VAYETZEI 1X
Bereshit 28:10 - 30:13 in Triennial Cycle
Eitz Hayim 166 - 176; Hertz   ; Plaut 193-202

This is one of those Parashiot that is full of things to talk about in a d’var:

•	Think of Jacob waking up from his dream about the ladder to heaven and realizing that he has slept in a holy place. In his seeming endless store of chutzpah, Jacob does not fall on his knees but instead offers God a bargain. If You, he says to God, will protect me, and feed me, and clothe me, and bring me safely back home, then You will be my God.  No one else in the Hebrew Bible acts that way in God’s presence.

•	Think also of Jacob at the well when Rachel arrives. The first thing he does is kiss her, and then explains that they are relatives. I can well imagine Rachel running back to her father and pleading for some strong men to go with her to the well because there is this crazy guy who tried to carry her off on the basis of some cock and bull story that they are related.

•	And think yet again of Jacob on his first night with Leah. We have already been told that Leah had weak eyes, which was likely a euphemism for not so good looking, whereas Rachel was shapely, which probably meant tzafdik. Now even assuming that her maid servants had brought Leah into the bed chamber with her veil still in place, are we to believe that, once alone with her, Jacob did not remove the veil, did not even look at his new bride, before consummating the marriage. More likely he recognized the deception and, instead of protesting, realized that he could turn the deception to his own advantage. He could have two women, indeed four, in his encampment.  Not bad for a virile young man.

However, I am not going to talk about any of those things, nor am I going to talk about our Parashah at all.  With apologies for the total change of pace, I want to recognize that today, 10 December, is Human Rights Day. The origin of this day emerged as the United Nations was developing in the wake of World War II, and, though there were many sources at the time, one of them was the Holocaust, which began 76 years ago with Kristallnacht, November 9 and 10, 1938, in Germany when 200 synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked, and 25,000 Jews were arrested and put in concentration camps.

Even minimal investigation of Kristallnacht makes two things clear: First, destruction was so massive that it could not have been carried out just by rampaging crowds; they needed to be supplied with high explosives and incendiary devices.  Second, the crowds were not simply interested in gold and silver implements to carry off; they were interested in destroying Judaism.

Pogroms were nothing new to Jews in Europe, but, typically, after a day or two of pillage, officials would step in and things would quiet down for a while.  Kristallnacht was not like those earlier pogroms.  I can think of nothing like it in post-Biblical history except perhaps for Roman and later Christian efforts to annihilate Judaism in Alexandria (500 to 700 CE).  Even the inquisition in Spain and Portugal gave Jews the option to convert to Catholicism and, so far from destroying Jewish buildings, the Church was eager to add them to its wealth.  The Soviet Union may have tried to wipe out Judaism, but that was no different from its efforts to wipe out all religions.

Whether or not Kristallnacht is unique in history, it is important to understand that such events always have active government promotion, and a willing populace. However, if they are going to be sizeable, they need a third component: what we call “evil.”  Evil has to be there to abuse largely defenseless people, to destroy their ways of living, and to debase their religion.  Pogroms against Jewish communities typically have elements of all three: government promotion; popular activity; and some form of evil.  The first two are easily definable; the last is not. Just what is evil?

Evil is difficult to define, but we can approach it with Hannah Arendt’s controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  Recently, I saw van Trotta’s brilliant film entitled simply Hannah Arendt.  After the film, I thought about what Toby and I had learned on our trips to old Jewish communities in Europe--about how many ordinary people collaborated with the Nazis, and how few tried to help Jews. Arendt depicts Eichmann as a man who had never learned how to think, or had forgotten how to think.  From those impressions, I initially suggested that Arendt’s subtitle should have referred not to the Banality of Evil, but rather to the Banality of the Implementation of Evil.  As Arendt emphasizes, people who do monstrous deeds still look like you or me when stripped of their weapons, their uniforms, and other trappings of power.

After seeing the film, I read Arendt’s book once again, and I have to apologize to her.  She would have considered my suggestion mundane, just a smidgeon of what she was trying to say.  She was after a much bigger subject, “the whole truth” (her choice of words) about evil itself.  In Hannah Arendt’s view, “good” has depth; it can even be radical.  In total contrast, “evil” can be extreme but it has no depth, and therefore it can never be radical.  She believes that evil stems ultimately from the failure to think, a failure that occurs at all levels from the individual to the national.  Once one examines the premises of an evil, there is nothing to be discovered – and that is its banality.1 And perhaps that is why it can be a disease that so easily infects masses of people, even people in otherwise civilized societies.

I am willing to grant Arendt her main point, but it still makes me uncomfortable. Can the Nazi’s ability to turn “the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new ‘righteousness,’” and create a world in which “evil lost its distinctive characteristic . . .”2 and could still be described as banal.  Perhaps, but it is a means so ultimately ingenious that it seems to me to be anything but banal.

What about anti-Semitism, which was certainly at the heart of Nazi efforts to eliminate the Jews and destroy Judaism?  Anti-Semitism is certainly an evil, but is it banal?  I do not think so.  So far as I know, the earliest documentation of anti-Semitism is found in the Christian Bible, particularly in the gospels.  Matthew refers to Jews as a tribe of vipers, and John originates the term that Jews were the spawn of Satan. These are blood libels; they say that Jews are contaminated from birth. This charge may be laughable, but it is not banal. So when the Nazis stirred up crowds for Kristallnacht, it was not just libels about Jews controlling the banks, which was demonstrably untrue, or getting all the best positions, also demonstrably untrue.  Rather, it was mainly some poorly understood concept in the minds of the populace about Jews being unalterably contaminated and therefore polluting what would otherwise be a pure Germany, or pure Poland, or pure Lithuania.  

To come back to Hannah Arendt’s thesis, the Nazis certainly took anti-Semitism to an extreme, which she admits is a characteristic of evil policies, but I maintain that it is far from banal.  Unfortunately, Arendt’s book does not deal with my concern. There is not a single reference to anti-Semitism in the index to her book.  Here is a book on a man who played a major role in carrying an explicitly anti-Semitic policy to its extreme, yet anti-Semitism is not discussed!

The Golden Horde, those Mongol invaders that swept out of Asia and into eastern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, can be described as banal. They had no thought but plunder and power – men to be tortured, women to be raped, and feed for the horses.  If you asked the series of khans who led the Golden Horde why they invaded, they would have found the question meaningless.  There was no answer other than the infant’s cry “I want.”  That is certainly banal.

But anti-Semitism is not banal, and it was anti-Semitism that provided the rationale for Nazi policies from Kristallnacht to the concentration camps to the “Final Solution.”  Most often, anti-Semitism is a goal in itself, not merely an excuse for something else, which is further evidence that anti-Semitism is seldom if ever banal. For the same reason, the Jewish Holocaust is unique. The attempts in East European countries to establish some sort of equivalence between what happened to the Jews under the Nazis and what happened to local citizens under the Soviets would be ludicrous if were not so painful. Kristallnacht may not recur, but anti-Semitism began in the first centuries of the current era, and it is still with us today – sometimes more, sometimes less, serious, but always there. Though anti-Semitism may be largely dormant or amateurish in the United States and Canada, media reports show that it is clearly once again on the rise in the politics of much of Europe.

Shabbat shalom