Aish HaTorah presents:

and secular alike. Yom HaShoah
would occur eight days before
Yom Ha'atzma'ut, Israel Inde-
pendence Day. Thus, Jews af-
firmed that without denying the
fierce, incredible power of evil
and death that we, nevertheless,
give the final word to life and re-
demption.
This understanding must
guide our commemoration of
Yom HaShoah. We must not suc-
cumb to the tendentious claim
that in America, the Jewish com-
munity has substituted the Holo-
caust for the positive message of
the Torah. It is false that the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum or
university chairs in Holocaust
studies come at the expense of all
the other forms of Jewish edu-
cation.
An encounter with the Holo-

caust is like the Akeidah, the
Binding of Isaac; tradition de-
fines it as a nisayon, a test. In re-
sponding, we are in danger of
losing our soul, but in respond-
ing correctly we are elevated. In
confronting the total death in the
Holocaust, the Jewish people •
risked nihilism and despair but
rallied to increase its commit-
ment to life.
Now we know that in affirm-
ing life, we must be prepared to
brave the worst that death can
inflict on us. Now Jews know the
tragic cost of our covenant of re-
demption. Wiser, more realistic,
more determined than ever, we
retell the whole Jewish story —
of which the Holocaust is an in-
separable, searing part — of the
journey from slavery to freedom,
from death to life.'

AND THE

TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

An exploration into the inner
dimensions of reality with

RABBI MICHAEL

BERGER

What Makes Us Special:
Some Reassurances

LEONARD FEIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

\,=

A young man stops me after a lec-
ture and asks, "Don't you believe
Jewish values are unique?"
He has correctly understood
my lecture, in which the empha-
sis was on our universalism. But
he wants to be reassured there's
something more to Judaism than
that, for if that is all there is, he
says, why bother? You don't have
to be Jewish to want a better
world and to work
for it, to clothe the
naked and feed the
hungry, and all
those other ele-
ments of righteous-
ness that Judaism
emphasizes.
And if you don't
have to, why should
you?
I don't want to
disappoint him.
Yes, here and there
one finds distinctive
Jewish approaches,
perceptions, values.
Nor am I above
feeling immense
pride in our Hag-
gadah in its refusal
to let us gloat over
the plagues visited upon the
Egyptians. Think of it: We are
urged to deplete our own joy by
spilling a drop of wine from our
cup for each of the plagues. That
is an astonishing tradition— and
one that most of us by now like-
ly take for granted.
But the value embedded in
that tradition is not, I am pleased
to say, unique. Other religions
and cultures seek to inculcate
similar values.
So what makes us special?

Leonard Fein is a Boston-based

writer.

First: Why do we insist on
identifying what's special? Where
is it written that a way of life
must be unique in order to be
compelling?
Evidently, that's not sufficient
for some people, whether because
they seek a rationale for every as-
pect of their behavior or because
Judaism has ceased to be — for
them — an organic way of life,

Thursday, May 2, '96
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and is now instead a choice one
makes — or doesn't.
Second: What is distinctive
about us has to with method
rather than with substance. Ju-
daism is at its heart a meth-
odology, a methodology for
inculcating the values we, along
with others, hold dear. And one
reason it is more distinguished
by its method than by its sub-
stance is that much of its sub-
stance has been absorbed by
western civilization. (Yes, I real-
ize that my use of western civi-
SPECIAL page 122

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