From a Jewish perspective what should be the problem? The biblical ethos is clear enough "the fathers shall not be put to death for the children neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers". What have the children to do with the atrocities of their ancestors? Is genocidal persecution transmitted in the blood? Is racism traced in the genes or in the chromosomes? Is guilt inherited? "You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your fellow man" (Leviticus 18:18). "You shall not abhor an Edomite for he is thy brother, nor an Egyptian because you were a stranger in his land. The children of the third generation that are born into them may enter into the assembly of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 23:8).

Any beyond the Bible do Jews not know the shiver of history, the unspoken horror that is wrought by collective guilt? The charge of deicide - the murder of the Son of God - "His blood be upon us and upon our children" has left in its wake the scars and ashes for two millennia. In his masterful codification of "The Laws of Repentance" (2:11), Maimonides declares "If you have injured another you must seek his forgiveness and if the injured had died before you could appease him, you are to take ten persons with you to his graveside and declare publicly 'I have sinned Thee O Lord and against this person having committed such and such sin against him."

And if the injured was alive and was asked forgiveness and he has refused to forgive, you must ask him again and again. Ask him three times and if he has not forgiven you then he is regarded as cruel. "It is forbidden to be obdurate and not to allow yourself to be appeased."

As a legal and a moral concept the imperative to forgive is clear enough and yet emotionally forgiveness is more complex. Sigmund Freud (quoted by Koestler -"The Arrow in the Blue", p. 26) said "When I have forgiven a fellow everything, I am through with him." Forgiveness can be a subtle form of condescension, even of rejection. The reluctance to forgive particularly in such grave situations may be a fear of a premature closure, too quick a disconnection, too anxious to proceed with business as usual. No one should expect that after such a trauma forgiveness should come easily. The Holocaust remains the dominant psychic reality of our lives. It clings to our skin. How could it be otherwise? Who could expect a battered people having absorbed the murder of 2 out of 5 of its members, 40% of its community to emerge unscathed, unscarred, fully normal? Even the impersonal marks of statistics are overwhelming: 1.5 million children murdered because of their Jewishness, 9 out of every 10 European rabbis killed, the decimation of 90% of East European Jewry, 2 out of every 3 Jews living in Europe murdered.

Logically, forgiveness has nothing to do with forgetfulness but forgiveness does entail forgetfulness. In the matter of "injury of words" called in rabbinic Hebrew "onaath dvarim", if you are to accept a penitent you are not to throw up the past in his face. You are not to remind him or yourself that yesterday this man was a sinner, that he came from an ancestry of killers. If you forgive you must forget. Additionally, forgiveness assumes that the one who is asking to be forgiven is genuinely repentant. The assumption is that he who asks for forgiveness will not repeat his malevolence. "How indeed", Maimonides asks, "does one know when the other person who asked forgiveness from God or man is genuine?" The answer is given in his codes, "When the same opportunity presents itself for repeating an offence and you refuse to do it, not out of fear or weakness. For instance if a man has sinful intercourse with a woman and after a time was alone with her, his passion for her persisting, his physical powers unabated but he refrains and does not transgress then he is a sincere penitent. It is clear that repentance and forgiveness have their moment. It is too late to achieve expiation when you are already too old, too tired, too frightened, too weak to sin. The pragmatic test of forgiveness is not expiation for the past but transformation of the character so that a genuine seeker for forgiveness is able to say 'I am another person and not the same who committed those deeds.'" The test of the worthiness of forgiveness is in the future. So it has filtered down into folk humor this story of two Jews who meet in the synagogue in the evening of the Day of Atonement. They have had a history of cursing each other. They approach each other and each seeks forgiveness from the other and receives it. As they enter the synagogue one says to the other "I wish you with all my heart just what you wish me." The other says, "Aha, so you're starting up again?"

The theologian Rosemary Reuther calls upon the church to offer "massive repentance" on the Jewish community. That would be welcome but it is not what I would seek for. My position is closer to that of Professor Yosef Yerushalmi, professor of Jewish history at Harvard who said, "I do not welcome a collective mea culpa from Christendom. It tends toward a kind of masochism behind which may lurk an eventual sadism. I do not want Christians to brood on the guilt of their forbearers and to keep apologizing for it. I do not want to encounter Christians as confessor and penitent." Then Yerushalmi concludes "Not by your ancestors but by your actions will you be judged. For my people, now as in the past, is in great peril of its life."

I thought of this when I read just this past week, the week that commemorates not only the fall of the Berlin wall but also coincides with the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 10 in 1938. The first pogrom of the Nazi's led to the breaking of the windows of synagogues and business shops and the hauling away of thousands of Jews in Germany. But on the eve of Kristallnacht something important took place that bears on our subject matter. Tens of thousands of Germans, non-Jews gathered in Stuttgart, Hanover, Dresden, and throughout Saxony to protest against the rising xenophobia in Germany, against the reemergence of anti-semitism, against the violence meted out to the refugees. It was reminiscent of the protest led by Francois Mitterand of France who led a march in 1990 with French citizens protesting the neo-Nazi desecration of a Jewish cemetery. "Never again" must not become only a Jewish slogan. When it becomes a slogan of the world, repentance has taken place and forgiveness follows.

The question is not whether to forgive, the real question is how to forgive without forgetting, how to remember without laying a heavy stone upon the heart of Jewish and non-Jewish children. The question is how do we speak to our post-Holocaust children - Jews and non-Jews alike. Our children must be told the truth. As Cicero put it "Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child." It would be wrong and perilous to raise children with fatal ignorance. It would be equally wrong to raise them with basic distrust, with a notion of human nature that runs counter to the great biblical heroic belief that the human being, the crown of creation, was formed in the image of God.

But we cannot will our belief and parents cannot teach children that which they themselves do not believe.

We need evidence, we need witness, we need authentification of our belief in the existence of godliness even in the hell of Auschwitz. Some two decades ago, I came upon the first, empirical data that helped me deal with honesty with the past and shaped my spiritual understanding of the world. The last twenty five years I have had the great privilege of meeting with and reading of Christian men and women, flesh and blood human beings, farmers, peasants, doctors, priests, nuns from all walks of life and from every country which the Nazis occupied - Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia - ordinary people who risked their lives and the lives of their families to protect and shield the hunted members of my Jewish family. I have heard and seen the testimony of Jewish survivors, many of whom are yet alive because of Christian people who sheltered them in closets, attics, barnyards, pigsties, sewers, monasteries, graveyards. These are the people made of flesh and blood like our own who for days and nights stamped passports, forged visas, falsified documents and would not turn Jews back to the countries of genocide.

Their rescue behavior is remarkable enough but equally important is the knowledge that these were men and women of another faith than my own, another catechism, another liturgy than my own. These were people who refused to be isolated within the four cubits of their own dogmas and doctrines and who with deliberacy transcended their circle of faith in order to protect people of another faith. These are the people who enabled me to overcome my own stereotypes, my own prejudices against "them". They helped me look into the eyes of Germans and Poles without the ugly and unfair condemnation of whole peoples or whole religions. They made it possible for me to believe in authentic goodness and in the integrity of forgiveness.

It is important for the sake of the health of our civilization. Do our children know of the ten of thousands of such human beings? Our children must know the names of Heidrich and Himmler but why should they not know the names of those non-Jews who hid Anne Frank and her family in an attic for two and a half years. Who are they? What are their names? What happened to them in the Amersfoort camps after some other Dutch people informed against them? Our children and we ourselves will hear about the conflicts around Cardinal Glemp and the Carmelite convent around Auschwitz and their hearts will sink to hear of the profound residual anti-semitism expressed in the Cardinal's message. But they must know also of another convent, a Benedictine convent outside the ghetto of Vilna where Anna Borowska, the Mother Superior, together with six Catholic sisters risked their lives hiding out the Jewish leaders of the Vilna ghetto - Jewish leaders such as Abba Kovner, Abraham Sutzkever, Edith Borak, Ari Wilner who were hidden in the convent dressed in nuns habits.

If we are serious about forgiveness we must not end our discussion by raking through the cremated ashes of yesterday alone. We must look for the sparks of altruism and of goodness so that we can begin again, hope again, believe again, form reconciliation again. Why in our churches and in our synagogues, why in our theological seminaries are the names and exploits of Aristedes de Sousa Mendes and Paul Gruninger and Sempo Sugihara not known? People - one a Portuguese Christian Consul stationed in Bordeaux, another a Chief of Police in Switzerland, another a Japanese Consul stationed in Krakow - who saved thousands of lives at the expense of their careers and their estates and in honor of the name of moral faith that unites us all.

To forgive is not to forget. To the contrary. Genuine forgiveness requires profound memory. In remembering the hero we do not forget the villain. Remember there are not heroes without the villains. But we and our children need heroes and if we will not search them out and raise them up and recognize their goodness the hunger for heroism will be filled by Rambo and Dirty Harry. Forgiveness and repentance are for the sake of the future. We are more than recorders of history. We are makers of history. Let me conclude with a remarkable statement that is found in Primo Levi's great book, "Survival In Auschwitz," his recounting of his tragic life in Auschwitz. He remembers Lorenzo, an Italian civilian worker who brought him a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months in the concentration camp. Levi wrote "I believe it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still exists a world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage...something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good but for which it was worth surviving. Thanks to Lorenzo I managed not to forget that I myself was a man."

Forgiveness is a sacred act. It calls upon the children of the victims and the children of the predators. It calls upon the memory of the past and the hope of the future. It calls upon a double testimony. Remember the evil that men and women can do but do not forget their capacity for goodness.

* This document, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author.

Back to the VBS Rabbi's Library

Back to Rabbi Harold Schulweis study index

Back to the VBS Web Site Index