Towards a Jewish Theology of Liberation

By Mark Ellis

Marc Ellis fine book about the future of the Jewish community was first published in 1987. But twenty years on, in the light of recent events in the Middle East and post-September 11, its powerful message of hope, directed towards a people 'poised between Holocaust and empowerment', remains as powerful, apposite, and pressingly relevant as it was b

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334048589

Mark Ellis

Mark is married to Joanne and they have three teenage children. He has held a variety of ministry roles, including worked with a church plant in Malaysia and with students in Scotland. He is currently minister of Grace Church Dundee.

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© Marc H. Ellis 1987

Preface © Julia Neuberger 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 0334 02899 4

First published in the USA in 1987 by Orbis Books

First published in Britain in 1988 by SCM Press

This new edition published in 2002 by SCM Press

9–17 St Albans Place, London N1 0NX

www.scm-canterburypress.co.uk

SCM Press is a division of

SCM-Canterbury Press Ltd

Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and printed by Bookmarque, Croydon, Surrey

To my father and mother

Herbert Moore Ellis

and

June Goldwin Ellis

who first taught me the meaning

of Jewish ethics and liberation

Contents

Preface by Julia Neuberger

Author’s Preface to the First Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A SHATTERED WITNESS

Elie Wiesel

Richard Rubenstein

Emil Fackenheim

Irving Greenberg

The Holocaust as a Universal Crisis

2. THE COST OF EMPOWERMENT

Irving Greenberg

Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter

Earl Shorris and Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht

3. MOVEMENTS OF JEWISH RENEWAL

From Secularism to Judaism

Movements of Social and Political Action

A Burgeoning Feminist Consciousness

4. LIBERATION STRUGGLES AND THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

Black Liberation Theology

Latin American Liberation Theology

Asian Liberation Theology

Jewish Responses

5. TOWARD A RECONSTRUCTION OF JEWISH LIFE

Etty Hillesum

Martin Buber

The Difficult Path of Hillesum and Buber

6. FROM HOLOCAUST TO SOLIDARITY: TOWARD A JEWISH THEOLOGY OF LIBERATION

The Challenges of a New Theology

Practicing Judaism in a Post-Holocaust World

Notes

Suggested Readings

Index

Preface

When Marc Ellis’s seminal book, Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, first came out in 1987, I was a young rabbi at a congregation in South London (South London Liberal Jewish Synagogue), in the wake of the so-called Brixton riots of the early 1980s, and very aware that much of what Ellis was writing about had direct relevance to the Jews of my community and far far wider. This was shortly after the time of the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ in Argentina, the mothers of the young people, mainly but by no means all young men, who disappeared under that brutal regime. This was the time of the real flourishing of liberation theology in Latin America. This was the time when a new spirit should have been gripping the Jewish people – at least those interested in theology – and yet somehow it seemed not to be there. Why not?

There were many reasons, but only a few are relevant here. First, the shock, the stunned reaction, after the Holocaust was still very much in evidence. What we now regard as the norm in Holocaust studies, Holocaust exhibits (such as at the Imperial War Museum) or Holocaust museums were in their infancy or only a gleam in the eye. The recording of detailed memories by those who had survived, either the camps or as refugees, was still just beginning. The outpourings of recollections can be timed pretty exactly to around the fiftieth anniversary in 1995 of the liberation of Auschwitz. Those who had survived were now getting older. They wanted to tell their story before they died. ‘Lest we forget . . .’, an element of liberation theology, though unrecognized by most of them, was a feature of the mid-1990s. So a plethora of records appeared – stories, letters, diaries, sound archive recordings – and the history of the Holocaust and the study of the Holocaust grew in significance, both emotionally and politically. And, until much of that was worked through, real thinking about what one could learn from the Holocaust was impossible.

Yet this was in the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, after the main composition of Ellis’s work, and certainly after much of the thinking took place on which this work depends, and of which it is the fruition. Ellis does not reflect, either, the Historikerstreit in Germany, where thinking about the Holocaust, and its uniqueness or otherwise, divided German historians from the mid-1980s on. Germany was still recoiling from its immediate past. People were still nervous of discussing what really happened. Parents were still loath to tell their children what they did, and school curricula did not discuss what took place. As Ellis reflects on the meaning of the Holocaust for Jews, taking a variety of interpreters, one is struck by how different the main interpreters would be now, the key texts one would wish the young to read. Certainly Elie Wiesel would still figure, though with greater critical discussion than was the case in the 1980s. But Richard Rubenstein and Emil Fackenheim seem more rarefied, people whom the serious theologians would read. Younger people might be pointed to Primo Levi, to Etty Hillesum, who features heavily in Ellis’s work and who has just been republished in Britain, and to the historians Martin Gilbert and Yehuda Bauer. But in terms of interpretation, Primo Levi as thinker and philosopher would probably outshine them all. And one might point to fiction in a way inconceivable in the mid-1980s – Anne Michaels’s poetic Fugitive Pieces, for instance, or W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants or Austerlitz.

But on the contemporary thinking about the Holocaust in the 1980s, Ellis builds his questions, and those of the writers he quotes, such as Earl Shorris and Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht. They concern how the Jews – and he points particularly to American Jews – cannot see the link between Jewish suffering and other sufferings. Those writers criticize Jewish neo-conservatism – a particular feature of the 1980s – and its assertion that Israel is always right, and that the Palestinian people have no rights. (Actually very few Jews have ever suggested that the Palestinian people have no rights – the question has been much more one of degree.) Those criticisms are well founded. But what fails then to emerge is the twofold response one might have expected.

First, one would expect to see cited in greater detail the powerful non-conservative voice in Judaism, such as that of the Peace Now movement in Israel and beyond, the Jews for Human Rights groups, the Jewish supporters of Amnesty International (inspired by a Jew, Luis Kutner) and the Jews in the forefront of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Helen Suzman and many many others. Those voices are as legitimate an expression of Judaism, or more so, as anything the neo-conservatives ever came up with, and so the criticism of a Feuerlicht needs to be tempered with a historical sense.

Secondly, and more importantly, what is lacking in any depth in Ellis’s work is a reflection on the role of the prophets, and indeed on what used to be called prophetic Judaism, the view of the most reform or liberal of non-orthodox Jews, following the prophetic route of crying out about the situation of their fellow citizens in their countries or in the world. This is a voice that Ellis recognizes, in his critique of Greenberg, to be founded on real suffering and empathy, but which, in his dismissal of Greenberg as a pseudo-conservative figure – not perhaps brave enough to speak outside the box – he does not explore. A further section of Ellis’s work on the real relevance of the prophetic tradition to modern Jews would be very welcome.

The second area, where I believe Ellis’s work has much more contemporary relevance, is in its attitude to Israel, and in his attempt – now sadly incomplete – to pull together the views of those who have been most critical of the Israeli state’s position on the Palestinian people and their state. That analysis holds good now as it did then. Those questions to Jews in the United States and the world over about why they allow such unqualified support for the most extreme of Israel’s actions when there needs to be support for the right of the state to exist, but not for many of its policies, are just as relevant now as they were then. Those groups, such as Rabbis for human rights, need support, but their thinking needs wider exposure. Those who founded the New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s (whom Ellis quotes) still speak with more liberal voices than many others. The beliefs of Buber and Walter Benjamin do still have a resonance, indeed an increasing appeal, among many young Jews. But the tradition in Judaism is not for theology, but action. The test of Buber and Benjamin is whether the two-state solution, the deliberate reduction of power, really attracts Jews, and whether the desire, in Benjamin’s words, to ‘wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ really exists among Jews. Has that voice of prophetic Judaism, the early thinkers of reform and liberal Judaism, changed to be so much part of the establishment that it has no edge? Are young Jews, whose consciences, whose Jewish consciences, are moved by the suffering of oppressed peoples, disaffected from Judaism because they cannot see within it those who truly devote themselves to their fellow human beings? Is the voice of the prophets lost in our land?

Ellis’s work may read as if it sits – as it does – in the 1980s. But his challenge to the Jewish establishment is no less strong now than it was then. Who are you? Where is your belief, your prophetic duty, to ‘open the blind eyes’, to ‘free the captive’, ‘to be a light to the nations’? What light to the nations are you now? Survival is not enough. Remembering your suffering is not enough. Creating a state is not enough, unless it lives by Jewish values. Materialism is not enough. Where are the awkward, conscience-pricking prophets? Where is the desire to free others, as we were freed from the land of Egypt?

The final tribute to Ellis’s work lies in the newer interpretations in many modern Haggadot, services for the Seder at Passover, remembering the exodus from Egypt. In many modern renditions, be they South African, Irish American, Russian, or whatever, there is included both the sufferings of others – a denial of the uniqueness of Jewish victimhood – and the imperative to help others be free. If Ellis’s attempt to help form a Jewish liberation theology has meant anything, it has meant a mainstream, though largely non-orthodox, addition to the Passover liturgy that recognizes the need for solidarity, sees freedom as indivisible, and accepts a moral obligation to be with those who are struggling and to help them. But the test lies in the action, not the words.

Julia Neuberger

Chief Executive

The King’s Fund

London June 2002

Author’s Preface to the First Edition

Like any study, this book is informed and limited by the particular experience and background of its author. A practicing Jew, I am a student of contemporary religious thought rather than a trained Jewish theologian. This book, therefore, does not attempt to expound an academic Jewish theology but rather to surface dialectics, issues, and possibilities that might give birth to a Jewish theology of liberation. Depending on one’s perspective, my study of and work with progressive Roman Catholic groups and institutions such as the Catholic Worker movement and the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers may evoke fear or wonder. These affiliations, however, rather than impeding my faith, have yielded a perspective that has renewed my Jewish outlook and commitment. Like many other Jewish and Christian believers, I affirm the continuity of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I regard Christianity, or perhaps more appropriately, contemporary followers of Jesus, as issuing from the Jewish community and following a stream of ideas, beliefs, and values that are similar and yet distinct from those of the contemporary Jewish people. I view the separation of faith communities as tragic, for it is a source of much pain and confusion. The Jewish prayers said each morning that thank God for making one a Jew and calling one to be free, represent for me a hope that my faith can lead to authentic solidarity with all those who struggle for human dignity and justice.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my appreciation to Stephen Scharper and the staff of Orbis Books for their encouragement and help in editing and producing this book. I am especially indebted to the late Philip Scharper, who first expressed interest in a book on a Jewish theology of liberation. I am also indebted to Theology in the Americas, which published my first article on the subject. Rosalinda Ramirez and Martha Robson were especially helpful in this regard. I am grateful to Temple Sinai in Toronto, Canada, the Ecumenical Institute at Tantur, Jerusalem, and the Development Studies Program in Dublin, Ireland, for encouraging me to explore these theological themes in diverse settings. Temple Israel of Northern Westchester in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and especially Rabbi Michael Robinson, have provided a place of worship and social commitment that has deeply enriched my life. My students in the Institute for Justice and Peace at the Maryknoll School of Theology first listened to these ideas and saw me wrestle with them in the more difficult times. That the Maryknoll Society has provided a place for a Jew to teach, study, write, and travel is for me a sign of a future we can only now imagine. Their struggle to be faithful in Latin America, Africa, and Asia has deeply influenced my own understanding of fidelity, and to them I will be eternally grateful. In this regard I think especially of Jim Noonan, Curt Cadorette, Steve DeMott, Allan Shied, Gene Toland, Patricia Hines, John Casey, Jack Halbert, Marie Giblin, Jerry McCrane, Roy Bourgeois, and Richard Albertine. To Ann McDonald, the first and final editor of this book, a person who has lived with these ideas during the weekdays and often on Shabbat, I can only say ‘thank you.’ Georgene Viggiano has been a cheerful typist and a friend, as has Clara Araujo. Finally, my thanks go to my ‘teachers,’ Paul Piccard, Lawrence Cunningham, Mary Daly, William Miller, Matthew Lamb, Paul Hansen, Sebastian Moore, James Cone, Pat Steffes, Irving Greenberg, Otto Maduro, Jack Rathschmidt and Richard Rubenstein. Their committed scholarship continues to provide a foundation for a just and peaceful way of life.

Introduction

The history of the Jewish people is filled with anguish and struggle. More often than not, the defining motif of Jewish life has been exile, forced wandering, and lament. And yet, through this travail the Jewish community has bequeathed much to the world: a developed monotheism, a prophetic social critique, an awareness of God’s presence in history, and the foundation of two other world religions, Christianity and Islam.

As important as these contributions are for the Jewish community, of which I am a part, the paradigm of liberation that forms the heart of the Jewish experience, the dynamic of bondage confronted by the call to freedom, has been appropriated also by struggling peoples throughout the ages. The songs of African slaves in nineteenth-century America calling on God for freedom echo the lamentations of the Jews in Egypt. The Exodus tradition, articulated in the writings of Latin American liberation theologians, again emerges within the struggle of Latin Americans for justice.

To cite these contributions of the Jewish people is to pose a fundamental contradiction of world history, one posed often but answered only weakly. Why is it that a people that has contributed so much to the world has received such scornful treatment in return? Why is it that Jews today are considered not as principal contributors to Western religious and intellectual heritage, but only as victims and survivors? And why is it that in these allegedly enlightened times a people born of suffering is doubted and dismissed, as if the world should have no concern for a people’s long and difficult history? And finally, why is the quest for a just and safe existence, so prized by the secular and religious left, denied to a small and suffering people just emerging from the death camps of Nazi Germany? Have not the Jewish people been ostracized, even condemned, for their difficult passage to empowerment