The issue of forgiveness has divided Christians and Jews perhaps more than any other with regard to the Holocaust. For Christians usually believe that they have been given an absolute commandment to forgive under any and all circumstances (though this does not mean that most Christians actually do this.) And it appears that most Christians are ready to expect Jews to do just that with regard to those who were involved in the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. Thus Jews all too often are told to forgive, to forget, or are accused of being uncharitable and vengeful if they insist on remembering. Can or should the murder of approximately six million individuals be set aside this easily? (Consider another question: should Christians forget the murder of one Jew approximately two thousand years ago?) Is this the usual way people react to other large scale killings and their perpetrators?
If we give more thought to the matter of forgiveness we find that there are many questions and angles to consider. For example, does it matter how extensively an individual was injured? Is it sufficient recompense if the person who did the injuring simply asks for forgiveness? What if the one who caused the harm shows no repentance? Or, more significantly, what if the person attacked was killed by the other’s action? And deliberately so? In that case can someone else provide forgiveness to the killer? And what if the matter involves a national community or a whole generation? Is it likely that an entire nation will repent of the actions carried out by its collective society or its government? Even if possible, would repentance be sufficient for the deaths inflicted and the lives of so many others torn to shreds? Can one generation forgive a previous generation for its actions that harmed and killed others? How much time should elapse before such a nation or generation may be trusted?
Will forgiving in these situations benefit anyone? Will forgiving the perpetrators provide better security for potential victims of bigotry or hate, or will it do the opposite? Where does the matter of justice and the rule of law enter the picture? After all, it is almost universally believed that justice is rooted in the divine Being and is seen as basic to the creation. Are justice and forgiveness in conflict? Justice may be the mercy provided for society.
Jesus’ teachings as recorded in the four gospels are often cited by Christians as the basis for insisting on forgiving in every situation. Yet Jesus always spoke only of person-to-person wrongdoing and responses, how one person should respond to being sinned against by another. Jesus urged almost endless willingness to forgive the wrongs done to oneself as long as the other repents and asks for forgiveness. At the same time, Jesus insisted that one should be reconciled with any person to whom one had done harm before approaching the altar with a gift to God. In none of these situations did Jesus speak about how anyone should respond to an attack on someone else.
Yet not too many years after the Holocaust a Christian foundation insisted that the world should not only forgive even those whose attitudes provoke us but should also “draw a line under the whole business [i.e., the Holocaust], just as if nothing of consequence had ever happened” (cited by Paul Lindhardt, in The Sunflower, 1st ed., p.165). Contrast that with Jesus’ insistence that “it would be better that a millstone be put around someone’s neck and he were cast into the sea than he should harm one of these little ones” (Matthew 18:6).
Repentance (reshuvah) clearly lies at the heart of the matter of forgiveness. But it is more than merely saying “I’m sorry”; it must be genuine and deep-seated, and involve a real turning around in one’s behaviour and intention. The turning around should also attempt to make some kind of reparation for the harm one has done, at least to those who have managed to survive. In 1985 in another situation thousands of South African Christians signed and issued The Kairos Document which insisted there can be “no reconciliation, no forgiveness and no negotiations…without repentance.” Have the murderers – all of those, in Europe, who participated in one way or another in the Nazis’ killing policy – shown repentance? Almost none have done so! So what is the basis for forgiving (no less forgetting)?
But how does this apply to those of the younger generations? They are not guilty of their parents’ or grandparents’ crimes. In that sense it is not appropriate to speak about forgiving them. But they can certainly regret what their predecessors did and do everything possible to ensure that such hatreds and policies do not again prevail. Above all it is essential that they not attempt to bury the past by forgetting, for such forgetting becomes complicity.
We hear much more about the need to forgive those who have committed wrongs of one sort or another than we do about the need to help and sustain those who have been injured. Some years ago this very situation arose in the Netherlands when a number of church groups and individual Christians sought the release of several Nazis held in Dutch prisons for war crimes. They argued that since these men were now in their later years and could do no more harm they ought to be allowed to live their last years in their homes. What these do-gooders had not even given thought to was how such action might affect survivors of the death camps living in Holland. Yet the mere thought of such a release caused extreme trauma in many cases. When those who were not victimised forgive the victimisers, those made to suffer – a second time – are the original victims (and their families).
This question of who may forgive, what may be forgiven, when, etc. is raised in Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Simon was led, as a Jewish prisoner of the Nazis, to the bedside of a dying SS man at the soldier’s request. The young German wanted to confess to a Jew about his participation in the brutal killing of several hundred unarmed Jews during an attack on a Ukrainian village, hoping to receive forgiveness. Should Simon forgive him? Or not? Did he have the right to do so? The responses to those questions by a number of invited contributors – Christians, Jews, and a few others – challenge our thinking.
We cannot speak about forgiveness without confronting the issue of remembrance. A Lutheran layman wrote some years ago, “this attempt to wipe Judaism from the face of the earth is…the most historic event of our aeon,…which cannot and may not ever become merely a bygone fact of the past…What has been done even to the least of Jesus’ brothers, to his Jewish brothers, has been done to him…; if the Christian Church has any right to call herself the Church of Jesus Christ, it must be also her own suffering” (Wolfgang Zucker, Lutheran Forum, Sept. 1975, p.10).
From: The Holocaust and the Christian World. – Reflections on the past challenges for the future. eds. C. Rittner, S. D. Smith & I. Steinfeldt. Pub. Kuperard, London, 2000. pp. 228-230.
Questions:
- Do our traditional theologies about suffering and evil cope with the enormity of the Holocaust? What is God’s role in all of this?
- What have been the Church’s teachings about Judaism and the Jewish people over the centuries? And how have they fed not only anti-Judaism but also anti-Semitism?
- What has been the experience of the Jewish people living within and under Christian rule since the early 4th century?
- How did the European churches and their leadership act during the Nazi period, and especially during the years of the “Final Solution”? How did North American churches react to the plight of Jews in Europe?
Further Reading:
- Alice L. Eckardt, “Suffering, Theology and the Shoah,” in The Holocaust Now, Steven Jacobs, ed. East Rockaway, NY: Cummings & Hathaway, 1993.
- Alice L. Eckardt and A. Roy Eckardt, Long Night’s Journey Into Day: A Revised Retrospective on the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
- Reinhold Neibuhr, “Anger and Forgiveness,” Discerning the Signs of the Times. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1946.
- Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower. N.Y.: Schocken, 1976; revised and expanded ed. 1997.
- Clark Williamson, Has God Rejected His People? Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982.
- Pull-Quotes for Alice L. Eckardt’s Dilemma of Forgiveness:
- “Non –Jews and perhaps especially Christians should not give advice about the Holocaust experience to its heirs for the next two thousand years. And then we shall have nothing to say.”
- Martin Marty in The Sunflower, 1997 ed., p.201; 1976 ed., p.173.
- “There is no compassion without justice.”
- Matthew Fox in The Sunflower, 1997 ed., p.146.
- “…some measure of justice is absolutely necessary to even consider forgiveness or reconciliation.”
- Sven Alkalaj in The Sunflower, 1997 ed., p.104.
- “…when real evil is done…detachment is immoral. The proper attitude towards evil is anger.”
- Reinhold Niebuhr, Anger and Forgiveness,” Discerning the Signs of the Times. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1946.
