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Acting Redemptively
By Diogenes Allen

THE volume of literature on the Jewish Holocaust is now so large that one hesitates to add to it. But I wish to outline a response to the Holocaust which I think Christians must attempt and which I have not found among the many Christian responses which I have studied.

I

When we read about the Holocaust or see films of its victims, we frequently feel that we must see that it never happens again. I am afraid, however, that this resolve can be carried out only with a deeper moral and spiritual renewal than can be produced simply by an exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust. It may provoke the reaction, "How terrible! We must not let it happen again." But as long as we give our allegiance to power and worldly success, however well disguised, such horrors can recur in spite of our resolves to the contrary.

Furthermore, a Christian must think not only of the future but also of the past. For Christianity is concerned with the redemption of evil. Redemption of evil is the substance of its hope. Not only is the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, one who seeks to redeem us from evil, but Christian people are to participate in that action. So my approach to the Holocaust is to ask how we Christians today can act redemptively, and in particular act redemptively vis-a-vis the victims themselves.

Crucial to my answer is the concept of a total event which I learned about in a book published in 1938 entitled Creative Suffering, by Iulia de Beausobre. She was arrested and tortured during the Stalinist purges and farm collectivization of the 1930s when some ten million peasants perished. She points out that the suffering inflicted on a person is not a complete event, but that a complete or total event must include a person's response to the suffering (and indeed the response of other people). The way a person responds affects the meaning and significance of the act. A person, for example, who responds to torture with fear, self-pity, and hatred, and in no other way makes the total event worse.

Diogenes Allen is Professor of Philosophy. Princeton Theological Seminary. A graduate of Yale and Oxford Universities, he has also taught at York University. Toronto. He is the author of The Reasonableness of Faith (1968). Between Two Worlds (1977). Traces of God in a Frequently Hostile World ( 1980), and Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil ( 1983). The substance of this essay was presented at a Jewish-Christian Seminar for ministers and rabbis in connection with the Continuing Education program. Princeton Theological Seminary

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But a creative response to the torture can bring a redemptive element into existence. Since the response is part of the total event, it affects the meaning and significance of the event.

The Holocaust, then, is not just an event of the late 1930s and early 1940s, an event over and done with. It includes people's responses to that event. How we react to it even now affects the meaning and significance of the event. If our response today is one of utter indifference, then the significance and meaning of the death of the victims differs from what it would be if our response is one of reconciliation with present-day Jews. These are just two possible responses to the event of the Holocaust, but they illustrate how the nature of a response becomes part of the total event and affects the meaning and significance of the event.

With the concept of a total event, we can find a way of acting today so as to bring a redemptive element into existence. The events of the '30s and '40s need not remain past events about which we can do nothing except perhaps hope to prevent the same in the future. Instead, they are part of a past which we can affect by our present response. We can affect what that past is, and can even affect the victims of the Holocaust, by the way we act today. Our response cannot change the pain and degradation they endured, but it can change the meaning and significance of what they endured. The Holocaust need not be simply an event of unmitigated horror, a senseless and meaningless liquidation of millions of innocent people.

II

How can we act today so as to bring to the total event a redemptive element" Here we need to look at the way presentations of the Holocaust generally affect people like you and me. We hear people refer to the Holocaust, perhaps read a book about it, or see a TV program about it. A normal human reaction to horrible suffering is to ask who is responsible for it. We want to know who is to blame; for we feel rage and hatred at the sight of cruelty, and we look around for its cause, as we want to focus our hatred on its source. But in the case of the Holocaust, people do not let us stop with the Nazis as the focus of our hatred, for they prod more deeply into the reasons for anti-Semitism and how it was that such acts were allowed to happen.

It is frequently suggested that we non-Jews share the blame with the Nazis. This is suggested in many, ways. Sometimes it is said that the Christian churches did not resist the Nazis; that the Pope was silent when he could and should have spoken up, and it is even claimed that he had at least a tacit understanding that in return for his silence the Nazis would not interfere with the Roman Catholic Church in Germany; and, more generally, that long-standing Christian anti-Semitism fostered the attitudes which led to the Holocaust. We present-day Christians are thus implicated indirectly because of our bonds to Christianity and its institutions, a creed which is said to bear a heavy responsibility for the Holocaust.

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This immediately puts us on the defensive. "I wasn't in German, in the '30s or '40s. I wasn't even born," some will say. The horror of the suffering portrayed, which provokes the normal human reaction of blaming and hating those responsible for it, now, clashes with a desire to declare our own innocence. That conflict can lead a Christian of today to feel resentment. There is, I believe, in many of us a tendency to resent Jews for constantly harking back to the Holocaust-a tendency to say, "All right, all right. Jews in the past have suffered. But do you think You are the only ones"' What about all the non-Jews who were liquidated by the Nazis! Why don't you talk about them too?"

This particular response may not always occur, and it may be present in different degrees of intensity, and indeed it is not the feeling all persons have. But resentment is one of the feelings many Christians have over the frequent references to the Holocaust by present-day Jews. This response cannot be redemptive. In fact, it adds to the negative weight of the Holocaust. It makes the total event worse.

As long as Christianity or Christians are perceived as bearing some degree of responsibility for the Holocaust, we Christians are likely to want to forget the Holocaust and not to be reminded of it. But present-day Jews cannot forget the Holocaust. They as Jews are bonded to the victims by an unbreakable bond. They fear that they and their descendants are exposed to the threat of its reoccurrence. So they will keep reminding us all of the Holocaust. Many Christians do and will feel some resentment toward present-day Jews for persistently recalling the Holocaust for us.

The first step toward acting redemptively is not really within the capabilities of present-day Christians. They are not bonded to the victims, and so were it only up to Christians to keep the Holocaust from being forgotten by most people, it would be lost in oblivion, as are the million Armenians who were led on a death march in 1915 by the Turks. It is because there are enough living Jews, who are bonded to the victims, that the Holocaust is not likely to be forgotten. In addition, present-day Jews hold the initiative in the matter of acting redemptively. They, have the opportunity of presenting the Holocaust in such a way that Christians will not react with destructive defensiveness. They, can present it in such a way that people will not feel resentment toward present-day Jews, and so that people will not want the Holocaust to be buried in oblivion.

Jews today are tempted to recall and present the Holocaust with anger and hatred, and to point the finger of blame. This is a perfectly human reaction, for Jews were outraged- out aged beyond the power of words to express-and present-day Jews are bonded to the victims not only by their very Jewishness but by their own experience of prejudice. To suffer innocently does cause one to feel hatred, to desire revenge, and at times to sink into self-pity, and despair. If these feelings are uppermost when Jews call our attention to the Holocaust, non-Jews may respond with resentment. However justified Jews are in what they say and feel,

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non-Jews are tempted to react defensively and to return hatred for hatred.

Jews can be said to have the initiative, then, first, because they, are the only group which is bonded to the victims of the Holocaust. They are our only assurance that as the years go by the Holocaust will not be forgotten. It is they alone who have kept and will continue to keep it before our consciousness, so that even non-Jews who have portrayed the Holocaust have done so primarily because Jews have put its horrible reality into their hearts and minds. Second, they have the initiative because it is they above all who determine the fashion and manner in which the Holocaust is kept before us.

III

The first step in acting redemptively, for all practical purposes, is in the hands of present-day Jews. They and they alone have sufficient motivation to keep reminding us all, as they have done in the past and will do in the future, of the Holocaust. But they must try to remind us in such a way as to prevent us from reacting to them, the presenters, defensively. They, must try to keep their bitterness, anxiety, hatred, and outrage sufficiently in check so that we will not react to their feelings even their justified feelings-with our rejection, resentment, and hatred. Why should they do this? Because if they do not, we can so easily evade looking at the Holocaust victims; we can so easily be deflected from attending to them. If the presenter does not sufficiently control the tone of the presentation, we will react to him or her instead of focusing on the subject itself. Our resentment toward the presenter will enable us to avoid facing the horror of the Holocaust and of our possible indirect responsibility for it, and certainly will keep us from facing our anti-Semitic feelings.

To say that the initiative, for all practical purposes, is with present day Jews is not an evasion of our responsibility. Rather, it is a humbling and even humiliating admission for a Christian to say that in order for us to act redemptively, for us to perform our Christian vocation, we depend on present-day Jews. We, whose faith is that evil can be and must be redeemed, depend on present-day Jews in order to be enabled ourselves to act redemptively. They, have the initiative. We Christians, who are used to having the initiative because we are so much more numerous than Jews, are supplicants. It is we-Christian leaders-who have to ask them to enable us to carry out part of our vocation as Christians. We know only too well that the mass of Christian people and the mass of secular people in America, prejudiced as they are against Jews, do and will react with resentment to any presentation of the Holocaust which, as it seeks to tell the truth, does not control rage, hatred, and bitterness. In such a case, not only will nothing redemptive happen, but the total event will then be worse.

But why should the Jew be asked to rise above the normal and natural reaction of the innocent toward outrage" Why should not Christians be

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asked to rise above their natural reaction of resentment to a presentation which evinces hatred and bitterness? Why must present-day Jews be nice" to us so that we won't be "nasty" toward them? We as Christian leaders ask them to assume the initiative for the sake and in the name of their brothers and sisters, the victims of the Holocaust. We ask them to rise above their natural reactions because if they do not, Christians who have refused to look at the reality of the Holocaust will continue to refuse to do so. They will continue to respond to every presentation of the Holocaust (and presentations will continue to made, largely because present-day Jews are bonded to those Jewish victims) defensively. The actual social situation is such that we Christians are dependent on Jews to enable the mass of American Christians to take a step toward redeeming the past.

IV

We share with Jews the need to rise above natural reactions. Although the initiative is not with us, more and more Christians must sooner or later recognize that in the matter of acting redemptively vis-a-vis the victims of the Holocaust, we are in the position of supplicants-dependent on the present-day Jew to help us overcome our desire to avoid facing the Holocaust and our desire to avoid any hint of complicity for it by the anti-Semitism which we harbor, perhaps secretly, in our hearts.

If Jews today can present the Holocaust to us all with their rage, hatred, and scorn under control-as has been the case in many instances-then we Christians and others can actually look at the past, see the horror of innocent people slaughtered, and recognize in ourselves the seeds of the kind of hatred and evil which did such things. It can lead us to a moral and spiritual renewal. Perhaps we can then pay our humble tribute to those Jews of today who have actually risen above natural human reactions.

Can we realistically ask those who have the initiative to rise about their natural reactions against outrage? There is evidence that today's Jews can, because there are Jews who have done so. Consider this one news report which appeared in The New York Times, Feb. 12, 1980, under the headline, "Three Nazis Convicted of Abetting Murder of 50,000 Jews." We find that Ida Greenspan, who was sent to Auschwitz from Paris at the age of fourteen in one of the boxcars that the defendants supervised, attended the trial. She said to a reporter afterwards that she thought the sentences (six to twelve years) reasonable. In addition, she is quoted as saying:

The three of them lived easy lives until now. and the sentences don't really mean much. Perhaps reliving all of this was harder for a person like me than for them. In any case, I don't hate them. If I did, that would mean in a way that their inhumanity had won.

This response to the outrage of the Holocaust is part of the total event. If both Jews and Christians respond as Ida Greenspan does, not only are

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we today moved toward deeper moral and spiritual renewal, but the meaning and significance of the death of the victims of the Holocaust is affected. Instead of being victims of an unmitigated horror, devoid of any redemptive feature, they become our honored dead who help to redeem us from our bitterness, hatred, and prejudices. In them we can find the prophecy of Isaiah fulfilled in a new way: "upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed" (Isa. 53:5b).