How Much Sadness?

When the sun sinks on Wednesday, a dark cloud of mourning will descend on observant Jews as they contemplate the catalog of calamities that have riddled the history of their people for 2,500 years.

For a people forced into millenniums of exile and hardship, there is much to contemplate on the annual fast day of Tisha b’Av: The destruction of the Jerusalem temples, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. The crushing of a revolt led by Bar Kochba against the Romans at Betar. The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. And the pogroms and crusades that relentlessly afflicted a homeless, vulnerable people for centuries. The the darkest event of all--the extermination of 6 million Jews in Nazi death camps during World War II--is commemorated on two separate days of the Jewish calendar.

But even as the day of mourning draws near, a growing debate is raising sensitive questions: How much sadness, suffering and victimization is enough?

While some voices are urging Jews to move beyond what they see as an overemphasis on victimhood and Holocaust memories, others fiercely counter that neither Judaism nor Jews are, in fact, excessively focused on tragedies and that minimizing their commemoration is premature and ill-advised.

“Making a point of remembering utter evil has always been a part of Jewish history and experience,” says Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust. “To be blindly optimistic is to be foolhardy.”

But Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, argues that the Jewish calendar is “overloaded” with darkness and mourning. He advocates abolishing the two Holocaust memorial days--generally observed in the spring and fall--in favor of commemorating all tragedies on Tisha b’Av.

“Three distinct days of mourning on the Jewish calendar threatens to turn martyrology and victimhood into a world view,” Schorsch writes. In an interview, Schorsch said he is most concerned with the political impact of such a world view in shaping an Israeli siege mentality that he believes has stymied the Mideast peace process.

A Standard of Calamity

In a provocative new book, “The Holocaust in American Life,” author Peter Novick, a history professor at the University of Chicago and a self-described secular Jew, argues that the cataclysmic wartime event has become central to Jewish identity and questions the value of this development for both Jews and Americans in general.

Novick also challenges common assumptions about Holocaust commemoration--that it sensitizes people to suffering, for instance--by arguing that it can also minimize other atrocities by serving as a standard of calamity.

Closer to home, Rabbi Steve Leder of Wilshire Boulevard Temple--the oldest and one of the largest Reform congregations in Southern California--has been outspokenly raising the question of whether Jews should continue to identify themselves as victims rather than the powerful, educated and successful group they have generally become.

His remarks in sermons and invocations--including one last year at the Southland’s largest Jewish fund-raiser, sponsored by the legal services organization Bet Tzedek--have stirred controversy. Younger Jews applaud him but older ones have castigated him, Leder says, warning him that touting Jewish accomplishments could produce a backlash of anti-Semitism or an appearance of arrogance.

“What will hold the next generation of Jews is an identity based on joy, meaning and strength, not an identity based on victimization,” Leder says.

Author Ian Buruma, currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, argues that the Jewish emphasis on the Holocaust has inspired other aggrieved minorities to view themselves through the lens of victimhood, creating a sordid competition described by one of his Israeli friends as the “Olympics of suffering.”

Buruma cites such activists as Chinese American author Iris Chang, who subtitled her recent bestseller on the rape of Nanking “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.” She has also wistfully expressed a desire for filmmaker Steven Spielberg to make a movie about the tragedy, in which thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of Chinese were raped and killed by troops of the Imperial Japanese Army.

“It is, it appears, not enough for Chinese Americans to be seen as the heirs of a great civilization; they want to be recognized as heirs of their very own Holocaust,” Buruma recently wrote in the New York Review of Books.

But others forcefully challenge these views, beginning with the assertion that the Holocaust has become the central element in defining Jewish identity, particularly among those who lack a religious life or other community connections.

Novick, for instance, cites a 1998 survey by the American Jewish Committee in which “remembrance of the Holocaust” topped the list of activities important to respondents’ Jewish identity--beating out synagogue attendance, Jewish study, working with Jewish organizations, traveling to Israel or observing Jewish holidays. Among other things, Novick also cites the hundreds of millions of dollars American Jews have contributed to Holocaust museums, memorials and centers, which now number more than 80 in the U.S.; the turnout at Holocaust-related events; and the plethora of books and articles on the topic.

At Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles, however, Rabbi Joel Rembaum says the congregation’s strong emphasis on Holocaust remembrance hardly outstrips other activities. The synagogue has a Holocaust memorial wall, includes Holocaust remembrance not only on the two commemoration days but also in Yom Kippur services, and has an extensive Holocaust curriculum in its day schools.

But, Rembaum says, the congregation’s Jewish identity is promoted far more actively through the synagogue’s crowded schedule of classes on the Talmud, Hebrew and Jewish mysticism and through family outings and the like. Leder says even secular Jews may be practicing Jewish values without realizing it--such as “Tikkun Olam,” or repairing the world, as they build homeless shelters, help the poor and engage in other social action.

“On an ongoing basis, there is far more money contributed to Jewish education than memorializing the Holocaust,” Rembaum says, citing one family who donated three times as much to Temple Beth Am schools as it did to the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance.

Even if Holocaust remembrance is a central facet of Jewish life, there is nothing wrong with that, others say.

“It seems to me we’re too close to the Holocaust to talk about getting rid of it and incorporating it into something normal,” says Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism. “We need to live with the raw pain, and our children and children’s children have the task to sort through it for meaning.”

And many say that arguments that the Jewish calendar is too dark wrongly characterize a religion of joy more than sadness, of embracing life more than death. “There is one Tisha b’Av but 52 Shabbats,” Leder points out.

The diversity of opinion and practice on issues of Jewish suffering will be aptly reflected in next week’s Tisha b’Av commemorations--or lack of them.

Like other observant Jews, Rembaum will abstain from food, drink, sexual activities, showers, even the wearing of leather shoes, a sign of comfort. In evening services, he will read the Book of Lamentations, chronicling the Israelites’ anguish over losing their lifeline to God in the destruction of the first Jerusalem temple by the Babylonians 2,500 years ago. He will reflect, he says, on the role of human error and sinfulness in bringing on the tragedies.

At Wilshire Boulevard Temple, however, no services will be held, although a program will be offered to the temple’s summer youth camp. Leder does not intend to fast, offer a prayer of mourning or light a memorial candle. Nor does he plan to reflect on God’s wrath against his sinful people--”I don’t think God is in the punishment business,” he says--or on the tragedy of the temple’s destruction.

“The destruction of the temple 2,000 years ago frankly changed Judaism in positive ways,” Leder says. “I don’t long for those days of a priestly sacrificial cult, or practices of killing goats on an altar.”