Shoah: The Paradigmatic Genocide
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Zev Garber, in Shoah: The Paradigmatic Genocide: Essays in Exegesis and Eisegesis, challenges God's Revelation and Man's Reason, or, rather, the fact that the Shoah could happen on this earth challenges all basic ideas about God and humanity. Garber may challenge God and man, but he rejects neither, finding instead that there is a way to survive with morality and faith intact, although never forgetting or minimizing the horrors visited upon the Jewish people by Hitler. In fact, one might argue that Garber's entire philosophy of man and God is rooted in the response to the Shoah. At the same time, the response of man, especially the Jew, to non-Shoah issues is seen by Garber as reflecting on the Shoah. For example, a Jew is seen as betraying the suffering of the Jews who died in the Shoah when he or she doubts or rejects his or her Jewishness. In some sense, then, the very meaning of life since the Shoah reflects and is reflected by the Shoah. The basic question Garber asks is how one can believe in God and have any trust in man's capacity for reason after the Shoah. In other words, how could God let it happen, and how could man make it happen? With respect to the question of rationality in a race which could both commit the genocide of the Shoah and let it happen, Garber notes that, indeed, "rational thinking" to some degree has been "rendered bankrupt in the post-Shoah age" (41), certainly at least in terms of any longer believing that rational thinking alone can deliver
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history. For example the suicide of the 93 Beit Ya'akov Maidens, evidenced by a letter, is not widely seen as fact, but "its importance . . . lies in the paradigmatic value of its 'faith knowledge'" as well as in "what the letter reveals about traditional Jewish theology" (97). In other words, historiosophy is another important tool--even if of the realm of the myth--which helps encourage the post-Shoah Jews to not only to survive, but to survive learning a deeper morality and a richer faith from the "faith knowledge" gleaned from the Beit Ya'akov martyrs.
The "psychology of labels" and language study are important because they force Jews to be precise about their history, especially the Shoah, and to avoid reckless language which on the surface seems helpful but which might in reality prove to be counter-productive.
The discussion of the significance and psychological impact of the term "Holocaust" is fascinating, especially in terms of the emphasis of the author on the importance of remembering that certain free human beings in Germany and elsewhere carried out those evil atrocities, and not all Germans. also, the power of the word "Holocaust" can turn all victims of the Nazis into an undifferentiated mass of victims:
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1861
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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