Hey OOTOB fans,
This is the first in a series that I’ll feature occasionally, where I bring you different things I’ve discovered around the web that I’ve found interesting lately. Call it “trending,” or whatever you want – I’ve found it interesting and I’ve decided to bring it to you. Feel free to send me things that piqued your curiosity or sparked conversation for possible inclusion here in future posts.
Firstly, I discovered a whole new blog that, honestly, I’m surprised I’ve never encountered before. It’s called “Ask Tanta Golda” and the concept is somewhat similar to OOTOB. The blogger, Geri Copitch, adopts the Tanta persona, which I find cute, although I certainly do not agree with all her responses. It’s unclear to me what her affiliation is, and it seems she prefers it that way. Check it out and share your impressions.
This video was sent to me by my friend’s mom and it sat in my inbox for like a month (I have precious little time for videos – I read faster than I can watch – plus it was a whopping 24 minutes long) before I watched it. But, man, was I glad I did. It was an immediate share on Facebook, and got a strongly positive reaction there including several shares. You can’t find it by searching YouTube because it’s privacy-protected. I won’t give it away – it’s a first-person account of the son of a Nazi and how he chooses to deal with his painful family history. Seriously, pull up a chair and give this 24 minutes of eyeball time. You will not regret it.
This piece has been getting a lot of attention in the Orthodox world. A few friends sent it my way and I found it both troubling and insightful. Here’s a response from Rabbi Maryles, a Modern Orthodox scholar, and here’s one from Rabbi Shafran, a “haredi” scholar.
MOTHER’S DAY AND RWANDA
To close, I have a Mother’s Day question for you. One of my friends posted this on Facebook:
“Today I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Mothering Day. You do not have to have your own children to make a difference in a child’s life. You also don’t have to be female. Thank you for being in our children’s lives and loving on them – you are our village!”
I love this friend, but this status doesn’t sit well with me at all. Mother’s Day is actually for… mothers. Why dilute this by universalizing it to include anyone that has anything to do with kids? It reminds me of several years ago, when the Holocaust Museum featured a refugee from Rwanda to speak at their annual benefit. While her story was incredibly stirring, I was in shock that the Holocaust message was being universalized, essentially losing an opportunity to hear from a Holocaust survivor. Now, maybe I’m getting a little too worked up over Mother’s Day, which is probably just a Hallmark holiday, but I think that’s why it bothers me so much. It’s the underlying trend to universalize everything Jewish to include everyone and anyone, thus reducing anything specific we’ve experienced to nothing more than a humanitarian mish-mash.
Thoughts?
FYI those reading, I wrote the words above about Mother's day – outing myself LOL! Mothers's day can be painful for so many people. And because it's SUCH a public "holiday", those who are in pain 1) feel worse, and 2) may feel that they are being judged by others. I also felt it was important to acknowledge those people who may not be parents themselves, but who "mother" other people's children as if they are their own. I just feel strongly that you don't have to be a parent (or you don't have to be the parent of a specific person) to be a "mother" to someone. I don't think this has anything to do with what you perceive as the "trend to universalize everything Jewish" – I think it's simply an acknowledgement of those who love us and our kids. I will post the same thing for Fathers' Day, FYI 🙂
Now, maybe I'm getting a little too worked up over Mother's Day, which is probably just a Hallmark holiday, but I think that's why it bothers me so much. It's the underlying trend to universalize everything Jewish to include everyone and anyone, thus reducing anything specific we've experienced to nothing more than a humanitarian mish-mash.
1) Mother's day is a Jewish holiday? I have a mini-rant ready to cue up this time of year when I hear people say "Jews don't need to celebrate Mother's day because Honor your Mother is one of the 10 commandments, so every day should be Mother's day."
2) During the Hutu genocide in Rawanda, I heard a rabbi give a sermon on how the US should not get involved in any way with the situation. Afterwards I told him "I didn't realize that 'Never Again' actually meant 'Never Again To Us.'. He turned away from me and talked to someone else.
Who said Mother's Day is a Jewish holiday? While I agree that you should treat your mother like a queen every day of the year, I'm all for paying extra attention to her on occasion.
I thought you just did, in the statement I quoted above. The pshat (literal meaning of the words) seems to be that Mother's day is being subjected to the trend to universalize everything Jewish. I'm being excessively literal – you wrote two unconnected thoughts in a way that made them appear to me to be connected and instead of trusting my common sense that you couldn''t have meant that, I asked you about it.
Ah. No, I'm simply drawing a parallel between: a) the non-specifically-Jewish-but-neither-unjewish holiday of Mother's Day, and universalizing that day to include anyone who nurtures children, and b) Holocaust memorializing and the trend to universalize that experience to all human sufferers of genocide.
I think it's ok to universalize Mothers' day to include anyone who nurtures children – I know take the opportunity on this day to recognize that woman in my life who is not my mother but mothers me anyway 🙂 I really, really don't think this is at the same level of, say, equating one genocide with another.
It's not at the same level at ALL (how could it be??) but it IS the same tendency.
Not sure what's wrong with universalizing the holocaust. Why is what we went through in the shoah any worse than the genocides all over the world? What is anything that we can learn from the shoah other than the need to step in when people commit atrocities? Just because it happened to us and not to someone else?
Sure I understand that we need to talk about the shoah by itself and teach our children and remember the horrors. But I don't see anything wrong with including information about how this is still happening all over the world.
I agree about universalizing the lesson, MP. I just don't think the actual Holocaust should be blurred through total universalization. And I wouldn't judge one genocide as better or worse than another. (Even within the Jewish experience, was Chmielnicki any less of a monster than Hitler?)
Just saw this article about Steven Spielberg universalizing the Holocaust experience:
http://www.jewishjournal.com/los_angeles/item/steven_spielberg_announces_new_genocide_research_center_at_usc
"“The Center for Advanced Genocide Research is another step in the direction of creating a global culture which abhors genocide and stigmatizes its perpetrators,” she wrote in statement to the Journal. “The greater the number and depth of these types of public, respected, academic, well-funded institutes, the greater will be the attention of the world in turning its focus on combating the evils of genocide. … We at Jewish World Watch feel fortunate to have this mighty resource right here in our backyards.”"
I abhor genocide and believe that its perpetrators should be stigmatized. On the other hand, I see no reason not to distinguish the Holocaust from other cases of genocide and have a museum or research institute focusing on it. I also have no problem with a museum or institute on the genocide in Rwanda, and I don't think the Holocaust should be memorialized in it. Particularism doesn't mean that one is more important than the other. Universalism just tends to deprive everything of meaning.
I absolutely agree.
Universalizing can deprive individual events and issues of their specific meaning, yes. But is there not a responsibility to SOMETIMES move beyond the specificity in some way and take the lessons to other events/issues?
Isn't this what tons of Jewish interpretation is about? Take some specific story in the Bible and universalize it. Take some specific event as a lesson in general.
Why is it bad for the Holocaust to try to help people connect the dots between the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide? Are there NO connecting dots? Even if there are no genuine, causal, historical connections, isn't there an ETHICAL connection? Does it really minimize the Holocaust to talk about another genocide?
Absolute particularism is a problem too, and deprives things of meaning in a different way, by rendering things SO specific that we could only mutely acknowledge them in their specificity and not DO anything except that.
I feel that Yom Hashoah can be confined to the Holocaust. I'm not sure why secular enterprises such as the Holocaust Museum, Holocaust Remembernce Day (January 27th, not Nisan 27th) and the like should not take the concept out of the particular and into the universal.
SBW: I agree. We should definitely learn general lessons from specific events. We should apply those lessons to other, analogous cases. The problem is where ALL particularism is avoided for fear of being, well, particularistic. We SHOULD talk about other genocides and try to prevent them (if we can). But there seems to be a reluctance to admit that we, as Jews, have anything unique. If you try to turn every Jewish experience into a universal one, you're left with a vague "Be nice" (what Ruchi referred to as a "humanitarian mish-mash"). That detracts from the memory of the Holocaust as experienced by the Jews and from every other experience of every other group.
I think we agree, mostly. So the problem seems to be that one Jew might feel "this time, in this context, we shouldn't universalize" and the other Jew might feel "this time, in this context–but not always–we can draw a more universal lesson". So your "this time/context" might be my "not this time/context". Or my momentary, contextual universalizing might to you remind you painfully of other universalizings that seem to minimize the Holocaust and Jewish uniqueness.
In fact maybe Ruchi is universalizing–SOME connections to other tragedies do not minimize, but make relevant and keep alive, the lessons of the Holocaust. We can't ONLY and ALWAYS look at it in its uniqueness. (Or does Ruchi think that?) So how and when is universalizing "too much" universalizing.
It is true that to me sometimes Jewish particularism can come off as too self-concerned, self-absorbed and not attentive to concerns of people other than Jews.
Well said. I will also add from a purely emotional perspective, that I attended the Holocaust Museum benefit to honor my grandparents who are survivors, and I was honestly shocked that they didn't have a survivor speak but rather a survivor of Rwandan genocide (as wonderful as she was). I felt that the choice dishonored the experience of the living survivors.
I just listened to the son of the Nazi last night and he does a very good job of universalizing the lesson in a way that doesn't detract from the Jewish experience.
In many communities, orthodox jews do not commemorate Yom Hashoah. Instead tisha b'av is the day to mourn the holocaust victims, the pogrom victims, the 10 martyrs, the destruction of the temple, the cossacks and everything else that went wrong for the Jews.
Do you think this is universalizing the holocaust? Why not? Why shouldn't we insist on mourning everything separately? Isn't this turning the 9th of av into a jewish tragedy mishmash?
I hadn't heard of Tisha Be'av being a memorial day for the Holocaust. The one I knew about was the 10th of Tevet. According to Holocaust historian Esther Farbstein (Hidden in the Heights, available in Hebrew, forthcoming in English), marking multiple events on the same day was in part intended to emphasize that the Holocaust was part of a long chain of murderous events in the Jewish exile. Even before the Knesset established Yom Hashoah, Hungarian rabbis instituted a memorial day for the Holocaust victims on the 20th of Sivan. They deliberately chose a date that had, for centuries, been a day of mourning for tragedies suffered by European Jewry. I think the idea was that it's too burdensome to have lots of days of mourning every year.
Re Tanta Golda, I have no idea what her formal affiliation is, but when she says "In the end, you should do what your heart says is right when observing Pesach," she sounds Reform.
Re Social Orthodoxy, I found Lefkowitz's article very depressing. He seems to think that the only way to retain a belief in God and the Torah is to hide out from the non-Orthodox world. But that just means that he personally doesn't believe, so of course he doesn't think belief is sustainable. I personally know lots of people who firmly believe in God and the Torah and are not "ultra-Orthodox." And I don't think Social Orthodoxy is sustainable over the generations. A desire to belong is strong enough to keep people observant only if they have no more comfortable options. In other words, if you go to college and have friends who are not observant Jews, you can easily switch communities and do whatever you want. People change friends at different times of life. Why restrict yourself for social reasons when you would be more comfortable in a different, easily joinable social group? On the other hand, if the restriction is compatible with your values and beliefs, you are likely to restrict yourself. Just as you wouldn't rob the local pizza parlor no matter how much you want that pizza (and assuming you know you wouldn't be arrested), you wouldn't violate Shabbat.
Right, social Orthodoxy doesn't seem to be transmittable to the next generation because it's cultural. It's hard enough to transmit a culture in the American melting pot even WITH a firm belief in the "Truth" of it all – so for certain it would be extremely hard without it.
DG – Tanta Golda is Reform. In her post from July 2012 about marriage she says, "As a Reform Jew Tanta Golda reads a lot about how the movement encourages…"
I didn't read Lefkowitz as saying that he does not believe, but rather that practice is more important than belief. In that, he's firmly within the mainstream of Judaism, which did not have creeds until the Middle Ages and did not need the term Orthodoxy to help define belief so firmly until the modern era.
In the past, if you wanted to know whether a Jew was reliable, you didn't quiz him or her on belief. You observed behavior. Does this person observe Shabbat? Do they come late to minyan? Are they known to be ethical in their business dealings? Have they ever broken off an engagement? How do they dress?
In general, the Jewish community has accepted a fairly wide range of beliefs, as long as they did not lead to deviations in practice. Maimonides, Spinoza, and Shnuer Zalman (founder or Chabad) were all denounced as heretics by authorities of their day. Two of those three maintained strict Jewish practice and their intellectual children are considered not only kosher Jews but exemplars of Orthodoxy today.
In America, Judaism is a religion. In Russia, if your father was a Jew, your nationality was Jewish, instead of (for example) Russian. In Israel, if your mother is a Jew, your nationality and your religion is Jewish even if you are an avowed atheist. I think the reason its easier to transmit a religion than a culture in America has more to do with America and less to do with Judaism.
But SDK, while you make some great points, none of those scholars created a philosophy around non-belief in God. THAT part is not transmittable.
It's not just the non-belief that is not transmittable. It's the practices in the absence of belief.
I meant that. Non- belief in a context of non-practice is, of course, transmittable.
The author says he is a second generation Social Orthodox Jew, because his father is a traditionally observant agnostic. So perhaps the issue of transmission is not as clear cut as y'all are saying.
We don't know anything about his mother or about his siblings. And we also don't know about his children. In fact we have very few stats in general about any of this. So I am just surmising what I think based on what I know about raising children to be committed Jews with the context of truth and how hard that is, and then extracting from there.
I was talking statistically. One individual may continue, but on a large scale it's unlikely.
This is a hard one for me, meaning hard for me to evaluate the proposed ideas honestly because I have already committed to a certain amount of practice despite a certain amount of doubt. The practice level is within my control, but how do you control doubt vs. belief? Fundamentalist thinking is very concrete and thus easy to teach to children. But (IMHO) it is also very fragile. If your faith can be destroyed by history or science, then I would say you have a fragile cornerstone. Cultures that survive are adaptable, but not so adaptable that they cease to exist. What is the right balance?
America is not China or Japan — it doesn't have a unified culture with strong norms about correct behavior when you step outside the door. Maybe a secular Jewish identity is more sustainable in Israel, where the cultural norms are Jewish ones.
I agree social Orthodoxy might not be sustainable, but I think some readers are underestimating how attached some nonbelievers are to OJ culture and the tight community bonds. A lot of people really want to be part of the culture – which says something very positive about the OJ world. The downside is that if the culture becomes too stifling, or too accepting of corruption and hypocrisy, the desire to belong is lessened.
I think OJ is, in the long run, hurting itself by demanding complete fealty to norms of belief. There are a lot of closet nonbelievers (who only open up to their closest most trusted friends, or to strangers on the internet). I understand OJ might fear for its survival if open doubt & skepticism would be tolerated, but OTOH, a lot of people who want to belong are driven away.
And in today's day and age, demanding that people insulate themselves from scientific and historical facts is just not realistic. In very insular communities it works for some people. It doesn't work for everyone in those communities, and it doesn't work for other communities at all.
I was waiting for you 🙂 I do know how attached nonbelievers are to the culture – for many secular Jews it's the glue that keep them affiliated – but culture is capricious. When we say "Jewish culture" here in America, for example, we mean, typically, Eastern European Ashkenazi culture. As evidenced by the potato kugel discussion in the Shabbos dinner post, that's pretty narrow in terms of the larger Jewish experience.
I remember when we traveled to Israel with a group of Jewish, non-Orthodox women, and they kept saying how beautiful Israelis are. I pointed out that their exotic look is due to the prominent representation of Sephardic Jews. We're just not used to that in most parts of America. Sure, you have pockets in Baltimore and LA, for example, but it's certainly not in the mainstream or media.
OJ doesn't demand anything. The Torah does. Your words sort of sound like when people say "why do Jews drive away interfaith couples?" The Torah wants us to marry in. The balance between fealty to that and inclusion to all is a tough one with no easy answers.
I don't have any conflict with science and history. If someone wishes to believe there are many ways to live with reconciliation there.
Have you seen this: http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/168889/the-problem-with-social-orthodoxy
You missed my point. A lot of people truly love the Orthodox lifestyle and are willing to observe it fully…but can't bring themselves to believe. Driving them away (or suggesting that they be marginalized) is very shortsighted.
Even I, in my complete disillusionment, appreciate and enjoy many (most?) aspects of being part of the OJ community.
Also – would you be surprised to learn that some Orthodox shuls quietly accommodate intermarried couples? It's rare, but I've seen it.
Tesyaa, I'm almost scared to ask but… how are they driven away? Over the past decade I've learned more and more about the non-believers in our midst (!) and would hope (pollyana?) that our community is there to include them and help them. Who talks about these things openly anyway, as you say? And it terms of synagogue affiliation, I think that's great!
Oh, my mistake! I thought when you mentioned driving away interfaith couples, you were equating driving away nonbelievers with driving away the intermarried! I'm glad you're not!
Yes, I know that nonbelievers are not driven away in any official way, shape or form; there is sort of a "don't ask, don't tell" situation about belief. As you say, "no one" talks about these things, but that is by choice of the believers, not the nonbelievers.. Some people who cannot stifle such an important part of their psyche leave the community – even if otherwise they're happy to observe halacha. The fact that modern orthodoxy is tolerant of open nonbelief (at least to some extent) is why it can accommodate open nonbelievers like the author of the social orthodoxy piece.
Think about it – you proudly (and have reason to be proud to) post your real name on the internet. In an Orthodox context, I have good reasons not to. (Even though in practical terms, a lot of people know my identity).
Ruchi, I agree with tesyaa that the problem is with Orthodox Jews, not the Torah. As SDK said, you can't force yourself to believe something. (Well, probably a lot of people do believe what they want to believe, but I can't, and it seems to me to indicate a lack of intellectual honesty.) So observant Jews who have doubts tend to feel unsafe confiding those doubts to others. The assumption in many Orthodox circles is that if you're observant, you have no doubts. At some point, many of these people are likely to leave Orthodoxy as a result.
Actually, I think it makes perfect sense for Lefkowitz to remain observant, since he seems to be an agnostic, not an atheist. You don't have to have perfect faith to be observant. If you think the Torah is likely to be true, that should be enough reason even if you have doubts. Do the "non-believing" commenters here really have perfect faith that God DOESN'T exist?
Tesyaa, I totally agree. I would even go so far as to say that making it uncomfortable to have doubts while being part of an Orthodox community reinforces those doubts. The way it works is that you have doubts, you feel unsafe confiding those doubts in others, so you try to get rid of the doubts yourself. But this desperation to get rid of the doubts only makes you focus on them, so the doubts grow until they come to dominate your way of thinking about Judaism. If instead you are part of a community that allows you to have these thoughts, you can focus on the part of you that believes, and the doubts (although they still exist) don't take over.
DG, this is a great insight.
I don't get why would someone with substantial doubts would still like the "lifestyle" or community so much. I can see staying because of kids/embeddedness, but to actively APPRECIATE it? This is not an existential question, just one about the experience of wanting to be socially O while not believing. It's a LOT of hoops to jump through everyday without belief. Does it mean you only "do" as much as you have to do to appear undoubting-O? Do you still wash your kids' hands 7 times (as I learned from one of the interviews)?
I would say that nonbelievers aren't going to jump through every hoop, but a lot of true believers sometimes cut corners or aren't as careful as they should be, or succumb to temptation to sleep late snd miss minyan, et
Ruchi has presented the common view that the actions that define one as Ortho are keeping kosher, keeping Shabbat, and observing family purity. Whether due to enjoyment, acceptance or force of habit, I am able to do that.
As to what's enjoyable about being Orthodox? Tons of friends for your kids to play with, Shabbos meals with friends- the social stuff. Social services organizations set up just for the Orthodox that will help with everything from free baby furniture to free babysitting. It's reciprocal and a lot of people thrive on being part of this type of community. Shabbos is a pleasure if you enjoy downtime. It works for a lot of people.
SBW: A few examples of things that can be enjoyable about Jewish observance:
1. Have you ever felt guilty that you were lounging around reading a book or talking to friends or family and not getting your work done? (The name "Should Be Working" sort of gives away the answer to that one.) We always have so many things that we have to do. When you keep Shabbat you don't feel that guilt because you aren't supposed to be doing those things. This makes it easier to relax.
2. Not only can you receive the services of the organizations that Tesyaa mentioned. (These often are happy to serve non-Orthodox people as well, but it's the Orthodox who know about them.) You are part of a community that expects people to give, and this can encourage you to be more giving. I personally really like that encouragement to be who I want to be.
3. The Jewish prohibition on derogatory speech means that the people around you are likely to try to avoid saying nasty things, not just about you but about others as well. This makes for a much more pleasant environment.
I do agree, though, that if you don't believe in it, you're likely to not be careful about the laws when they're inconvenient.
Re Social Orthodoxy: I liked the irony in what the "charedi" rabbi said about how "orthodoxy" has been co-opted by various groups to lend legitimacy to their positions, in contrast to how it was initially a term used to distinguish groups who doggedly held onto their outmoded traditions despite the forward thinking "advancements" of the neologues.
Re: holocaust and Rwanda. I think the problem of universalizing here is that it misses a really important aspect of the holocaust which was that it took place in a country civilized, educated, well-mannered and cultured to the extreme. I don't mean any disrespect to Rwanda or want to trivialize in any way the genocides that happen there or any where else, but I think that so long as people think that these events are just taking place in "darkest africa" or "somewhere far away in a third world country" they themselves feel immune. The lesson of "never again" I think was specifically meant to refer to the idea that it should never again happen right in our backyard in a country where we feel relatively accepted and safe.
Hi S,
I don't fully understand the irony – can you clarify?
Re your second point, that is really insightful and I think it's a great point.
S, are you saying that "never again" means precisely "never again to us"? And by implication, "Never feel safe, Jews"?
These would be to me frighteningly narrow ways to understand "never again". Enough to make me ashamed of the slogan.
I don't exactly subscribe to "never again" (as though it was our fault it happened in the first place due to some negligence or lack of political smarts) but I always did understand it to mean specifically us Jews.
I think you're right that that's how it's used, Ruchi, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about others as well. If anyone insists that Jews should only be concerned about genocidal attempts against Jews, I would wonder why they think other nations acted abominably by not saving the Jews in the Holocaust. After all, if we don't have to care about them, why should they be expected to care about us?
Of course. I think it's part of being a light unto the nations.
I think Jews are really good at that already, though. Particularizing, not as much.
Growing up C, it never occurred to me that "Never again" was a Jewish particularist slogan. For that we had "Masada shall not fall again."
Sorry to clarify the above: Re: social orthodoxy, I meant that Orthodox Jews never called themselves Orthodox. They were just Jews. It was only when the maskilim wanted to invent newer forms of Judaism that they used the term Orthodox to distinguish themselves from "those backward outmoded Jews" so it was never a particularly positive term. Thus I appeciated the irony in the way that now "Orthodox" is a term that has been attached to certain movements like "social orthodoxy" or "open orthodoxy" to lend legitimacy to what they are doing, in other words how it has gone from being a somewhat derisive term to something positive.
Should Be Working, funny, despite what I wrote above I never thought of "never again" to apply specifically to the Jews. For me it always represented the idea a society, associated with culture, good breeding, education etc etc had been complicit in an atrocious act against humanity right there in its backyard (not across any oceans) and we should always henceforth be aware of the possibility of how any society can go horribly wrong in this way, no one is immune. Which is why I think that Rwanda is not analogous because we somehow think if it happens in Africa then we are immune to it happening in England, Canada, USA, whatever.
Also, if social orthodoxy is just people who live an orthodox lifestyle but have doubts about G-d, authenticity of the Torah, da'as Torah etc then it doesn't need a name or to be a movement. There's plenty of people who follow all the practices and have doubts and there's plenty of resources for them to learn and educated themselves and grow in their emunah etc etc. The real issue and the reason it's not transmittable as a movement, is because it is not going to leave practice unscathed.
Maybe they're pushing for women to lay tefillin or whatever. But maybe they're doing everything the same as any standard Orthodox community. But without the belief, it won't last beyond one generation. THe next generation won't even care enough to bother. The whole practice and belief dichotomy makes out that the two are completely distinct, you can do the lifestyle without any work on the belief side of things but the lifestyle will inevitably slip if it's not backed up by a faith, however shaky. Questions are great, doubts are fine, no one's throwing the catechism at a Jew and forcing her/him to believe anything, but the "duties of the heart" (to borrow the phrase from the famous sefer of that name) is as much a part of Jewish *practice* and the work of a Jew's life, as kashrus and shabbos precisely because a shabbos you observe because you want to connect to Hashem, have a spiritual day, do a mitzvah, whatever is a DIFFERENT SHABBOS to the "shabbos" you keep only because everyone else in your neighborhood does it and so it's the cool thing to do, or you're squeamish about breaking it.
Mother's Day is a real holiday, not a Hallmark holiday. It was created after the horrors of WWI.
With something like Rwanda or the Armenian genocide, I think there is a direct connection. The kind of people who saved Jews and resisted the Nazis were the same kinds of people who act righteously when other minorities are threatened. The process by which Jews were annihilated, meaning the political process, the ideological process, is the same process that is used against others.
From a Jewish point of view, the Holocaust was the most brutal in a long (long) series of oppressions that we have suffered as a minority. But the Holocaust is not only about what happened to us but also about what happened to Europe. Fascism is no joke. Ditto authoritarianism. Racism happens to many groups and it is often fatal.
The first people imprisoned under Nazism were all of Hitler's political opponents. In a one-party state, it does not matter why you have come to the negative attention of the authorities — you are dead because they can do anything they want. So there are lessons for us as Jews, but there are also general lessons to be learned about the dangers of Nazi thinking, Nazi ideology, Nazi tactics. If we refuse to learn those lessons, then I would say that we have not learned all of the lessons this event should teach us. OTOH, we do not learn anything about ourselves as Jews, I would also say that we have not learned all of the lessons. You cannot understand the Holocaust without knowing both Jewish and general history.
Perhaps some Jews have not learned any universal lessons from the Holocaust, but that is not true of the Jews I know. When we say, "never again", we mean "never to us and never to any other people". We feel strongly that fighting Nazi thinking and behavior — wherever it is found — is part of our mission in the world as Jews. I would personally go so far as to say that I believe that this is part of our mission from G-d. I do not think we were sent to suffer among the nations as a minority group to learn only that having a gun is superior to not having a gun. I think we are meant to learn something about being a stranger in a strange land.
So, the Museum hosts those kinds of events because Jews are interested in them. Hopefully, this kind of event is balanced by more specific events about the Shoah as well.
According to Wikipedia (for what it's worth), Mother's Day was founded before WWI.
I sent a post but it got eaten 🙂 Mothers Day in the UK is a different date, usually in March, and is actually "Mothering Sunday", a Christian day. Not sure of the detail, but I think it's been around, here, in that capacity, for a long time. The UK is 'officially' a Christian country and the national anthem is"G-d Save the Queen"( however, the first verse is usually the only one sung…..another verse includes the line "rebellious Scots to crush" which makes it difficult for some to accept….and we Scots have a referendum soon, on whether to stay in the UK….sorry Ruchi, gone astray there!) so, Mothers Day here us a Christian church thing, though vastly commercialised.
Again, SDK, you make great points. I suppose there is a time and place for everything. A Jewish museum is going to have to make those calls carefully – when to particularize and when to universalize. Each has its place.
So much here, Ruchi! I just glanced at the Tante blog which I had not seen before either. Looks like she updates very sporadically, which might be why we were not in the know.
Thanks for pointing out the social orthodoxy. I read it yesterday when I saw your email and I've been thinking about it ever since! I know I have something to say about it, but can't decide that is yet.