Seeking Understanding: A Conversation with _Embracing Auschwitz_
A Book Review from Tara Jernigan
Embracing Auschwitz: Forging a Vibrant, Life-Affirming Judaism that Takes the Holocaust Seriously. By Rabbi Joshua Hammerman. Teaneck, New Jersey: Ben Jehuda Press, 2020. Pp. x + 206. Cloth $18.95.
The prayer attributed to St. Francis profoundly requests, "O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love." That prayer speaks to us because at some level each of us wishes to be understood, and each of us knows that true love of our neighbors must instead seek to understand, to accept the stranger, not on our terms but on theirs. There is, however, another desire deep within us, to keep our pain to ourselves. We want to be understood, except where it hurts. When someone overcomes this natural desire for self-preservation and makes their pain known to us, we have a profound responsibility; we walk on holy ground.
One of my favorite undergraduate professors is a Holocaust survivor. He did not share that part of his life with us when I was his student but in his retirement has put his experience into the public discourse. He has pulled back the veil of suffering in order to help the next generations to understand. He has invited us into his sacred space.
As a longtime reader of Holocaust literature, I was intrigued when he shared with me that he was reading Rabbi Joshua Hammerman's provocatively titled book Embracing Auschwitz. What, after all, would anyone want to embrace about Auschwitz? Nonetheless, I took to the book in gulps, at first seeking to understand myself and why I was so enthralled with literature around some of the world's darkest hours, later seeking to understand these survivors on their own terms, and finally asking if those terms are dangerously relatable for us as Christians.
Hammerman writes extensively of a new Torah. In Christian words, "Torah" (which at its root means "teaching," as do the earliest of Christian reflections on what it means to be the church, known as the Didache in Greek) is used for the first five books of the Bible and often as a shorthand for what we would all the Old Testament. A testament means a witness, like a last will and testament, and I do not think Hammerman would argue with the notion that Auschwitz, in its audacious hope and with its echoes of the Jewish communities that no Nazi could destroy, stands as a testimony. As Hammerman reflects on his own journey to Eastern Europe, he remarks on the poignant reminders he found in the marks on the doorposts of formerly Jewish homes, marks left by the one-time presence of the mezuzah each Jewish family would have on the doorframe, containing a portion of the Scriptures and reminding all that the people of God dwell in those homes. Hammerman's observation that those marks of faithfulness remained, even when the ones who had made them were long gone, became a vivid assurance to himself that "I can't screw up this continuity thing. Somehow Jews survive even when there are no Jews around. We have the astounding capacity to outlive even ourselves" (p. 45). This is a statement of that testament and a proclamation of faith as loud as any creed.
In the face of this audacious hope, Hammerman holds as a central thesis that "the Holocaust has taken its place at the very core of what it means to be Jewish" (p. 13). I think if I had read this when I was younger, I would want to ask the author "How could you say that?" It seems, on one level, audacious, morbid, and even disgraceful. It is certainly the opposite of the hope I found lurking in the darkness of Embracing Auschwitz. I wanted to demand: How could you replace five thousand years of tradition, music, Scripture, passion, "holy living and holy dying" (in the words of the Christian theologian Jeremy Taylor) with the Holocaust? Here, it seems as though the author is complicit in gutting his own faith, willing to redefine his Jewishness based not on the tradition he has inherited but on this pivotal moment of suffering.
Nevertheless, the Christian does have a powerful point of reference. I remind myself that the Holocaust came in Jewish maturity, but the persecution of the Christians came in our collective infancy. To read the Holocaust as part of the very core of what it means to be Jewish requires reading the text through the lens of the Christian persecutions, which two millennia later retain a place at the very core of what it means to be a Christian. The first three hundred years of the church were marked by Christians being used as human torches to light the streets of Rome, men like Lawrence of Rome being tortured to death on a gridiron (and reportedly telling his tormentors that he was done on the one side and should be turned over) and the venerable Polycarp, martyred at the age of eighty-six, by both burning and sword. For Christians whose faith is more than a surface garment, keeping faith with such men and women is a call to sacrifice, commitment, and indeed the very core of what it means to be Christian.
In fact, history has since shown us that when we lose track of that message, we become the persecutors; we lose our way. Hammerman remarks, "The blood of our brother Abel is screaming from that very earth. We must care for the earth because our ancestors and martyrs are buried within it. . . . We cannot go anywhere without walking on their bones. We must tend to their graves" (p. 117). This is more than an overdramatized call to environmentalism; it is a clear reminder that we are who we are because our ancestors, in body and in faith, were who they were. It is a call to keep faith with the dead.
Thus, my older self believes that it is cruel to deny the Jews this perspective, however audacious it may be. We Christians have done the same, and I wonder if the Holocaust, in 2000 years' time will be such a clarion call to the Jews of the future as the persecutions of the church must be to the Christian.
In our time, we cannot use this perspective as Christians - mostly comfortable, modern Christians - to say, "I understand what the Jews experienced in the Holocaust." We cannot, but understanding rather than demanding to be understood, even understanding such dark and painful moments as the Holocaust, may be a doorway for us to come alongside, accept our Jewish neighbors on their own terms, and sit shiva (to grieve in love and community) with them.
Tara Jernigan (D.Min 2010) serves on the Board of Directors at Nashotah House. Tara is a vocational deacon in the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh, serving at Christ Church in New Brighton. She teaches the history and theology of the diaconate in various Anglican venues and the biblical languages in an online Christian high school.
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