I, the Holocaust, Am Your God
It’s long been remarked that the Holocaust and Israel have replaced God and halakha as the touchstones of Jewish experience and identity. The Holocaust is our deity, Israel our daily practice.
You get a sense of this in a New York Times oped Elie Wiesel wrote on the day that NBC first aired its mini-series Holocaust. That was in April 1978.
All Jewish families, mine included, watched it. One Jewish magazine even said that watching it “has about it the quality of a religious obligation” for Jews. Like the Six-Day War, it was a founding moment of contemporary Jewish identity.
I remember it vividly. I watched all nine and a half hours of it. I developed a mad crush on one of the characters, a beautiful, dark-eyed Jewish partisan in the forests of Poland or Soviet Russia (played, I realized much later in life, by a much younger Tovah Feldshuh). During one scene, of a synagogue packed with Jews being set ablaze by the Nazis, I ran out of my parents’ room, sobbing uncontrollably.
It was terrible TV; I tried to watch it years later and couldn’t make it past the first half-hour.
But Wiesel didn’t complain about the aesthetic quality of the show; it was the desacralization of the Holocaust he objected to. As quoted by Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life:
It transforms an ontological event into soap-opera…..We see long, endless processions of Jews marching toward Babi Yar….We see the naked bodies covered with “blood”—and it is all make-believe….People will tell me that…similar techniques are being used for war movies and historical re-creations. But the Holocaust is unique; not just another event. This series treats the Holocaust as if it were just another event….Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized….The Holocaust transcends history…..The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering…..The Holocaust [is] the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who were there know what it was; the others will never know.
It’s all there. The Holocaust not as an event in secular history but as a leap into transcendence; it cannot be explained, it can only be circled, like a holy fire. Auschwitz is our Sinai, the ovens our burning bush. Like the Jews receiving God’s commandments, the Jews of the camps experienced a sacred mystery, received a secret message, which we can only approach at a distance, with awe and trembling. I, the Holocaust, am your God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Just in case the overtones weren’t clear, Molly Haskell, writing about the show in New York Magazine, threw in an explicit reference to the Second Commandment for good measure:
How can actors, how dare actors, presume to imagine and tell us what it felt like! The attempt becomes a desecration against, among others, the Hebraic injunction banning graven images.
No graven images of the Holocaust. I, the Holocaust, am your God.
I also hated Schindler’s List—What was it Stanley Kubrick said? “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. ‘Schindler’s List’ is about 600 who don’t.”—and much of the discussion around it. But faced with this kind of dreck from Wiesel and Haskell, this pseudo-religion of pyres and purgation, give me the bubblegum uplift of Oprah Winfrey any day: “I’m a better person as a result of seeing Schindler’s List.”