Love of the Land: Lessons of the Holocaust

Lessons of the Holocaust

Moshe Feiglin
Manhigut Yehudit
27 Nissan, 5770
11 April '10

Translated from the NRG website

I am very ashamed of the Holocaust. How my people were taken, stripped, humiliated, tortured and led to their deaths - before the eyes of the joyous Poles, Ukrainians, French and other offspring of Christian enlightenment; how newborn babies were impaled on pitchforks on the way to the death pits; how millions were led to the factories of death, and suffocated and burned, fertilizing the fields of Poland and Europe with our people’s ashes - with almost no resistance.

I am very proud of the Holocaust. If the German Asmodeus - the most explicit essence of absolute evil ever revealed in history - sees me, the Jew, as its ultimate enemy, then that means that I am on the other end of the scale. In other words, there is something very good about my people. If the German Asmodeus represents absolute evil, then it is very afraid of the absolute good - G-d - that I represent.

There is no way to explain the Holocaust. I know survivors who are not on speaking terms with G-d. I know many who are the opposite. I have no right to go there – and I have neither the ability nor the desire to do so. But irrespective of the theological questions surrounding the Holocaust, one thing clearly occurred in its wake: Jewish history stopped being written in exile and started to be written in the Land of Israel.

Very soon, for the first time since the First Temple period (!), the majority of the Jewish People will be living in the Holy Land. This fact constitutes a spiritual critical mass. Jewish law changes in several realms by virtue of the demographic fact that “most of its sons are on [the land].” The absolute number that we are approaching in the Land of Israel is chilling. Six million.

G-d, Who chose us to be His eternal people and to attest to His existence, has made us a target for extermination by every evil in the world. It is certainly understandable why there are Jews who constantly try to escape this fate. As individuals, this may be possible – an individual may be able to assimilate and rid him/herself of this trouble. But as a people, we cannot escape our destiny. We cannot exist without it.

When the time of national awakening comes, when the gates of the Land open before us but we insist on remaining merely the bearers of religion in exile - the ground burns under our feet. And when we flee to the other extreme, create an alternative Israeli nationalism and shun Judaism and the Torah, then even if we have decided that we are no longer Jews, but only normal Israelis, even if we have established a modern state and hold 200 atom bombs in our nuclear arsenal - we are still six million Jews under the mounting danger of annihilation.

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Love of the Land: Lessons of the Holocaust