Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust by James M. Glass

Author:James M. Glass [Glass, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1403939071
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2004-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

Spiritual Resistance: Understanding its Meaning

Recording and witnessing: what is being seen

Diaries and survivor accounts are united by one overriding fact: the power of the German assault, its suddenness, its attack not only on body but also on mind and reason. Ghetto diaries describe human life slowly withering away; orphaned children, the elderly dying in the streets; food supplies diminishing; wealthy Jews turning in a matter of weeks into beggars; black markets and smuggling; families torn apart; people sinking into madness; random attacks from Germans and locals; and moral disintegration under the pressure of survival and the German policy of reprisals. Everywhere Jews looked, not only did brutality define the landscape but a community appeared whose leadership had fallen prey to German lies and whose spiritual leadership struggled with impossible human, moral and psychological demands.

Beaten, killed, starved, degraded, stripped of all possessions and dignity, the individual Jewish self undergoes trauma, madness, unimaginable from the vantage of normal day-to-day life. Madness comes to define much of daily life in the ghetto, and much in the rabbinical response to the Holocaust, including the writing and adapting of Jewish law, is an effort to contain, or at least provide some comfort to, a community facing madness and annihilation.

No area of Jewish life is more subject to ambiguity in understanding resistance, particularly regarding defenses against madness, than the role of spiritual and religious leaders and the place of theology during the Holocaust. Evidence appears in anecdotal form: rabbinical stories,

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first-person accounts, Jewish law or Halakhah written during the Holocaust, classical texts (Talmud, Midrash, Kabbalah); rabbinical recollections and reflection.1 The evidence paints a picture of a theologically unshakeable and courageous rabbinate who, with few exceptions, opposed violent resistance.2 Very little in the secular accounts (Zionist, communist, Bundist) questions rabbinical dignity.3 Even partisan diaries are for the most part silent on the role of the rabbis. Some of the literature speaks of rabbis who supported underground activities, although such support was rare. The underground and partisan rage focuses on the Germans, the Judenrate and the Jewish police. These were the truly hated presence; but the resistance was focused. What Emmanuel Ringelblum calls the Jewish ‘masses’ were not. It is in this universe of rapidly declining moral expectations, the loss of hope and the rise of dissociated and mute selves, that theology and faith may have had some impact, or at least that’s the argument I want to make.

While spiritual resistance may not have saved lives, it may have instilled a psychological refuge inside the self and within the community, where the self’s identity as a person and a Jew could not be touched or degraded by German barbarism. This argument suggests that spiritual resistance and violent resistance reached for the same end: the preservation of self, or sanity, in a moral universe of rapid disintegration and loss of will. Spiritual resistance sought to save the soul, or psyche, from madness through silence in relation to the oppressor, but not silence in relation to God or to the Jewish community itself.

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