Dear Zealots by Amos Oz

Author:Amos Oz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

This is how Shulchan Aruch Judaism evaded and still evades a genuine theological reckoning with the murder of a third of the Jewish people. On this matter there have been dissenting voices here and there in the ultra-Orthodox world, such as that of Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, founder of Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak.

Non-Zionist Halachic Judaism has similarly fled from contending, theologically, with the unprecedented phenomenon of the Jewish people’s political independence in the Land of Israel, with the construction of Jerusalem—not by an angel or a seraph, not by the coming of the Messiah, but rather by a secular, modern political movement, one very much influenced by the national movements that arose in other parts of the world.

in an unthinking turn of phrase, the Nazis’ victims and the casualties of Israeli-Arab wars were all perceived to have died for “the sanctification of God’s name.” But the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices were not killed to sanctify God’s name. It infuriates me to hear the phrase “may God avenge their blood,” since millions of them did not believe in sanctifying God’s name in the first place. Hundreds of thousands of the victims, who were born to non-Jewish mothers, were not even considered Jews by Shulchan Aruch Judaism, so what gives them the right to attribute “the sanctification of God’s name” to these deaths? What gives Halachic Judaism the right to appropriate their identities and trample their dignity? Very many of the casualties would probably have considered the label of “martyr” or “killed for the sanctification of God’s name” a crude desecration of their memory, of their identity, of their self-determination.

Most of the Jews killed in wars between Israel and Arab states did not enlist in order to sanctify God’s name either. They went into battle to protect their lives, their loved ones, and their nation. Many hundreds of those killed in Israel’s wars were not Jews at all: they included Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouin, Circassians, and people of other nations who came to Israel as volunteers and gave their lives, most certainly not to sanctify God’s name. Not at all.

In the early 1950s, the Israeli passengers of a bus were murdered at Ma’ale Akrabim in the Negev. The minister of defense declared on the Knesset podium: “Jewish blood shall not be forsaken!” Here we must pause and emphasize that this horrible phrase, “Jewish blood,” does not appear anywhere in Jewish sources. Not once. We do not have “Jewish blood” as a concept. In the Bible there is “clean blood.” There is “the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me from the ground.” There is “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” Later, we have the saying “Your blood is no redder,” meaning, no redder than anyone else’s blood, for we were all created in the image of God. Conversely, “Jewish blood” was a central concept in the Nuremberg Laws legislated by Hitler’s Reich. Recently, this monstrous concept has become popular among many of the more extreme Israeli Jews.

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