THE Holocaust and the attempt to destroy Jewish witness represent a “revolt against something of unique spiritual importance”, and should not be reduced to generalities about intolerance and racism, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams told a gathering at King’s College, London, this month.
Delivering the second annual lecture in memory of Rabbi Lord Sacks, Lord Williams acknowledged concerns that “the current culture of Holocaust education and the developing culture around Holocaust Memorial Day are at risk of being swallowed up by a set of generalisations about the evils of general intolerance, racism, and exclusivism.”
He recalled how a group of sixth-formers who had joined a visit to Auschwitz had spoken in generalities about their experience: “Hardly any had much sense of how the Shoah relates to the entire history of Jewish identity in Europe. It had become an instance of something: intolerance and prejudice. Shocking and terrible of course, but detached from everything that makes the persecution of Jews a distinctive thing.”
Such a response reflected a lack of awareness of the distinctive contribution that Judaism had made to the moral imagination of society, he suggested. “Jewish particularism is a sign of human action and interaction pervaded by a sense of conscious awe, by the expectation of finding significant life in every moment. It is a sign of what shared human life might look like in a world where transaction did not have the last word. . .
“This means that the mass slaughter of Jews is historically something distinct from genocide in a general sense or the killing of other minorities — which is most definitely not to say that other mass slaughters are somehow less serious or less in need of understanding against the specifics of their background, quite the contrary. . . The paradoxical twist in affirming Jewish particularity is precisely that it affirms the absolute commitment of God to every life in its unique location and ecosystem, and indeed every material element of the creation.”
He warned: “The particular attempt to destroy Jewish witness is a kind of revolt against something of unique spiritual importance, a revolt against the possibility of something more than contract in our dealings with one another.”
Lord Williams took as his title “Covenant, Solidarity, and Building Together: From cohesion to community”. Reflecting on frameworks for statecraft, he began with transactionalism as an approach based on contract: agreeing to “watch one another’s backs . . . We don’t do much to allow diverse accounts of the good to interact and modify or challenge each other and we have low expectations of anything new emerging.”
Cohesion, meanwhile, meant “agreeing certain values as representing what we all want to protect in a situation of shared jeopardy”. But covenant was, in Rabbi Sacks’s words, “transformative”: a framework “in which, because it takes for granted that each life, each situation entails the divine demand for attention and expectancy, human agents are enabled to discover in relation with their neighbour possibilities for action and understanding that they could not have imagined alone”.
Much of his lecture was devoted to exploring the gift of Jewish particularism, and the need for Jewish identity to be “affirmed and defended in its distinctiveness, not reduced to an abstract universalism”.
He observed: “The notions of covenanted chosenness that define Jewish identity are not a way of implicitly affirming that Jewish human life is intrinsically more worth while than any other kind of human life. . . The point is that the ritualised, normalised attentiveness of compliance with the commandment is a dramatic sign of the immeasurable significance that lies under the surface of any and all phenomena in the world; so, any and all human life. It’s a sign . . . that the world is worth committing to. . . And the presence of such a sign, in the covenanted community, such a visible society within yet not contained by the family of nations, is not a luxury for the human future.”
In Christian history there had been a failure to understand such covenantal living, he suggested, which had produced a “simplistic contrast between gospel and law. Christianity was to recover in various ways something of the Jewish vision of acting in awareness and expectation in all things. Some aspects of monastic practice, for example, bring this back into focus, but there is a constant slippage away from any serious attempt to make theological sense of the continuity of God’s covenant with the Jewish people as an unbroken vocation.”
He warned of the resurgence of anti-Semitic rhetoric and activity since the “butchery of October 7th and all that has followed”. The plight of the hostages was “a bitterly vivid symbol of the way that so many lives, Jewish and non-Jewish, are held hostage by a climate of terror, in which the passionate determination to destroy the visible witness of Jewish commitment is a recurrent motif, generating, in turn, not only the self-defence that any society would put in place, but, in some extreme quarters, a counter-rhetoric of absolute destruction”.
Recent debate had been “disfigured” by “toxic sloganeering”, he warned, and had awakened “a never very deeply sleeping set of anti-Jewish tropes about collective blood guilt”.
Read comment from Paul Vallely and an interview with Anne Sebba on her latest book, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A story of survival.
