Sunday was Holocaust Memorial Day. Edward Kessler examines whetherbiblical texts offer Jews and Christians a way of resolving their differences over what happened in that awful period.
How should we read the Bible after the Holocaust? This question is relevant because last Sunday was Holocaust Memorial Day in the European Union and we should remember that the Holocaust took place:
• in one of the most biblically literate countries in the world;
• in a country with a large number of biblical scholars; and
• in a country with a highly developed biblical scholarship.
In general, Jewish responses to the Holocaust tend to fall into two categories. The first is represented by the author Elie Wiesel who argued that the Shoah resulted in a "rupture" in the relationship between humanity and God and a consequent distancing from Scripture.
The second is to view events between 1933 and 1945 as one would view persecution and oppression during other periods of extreme suffering. According to this argument, the voices of the prophets speak more loudly than Hitler and traditional biblical interpretation retains the means by which to come to terms with the Holocaust.
From the Christian perspective, a number of Christian scholars have recently described the Holocaust in terms deliberately reminiscent of biblical language - a kind of new revelation.
This has been proposed by the Methodist Holocaust scholar, Stephen Smith, who argues that Christian negligence in failing to speak out against the Nazi treatment of the Jews implicates the church as an accessory to the outcome of Nazi actions.
As a result, the Holocaust is a Christian "problem" demanding a Christian response. An American Catholic scholar, Prof John Pawlikowski, puts this argument a different way. He states that "the Holocaust has made it immoral for Christians to maintain any Christology that is excessively triumphalistic or that finds the significance of the Christ Event in the displacement of the Jewish People from an ongoing covenantal relationship with God".
Another subject for discussion among Christians and Jews concerns the authority of Scripture. What authority does the Bible retain after the Holocaust? As Martin Buber put it, "dare we recommend to the survivors of Auschwitz, to the Job of the gas chambers, 'thank ye the Lord for He is good, for His mercy endures for ever' ?" (Psalm 111:1)
One response is to accept that we can no longer read of a God who "sleeps and slumbers not". We must develop new interpretations of Scripture - interpretations which allow for alternative meanings. In other words, Jews and Christians must become willing to see a multitude of different possible meanings, in marked contrast to the single "authentic" meaning, backed by clerical or scholarly authority.
The tendency to offer a variety of different meanings, each of which claims validity, might be described as "exegetical relativity". This approach also has the advantage of providing the means by which to deal with texts, which appear to run contrary to what we regard as the fundamental values of our tradition or which may be read as a licence for violence or bigotry.
Exegetical relativity can be applied to those biblical texts which have been used for much evil, as for example, the way which the Bible has been used to maintain slavery or second-class citizenship, to hold women in subjugation to men, and so on.
I would argue that its application should be dependent upon one criterion: that biblical study should reject any interpretation which would promote hatred, discrimination or superiority of one group over another.
The use of a biblical text for these purposes should be considered invalid, requiring reinterpretation.
This approach is justified by a principle shared by both Christians and Jews: humanity should live by the commandments and not die by their observance.
This means that after the Holocaust biblical texts need to be examined in light of potential damage they may cause (or the real damage they have caused). In Judaism, for example, the sacred duty to preserve life takes precedence over the commandments. Simply put, when human life is at stake the biblical text needs reinterpretation. Jesus made the same point when he said: "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath". (Mark 2:27)
In this way we open the doors of interpretation and reinterpret problematic texts and hopefully abolish their abuse.
The existence of exegetical relativity may leave the interpreter with an uncomfortable tension because of the presence of a number of interpretations arising out of a single biblical passage. The multitude of possible interpretations may be disconcerting but their existence illustrates the variety of interpretations which can be applied to Scripture. Occasionally, such an approach highlights an inherent ambiguity within the biblical text.
This contradiction is meaningful to those who are struggling with the meaning of the Bible in light of the Holocaust. The existence of ambiguity may enable Christians and Jews to realise that the plain, obvious and traditional interpretation is not the final meaning of the text.
• Dr Edward Kessler is Executive Director of the Cambridge Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations; whose website is www.cjcr.cam.ac.uk