Recently, a well-known TV personality was heavily criticized for saying that the Holocaust was not about racism, just evil murdering good. Apparently, she thought that racism was a black-and-white issue, and did not consider Hitler’s, ysv”z, personal and illogical war against the Jewish people specifically one race against another.
Of course the response was quick to come, and the TV personality was quick to apologize for the misstatement. They had learned the hard way that Nazi against Jew was a racist attack as well.
Torah says differently, VERY differently. I am in no way exonerating the TV personality, just pointing out the error and danger in the thinking of those who reprimanded them. They miss the most important point of the Holocaust, which leaves us vulnerable, God forbid, to another.
The Holocaust was not about racism. Hitler, ysv”z, did not care how assimilated a Jew was, or even if they were totally Jewish. Christians stole Jewish babies and raised them as their own. The Nazis killed them no matter how young. Hitler, ysv”z, claimed that there was some indelible “spiritual” quality about a Jew that would drive him to do something at some point, even if completely detached from Judaism, that was bad for mankind as he saw it. Every last Jew had to go.
When it comes to racism, out of sight is usually out of mind. Racists don’t care if people different from them live thousands of miles of away. They only care when they live next door. Not Hitler, ysv”z. He wanted to exterminate Jews anywhere they could be found in the world…even if the chances were slim that he’d ever bump into them.
Had Hitler, ysv”z, never amounted to more than a bar room brawler, history would not have taken notice of him. The world is filled with crazy and obsessive racists. But the fact that he rose to the top of one of the most intellectual and talented countries in his time and STILL held on to his obsessive hatred of the Jews, even using it to fuel much of his war effort, begs answers. It baffled historians.
But historians do not like to be baffled. So, they came up with all kinds of possible reasons why Hitler, ysv’z, was so focused on wiping out the entire Jewish people. But each if you go the full distance with each of them, they all tend to fall short. But if it is all you can come up with, what else can you say?
But it’s like scientists who try to explain human consciousness without believing in the soul. There are many theories but none which actually work. They simply come from the wrong realm. Likewise, the Holocaust was supernatural, and though physical means were used to carry it, the physical realm was not the reason for it.
God was.
Ouch.
Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, etc.
You see, if we claim it is racism, it’s on the enemy. If we claim it is from God, it’s on us. If we say it is human racism, we can pretend that it follows human logic. If we hold it is from God, then it follows divine logic and can be unpredictable. That is, it might not be clear to us at the time that it is building against us because it doesn’t seem logical at the time, that it should.
Fear mongering is not a good thing…when it is unfounded. When earthquakes don’t happen for a while, we don’t assume they have stopped altogether. Just the opposite, we increase our anticipation of them, even say things like “the next one is overdue.” Even the Talmud speaks of 70 year cycles at the end of which God shakes the world up to get things back on track. The Holocaust happened over 75 years ago…
We are part of the post World War II generation. We are part of a generation that was intent on recovery and rebuilding, and that resulted in a lot of noble endeavors and tremendous accomplishments. For several decades, life seemed straightforward, honest, and enriching. History was good to us, especially the Jews after all they had experienced before it.
We thought that man had moved on past his more basic instincts. We thought that he had finally become so civilized and advanced that he no longer cared for those things that undo societies. We thought wrong, again.
The Jewish people make up an incredibly small portion of the world’s population. Yet, history is not about the rest of the world and its accomplishments. It’s about the Jewish people bringing the rest of the world back to God, and that first means coming back to God themselves. That is what determines if there will be hurricanes or tornadoes, floods or droughts, honesty or corruption, medicines that help or medicines that kill.
That is the BIG picture of history. If you can’t see it, then you are living in the small picture, and history has proven so many times already that, as safe as that may seem in the short run, it is the most dangerous thing in the long run.