory, it is equally impossible to capture it in the
realms of the imagination. The outcome of every such
analytical or artistic attempt is distortion rather than
representation, camouflage rather than reconstruction,
forgetting rather than remembering. These are almost
a priori rules of the critics, which are independent of
the nature and quality of the specific artistic piece
toward which they are directed.
A religious consciousness built
around the Holocaust may become
the central aspect of a new religion.
"Thou shalt not take the name in vain!' How many
outbursts of rage did Menachem Begin earn when he
dared to profane the name. How many warnings have
been uttered since then by researchers of the
Holocaust, politicians and educators, against that disre-
putable phenomenon, a transgression, no doubt, de-
rogating the Holocaust by borrowing its name for
calamities and disasters of a lesser order of atrocity, the
earthly order.
"Remember the day of the Holocaust to keep it
holy, in memory of the destruction of the Jews of
Europe!' This is the most important commandment.
This is the burden whose shirking is the archetype of
sin. Not only the organized drive to forget, but also the
innocent forgetting, the result of assimilation or simple
lack of interest in the remnants of the Jewish posses-
sions which a person carries with him or herself, is an
act of terrible renunciation. Those who cause forget-
ting, to say nothing of those who deny, cooperate with
the enemy. Those who assimilate complete the Nazis'
work. Those who are faithful to themselves, and to
their people, will repeat the tale until the end of time.
Even if a thousand years pass and all the documents
are lost, the revelation of Evil will be present in the
midst of the nation through the countless threads of its
common memory.
Absolute Evil must be remembered in exquisite de-
62 TIKKUN,
VOL. 2, No. 1
tail. And already scattered throughout the land are
institutions of immortalization and documentation, like
God's altars in Canaan one generation after the settle-
ment. Already a central altar has arisen which will
gradually turn into our Temple, forms of pilgrimage are
taking hold, and already a thin layer of Holocaust-
priests, keepers of the flame, is growing and in-
stitutionalizing; only, instead of rituals of sacrifices,
there are rituals of memorial, remembering and repeti-
tion, since the sacrifice is completed and now all that
is left is to remember.
T
he mythologizati?n and demonization of the
Holocaust are inextricably tied to one another.
They are part of the same process of "sanctifica-
tion" which adds an important layer of religiosity to
our lives, as free-thinking and secular as we may be. It
is quite possible that the more the secular self-aware-
ness is developed, the deeper the distancing from what
is required from the revelation at Sinai, the stronger is
the tie to and the need for a modern revelation, the
revelation of Absolute Evil. The commandments reside
almost by definition beyond the political Left and
Right, beyond the power struggles and ideological con-
flicts, beyond the opposing interests and world views.
They establish the boundaries of Jewish legitimacy;
they establish the Holocaust as a transcendent event
which precedes and qualifies any attempt to fashion a
modern Jewish identity. Who will dare deny them pub-
licly? Who will dare deny the uniqueness of the
Holocaust? Who will dare claim that he or she has
comprehended it, in theory or in a work of art, as it
actually was? Who will admit bearing its name in vain?
Who will dare to let loose the reins of forgetting, to
relieve the burden of the memory?
Why is our Holocaust myth so dangerous? Because
it blurs the humanness of the Holocaust; because it
erases degrees and continuums and puts in their place
an infinite distance between one type of atrocity and all
other types of human atrocities; because it encourages
the memory as an excuse for one more nation-unifying
ritual and not as a tool for historical understanding;
because it makes it difficult to understand the
Holocaust as a product of a human, material and
ideological system; because it directs us almost exclu-
sively to the past, to the immortalization of that which
is beyond change, instead of pointing primarily to the
future, to the prevention of a holocaust-like the one
which was, or another, more horrible-which is more
possible today than ever before but is still in the realm
of that which is crooked and can still be made straight.
Is it possible to break away from the myth in a
responsible way, without wicked cynicism and without
pleasure for its own sake at the bursting of a myth? It
seems to me to be possible. First of all, I must state
explicitly: I am in no way trying to say that the
Holocaust was anything less than Absolute Evil, that
we may already forget, that we can already use the
name indiscriminately. But I do want to deny the com-
mandments as they were formulated above and as they
are present in public Jewish life and political discourse
in Israel and abroad. And more than anything else I
wish to deny the one assumption hidden behind the
entire Holocaust myth, that the Holocaust is an exclu-
sively Jewish matter. I do not necessarily refer here to
the destruction of the Gypsies, the slaughter of Russian
captives or the persecution of the communists and
other opponents of the regime, even though these
should be accounted for, and the exact differences
should be considered carefully. I mean to say that the
Jewishness of the Holocaust (like its Germanness) is
only one aspect of the horror, the most crucial aspect
from our point of view but by no means exclusive, and
that the overlooking of other aspects, which are not
necessarily related to the Jewish issue, is no less danger-
ous than the denial of the Holocaust by contemporary
anti-Semites.
Until the emergence of the Absolute
Evil no one believed that there was
a hidden lawfulness controlling
every appearance of evil in our
world.
It is impossible to explain Nazism without explaining
what gave birth to and maintained in Nazism that
"cruel lust for total destruction" of the Jews. But to the
same degree it is impossible to explain how that same
lust could be filled, in such a systematic, exact, pro-
longed and insane manner, without explaining those
modes of discourse which expelled the Jews from the
domain of humanity, the technologies of power acti-
vated to implement the ideological statements, and the
erotica of power used to guarantee complete execution
of the mission, until the last moment, until the final
breath. The Jew was, of course, placed, from the first
moment of the Nazi phenomenon to its last, in the
focus of these modes of discourse, a final target of all
the power technologies and a last release of its eroti-
cism. One question is what were those things which
made it possible to turn the Jew into the object of that
"excluding" discourse, an insane discourse of power
penetrated with eroticism but complete in its
mechanisms. This is the "Jewish Question" of
Holocaust research.
A
nother separate question (in theory, though in
reality not completely separate) is the struc-
ture, the enabling conditions, and those factors
which allowed those same modes of discourse and
those same power arrangements, from which the Nazi
phenomenon was composed, to emerge and to persist.
This is the "Universal Question" of Holocaust research.
It is a question which we too rarely ask.
A similar distinction can be made from another
direction. What distinguishes Nazism, like what distin-
guishes the Holocaust, is the unique combination of a
series of extreme factors, each one of which alone
would not have been able to give birth to the terror.
One question is what made possible the combination
which turned Nazism and the destruction of the Jews
of Europe into phenomena without compare in human
history. And another question is what were those ex-
treme factors, how do they appear in less extreme
conditions, what encourages their radicalization, and
what is likely to prevent it? The question of reconstruct-
ing the unique combination is the "Jewish Question,"
the question of deconstructing that combination into
factors is the "Universal Question." The reconstructive
question presents the Holocaust, whether consciously
or unconsciously, as a transcendent event which lies
beyond the limits of human reach, an event whose
horrors we, as humans, will never be able to come close
to repeating. The deconstructive question, on the other
hand, returns to the horror of its humanness and points
out the possibilities and their degrees and continuity.
The Jewish Question turns the Holocaust into a holy
source of reference to the past. The universal question
presents the Holocaust as a permanently necessary
background to interpretations of the present and inten-
tions for the future. In the final account, the difference
is a question of where we choose to place Absolute
Evil: as a revelation whose place is in the past, or as a
possibility whose place is in the present.
A possibility whose place is in the present. This can
be understood only if we try to deconstruct into factors,
only if we try to closely examine the humanness of the
structures of discourse and power, only if we stubbornly
insist upon seeing them as the realization of human
possibilities, or in other words, as our own possibilities.
First of all, the "excluding" and "another," reference to
another which serves as the borderline, as the archetype
of negation, as a focus for the definition of a reverse
identity; a package of "excluding" oppositions wrapped
in the same fundamental distinction and drawn after it:
superior-inferior, authentic-unauthentic, holy-pro-
faned, pure-impure, healthy-sick, living-dead; a sys-
tematic application of the conceptual borderline
(Aryan-non-Aryan) over geographic space (and also
over historical time: before and after the Jewish pollu-
tion, before and after the German revolution); the
revealed and concealed mechanisms for encouraging,
distributing and imposing the "excluding" modes of
discourse, its internal organization and principles of
the hierarch contained within it, the sterilizing of chan-
nels of debate and blocking of the possibilities of
disagreement and deviance.
One Holocaust was; another is
possible; therefore do everything
possible . . . so that there will be
none at all.
Parallel to these, the development, organization and
nurturing of the technology of power: use of all existing
power mechanisms while developing new tools of
power; complete exploitation of the social potential for
supervision, surveillance, policing and exclusion and a
refinement of those mechanisms responsible for these
functions; takeover of the educational system and estab-
lishment of cadres of the reliable and loyal; manage-
ment of the individual among the masses, and of the
masses for purposes determined in advance; rationaliza-
tion and bureaucratization of the power mechanisms,
independent of the irrationality of the goals; adaptation
of the academic world and the takeover of the sources
of applied knowledge; accelerated development of new
technologies of destruction.
And finally, the tremendous eroticism invested in the
organization of the power order: the training of the
individual's body, along with the massive parade exer-
cises; the emotional bond between the individual and
the masses, between each individual and the leader,
and between the leader and the masses; the develop-
ment of obedience as the model of love relations;
covert and overt opposition to objectivity, rationality
and modernity, and an emphasis on inner life, emotion
and mysticism; the transformation of "nation," "race,"
"people" and "fuehrer" to objects of love, loyalty and
sacrifice, with the necessarily adjacent concepts as ob-
jects of hate, disgust, and "lust for destruction."
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, the analysis
is not meant to be radical (modes of discourse were
never detached from mechanisms of power, and power
has never been very separate from its erotic overtones),
but these, or something close to these, are the factors
which can be the basis for possible continuums. Of
course, the distinction between the search for the
unique combination, which is meant to protect the
transcendence of the Holocaust, and its division into
64 TIKKUN,
VOL. 2, No. 1
factors, which can specify the range of possibilities, is
not unequivocal. These two questions are doubtlessly
interconnected and interdependent. But the difference
exists and is decisive. It is the difference of priorities
in the directions of research, of emphasis in the rhetoric
of mourning and remembrance, of directions in learn-
ing for the future. In short, the difference is essentially
political: It is the difference in the use which the living
make of the memory of the dead, the present of its
history. This is the difference in whose light I propose
to part with the myth and to rewrite the command-
ments of the Holocaust. To rewrite means that we
ourselves interpret and write, while we strive for self-
awareness in our attitudes to the Holocaust. To rewrite
means not to listen silently to the voice carried to us
directly from the destruction of Europe, from the sight
of the revelation of Evil. To rewrite means to determine
commandments whose hidden assumptions are open to
the light of day and may stand over and over again the
test of critical thought. To rewrite, something like this:
Thou shalt have no other holocaust. In reality. One
Holocaust was; another is possible; therefore do every-
thing possible so that you will not have, so that they
will not have, so that there will be none at all.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or
likeness. Do everything that you can to concretize the
horror. Honor its intricate details. Present as much as
possible of its creeping before the explosion, its day-to-
day occurrences, its uncountable human, all too
human, faces.
Remember. First of all, try to understand. Remember
in order to understand. To understand the technology
of power and the modes of "excluding" discourse which
made the Holocaust possible: the discourse which
made it possible to exclude a group of people from
within the borders of the human race, and the technol-
ogy which made it possible to massively deport them
to their deaths.
hat is being discussed here is no simple
problem of historiography. What hangs here
in the balance is the process of the political
institutionalization of a joint national memory, and
essentially the borders of the self-awareness of the
modern Jew, the self-identity of post-Holocaust Jewry.
The Jew who, in relating to the Holocaust, accepts,
whether explicitly or implicitly, the theological treatise
which I described, is as a firebrand saved from the fire
who counts his or her losses over and over again in
ritual periodicity; one whose memory is always a night-
mare and whose nightmares fashion dreams, whose
mere live presence is a reminder of the destruction,
who does not cease to blame, judge and accuse others,
to swear that s/he will never again be their sacrifice.
Why is our Holocaust myth so
dangerous? Because it blurs the
humanness of the Holocaust; be-
cause it . . . puts . . . an infinite dis-
tance between one type of atrocity
and all other types of human at-
rocities; because it encourages the
memory as an excuse for one more
nation-unifying ritual and not as a
tool for historical understanding . . ,
But perhaps it is already possible to make a breach
in the theological treatise which requires such a
stance-perhaps it is already impossible not to-to
strive for a more delicate balance between the enslave-
ment of the present to the burden of the past, and the
interpretation of present reality in terms of the pos-
sibilities which this past presents to it as its own real
possibilities? Perhaps it is already possible to restrain
the laments, immortalizations and blaming, to make a
little room for the deconstructive effort, which is essen-
tial and urgent because it also means an effort of
location and deterrence? Our lives are already penet-
rated with the presence of some of those very factors
that should be deconstructed; the hour is urgent.
From that conflagration we must today carry a differ-
ent message, a message at whose center lies the human-
ness of the atrocity, the fact that the atrocity is an
existing human possibility-that is, our possibility. This
is the proper basis for modern human solidarity. When
the required modes of discourse exist, when the tech-
nologies of power are at hand, when love and hate are
present in the proper dose and directed in the appropri-
ate channels, then every person may be the sacrifice,
and everyone may be a participant in the slaughter.
And we must also take into account how much the
technologies of destruction have advanced since then,
and how much, as a result, the investment in obedience,
loyalty and lust, required to operate them, has been
reduced.
The moral confrontation of a Jew today with the
Holocaust entails the personalization of the acts of
destruction and the universalization of its possibilities.
The universalization of the Holocaust is today an essen-
tial component in the consciousness of the Jew, one
generation after Auschwitz, and a necessary condition
for our moral existence.
