The General-Human and the Particular-Jewish Dimensions of the Holocaust: A Philosophical-Educational Reflection

Abstract

This article presupposes that historical research on its own cannot aspire to constitute the pinnacle of ‘understanding’ of the Holocaust and to offer a sufficiently broad basis for grappling with its philosophical significance. Questions concerning divine and human justification, the feasibility of human culture and education in the wake of and in the face of the Holocaust, and what we should learn from the memory of the Holocaust and turn into a component of our lives, are not only the battlegrounds of historians, but also of thinkers and writers, artists and public leaders, educators, theologians, and social leading figures. Questions of theodicy as well as those of the justification of humankind, culture, and religion are universal, above all, and only as such are they also uniquely ‘Jewish’. The Holocaust obliges the Jew to confront the questions that arise from its memory from a dual perspective: that of the Jewish Holocaust survivor and that of a member of the human race that perpetrated and allowed this murder to happen. All Jews living after the Holocaust, to the end of time, are, in some respect, Holocaust survivors. Still, individual Jews also belong to the greater human race that executed and enabled the Holocaust and that must grapple with the fact that, from this point onward, the act of ‘Holocaust’ is part of the reserve of possible human behavior. Every individual is obliged, therefore, to be aware of the fact that human beings are liable to act in this horrible way, that racial hatred can descend into such chasms, and that murderous totalitarianism is capable of paralyzing virtually all resistance.