Israel Matzav: The Holocaust and morality

The Holocaust and morality

I would be remiss if I did not pass along this thought-provoking piece by Yair Lapid.

Every Israeli with a hint of historical memory (and who doesn't have it?) knows that our existence is fragile. Our homes, malls, and the roads we paved – all the asphalt and steel monsters that are supposed to represent unshakeable continuity – are merely a thin camouflage net placed over constant anxiety in the face of the people who wish to kill us.

If we let go for a moment of the notion of survival, the new Nazis will rise – and it doesn't matter whether they don keffiyahs or Wermacht helments – and try to kill us. We also learned that we must not count on the world to protect us. It will be deeply shaken to the core of its delicate soul, of course, and may even set up an orphanage for our children on the outskirts of Brussels, but we better not expect much more than that.

This is the reason, by the way, why the average Israeli is overcome by justified fury when he encounters the New Left's intellectuals, who pretend that Israel is part of the enlightened Europe and that for the sake of the human rights discourse we must concede to the oppressed masses, whose only sin is their desire to kill us. "Auschwitz cannot be an excuse for everything," they keep telling us. However, Auschwitz is not the excuse, but rather, a tangible and still-relevant reason, backed up by millions of corpses.

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However, during the Holocaust the only moral people were precisely the ones who refused to listen to the ruling establishment in their countries. Hannah Arendt wrote that had we accepted the moral perception that existed until the Shoah, we could not have brought Eichmann to justice. After all, he acted in line with the morality that was common during his time, certainly in his own country.

Yet if we nonetheless indicted Eichmann, it was an act of faith in the human race: We believed, and we still do, that every person has the ability to distinguish good from bad, even if the entire world says otherwise. And if we executed Eichmann nonetheless, it was a resounding message that nobody can shirk the responsibility to take a moral position in favor of life. Hannah Arendt was wrong about one thing: It is not the "banality of evil" that threatens us, but rather, the banality of silence. Nobody must be silent in the face of death.

The survivors taught us, painfully late, that this was not the truth only in respect to the Germans, but also in respect to the victims. In his great book, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor who lost his entire family, wrote: "In the concentration camps, in that living laboratory, we saw some of our comrades behaving like pigs and others behaving like saints. Both alternatives are hidden in a person; and which will be realized depends on decisions and not on conditions."

Read the whole thing.

Yair Lapid is a journalist and the son of Tommy Lapid, who was a Holocaust survivor who became virulently anti-religious and founded a political party - Shinui - that was anti-religious but eventually turned Right on security issues and joined Ariel Sharon's cabinet in 2001. I discussed Tommy Lapid (who passed away about two years ago) here and here.

I have not read enough of Yair's work to comment on the extent (if any) to which he shares his father's anti-religious feelings. But I can tell you that to the extent that I am aware of it, he attempts to practice what he preaches. Yair Lapid has set up a program that allows Israelis imprisoned abroad to return to Israel and serve out their sentences here. And I know that he takes religious Israelis into that program.

Israel Matzav: The Holocaust and morality