THE Holocaust and the try and destroy Jewish witness represent a “revolt against something of unique spiritual importance”, and shouldn’t be reduced to generalities about intolerance and racism, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams told a gathering at King’s College, London, this month.
Delivering the second annual lecture in memory of Rabbi Lord Sacks, Lord Williams acknowledged concerns that “the present culture of Holocaust education and the developing culture around Holocaust Memorial Day are prone to being swallowed up by a set of generalisations concerning the evils of general intolerance, racism, and exclusivism.”
He recalled how a gaggle of sixth-formers who had joined a visit to Auschwitz had spoken in generalities about their experience: “Hardly any had much sense of how the Shoah pertains to the whole history of Jewish identity in Europe. It had change into an instance of something: intolerance and prejudice. Shocking and terrible after all, but detached from the whole lot that makes the persecution of Jews a particular thing.”
Such a response reflected a lack of expertise of the distinctive contribution that Judaism had made to the moral imagination of society, he suggested. “Jewish particularism is an indication of human motion and interaction pervaded by a way of conscious awe, by the expectation of finding significant life in every moment. It is an indication of what shared human life might seem like in a world where transaction didn’t have the last word. . .
“This signifies that the mass slaughter of Jews is historically something distinct from genocide in a general sense or the killing of other minorities — which is most definitely to not say that other mass slaughters are by some means less serious or less in need of understanding against the specifics of their background, quite the contrary. . . The paradoxical twist in affirming Jewish particularity is precisely that it affirms absolutely the commitment of God to each life in its unique location and ecosystem, and indeed every material element of the creation.”
He warned: “The particular try and destroy Jewish witness is a sort of revolt against something of unique spiritual importance, a revolt against the opportunity of something greater than contract in our dealings with each other.”
Lord Williams took as his title “Covenant, Solidarity, and Building Together: From cohesion to community”. Reflecting on frameworks for statecraft, he began with transactionalism as an approach based on contract: agreeing to “watch each other’s backs . . . We don’t do much to permit diverse accounts of the nice to interact and modify or challenge one another and we’ve low expectations of anything latest emerging.”
Cohesion, meanwhile, meant “agreeing certain values as representing what all of us need to protect in a situation of shared jeopardy”. But covenant was, in Rabbi Sacks’s words, “transformative”: a framework “by which, since it takes with no consideration that every life, each situation entails the divine demand for attention and expectancy, human agents are enabled to find in relation with their neighbour possibilities for motion and understanding that they might not have imagined alone”.
Much of his lecture was dedicated to exploring the gift of Jewish particularism, and the necessity for Jewish identity to be “affirmed and defended in its distinctiveness, not reduced to an abstract universalism”.
He observed: “The notions of covenanted chosenness that outline Jewish identity will not be a way of implicitly affirming that Jewish human life is intrinsically more price while than every other sort of human life. . . The point is that the ritualised, normalised attentiveness of compliance with the commandment is a dramatic sign of the immeasurable significance that lies under the surface of any and all phenomena on the earth; so, any and all human life. It’s an indication . . . that the world is price committing to. . . And the presence of such an indication, within the covenanted community, such a visual society inside yet not contained by the family of countries, will not be a luxury for the human future.”
In Christian history there had been a failure to grasp such covenantal living, he suggested, which had produced a “simplistic contrast between gospel and law. Christianity was to recuperate in various ways something of the Jewish vision of acting in awareness and expectation in all things. Some facets of monastic practice, for instance, bring this back into focus, but there may be a continuing slippage away from any serious try and make theological sense of the continuity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people as an unbroken vocation.”
He warned of the resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric and activity for the reason that “butchery of October seventh and all that has followed”. The plight of the hostages was “a bitterly vivid symbol of the best way that so many lives, Jewish and non-Jewish, are held hostage by a climate of terror, by which the passionate determination to destroy the visible witness of Jewish commitment is a recurrent motif, generating, in turn, not only the self-defence that any society would put in place, but, in some extreme quarters, a counter-rhetoric of absolute destruction”.
Recent debate had been “disfigured” by “toxic sloganeering”, he warned, and had woke up “a never very deeply sleeping set of anti-Jewish tropes about collective blood guilt”.
Read comment from Paul Vallely and an interview with Anne Sebba on her latest book, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A story of survival.
