It Is For Us The Living - Thoughts for the Tenth of Tevet, the Day of Communal Kaddish for the Martyrs of the Shoah

Rabbi Dr. Norbert Weinberg
It Is For Us The Living - Thoughts for the Tenth of Tevet, the Day of Communal Kaddish for the Martyrs of the Shoah

From the  Prologue to
Echoes of The Holocaust: Survivors and Their Children and Grandchildren Speak Out
By Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg  pages 25-26

Link to book

[ Note: The Tenth of Tevet, a traditional fast relating to the destruction of Jerusalem, was adopted by the Israeli Rabbinate, as a day for the recitation of Kaddish in memory of the martyrs who actual date of death was unknown]

Several years ago, when my mother, Irene Weinberg, of blessed memory, passed away, I realized that so many of her generation, the last witnesses of the great horror that befell the Jewish people, were soon fading from the world scene. I set about researching and writing about her experiences as well as those of my father, Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg, who had passed away some years before.  *
There is a great burden that falls upon us, already an aging 2nd generation and an adult 3rd and even 4th generation, to act as witnesses. This is so vital, as we see blood libels once again used against Jews today by supposedly enlightened intellectuals in Europe and even in the United States under the guise of anti-Zionism. As the past recedes, people who should know better make unconscionable statements. Thus a student leader in South Africa, a child of victims of racial apartheid, could praise Adolf Hitler for his “charisma” and hope for such a leader for his own country.
We also have a double challenge. One the one hand, we continue as witnesses to the hell that our people went through but we also have a second challenge, to keep alive the flame of Jewish teachings, the sacred teaching that said that all humans are created in the “ Tselem Elokim”, in the Image of the Divine. It was this very teaching which Hitler and Nazism sought to erase along with the people who had preached it to the world.
I can only think it fitting to paraphrase the words of President Lincoln, at the Gettysburg Address:
 It is for us the living, children and grandchildren of our martyrs, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they were persecuted, the teachings of the great a noble heritage of Judaism and the Jewish people-- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have lived in vain, that the lives of these, our people, shall not have been without enduring meaning.
I thank Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg for putting together this collection of recollections, essays, and poetry from the children and grandchildren of our survivors. I greatly appreciate Rabbi Rosenberg’s keeping the focus on the Shoah, or Holocaust, as an event unique to the Jewish people. While it is true that many millions died in this horror, only the Jews were selected and targeted for annihilation in total and only the demonization of the Jews could serve as a force to galvanize otherwise civilized men and women into unspeakable acts of cruelty and horror.  When we universalize the account, in hopes of building alliances, we dilute the significance of what happened.
I want reiterate my thought, a thought for the generations: For all that we Jews have gone through in history, as horrible as it may have been, we are blessed to be the heirs of a tradition going back to Abraham and Moses and on down to our days, a tradition that speaks of a courage to face all obstacles, a tradition of hope and faith in a universe created for good and guided by Divine Providence to an ultimate redemption of all humanity.
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• Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg, my father and my teacher, served as the first State Rabbi of Hesse, Germany (region around Frankfurt) after World War II. I have published the account of our family origins, his youth and education, his persecution by the Nazis and escape to the Soviet Union and back, in my book Courage of the Spirit. Irene Weinberg, my mother and my teacher, was a native of Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) who outwitted her Nazi hunters by hiding in the open as a Pole in both Lwow and Warsaw. I hope to have her account published in the near future.

Introduction to Echoes of The Holocaust: Survivors and Their Children and Grandchildren Speak Out

Rabbi Dr. Norbert Weinberg    Introduction to
Echoes of The Holocaust: Survivors and Their Children and Grandchildren Speak Out
By Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg

Several years ago, when my mother, Irene Weinberg, of blessed memory, passed away, I realized that so many of her generation, the last witnesses of the great horror that befell the Jewish people, were soon fading from the world scene. I set about researching and writing about her experiences as well as those of my father, Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg, who had passed away some years before.  *
There is a great burden that falls upon us, already an aging 2nd generation and an adult 3rd and even 4th generation, to act as witnesses. This is so vital, as we see blood libels once again used against Jews today by supposedly enlightened intellectuals in Europe and even in the United States under the guise of anti-Zionism. As the past recedes, people who should know better make unconscionable statements. Thus a student leader in South Africa, a child of victims of racial apartheid, could praise Adolf Hitler for his “charisma” and hope for such a leader for his own country.
We also have a double challenge. One the one hand, we continue as witnesses to the hell that our people went through but we also have a second challenge, to keep alive the flame of Jewish teachings, the sacred teaching that said that all humans are created in the “ Tselem Elokim”, in the Image of the Divine. It was this very teaching which Hitler and Nazism sought to erase along with the people who had preached it to the world.
I can only think it fitting to paraphrase the words of President Lincoln, at the Gettysburg Address:
It is for us the living, children and grandchildren of our martyrs, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they were persecuted, the teachings of the great a noble heritage of Judaism and the Jewish people-- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have lived in vain, that the lives of these, our people, shall not have been without enduring meaning.
I thank Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg for putting together this collection of recollections, essays, and poetry from the children and grandchildren of our survivors. I greatly appreciate Rabbi Rosenberg’s keeping the focus on the Shoah, or Holocaust, as an event unique to the Jewish people. While it is true that many millions died in this horror, only the Jews were selected and targeted for annihilation in total and only the demonization of the Jews could serve as a force to galvanize otherwise civilized men and women into unspeakable acts of cruelty and horror.  When we universalize the account, in hopes of building alliances, we dilute the significance of what happened.
I want reiterate my thought, a thought for the generations: For all that we Jews have gone through in history, as horrible as it may have been, we are blessed to be the heirs of a tradition going back to Abraham and Moses and on down to our days, a tradition that speaks of a courage to face all obstacles, a tradition of hope and faith in a universe created for good and guided by Divine Providence to an ultimate redemption of all humanity.
______________________________________________________________
• Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg, my father and my teacher, served as the first State Rabbi of Hesse, Germany (region around Frankfurt) after World War II. I have published the account of our family origins, his youth and education, his persecution by the Nazis and escape to the Soviet Union and back, in my book Courage of the Spirit. Irene Weinberg, my mother and my teacher, was a native of Lwow, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) who outwitted her Nazi hunters by hiding in the open as a Pole in both Lwow and Warsaw. I hope to have her account published in the near future.

Translation of Full text of the Three Essays on Courage of the Spirit 1937

The Scholar Lays Intellectual Siege to the Zeitgeist

Ten years of rabbinical study, finally completed, would now be put aside for nearly a decade. My father had plenty of time, during his two years in prison, to further his intellectual insights into contemporary philosophy. Upon his release, he returned to Austria and pondered what the future had in store.

He penned his thoughts in a series of three essays on the position of Judaism as the naysayer of civilization, especially in contrast to the popular intellectual trends of his day: the economic determinism of Marxism; the genetic determinism of Nazi racism; the cultural determinism of fascism; the psychological determinism in the schools of depth psychology espoused by Freud and Jung. In the second and third essays, he attacks the enthronement of instinctual drives in neo-Romanticism as expressed by D. H. Lawrence and Nietzsche, and he culminates his writings by examining the nihilism inherent in national socialism—specifically, Nazism.

The title of the series in German is “Mut Zum Geist,” which translates as “The Courage of the Spirit” as I have phrased it, but more accurately, “Courage to or for the Spirit.” The word Geist has greater implications than the English word spirit, which has only religious connotations. In German, it encompasses the whole realm of the mind, whether individually or collectively for humanity, or of an underlying mind of the universe. It requires courage to face Geist—the realm of values and ideals. Quite appropriately, this phrase appears later in the writings of Viktor Frankl, also a Holocaust survivor and the father of Logotherapy, who emphasized the centrality of meaning in life and the need for moral courage. It stands in contrast to the triumph of the will as hailed by moviemaker Leni Reifenstahl in her propaganda film Triumph des Willens, or Triumph of the Will, which reveals her adoration of Hitler. She was a devotee of Hitler’s from the moment she read Mein Kampf. The title of her film was Hitler’s idea, and the film was based on one of the early Nuremberg rallies.




My father’s essays appeared in the Judiche Presszentrale Zurich, the main Jewish newspaper of Zurich. For many years, I have had the first essay in my possession. The librarian of the Zurich Jewish Community, Dr. Yvonne Domhardt, sent me copies of the other two essays my father published.

Following pages contain the complete essay translated into English. I thank Professor Michal Bodeman of the University of Toronto for his clarifications.
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The Courage of the Spirit

Dr. Wilhelm Weinberg (Vienna)
Judische Presszentrale
Zurich, June 18, 1937

Editor’s Introduction:

Under this rubric, we shall be presenting a series of essays. The author brings our attention to the nihilistic-destructive developments in our times against all that is spiritual [Geistige] and seeks to reach a position whereby the Jew must stand in opposition. The title provides the underlying theme of the essays. The first essay bears the subtitle “Under the Sign of Fatalism.” In this essay, he examines a cross section of the key themes of contemporary thought.

Under the Sign of Fatalism

The Jewish Messiah idea implies a systematic plan and consciousness in the totality of the direction of humanity and in its cultural formation. Our contemporary stream of thought has no room for such a concept nor, indeed, for an idea of a conscious will nor for an idea guiding universal developments
It has been an accepted thesis for decades within all trends of our culture that all events occur independently of human will. Little and rarely does anything result from conscious thought. Like the apparition that vanishes at the toll of the bell to usher in a new day, so all the values and ideals of mankind melt away, overpowered with unpitying might by the merciless hand of economic, biological, and historical Ananke (fate). A Moses must once again smash the Tablets of the Law, the central element of the Torah, for the Torah implies guidance, the pull of an absolute ground of meaning, and is as such in opposition to determinism.

I

The first to dethrone human will as the critical factor of history is economic theory, which utilizes the most scientific of tools. Karl Marx proved that human life is not determined by will and resolution but by the blind law of the deterministic power of economics, which allows no resistance by any other force. Historic development, according to Marx, is determined by the economic condition, that is, that the path of a given society is set by the manner of production and the exchange of goods. People do not shape their historic societal life through reason and free choice. It is just the opposite. “The means of production of vital necessities absolutely controls the social, political, and intellectual life-process. It is not human consciousness that determines existence, but, on the contrary, it is the historical existence which determines the human consciousness.”
Even ideals are mere reflections of the condition of production. This dethroning of the will as one of the consequential factors of history leads, therefore, to this fatalism: the Marxist theory of impoverishment, whereby a few will always be wealthier, others always poorer, and whereby the collective middle and artisan classes are unalterably driven to destruction. Assuredly, after the prophesied apocalyptic collapse of society there will follow a new and better organized one. This too will not be the consequence of human will and its aspiration to justice; rather it will be the consequential development of the modes of production independent of our will.
(To prevent any misconceptions: We have presented Marxism in its mechanistic formulation. It is known that in Leninism it has found an activist interpretation. This is based on a statement by Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. It is up to you, however, to change it.”)

II

Following the economic fatalism, there is the biological one, based on entirely different presumptions: the teaching of racism, the teaching of the inequality and immutability of the human races. Hereby fatalism is presented in its unadulterated form. Beforehand, it was God who arbitrarily distributed the destinies and who predestined one man to sainthood, the other to damnation. Today, it is hereditary blood. There are talented and untalented races. Only one race is called to take its place at the weaving loom of culture, the Aryan race, and in particular, the German. The others are condemned to unfruitfulness. “Had it not been for the Germans, mankind would have sunk into eternal night” (Chamberlain). [Note: This is referring to Houston Chamberlain, the theoretician of racism who anointed Hitler as the savior of humanity.]
The worthlessness of the other races is as unchangeable as a mathematical proof and as eternal as the law that regulates the path of our planets. This is the will of destiny, and it cannot be changed by any human activity.
There can be no further development of the ungifted races since the hereditary characteristics have not changed over the centuries. “The environment cannot change [the] particular variations of the races” (Eugen Fischer). [Note: Fischer was Hitler’s primary scientist on eugenics and race.] The course of human history is independent of human will. The driving force of historical-social world events is to be found only in the struggle of the higher races against the lower races. Family, religion, and state are only manifestations of blood. There cannot be a concept of humanity as the encompassing unity of all races; so, too, there can be no universally binding human cultural value. The worth of any given value is tied to blood and skull measurements and is therefore altogether relative.
One must end this chapter on the race problem with a Jewish answer. “I call upon heaven and earth as witness, that whether one is Jew or heathen, man or woman, free or slave, the Holy Spirit rests upon each one in accord with his merits” (Tana d’bei Eliyahu, Ch. 8).

III

From the perspective of the study of intellectual developments, Spengler introduced fatalism into the perspective of his theory of the formation of culture. [Note: Oswald Spengler was a theoretician of the primacy of German civilization; however, he rejected Nazism.] In his analysis, culture is self-sustaining, independent of human willful influence, and free from any goal orientation. “Cultures flourish, and people are transformed in their geographic locales into a folk. They are not the shapers of but [are] shaped by this culture.” Its development is intrinsically bound by law: like all living beings, cultures have their childhood and their blossoming, following which, without any hope, comes their dissolution. They are as bubbles of soap shaped by the straw in the mouth of a child; radiantly and iridescently, they float up, linger awhile, and vanish into nothingness. Likewise, cultures sprout forth from the branch of the Spenglerian deity of Fate into a meaningless existence, and after a brief blossoming disappear just as meaninglessly and without a trace.
Spengler does not recognize humankind. There are only isolated cultures between which no concept provides a bridge of understanding. The members of one cultural circle can never comprehend the members of another cultural circle. Humankind as a whole has no unifying idea, no plan, no goal, no evolution.
The total gruesomeness of such an organic fatalism has been thought through to its historical conclusion by Spengler: everything happens the way it must—as a blind Fate has willed it. Unda fert nec regitur: the stream carries humankind, not allowing any steering of the course. [Note: “One can ride the wave, but not make it” was a favorite quote of the Iron Chancellor Bismarck, the father of what is often termed the Second Reich.]

IV

It is beyond the perspectives of this brief essay to prove that all realms of knowledge are branded by the paralyzing tidal wave of fatalism, or to delineate the ways that they confine the room for play of the human spirit and will.
We need, however, to examine depth psychology [another term for psychoanalysis]. We are cast down by the fatalism of Marx’s modes of production, by hereditary blood racial teachings, by Spengler’s organic culture. Likewise, we are cast down by depth psychology, which evolved out of medicine. This is the fatalism of the subconscious, be it of the individual according to Freud or the collective according to Jung. According to Freud, the function of conscious thought in human endeavor is limited. Past events are forcefully drowned into the subconscious, which functions despite a controlling censor and forms our lives. Freud’s individual subconscious is supplemented by Jung with a collective subconscious, which stems from prehistoric strata in the evolution of our souls. This determines our mental bearing. In contrast with this un- and sub- consciousness, our conscious knowledge is of little bearing. It is not the super-conscious, but the sub-conscious that has the power to shape the destiny of people and to give direction to the tendencies of one’s life-formation.
Indeed, the trap of fatalism is so varied and tightly wound that it leaves absolutely no room for action on the part of human will and consciousness.

V

We draw the bottom line: All these intellectual circles cut right to the quick, and make cruel sport of ideological and activist factors and disprove the conventional lies. The word ideology is needed only as a contemptuous taste, as Napoleon used it, only in passing. In such an intellectual world, there is no room for a phenomenon such as Judaism with its teleology based on an absolute ground of meaning.
Judaism’s theory of history is activist; the Jewish ethos is a willful ethos; the Jewish religion is outspokenly a religion of will. The originality of Judaism rests primarily on the point that the Bible, for the first time, inquired into the question of the sense and inner unity of all human history and conceived of the individual events of history as steps up to a meaningful and powerful world goal. In contrast to nature, history, for us, is not a constant alternation, constantly in flux, up and down in a mindless fashion. The spirit drives history in its development to ever-higher forms to an ethical humane elevation of human society, despite recurring setbacks. We do not deny the law of reality, which researchers have made clear, but over and above this, there is a law of the ideal; over and above the factual, there is the truth.
Goethe said, “The whole world lies before us as a rock quarry before the master mason who earns his name only when he puts this happenstance mass together with the greatest economy, purposefulness, and resoluteness in accord with his personal original vision.” With these words, Goethe posited the zeal for life of the man committed to action in direct contrast to the fatalist who sees the world as a wave that carries man aimlessly without purpose and without allowing him any means of steering.
No! Humanity is not the disturbed dream of some sleeping deity, and [it is] no mad chaos wildly swirled about by a happenstance. God created the world according to plan. As a perceptive statement of the Midrash says, “He consulted the Torah before He began to create.” The duty of humanity in this world is prescribed in these brave words by an ancient Jewish philosophy of history: “Man is called upon to be God’s co-worker in the act of creation” (Mechilta, Exodus 18:13).

My father was ahead of his time in his astute summation of societal trends and flawed belief systems. The same philosophical, spiritual, and moral challenges face us today. Nazism has been crushed, racism has been shamed out of the living rooms of decent people, communism has fallen, and Freudianism no longer dominates therapy.
However, new challenges to the human soul arise as we advance technologically and become a more global society. Do our genes define us? Is our behavior controlled by hormones in the brain? Are we constrained by our social class, never to move upward? Is some quark playing dice with our universe?
As I read my father’s essay, I recognize that it is up to us to act as God’s co-workers in the act of creation.
 

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Courage of the Spirit:
On the Cult of Naturalism

In a follow-up to his first essay published in the Zurich newspaper, my father took up the cudgel against the neo-Romantic spirit of thought, which proliferated as a form of rebellion against the Reine Vernunft, the Pure Reason of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The new Zeitgeist emphasized emotion, experience, or will against straight logic as opposed to the ideal or the intellectual, the realm of the mind (as expressed by the term Geist, translated here as Spirit).

While acknowledging the excesses of absolute rationality, he warns of the destructiveness inherent in the unrestrained adoration of the instinctual forces deep within the human soul. This line of reasoning led from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil to the horror of Riefenstahl’s paean to the embodiment of power in Triumph of the Will.

Not only would six million Jews lose their lives, but tens of millions around the world would fall victim to the unbridled power of human savagery.

My father’s second and third essays present the only solution: the application of Chochmah, the wisdom approach of classic Jewish thought, which seeks a fusion of these two dichotomies in human existence.

The following pages contain a complete transcript of these two essays.
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The Cult of Naturalism

Jüdische Presszentralle Zürich
(Jewish Central Press of Zurich)

15 Oktober 1937 No. 962 of 15th October 1937, page 1-2 Mut zum Geist - Courage of the Spirit

By Dr. Wilhelm Weinberg, Vienna
Second Essay

Every person, insofar as he has attained a certain intellectual maturity, relives his own expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the land of innocent non-spirituality. The question is whether that Biblical narrator, who told us of the expulsion of the first human couple from Paradise, was correct in his interpretation that the plucking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge inevitably brought on Death and whether in truth the Tree of Knowledge is the origin of all ills. Judaism has answered this in the negative, and there can be no doubt that the story of the Garden of Eden has come to us from a non-Israelite source.
In contrast, a chain of leading contemporary thinkers has affirmed this view. This is clear from the title of an essay by the Zurich psychologist Ludwig Klages, “The Spirit as Adversary of the Psyche,” one of his best-known works. With this title, the intention is soon made clear: Spirit is in opposition to life; it is the onset of disease, a mistake; it is a danger to life. This tendency is also evident in the title of an essay by the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing, whose life ended tragically. “Destruction of the Earth by the Spirit” is how he titles this essay, in which he examines the role of consciousness in the development of the world and comes to the conclusion that it has been disastrous in all ages.
Back to our point: for him (Klages), body and soul are inseparably connected poles of the living cell. A wedge now is being driven between body and soul by the spirit, with the intent to split them apart, to remove the soul from the body and the body from the soul, so that ultimately all life is killed. Hence, there develops a struggle against science; against all that is the product of consciousness; against intellectualism, rationalism, and all movements that derive from these—the natural—all that is the historic and social life that underlies the spiritual. Klages himself establishes a main point, that the phenomenon of morality, the product of the intellect, is the result of bad blood.

I

The spirit is dethroned as a despot that has annihilated the best values of life. But what has been placed in its stead? The elemental, the natural instinct: blood and earth earn the highest devotion and are elevated to the level of a categorical imperative. Back to guiltless unspirituality, to the world of dumb, instinct-driven life, that calling is the promise of the salvation of all culture.
“My great religion,” so writes the priest of basic instincts, the English author D. H. Lawrence, author of the renowned work The Dark God, “is a belief in the blood, as the flesh being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds, but what our blood feels and believes and says is always true.” [Author’s note: I have not found a work with that title or its equivalent in English. This phrase appears in Lawrence’s Kangaroo, and is a theme in his writings. Although probably best known for his racy Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence detested democracy and was a hero to fascists, even to this day. We fail miserably to understand the nature of Nazism and fascism when we think of them as merely the redoubt of the ignorant rabble. These ideologies have drawn some of the finest intellects of the twentieth century.]
If the word idolatry means more than a simple formal term—more than merely the shaping of molten, hewn, or painted images of a religion and its worship—then the flesh-and-nature worship that goes hand in hand with enmity of the spiritual of our modern idol worship, Abodah Zarah in Hebrew, is the purest water.
As Jews, we flee from the unpleasant, from the suggestion of succumbing to the environment of inherent historical factors such as race, nationality, geographical conditions, the influence of the historic environment. This is reduced to one concept: to favor the natural growth of life to the detriment of the absolute spirit. Although this is humanly understandable, it does not change the fact that it is driven by idolatry. It is a fall from the spiritual when Jews elevate this dynamic recklessness, which life in its full lustfulness endeavors to impose, to the level of divine legislation. Races, peoplehood, climate, and heredity are all facts that cannot be denied. But may one derive any authority in the ideal sense from mere facts? They come to serious implications. Does there not lie in the autonomy of the factual the danger of the demonic? Is the intellect with its a priori forms, as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer claimed, truly imposed over the surface of life? Are feeling and intuition, as per Bergson, the only guide to the truth? Can the “existence of the growth of life occur devoid of thought” as Spengler intended? Furthermore, is the flesh truly wiser than the spirit as Lawrence claimed?
We follow Maimonides and not Lawrence’s “dark god.” In his discussion of false prophets who seek to prove their calling by creating some miracle states, “The eyes of the spirit, which permeates the law, is keener than the deceptive eye of the flesh which sees the miracle.”
Jews have always disdained to howl with the wolves. They had the courage, even in danger, to be “a lamb among seventy wolves.” Did not people boast until recently that they are the sober man among drunkards? This has changed thoroughly. Jews are also eagerly involved in the iconoclasm against everything that is an expression of its critical spirit, and passionately take a stand against intellectualism and rationalism. It should be noted incidentally, not without its own appeal, that in this context the term “intellectual” shows up with a dismissive tone for the first time in the Dreyfus affair. It seems tragic therefore when Jews join in this howling against intellectualism. We too have our neo-Romantics who passionately take sides with the unconsciously driven feud that all that is individually different is historically conditioned, bound in time and space, in a word, that is and ought to preface all need it not finally be in the strongest terms to recall that in the value construct of Judaism, the spiritual and godlike is stressed much more than the sensual and animalistic! Life requires review by the much maligned intellect, that the will to live under the normalization by the conscious, “Thou shalt,” is one of the characteristic dicta that Judaism presents to humanity, to express thereby that what is of nature requires conquest and organization of the moral.
The Enlightenment has ignored the fact of the carnal nature of humanity and its innate soul and thereby removed it from the natural and historical foundations of life. This was the excess surge of what was in itself a rational principle, and we do not deny the danger of emptying our collective culture of its soul, which has occurred. However, these biases were corrected long ago; indeed, to borrow an expression of the late fearless Jewish psychologist Alfred Adler, [they were] overcompensated, and it is now time to oppose the neo-Romanticism with a Neo-Enlightenment. [Author’s note: Adler, known for his concept of the inferiority complex, was one of the guiding figures of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement in Vienna, of which my father had been a member in his younger years.]
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Third Essay
No. 963 of 22nd October 1937, p. 9

We are very far from ignoring the instinct-driven life and pretending as if it did not exist. With such an attitude toward the natural element—a spiritualism of a one-sided concept of the mind that ignores the dark forces of the drives—the instinctual and demonic must have its bitter revenge at the end. Neo-Romanticism is proof in our time. We are witnessing how the repressed dark waters of the instinctual life, in spite of the regulatory commission which Enlightenment imposed, have suddenly broken through the dams of the subconscious mind and flooded the whole of our consciousness. Nietzsche was its first victim and ended in mental derangement, and the German people as a whole were her second victim, which has ended in National Socialism. The one-sidedness of the Enlightenment has been avenged bitterly, and we are careful not to fall back into it.
Within the Jewish spiritual world there exists alongside the one direction of spiritualistic prophecy another direction that is known under the name Chochmah, wisdom. It is known and has made its imprint in many writings and various expressions. Its first beginnings go back to, significantly, the time when the Jews came in contact with the nature-loving spirit of Hellas. This Chochmah knows the bond that exists in all of life is of two distinct halves, the animal-biological and the higher spiritual world, which lie in a constant struggle against each other; she [Chochmah] knows that we must also reckon with the reality of the animalistic. She affirms life. The body is to be preserved and maintained, and not be tormented by asceticism. But she never forgets that this reality is only an infinitely malleable matter, a formless mass out of which she will shape her work. She makes use of nature as the miller makes use of the torrential power of the waterfall; she knows of its demonic nature and transforms it by making concessions into the service of a higher world. The Chochmah shows us the possibility of steering and shaping the instinctual drives and its transformation into a dedicated significant, higher entity. Whoever has impartially studied the history of humanity will admit that this steering of the drives remains the basic requirement of every cultural achievement. The first and last resort for us remains the spirit and not the “dark gods.”

I know it! Yes! Drive—hollow, unruly, wild
Drives, swirls of this life-wheel—but over it
Lights the stars and proceeds to that which is bidden!

~Richard Beer-Hoffman, “The Young David”
 

Guns Don’t Kill People—Ideas Kill People Thoughts on Kristallnacht , the Holocaust and Paris 2015

Guns Don’t Kill People—Ideas Kill People           Thoughts on Kristallnacht , the Holocaust and Paris 2015             Nov 14, 2015
The following are notes from my discussion on Kristallnacht and the conflict between the values of Judaism and those of the key ideologies of the 20th century. This was prepared before the massacres in  Paris on Nov 13. There are strong themes that carry over from 20th century conflicts into this new 21st century conflict between a liberal West and a militant political Islamism. 
Whether Islamism-- in its various manifestations, as Al Qaeda, or Salafi Jihadism or Islamic Caliphate, or Moslem Brotherhood, or Iranian Islamic State-- reflects or speaks for Islam as a religion is irrelevant. Attempts to whitewash Islam as the “Religion of Peace” on the one hand or to label Islam as inherently evil on the other are also irrelevant. However, it must be understood that the root of these Islamic movements are deeply anchored in historic Islamic texts and traditions, whereas Nazism and Communism, the two scourges of the previous century, were full-bore rebellions against the foundation texts of Christianity. 
It is time to recognize that these are strongly developed ideological systems devised by bright and educated thinkers. To rationalize this as solely a movement of the “disadvantaged” or “ oppressed” of the Shabab  of the banlieu  of France is a futile as dismissing Nazism as solely a movement of the lumpenproletariat of Germany. Dr. Zwahiri is a trained physician, Bin Laden was a trained engineer, the ideological father of their movement, Sayd Qutb, was trained in American universities. Hitler had his Heidegger’s and his Reifenstahl’s as admirers. Never underestimate the capabilities of a militant political movement.
In that light, I look at the central conflicts of the 20th century as they were being played out in the 1930’s, when Hitler had established the Third Reich and Stalin was firmly enthroned in the Worker’s Paradise.
Kristallnacht, Nov 9-10,1938.
This is a bitterly ironic name." Kristall", literally, the English Crystal glass, was given by one of the Nazi leaders immediately after the November pogroms, to make fun of the victims. There is a 2nd  bitter irony--the victims were blamed and fined 1 billion reichsmark! The 3rd bitter irony is that form this, the Nazi regime understood that its war on the Jews must now be taken form the amateurs and handed over to the professionals, from SA to SS.
This date is generally considered to mark the start of the Holocaust. That too is a bitter ironic name, as it means a "Burnt offering", as if our people were the sacrificial ox for the sins of the world. The  Hebrew word "Shoah" is  more appropriate, as it means a horrible destruction.
What was behind this consuming passion to destroy the Jews? From whence this utter inhumanity?
Was it resentment of the poor?  Germans were not poor! They did not suffer physically from the hardship of war as did the French, on whose soil the armies fought. My father lived through that period and  recalled that the Germans lived very well compared to the rest of the Europeans.
Was it historic anti-Semitism? Germans were not more anti-Semitic than other Europeans.
Was it mass psychosis? Madness of the crowds?
Or is the human being a creature of ideas, ideals, and ideologies which can override all other instincts, which can override human decency, which can leads to Nietzsche’s concept of “Beyond Good and Evil.”
I look back at writings of the period from my father, Rabbi William Weinberg, which I translated and printed in my book, Courage of the Spirit.  My father had gone through childhood in the shtetl to adulthood and the study of Political Science in cosmopolitan Vienna to Rabbinical studies in Berlin. He spent two years in Nazi prison from 1935 to 1937, and learned both Nazi and Communist intimately form his fellow prisoners ( Yes, Nazis  who were too uncontrollable even for Hitler were imprisoned).He escaped to the Soviet Union, and came back, after the Shoah, to Austria and Germany, where he served as the first State Rabbi of Hesse).
For one thing, he insisted that historic anti-Semitism, emanating from Christianity, was not the root cause.
This is an excerpt form an essay that appeared in the early 1960’s in the Bnai Brith Monthly at time of Vatican II:
“ Neither Hitler, nor the Dreyfusards, nor the anti-Semitic right-wingers who between the two World Wars grouped themselves around the daily, L'Action Francaise, fought under the faded banner of the church. We must not be deceived by smuggled-in pieties. Nazism's anti-Jewish ideology was not based on the theological antagonism between the Pharisees and Jesus. The Nazis did not adorn themselves with the symbol of the cross, but with the swastika, which stood for many things but not for Christian myths or beliefs.  . . .
To the best of my recollection. no Nazi ever threw the New Testament at me, nor did any Russian anti-Semite, during the four years I was a refugee in the Soviet Union. Anti-Semitism is essentially a-religious, thoroughly secularized, and materialistic.
Important new view now has been published, by Timothy Snyder, Black Earth. This is from an essay in New York review of Books, Sept 2015 summarizing his point. What Snyder writes is presaged in the essay that my father published in 1937, before anyone had thought of the idea of a Holocaust ( except for Hitler himself):
“ After murder, Hitler thought, the next human duty was sex and reproduction. In his scheme, the original sin that led to the fall of man was of the mind and soul, not of the body. For Hitler, our unhappy weakness was that we can think, realize that others belonging to other races can do the same, and thereby recognize them as fellow human beings. Humans left Hitler’s bloody paradise not because of carnal knowledge. Humans left paradise because of the knowledge of good and evil.
 . . . If humans were in fact nothing more than an element of nature, and nature was known by science to be a bloody struggle, something beyond nature must have corrupted the species. For Hitler the bringer of the knowledge of good and evil on the earth, the destroyer of Eden, was the Jew. It was the Jew who told humans that they were above other animals, and had the capacity to decide their future for themselves. It was the Jew who introduced the false distinction between politics and nature, between humanity and struggle. Hitler’s destiny, as he saw it, was to redeem the original sin of Jewish spirituality and restore the paradise of blood. Since Homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a “worldview” that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, “faith” in its own mindless mission.”
I appreciate Snyder's explanation because it echoes language that my used 80 years ago. 

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The Courage of the Spirit  Dr. Wilhelm Weinberg (Vienna) 
Judische Press Zentrale  Zurich, June 18, 1937    Printed in 3 essays- my translation from the German.(abridged excerpts)
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Essay 1 Under the Sign of Fatalism

The Jewish Messiah idea implies a systematic plan and consciousness in the totality of the direction of humanity and in its cultural formation. Our contemporary stream of thought has no room for such a concept nor, indeed, for an idea of a conscious will nor for an idea guiding universal developments 
It has been an accepted thesis for decades within all trends of our culture that all events occur independently of human will. Little and rarely does anything result from conscious thought.  . . . .
_______________________________________
The first to dethrone human will as the critical factor of history is economic theory, which utilizes the most scientific of tools. Karl Marx proved that human life is not determined by will and resolution but by the blind law of the deterministic power of economics, which allows no resistance by any other force. Historic development, according to Marx, is determined by the economic condition, that is, that the path of a given society is set by the manner of production and the exchange of goods. People do not shape their historic societal life through reason and free choice. It is just the opposite. “The means of production of vital necessities absolutely controls the social, political, and intellectual life-process. It is not human consciousness that determines existence, but, on the contrary, it is the historical existence which determines the human consciousness.” . . .
Even ideals are mere reflections of the condition of production
_________________________________________________________
Following the economic fatalism, there is the biological one, based on entirely different presumptions: the teaching of racism, the teaching of the inequality and immutability of the human races. Hereby fatalism is presented in its unadulterated form. Beforehand, it was God who arbitrarily distributed the destinies and who predestined one man to sainthood, the other to damnation. Today, it is hereditary blood. There are talented and untalented races. Only one race is called to take its place at the weaving loom of culture, the Aryan race, and in particular, the German. The others are condemned to unfruitfulness. “Had it not been for the Germans, mankind would have sunk into eternal night” (Chamberlain). 
The worthlessness of the other races is as unchangeable as a mathematical proof and as eternal as the law that regulates the path of our planets. This is the will of destiny, and it cannot be changed by any human activity.
There can be no further development of the ungifted races since the hereditary characteristics have not changed over the centuries. “The environment cannot change [the] particular variations of the races” (Eugen Fischer). [Note: Fischer was Hitler’s primary scientist on eugenics and race.] The course of human history is independent of human will. The driving force of historical-social world events is to be found only in the struggle of the higher races against the lower races. Family, religion, and state are only manifestations of blood. There cannot be a concept of humanity as the encompassing unity of all races; so, too, there can be no universally binding human cultural value. The worth of any given value is tied to blood and skull measurements and is therefore altogether relative.
One must end this chapter on the race problem with a Jewish answer. “I call upon heaven and earth as witness, that whether one is Jew or heathen, man or woman, free or slave, the Holy Spirit rests upon each one in accord with his merits” (Tana d’bei Eliyahu, Ch. 8).
( part Three is a digression on Otto Spengler)
_________________________________________
. . .
We need, however, to examine depth psychology [another term for psychoanalysis]. We are cast down by the fatalism of Marx’s modes of production, by hereditary blood racial teachings, by Spengler’s organic culture.  Likewise, we are cast down by depth psychology, which evolved out of medicine. This is the fatalism of the subconscious, be it of the individual according to Freud or the collective according to Jung. According to Freud, the function of conscious thought in human endeavor is limited. Past events are forcefully drowned into the subconscious, which functions despite a controlling censor and forms our lives. Freud’s individual subconscious is supplemented by Jung with a collective subconscious, which stems from prehistoric strata in the evolution of our souls. This determines our mental bearing. In contrast with this un- and sub- consciousness, our conscious knowledge is of little bearing. It is not the super-conscious, but the sub-conscious that has the power to shape the destiny of people and to give direction to the tendencies of one’s life-formation.
Indeed, the trap of fatalism is so varied and tightly wound that it leaves absolutely no room for action on the part of human will and consciousness.
_________________________________________

. . .
Judaism’s theory of history is activist; the Jewish ethos is a willful ethos; the Jewish religion is outspokenly a religion of will. The originality of Judaism rests primarily on the point that the Bible, for the first time, inquired into the question of the sense and inner unity of all human history and conceived of the individual events of history as steps up to a meaningful and powerful world goal. In contrast to nature, history, for us, is not a constant alternation, constantly in flux, up and down in a mindless fashion. The spirit drives history in its development to ever-higher forms to an ethical humane elevation of human society, despite recurring setbacks. We do not deny the law of reality, which researchers have made clear, but over and above this, there is a law of the ideal; over and above the factual, there is the truth.
. . . .
No! Humanity is not the disturbed dream of some sleeping deity, and [it is] no mad chaos wildly swirled about by a happenstance. God created the world according to plan. As a perceptive statement of the Midrash says, “He consulted the Torah before He began to create.” The duty of humanity in this world is prescribed in these brave words by an ancient Jewish philosophy of history: “Man is called upon to be God’s co-worker in the act of creation” (Mechilta, Exodus 18:13).


Essay 2
On the Cult of Naturalism   15th October 1937

Every person, insofar as he has attained a certain intellectual maturity, relives his own expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the land of innocent non-spirituality. The question is whether that Biblical narrator, who told us of the expulsion of the first human couple from Paradise, was correct in his interpretation that the plucking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge inevitably brought on Death and whether in truth the Tree of Knowledge is the origin of all ills. Judaism has answered this in the negative, and there can be no doubt that the story of the Garden of Eden has come to us from a non-Israelite source.  . . .. A wedge now is being driven between body and soul by the spirit, with the intent to split them apart, to remove the soul from the body and the body from the soul, so that ultimately all life is killed. Hence, there develops a struggle against science, against all that is the product of consciousness: against intellectualism, rationalism, and all movements that derive from these, the natural, all that is the historic and social life that underlies the spiritual.  . . .
The spirit is dethroned as a despot that has annihilated the best values of life. But what has been placed in its stead? The elemental, the natural instinct: blood and earth earn the highest devotion and are elevated to the level of a categorical imperative. Back to guiltless unspirituality, to the world of dumb, instinct-driven life, that is the calling that is to be the promise of the salvation of all culture.
“My great religion,” so writes the priest of basic instincts, the English author D. H. Lawrence, author of the renowned work The Dark God, “is a belief in the blood, as the flesh being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds, but what our blood feels and believes and says is always true.” If the word idolatry means more than a simple formal term, more than merely the shaping of molten, hewn, or painted images of a religion and its worship, then the flesh-and-nature worship that goes hand in hand with enmity of the spiritual of our modern idol worship, Abodah Zarah in Hebrew, is the purest water. . . .
. Races, peoplehood, climate, and heredity are all facts that cannot be denied. But may one derive any authority in the ideal sense from mere facts? They come to serious implications. Does there not lie in the autonomy of the factual the danger of the demonic? Is the intellect with its a priori forms, as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer claimed, truly imposed over the surface of life? Are feeling and intuition, as per Bergson, the only guide to the truth? Can the “existence of the growth of life occur devoid of thought” as Spengler intended? Furthermore, is the flesh truly wiser than the spirit as Lawrence claimed?
We follow Maimonides and not Lawrence’s “dark god.” In his discussion of false prophets who seek to prove their calling by creating some miracle states, “The eyes of the spirit, which permeates the law, is keener than the deceptive eye of the flesh which sees the miracle.” 
Jews have always disdained to howl with the wolves. They had the courage, even in danger, to be “a lamb among seventy wolves.” Did not people boast until recently that they are the sober man among drunkards? This has changed thoroughly. Jews are also eagerly involved in the iconoclasm against everything that is an expression of its critical spirit, and passionately take a stand against intellectualism and rationalism.  . . .





Third Essay
22nd October 1937
We are witnessing how the repressed dark waters of the instinctual life, in spite of the regulatory commission which Enlightenment imposed, have suddenly broken through the dams of the subconscious mind and flooded the whole of our consciousness. Nietzsche was its first victim and ended in mental derangement, and the German people as a whole were her second victim, which has ended in National Socialism. The one-sidedness of the Enlightenment has been avenged bitterly, and we are careful not to fall back into it
Within the Jewish spiritual world, there exists alongside the one direction of spiritualistic prophecy another direction that is known under the name Chochmah, wisdom . . .. This Chochmah knows the bond that exists in all of life is of two distinct halves, the animal-biological and the higher spiritual world, which lie in a constant struggle against each other; she [Chochmah] knows that we must also reckon with the reality of the animalistic. She affirms life. The body is to be preserved and maintained, and not be tormented by asceticism. But she never forgets that this reality is only an infinitely malleable matter, a formless mass out of which she will shape her work.  . . The Chochmah shows us the possibility of steering and shaping the instinctual drives and its transformation into a dedicated significant, higher entity. Whoever has impartially studied the history of humanity will admit that this steering of the drives remains the basic requirement of every cultural achievement. The first and last resort for us remains the spirit and not the “dark gods.”
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International Tracing Service ( ITS) has helped me find documents at Bad Arolsen Archives

I recently received a copy of files regarding my father from before and after the Holocaust.

It includes the record of his imprisonment by the Nazis, his residence in Vienna in 1946,  in Hallein, 1948 and Frankfurt, 1950, as well as our relocation from Frankfurt to Cincinnati , Ohio.

Dear Mr Weinberg,

Please find enclosed our information with enclosures, and we hope that we could be of assistance to you.

With best regards,

Annegret Stockdreher

Inquiry Response Department

International Tracing Service (ITS)
Große Allee 5-9
34454 Bad Arolsen
Germany

Phone:   +49 (0)5691 629-0
Fax:        +49 (0)5691 629-501

http://www.its-arolsen.org

inquiryteam-12@its-arolsen.org

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Registry of Polish Nationals in Brandenburg prison

Listing for my father accused of financial crimes for helping  Jews move funds

Further listing of prisoners

Jews registered in Vienna 1946

My father's residence on Praterstrasse, only a few blocks from a park now named in honor of his high school friend, manes Sperber

Resettlement to USA

Resettlement list 2

DP registry card

My father's residence in Hotel Stern while working at Hallein DP camp, Austria

A Mother's Day Poem From The Holocaust

A Mother's Day Poem From The Holocaust

My mother, Irene Weinberg, kept a copy of a poem in Polish, Dzien Matki, Mother's Day, by Zofia Nawrocka, which describes the anguish of a woman who learns of her mother's capture by the Nazi's during the Holocaust. My mother translated it into English.

IndieGo Publishing Offers Reduced Prices on Norbert Weinberg's Book Courage of the Spirit to Commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Defeat of the Nazis

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Press Release on 70th Year Commemoration

IndieGo Publishing Offers Reduced Prices on Norbert Weinberg's Book

Courage of the Spirit to Commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Defeat of the Nazis

Hollywood, CA, April 28, 2015 --(PR.com)-- Rabbi William Weinberg, the subject of the book Courage of the Spirit, finally gained his freedom in Vienna with the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies on May 9, 1945. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of this event, IndieGo Publishing is offering Norbert Weinberg's book at greatly reduced promotional prices from April 26 through May 10, 2015.

You can purchase the paperback for only $7.50, half the original price, using discount code 7J6LFAYJ at its CreateSpace ebookstore:

www.createspace.com/4773507

The ebook will be available for 99 cents from Nook, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple's iBookstore, and for $1.99 from Kindle.

Courage of the Spirit portrays the spiritual struggle of the author's father, Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg, who survived Nazi and communist tyranny to become the first State Rabbi of the community of Holocaust survivors in the German State of Hesse. Rabbi Weinberg's journey spanned thousands of physical miles by freight train and on foot, from cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin to Stalingrad and central Asia as he and his brother Benjamin kept a step ahead of the Nazi armies. The book spans the mental and emotional journey from the medieval shtetl and the great empires to the weak democracies and totalitarian regimes that followed, and finally, to freedom. Courage of the Spirit reconstructs these events from conversations with the author's father and his uncle, from family notes, and from historical documentation.

Contact Information: Norbert Weinberg  818-935-6053 Contact via Email  norbertweinberg.1948@gmail.com http://www.courageofspirit.com  You may also contact IndieGo Publishing at indiego.ebooks@gmail.com

Why the Nazis Needed to Destroy the Jewish People:A Look Back after 70 Years

April 18 2015  

Why the Nazis Needed to Destroy the Jewish People:A Look Back after 70 Years

Courage of the Spirit Essay, 1937

Our Torah reading of this Shabbat opened with the bizarre death of the two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu just at what should be the greatest of days, the day of their dedication as priest of the new sanctuary in the desert. Moses tries to comfort his brother, ” I will be sanctified by those closest to me,” but Aaron answer is  Vayidom Aharon, “Aaron kept silent.” He could give no answer and could accept no comfort. ( Leviticus 10).

The fate of the martyrs of Holocaust in some ways is reminiscent of the fate of Nadav and Avihu. Let no one blame any faction of Jews for failure or lack of righteousness nor for silence or fear.  Our only deep answer possible is that of Aaron, Vayidom Aharon. We are silent, like Aaron.

Nevertheless, speak we must and lay the blame clearly, not at the feet of the victims, nor at the feet of God, but at the feet of the perpetrators, the  bulk of the Germans and their fellow travelers of other nations who swore allegiance to Hitler or joined in the bloodshed for whatever reason.

Now it is 70 years to the end of the Holocaust on May 7, 1945, marking the collapse of the Third Reich.  Our own friend ,Joe Alexander, was freed at Dachau on April 29.My mother, Irene Weinberg, was liberated sometime mid-February in the Czestochowa region and sometime in April my father arrived in a liberated Vienna.

I mention my father, Rabbi Dr William Weinberg. Many of you know that I recently published a book about him, Courage of the Spirit. He had served as the first State Rabbi of Hesse, the American zone around Frankfurt, Germany. I look into his writings to find hints of how and why this great human horror story unfolded.

Why did the Nazis need to destroy the Jewish people. It is true that they vented their rage on homosexuals and Gypsies and were out to enslave the Slavs, but only one people so focused the mind of Hitler in his manifesto, Mein Kampf.  Only one people, small and few in numbers, the Jewish people, so focused his mind. Why so? Obviously, there is the old history of Christian anti-Semitism and the accusation of Christ-killer. But, as my father wrote, not one Nazi ever accused him of being a Christ killer.

He had spent two years in a Nazi prison from 1935 to 1937. His fellow inmates were political prisoners for the most part, either Communists or other Nazis! Yes, other Nazis, because Hitler needed to control those Nazis who believed too much in the cause. So for two years, he learned the inner thinking of the Nazis, up close.

He was released in April and escaped quickly to Vienna, and while there, he wrote a series of essays that appeared in the Zurich Jewish newspaper just two months later, under the name," Courage of the Spirit". It was on the contrast between Judaism and the great ideologies of modernity: economic determinism, what we call Marxism, psychological determinism, what we call Freudianism, and biological determinism, what we could call, in parallel, Hitlerism.

Note the irony that two of the three are associated with Jews. Marxism proved to be pathological, Freudianism, much more benign, but the third was fatal, certainly to us as Jews. In opposition to these three, my father posed Judaism. Modern ideology proposed that we are all controlled, either by our economic status, our psychological make-up, or our blood ( today, the equivalent is DNA), especially as marked by race. Our concepts of true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, are illusions, imposed upon us by factors beyond us. We are ourselves therefore never free agents of our own will. In opposition to this was the core idea of Judaism:

“Judaism's theory of history is activist, the Jewish ethos is a willful ethos, the Jewish religion is outspokenly a religion of will. The originality of Judaism rests primarily on the point that the Bible, for the first time, inquired into the question of the sense and inner unity of all human history and conceived of the individual events of history as steps up to a meaningful and powerful world goal. “(Translation of text, Courage of the Spirit, pp 122-138)

In other words, to cut through my translation of his flowery German prose, we as Jews believed in a common destiny for humanity, a common value, a common ethic. It is this which distinguished us from Nazism, even more so than from the other ideologies, which shared at least some sense of commonality of humanity. It is this belief that the human shares his humanity with others, that the human is “God’s partner in creation”.

There is one other aspect to Nazism that has never been properly explained. This too was addressed in the essays. At the root of Nazism is nihilism, a belief that all the inherited values of western civilization were an imposition through Christianity by the Jews.  This concept of permitted and forbidden would be opposed by the expression of pure will and force, an elimination of the boundaries of conventional morality. In addressing this outlook, my father declared that this liberation of the individual from moral restraints would be ultimately catastrophic, and he wrote:

          “Nietzsche was its first victim and ended in mental derangement and the        German people as a whole was her second victim which has ended in       National Socialism.”

Now, Nietzsche was the brilliant philosopher who preached the devaluing of all values. He died in terrible insanity. The metaphor, for my father’s readers was clear. The German people had fallen into the same degenerative insanity that had befallen the great intellect. Nietzche self-destructed; so to say, the German people had self-destructed. So prophetic! Within the space of seven years, the Third Reich had plunged the entire world into a “Twilight of the Gods”, the world saw mass murder with efficiency on a scale never imagined, and the human race entered the age of nuclear weaponry. Germany was rubble.

I contend that to understand this horror that Nazism needed, in order to destroy the Jewish people, a reason greater than that of “Christ killer.”

Nazism, as a movement of will and the expression of absolute power, needed to destroy the very people who brought the world their commonly accepted system of values. Christianity stood in the way, for sure, but the resistance of the Church, whether Protestant or Catholic, proved feeble and powerless to sway the bulk of the people of Germany and their fellow travelers, the collaborators among the other Europeans. No. The target had to be “The Jew”, because the Jew is at the root of Christianity. The Jew represents the father, represents obligation, responsibility, prohibition. To borrow from Freudian explanations, the son must destroy the father in order to have the mother. This underlying pathology was a greater cause of fear in Hitler’s obsessions, as of those of his followers, a greater fear than the Jew as capitalist and communist combined, or the Jew as the creature whose tentacles control the governments of the world. Buried deep in their psyche, was the Jew as the obstacle to the fulfillment of unbridled passion, power and force. For Nazism to be the “Triumph of the Will” it needed, above all, to triumph, not over the malicious American and English capitalists, not over the evil Bolsheviks, but over the Eternal Jew. All the efforts of the war would be subordinated to the annihilation of the Jew.

We are here today, then, because we still stand for the conscience, for the freedom of the human soul, for the ability to shape our lives as individuals and as peoples, for a belief in a higher goal for humanity that is shaped in the Divine image. We stand for a day, as difficult and deluded as it may seem, a day in which the words of the prophets Isaiah and Micah would be fulfilled, words inscribed on the walls of the United Nations, words that Nazism worked so hard to prevent:

“They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3-5).

To this, the prophet Micah added:

“All the nations may walk in the name of their gods” . . ..

“In the name of their gods”! The prophet did not care what way different nations followed their gods or their version of God, no matter if they called in the name of Jesus or in the name of Allah or  Ahura Mazda.

He concluded:

“But we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.( Micah 4:3-5)

So shall we all walk one day, all peoples, each in its own path, but together.

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