June 2001 Warning: Don't Come Too Late By Rabbi Alvin Kass Recently, I saw Judgment at Nuremburg on Broadway. This extraordinary play deals with the 1948 second tier of trials, involving lower level Nazi officials, in this case four judges. The prosecution accused these judges of legalizing Nazi atrocities such as sexual sterilization of state enemies and the enforcement of prohibitions against intimacy between so-called Aryans and non-Aryans. The dewfense responded that these judges were simply following orders and trying to prevent worse things from happening. Furthermore, it was argued that if you indict them, you have to indict the whole world which acquiesced in these horrible misdeeds. As I reflected upon the opposing arguments, there came to mind Abraham Joshua Heschel's famous pronouncement: "Some are guilty, all are responsible." What Heschel is saying essentially is that there are degrees of direct involvement in moral evil, rendering some more culpable than others, but there is no point along that spectrum at which anyone can claim total exemption. Therefore, both the prosecution and the defense are correct. The prosecution is right that those judges whose rulings victimized innocent people, depriving them of the inalienable rights to which they are entitled as human beings must be punished by society. These malevolent acts violate a categorical mandate from divinely sanctioned natural law to accord justice to each and every human being, regardless of race, religion, color and creed. The defense is also right in affirming that all people bear responsibility for injustice. The one who acquiesces in the evil done by others is implicated in that evil. The one who remains quiet when the demagogue speaks gives his vote to the demagogue. The one who remains indifferent encourages the forces of hatred. THus, only some will bear the guilt that is prosecutable in courtm but all must accept moral culpability for what occurred. As Judaism views it, universal responsibility flows from the interdependence of mankind. The entire human race is linked horizontally through space and vertically through time. All the members of a single eneration in space have a common destiny they cannot escape. There is a parable about a child who ate too much ice cream and got a stomach ache. The stomach complained that it should not suffer the consequences of the palate's lack of self-control. Both stomach and palate, however, are part of a larger organism, and whatever affects any part of the organism will have an impact on the other parts as well. Similarly, the various links in a family through time are indissolubly joined together both for good and for evil. Because we are all connected by a thousand invisible threads, we have to recognize the responsibility we have to take into account the consequences that will accrue to others from our actions. Certainly what the Nazis did had an effect on their contemporaries along with all the subsequent generations to come. The essence of Heschel's message is caught in an incident that befell him at the age of seven. He was studying Bible with a rebbe in Poland. When they reached the Akeda, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, Heschel reviewed what happened: "Isaac was on the way to Mount Moriah with his father, then he lay on the altar, bound, waiting to be sacrificed. My heart began to beat even fasterl it actually sobbed with pity for Isaac. Behold, Abraham now lifed the knife. And now my heart froze within me with fright. Suddenly the voice of the angel was heard: 'Abraham, lay not thine hand upon the lad, for now I know that thou fearest God.' And here I broke into tears and wept aloud. The Rabbi asked: 'Why are you crying? You know Isaac was not killed!' And I said to him, still weeping: 'But, Rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late?' The Rabbi comforted me, and calmed me down by telling me that an angel cannot come too late." Heschel reasoned: "An angel cannot come late, but we, made of flesh and blood, we may come late!" That story was first told in relation to Vietnam at the first mobilization meeting of Concerned Clergy and Laity in Washington in January 1967, but it has relevance to the Holocaust and all other human tragedies. Heschel reminds us that it is always possible for us humans to come late. If the end of the Holocaust had been delayed much longer, the totality of European Jewry might have perished. God forbid, as we confront the crucial issues of the twenty-first century, that we should come too late!