October 2001 Holocaust Plus By Rabbi Alvin Kass As the Jewish holidays wind down, a new year of energetic activity looms ahead. For many Americans, Jews and non-Jews, these include courses and programs on the Holocaust. A specialized field of scholarship has grown up around this catastrophe, including undergraduate and graduate courses, academic centers, conferences, fellowships, and endowed chairs. There are libraries devoted to it, along with museums, films, docudramas, internet sites, and novels. Granted that the Holocaust is an extraordinarily important subject which needs to be studied, is it possible to overdo a good and necessary thing? Can there be too much attention paid to this singular horror? That is the nub of a hotly debated issue within the worldwide Jewish community. Some believe the Holocaust is getting the attention it deserves, while others are uneasy about concentrating on an attempt to wipe out the Jewish people instead of on the whole of Jewish history. Proponents of the Holocaust as an independent and specialized field of study regard the Holocaust, along with the creation of the State of Israel, as the defining event of Jewish history in the twentieth century, if not the last two thousand years. It also has anÊoverwhelming significance for mankind in general, because all the distinctive features of modernity such as nationalism, decline of religious authority, an innovative political ideology, bureaucracy, technology, the secular state, racial theory and intentional state-sponsored genocide come together in a unique way. Furthermore, Nazism challenged to the core all the classic Western doctrines of ethics, philosophy, and theology. As a result, any effortÊto comprehendÊthe modern world, including its unprecedented capacity to alter the human condition and its prodigious potential for good and evil, must confront all those events that collectively constitute the Holocaust. Opponents of all this attention on the Holocaust contend that mass murder should not be treated as the defining moment of Judaism. Nor does it provide the basis of a sound moral education. In too many cases, greater stress is given to the fact that the Jews were killed because of what they believed in than to the content of those beliefs. If the slaughter of the European Jews should not be forgotten, neither should it overshadow the way of life it tried to destroy.Ê Education, both under Jewish and secular auspices, ought to have much more to teach about the creative energy of the Jews than the destructive energy of Hitler. Salo Baron, the preeminent Jewish historian of modern times, bemoans the treatment of Jewish history as a "Vale of Tears". The Jews have suffered a great deal but they have also contributed richly to human civilization. Apart from all the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners spawned by the Jewish people, they likewise created an indigenous culture based on the Bible and the Talmud which has done more to propagate the values of humaneness and compassion than any other people on the face of the Earth. We must also be cognizant that our focus on the Jews as victims of the Holocaust should not obscure the nature of the aggression against them. The murder of European Jewry was a political act, a war within a war. The Nazis almost succeeded in the annihilation of the Jews even though they failed in their efforts to subdue Europe, because in his battle with the Jews, Hitler had the support of the countries he conquered. Anti-Semitism battened on the long-standing image of the Jews as victims. You cannot understand the Holocaust unless you place it within the context of the political predicament of the Jewish people which has perceived and used the Jews as a target for the past two thousand years. Of course, it is essential to document, to study, to analyze, and to commemorate the greatest moral failure in Western civilization, but it is only a part of Jewish history. The really significant dimensions of our annals possess content which is edifying, uplifting, elevating, sanctifying and inspiring. It is the preservation and furtherance of the latter which justifies the pain and self-sacrifice of the former. By all means, learn about the Holocaust, but pay even more attention to the positive accomplishments of the Jewish people. It is a saga of peerless genius and incomparable glory for which the rest of the human race ought to be eternally grateful.