About
Thoughtful debate elevates us all. In For Heaven’s Sake, Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the future of Zionism in Israel and on the global stage.
The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.
Israel at War – Holocaust Memorial Day Transcript
Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Donniel: Hi friends, this is Donniel Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi from the Shalom Hartman Institute. And this is our podcast, For Heaven’s Sake, Israel at War, Day 564.
And Israel being at war colors this episode in a different way this week. We dedicate this episode to a hero, Norit Rokach, a graduate of the Hartman Institute’s Girls’ High School, our midrashia, who is a combat officer in the Israeli army, a company commander. And she was critically injured on Shabbat in Gaza when Hamas fired an RPG at her tank.
And she’s one of the most unique young women in Israeli society. She was given the President’s Outstanding Soldier Award. There aren’t that many women who are combat officers and captains. She’s one of the unique ones. And unfortunately, as so often happens, tragedy befalls our most unique ones and challenges them. And we pray for her recovery and that she can have a good life and the life that she really deserves for who she is and for what she’s done for our country. So in some small way, we’re saying thank you and embracing her and her family. And for those of you who want to keep her in your prayers, Nurit Rokach, it’s Nurit Bat-Eti.
And so, yes, Israel is at war. Israel at war is not a theory, and it’s not something that’s happening to somebody else. It hits us every day in many different ways. And in light of this, we wanted to think about how Israel at war is going to shape the way we think about Holocaust Memorial Day this year, which comes on Thursday.
October 7th and the fact that we’re at war is colouring everything. It’s the lens through which we’re looking at all of our existence. We talked about what does it mean to celebrate Pesach this year when we have hostages. What does it mean to go from slavery to freedom? And today we want to ask, what does it mean to remember the Holocaust in light of these events? How have these events changed our experience, changed the way we think about it?
And so I want to start by turning to you, Yossi, and ask you this, you know, like at the Haggadah we say, ma nishtana halayla hazeh, how is this night different? How is this Holocaust Memorial Day different from you than from every other year?
Yossi: In a strange way, Donniel, this Yom HaShoah is less central for me than previous years. The survivor families that I knew growing up, certainly my family felt this way, we felt the burden of responsibility of keeping alive the memory of the Shoah, especially in the early years after the Shoah, when so much of the Jewish people didn’t know what to do with this, what to say. And so there was widespread silence. And we felt the need to commemorate, to talk, to make sure that there would be a language for the Shoah. And gradually that became much less urgent because the Jewish people took up the Shoah as a central part of its identity.
What has happened for me post October 7th is that we’re seeing the return of victimhood in Jewish consciousness. And I find this profoundly disturbing because for me it negates the great post Holocaust achievement of the Jewish people, which was not just to survive, not just to endure the Holocaust, but to defeat it in the sense that we responded to our apocalypse by dredging up our ultimate dream, the dream of return to Zion, and in the diaspora, the dream of creating self-confident, free, accepted Jewish communities. These were the great achievements of the post-Holocaust era. When we go back into Holocaust consciousness and trauma, and when we connect October 7th to the Holocaust, we’re defeating ourselves psychologically.
Donniel: So it’s interesting, if I understood you correctly, and tell me if I did, I asked you how is this Yom HaShoah different? And if I understood your answer, is, you’re very uncomfortable this Yom HaShoah? That normally you are very, like as a survivor family, Yom HaShoah was your banner, is what you want to teach the Jewish people, and October 7th has brought it back in a way that you’re not comfortable with. Are you uncomfortable this Yom HaShoah?
Yossi: I’m uncomfortable in the sense that I feel less emotionally connected. You know, I think it’s part of, the fear that I have is an abuse of the Holocaust, first of all by our enemies, who are now relating to Israel as Nazi Germany and this war is genocide.
And then internally, within the Jewish people, how we’re relating to ourselves as Holocaust victims. And we are not the Jews of the Holocaust, and we’re not the Nazis. And yet that seems to be the only choice. That’s the framework in which this Yom HaShoah is playing out. And I don’t find my place in that discourse.
Donniel: They’re taking the Holocaust away from you.
Yossi: They’re taking it in directions, first of all, among ourselves for totally understandable reasons. October 7th was the greatest trauma for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. But it wasn’t a Holocaust event because as you and I have said over and over again on this podcast, October 7th was immediately followed by October 8th. You can’t have achieved the kind of victory that we did over Hezbollah, over Iran, in part over Hamas, that’s still an open question, but nevertheless, from a place of victimhood. We weren’t victims.
Donniel: I hear you. You know, it’s so interesting how we’re such close friends and we experience reality so differently. As you know, and as I’ve said many times, I’ve never related to Yom HaShoah. I always had, I didn’t have the responsibility of bringing the reality and the pain of the Holocaust to the Jewish people who didn’t want to hear it or… I didn’t have to carry that banner the way you did in your upbringing. And it was like this was the Torah of your father that you had to bring to the Jewish people. I didn’t have that.
Like the distinction between the Shoah on October 7th and how it’s abused or abused. They don’t activate the same things by me as they do by you because I haven’t spent the same amount of time thinking about them.
Maybe before I go to Yom HaShoah, the purpose of holidays in our tradition is to challenge you to stop your everyday life. Holidays in our tradition are speed bumps. You’re walking along your life, by nature, you tend to become mediocre. Everything is fine, and what was, it’s like there’s a sort of a flow of being.
But it’s also part of what makes life sustainable. There’s consistency and predictability. And the Jewish people put 250 plus holidays in the year to tell you that since I want more of you, I want you to think. I want you to be aware of ideas. And the holidays in many ways are the counterpart of Torah. Torah is a book teaching us ideas. Holidays are a way for us to live and experience and allow room for ideas and values to come into our consciousness in ways that we don’t normally allow them to enter. You don’t have to read a book, you just have to experience the holiday.
And so as I come to this Yom HaShoah, I find myself thinking about something that I wouldn’t normally think about. It’s like almost experiencing and thinking about a book that I would never even open. And you’re forced to! That’s the idea. You’re forced to. You’re not allowed to say, I’m going to skip a holiday. And you’re not allowed to say, know, as Heschel once said to a student who said, I can’t pray, the spirit doesn’t move me. Heschel famously says, well, it’s time for you to move your spirit.
Yom HaShoah, the holiday, is challenging us to move our spirit. And one of the things that it challenges me to think about this year is something that I hate to think about. I want to, this Yom HaShoah, think about it. And ask myself and challenge myself what place it has in my life.
October 7th made me experience evil. I don’t know if it’s radical evil, complete evil. I don’t know what…
Yossi: Yeah, I would go for those terms, yeah.
Donniel: And October 7th technically, Yossi, it’s the same as the Holocaust, not as bad as the Holocaust, all of the above, doesn’t really matter to me, because Yom HaShoah challenges us not necessarily to connect to Jewish victimhood and to anti-Semitism alone, but it’s to accept the presence in our life, in our world, in the midst of enlightenment and progress, the inhuman, or maybe this radical evil, as my mother would challenge me to say, she says, don’t call it inhuman, it’s human. That’s like, don’t define the human always by the most noble. Part of this is to say this is human.
And this here, I’m connecting to the the Holocaust experience of evil in ways that I haven’t in the past. Maybe last year we were still so, I don’t know where we were, and maybe I had the same feeling last year. But Yom HaShoah is reminding me, Donniel, that as you want to think about enlightenment, and as you want to think about Israel tomorrow, and as you want to think about peace, and as you want to think about hope, your life has to make room for the presence of evil. And if you don’t, it’s not simply that you’re going to be profoundly mistaken and you will expose yourself to danger, but that your hopes for the future have to take into account this evil. And that’s the Torah of Yom HaShoah for me at this moment this week.
Yossi: Well, I love everything that you’ve said and I love the holiday analogy to speed bumps. That’s really wonderful. And, you know, I’ve been thinking about radical evil since I’m three years old. It’s not an exaggeration because my father spoke to me incessantly about the Shoah, those were my bedtime stories. You know, I would say, know, daddy, tell me, tell me a story. And he would tell me, well, I was hiding in this hole with two friends and who knows what else he said. And he was trying to prepare his American-born son for radical evil because his great fear was that I would be naive. I would be another naive American Jew incapable of meeting existential threat. And so that’s how I was raised.
You were raised to be a Jewish intellectual, and I was raised to deal with radical evil.
And when I think about radical evil, and I love what your mother said, that it’s not inhuman, it’s human. For me, the difference between mundane evil and radical evil is intent. And the question of premeditation. When you act out evil impulses, there’s a certain animalistic tendency that we struggle with in ourselves. You know, human beings are the meeting point in some way between the divine, the angelic, and the animalistic. And we’re a struggle, we’re a battleground between these two forces.
Occasionally, or more than occasionally, there’s an outbreak of the animalistic tendencies, which is what religion tries to control and redirect. Certainly, that’s, I’d say, much the purpose of Judaism. But to shift to radical evil, it’s when you use your humanity, and again, this brings me back to your mother, it’s when you’re acting as a human being, when you’re acting as a civilized human being in the name of evil, that is where evil becomes radical.
So for example, for me, what’s so stunning about the Shoah is that it wasn’t a pogrom, right? It began as a pogrom on Kristallnacht in 1938. And then the Nazis shut that down. They said, we don’t do pogroms. We are going to be doing systematic, premeditated, organized mass murder, which will take place on many levels. It’s going to involve state bureaucracy. It’s going to involve the medical establishment, academia, on almost every, the army, of course, on almost every level of society. You mobilize the instruments of society, bureaucracy, is an expression of civilization. You mobilize civilization itself for evil. you—what I would call the Shoah a crime of dispassion.
And I would call October 7 a crime of dispassion as well. Think about the terrorists filming the atrocities. Think about the terrorist phoning up his parents, all excited, saying, I’ve just killed 10 Jews. Or the atrocities that the terrorists committed. And I don’t even want to repeat some of them. And the delight with which they were engaging in the atrocities. This is radical.
Donniel: And so the question is, what do we do when we encounter this? As you all know and as our audience knows, I’m petrified of how radical evil or the experience of this radical evil is going to infect us. That when you live in the midst of radical evil, it’s like a cancer. And maybe again, as my mother said, if it was inhuman, it wouldn’t be able to affect us. It’s precisely because it’s human. that it could infect us. This is, it’s a human disease. It’s a potential that we all have.
So I want this Yom HaShoah to look at it. I want it to obligate me to think about how I think about the future. But I also want to look at it very similar to the way we spoke about together about Pesach, how our experience of suffering doesn’t become the vehicle for our ability to inhumanize others, but quite to the contrary. So how does this experience of radical evil make us not just more cautious, but change our utopia, change our vision for the future, understand people who can’t hear us to the same degree, and at the same time not infect us? I’m thinking about it and this is the challenge of this Yom HaShoah.
And maybe if I could transition to another dimension that I’m thinking about this year. And so much of Zionism is built on the negation of the Shoah. Zionism is about a narrative in Hebrew, mi-Shoah le’tkuma, from the Holocaust to rebirth. And the Jewish people are reborn in Zionism. And Shoah was not supposed to happen again.
Now, according to you, it didn’t happen again. But for so many Israelis, the average Israeli, they are seeing October 7th as a reincarnation of the Shoah again. And something that is fundamentally broken in Zionism for them. It’s broken. Zionism, the whole ethos of Zionism was that we don’t have Shoah anymore. And what I’m frightened about and…
Yossi: It’s the return of Jewish helplessness on October 7th. That’s the Israeli trauma. The failure of the state to fulfill its promise to the Jewish people of a safe, to protect them.
Donniel: So I’m wondering in light of this, you know, you and I have spoken a lot about this, and we’ll probably have to in the future delve more deeply into this as Israel’s engagement now in war in Gaza, the second stage of this war is taking on a very different form of the first war, but of the first stage of the war.
But I’m wondering whether this stage of the war, Yossi, is really a war at all against Hamas. Is really a war to destroy Hamas. You know, I don’t, I’m wondering whether this stage of the war is to reclaim the myth that Zionism is, moves us from Shoah to rebirth and brings that, puts that experience outside of Jewish consciousness.
It wouldn’t be enough for Hamas to relinquish its political control. It wouldn’t even be enough for us to have a political solution for Gaza. I want to reclaim our ability to be the masters over tragedy. Zionism is the solution to Jewish tragedy and I could only achieve that not through politics and not through concession, but through military might.
Like even if you look at the language, if Hamas doesn’t do this, we are going to unleash on them a hell like they’ve never seen, like as if what have we been doing? Even the language is not coherent. There is no end game. There’s no strategy there. Now it’s even less clear what do we want to do? I think what we want to do is I think we want to occupy Gaza, not because there’s no other solution for Hamas. We want to re-occupy it because when we saw after the first ceasefire Hamas parading, that’s what made October 7th, it brought the shame of October 7th. And we want Zionism back. We want our myth that we are free from these dangers. And could you ever be free?
And so we’re now in the midst of some war in which we’re searching for some elusive ideology of the existence and telos, purpose of our country. It’s like I could fight Hamas, but we’re fighting here a demon, and I don’t know how you ever win this again.
Yossi: So I think that’s an important insight into our psyche today. I would like to add another dimension. And that is that what the State of Israel did for the Jewish people after the Shoah was enable the beginnings of our healing. The fact that Jews can pray after the Shoah, can go to synagogue, and say those words of praise to God without irony. Because I remember when I was growing up and I was davening, praying in a synagogue of survivors. Nobody prayed. And this was a synagogue of Hasidic survivors. I don’t remember anyone praying. Everyone was gossiping and talking about business and laughing. None of these young, they were young men then, young survivors, none of them were praying.
Donniel: So Jews not praying is a post Holocaust phenomena.
Yossi: Absolutely.
Donniel: I mean, like going to shul and making noise.
Yossi: Yes, you went to shul because that’s what your martyred parents would have expected of you to do.
Donniel: Yossi, I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I’ll interrupt you for a second because I think you’ve just given me an insight into something that aggravated my father more than anything else in his career as a rabbi. And that was the institution called the Kiddush Club, where in the middle of davening, this is an Orthodox shul, where after they were making noise, in the middle, a whole group would get up and go out and drink.
What’s going on? You want to have kiddush afterwards. That’s a collective communal experience. So maybe the kiddush club is also a post Holocaust phenomena. It’s like, the irony. It’s like Purim that in the midst of this insane story, okay, if that’s the way we’re going to survive, then I’m going to get drunk.
Yossi: Yeah, but here’s, but you know, it’s funny, Donniel, because I think that the post-Holocaust response to the irony of Jewish prayer gradually began to wane. And you don’t see it in this new generation. And I think that’s a tremendous spiritual victory of the Jewish people. And I believe that Israel was instrumental in helping the Jews heal in multiple ways.
And one of the ways was to pray. The way that my father put it to me after the Six-Day War, he said, I can forgive God now. You know, such a Jewish thing to say. God didn’t deserve my prayers and now I can forgive God. You know, that’s such a Jewish way of rejecting God. You know, it’s not that I don’t believe in God. It’s because I believe in God and God, you could have stopped this.
Donniel: It’s heresy as protest.
Yossi: Yes, it’s heresy, it’s protest, and as an affirmation of the reality of God. So, again, and I’m filtering this through my family’s experience, through the community that I knew growing up, the experience of Israel gave us such an overwhelming sense of gratitude and joy that it helped partly displace the trauma of the Holocaust.
And, you know, it used to aggravate me to no end when I would think about in the 1960s, who are the symbols of the Jewish people? In Israel, it’s kibbutzniks, and in America, it’s comedians, Borscht Belt comedians. And all of these positive symbols when our face should have been a raging survivor. And even Elie Wiesel was somehow more tormented than angry. And I said, where’s the Jewish rage? Where is it? And Israel in some way sublimated our rage.
Donniel: So then what? So now October 7th brought it back?
Yossi: Yes, yes, but before I get to that point, I have one more move I want to make, which is, Israel didn’t only sublimate the trauma of the Holocaust. It sublimated Jewish anger over another trauma, which is that in a certain sense, the Holocaust didn’t end. And by that, I mean that the essence of the Holocaust was a war against the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s right to exist.
What anti-Zionism did, the Arab war against Israel, the Soviet Union’s war against Zionism now being taken up by progressives around the world, move from the war against the right of the Jewish people to exist to the war against the Jewish state’s right to exist. Israel becomes the only state in the world that has to defend its right to exist. And I hate, hate that phrase, our right to exist. I don’t use it. I’m deeply offended by it.
I spoke to a group of German journalists a few years ago in Jerusalem. And one of them says to me, you know, we’re very pro-Israel in Germany. We support your right to exist. And I said, you know, we’re very pro-German in Israel. We support your right to exist. And there was nervous laughter in the room. And they understood that, maybe saying that we support Israel’s right to exist is setting the bar of being pro-Israel a little too low. And yet we’ve internalized that. Yeah, we have to defend our right to exist. Why do we have to defend our right to exist? What the source of my rage today is that, and that after the Holocaust, we’re still fighting to defend our right to exist.
So now, to bring it to October 7, my sense is that on a very deep and unconscious level, what has erupted in the Jewish soul, this rage, this post-October 7th rage, is what do you mean that we’re still defending our right to exist? What do you mean that we’re still in a war of existence? After that, after that, and we take this all as normal?
And so the rage within the Jewish people is saying no. There’s nothing normal about the fact that after the Holocaust, the Jewish people is still struggling to defend its right to exist.
Donniel: So this Yom HaShoah, we are challenged in really different ways, whether there really should be no connection between the two or not. The fact is, is that we are. There is a rage, there’s an outrage, there’s victimhood. There’s profound experiences that we have to come to terms with. There’s evil. There’s an attempt to reclaim some place that existed beforehand that we’ve somehow lost that we don’t want to be Shoah Jews.
There’s all these ideas that you and I surface today and this speed bump of Yom HaShoah is asking us, okay, think about them. Think about them, think about what they mean. Think also about what you do with them. Think about how are they controlling you? Are they moving you in places that you want to go?
I’m always worried about rage. I don’t do rage the same way you do. Because I’m worried about its uncontrolled nature. I’m worried about fantasies. I’m worried about radical evil. But they’re all there. And this Yom HaShoah, you you could say they’re not there, and okay, no, no, they’re there. And they’re alive and they’re shaping our people.
And how we develop a Torah of Yom HaShoah in light of all of these things that we’ve spoken about is really what Yom HaShoah demands of us. And to make sure, you know, and as I said, without belaboring it, like what are we fighting for right now? What are we trying to reclaim? Are we trying to claim our right to be? Are we trying to claim our right to exist? Are we trying to claim our right to be in a perfect world? Are we fighting to claim some fantasy?
All of these make very, very big differences. And they create different policies and different agendas. But Yom HaShoah is there. It’s part of our life. We have to use it as a force for growth. Not as a force for destruction, but how we do so is not simple.
Yossi, last words for today?
Yossi: I don’t have a last word on this. It’s an ongoing lifelong process of trying to understand and not being able to understand and at best trying to get to an approximation of understanding.
Donniel: Right. Maybe instead of understanding, the job of a holiday is to make you feel something. Holidays aren’t there to create coherent philosophies. They’re a speed bump to challenge you to expand your horizons and that needs to be enough.
So Yossi, it’s a pleasure to be with you as always.
Yossi: Always, Donniel.
Donniel: Let’s keep Norit Bat Eti in our prayers and our hostages and our country and our people, our world. Today is day 564. This is For Heaven’s Sake, Israel’s still at war. Thank you for listening, friends.
