Hanukkah: the anti-revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto As I like to say from time to time, Judaism is subversive. He struck similar ideas long, including the most obvious and including those propagating at high speed within the Jewish community. The festival of Hanukkah and its comments give us the opportunity to look critically one of the most consensual of that community: the revolt of the Warsaw Ghetto. The facts are: early 1943, when the Nazi deportations have already been sent to death camps over 300,000 Jews in the Ghetto , an insurgent group chooses to take up arms and resist. April 19, the SS plan to regain control in 3 days it is only May 16 that the revolt was crushed.
symbolic point of view, this revolt was magnified by all institutions, beginning with the State of Israel, wishing to fight against the idea that Jews were led "to the slaughter like sheep" ( We return to this expression). When setting up a day of commemoration of the destruction of the Jews in Europe in 1951, the full name has been defined veHaGuevoura Yom HaShoah, the Day of Holocaust and Heroism, for the first well to remind citizens of Israel that their attitude could only be guided by the heroes of the Ghetto to avoid a new Holocaust and reject any negative attitude of passivity.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising is commemorated every year by Jewish institutions around the world (including the CRIF in France) with a similar semantic field: "Do not let them take up arms and resist no longer resignation as have too many Jews whose behavior has been shaped by exile, persecution and sometimes intellectualism.
Now a question: what can we say about the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt if one takes the point of view of Judaism and Jewish tradition? What place Judaism attaches Does the heroism of the type that has been deployed by Anielewicz and his family?
Support us once will not hurt, on the commentary on
Yeshayaou Leibowitz Day Hanukkah (
in. The Jewish Holidays, Editions du Cerf ). First, he recalls that there are different kinds of heroism. That which is valued by tradition, is it consists in an individual
"the triumph of consciousness of its obligations to its natural tendencies and impulses acting in him." Design of heroism clearly illustrated by the famous aphorism
Ben Zoma in
Pikei Avot (4, 1): "Ezehou Guibor? Hakovech been Ytzro" "Who is the hero? He who masters his instinct ". Besides that, the warrior heroism, bravery in battle, do not collect opinion on the part of Jewish tradition, even if war is a phenomenon which it looks logically. Leibowitz even notice
that heroism warrior "is the form of heroism the most trivial. It's an empirical fact, indeed, that is frequently encountered among the brave men of all civilizations, in all societies and all historical epochs. "
Taking up arms is good, but it's not really what the Torah requires us to be where the heroes. More prosaically, it
develop "the qualities that are to control their greed, power, honors or her sexual libido (...) these forms of heroism, despised because difficult to reach, does not enjoy much attention in educational institutions where we raise and educate our children. "
There is thus a form of discomfort to be determined to make a desperate revolt, but after all" classic, "as the paradigm of the essence of Judaism and a Jewish people proud of him, freed from its guilt-reflexes.
But going further, were there not a duty to die with dignity? NO Is not it outrageous for people to leave "led to the slaughter?" Leibowitz recalls where does this expression. The prophet Isaiah pronounces. When he describes in the "servant of God", characterized by attributes which are regarded as virtues:
"Mistreated, abused, yet he opened not his mouth, like a lamb being led to the slaughterhouse, the silent sheep, a sheep dumb before the shearer, he opened not his mouth "(Isaiah 53:7) Leibowitz not unaware of the misunderstanding and even contempt with which its non-combatants have been the object side of the glorification of the ghetto uprising. But he defends. Better still, he places it at a prominent:
"Up, once again, one of the signs of our most negative psychological situation, spiritual, intellectual and moral in the fact that there are among us people who blush that our fathers and brothers were murdered in considerable numbers as "beasts to slaughterhouse, "a term which in the eyes of the generation that created the State of Israel in 1948, was considered offensive and insulting, considering this attitude as an expression of the Jewish diaspora whose conduct we would have freed, returning to the design of the heroism of our ancestors. Here we must reflect and challenge with the strongest criticism of this attempt million Jewish men, women and children who died in the Holocaust, because they would have gone to death without a fight. In truth, there is no greater mistake than this (...). We can not overlook the crucial fact that these Jews have offered their souls and sacrificed their lives because of their recognition of their duty towards God and His Torah. Of course, everyone has the right not to identify with the metaphor of the prophet Isaiah, but the thing is clear, anyone who looks with contempt millions of Jewish heroes who went to death as "livestock to slaughterhouse "in the name of a conception of bravery belongs to a completely different area can refer to Jewish sources. It is good that this man knows that, by this view, he joined a conception of heroism shared by the worst and most miserable people of the Gentile, Gentile, where, incidentally, are not uncommon those who know the true meaning of bravery. " 
Let's further say that Leibowitz: resistance, the Jewish perspective, embodied otherwise than by recourse to arms. It is embodied by actions largely overshadowed by the current historiography on the Holocaust, but nevertheless extremely powerful. It is a spiritual resistance, such as that reported by meticulously rare books, such as
Responsa from the Holocaust or Celebrations in turmoil (ed. Verdier) . Fierce resistance from those Jews who risked their lives, maintained by the fast of Yom Kippur, kept there against any rational explanation will meet the requirements related to Jewish holidays or the Hassidic Rabbi who on the day of Simchat Torah insisted that 'with his Chassidim, they dance to the bottom of pits dug for them by the Nazis, in honor of the Torah.
Porter heroic approach to the pinnacle of bravery warrior who has never linked its action to a momentum referring to the spiritual heritage of the Jewish people (as demonstrated in the case of Marek Edelman, leader of the revolt after the death of Anielewicz, for which Israel, the Torah or the Jewish people have never had any meaning) is therefore a form of betrayal of the millions of Jews whose intensity was more discreet existential much more decisive for the survival of the Jewish people.
hard to hear, given the unanimity that prevails around the revolt of the Ghetto ... and yet, if Hanukkah teaches us anything, it is two things:
1) First if you look carefully, it is certainly not a fight between Jews and Greeks. But first and foremost a real war between Jews faithful to the message of the Torah and Hellenized Jews. The war began when in fact Mattitiaou Hellenized Jew who killed one had dared to make a sacrifice to a God of Olympus.
2) then, that armed struggle is valued only if its foundation is identified with a genuine desire to live the divine message and the spiritual heritage of Israel. Witness the reluctance with which the sages of the tradition have incorporated the military victory in the celebration of the Feast of Chanukah: highlighting exclusive in the Talmud and the ritual of the miracle of the flask, refusal to integrate the Maccabees in the biblical canon, etc. ...
If our leaders and intellectuals want to be faithful to the message of Chanukah and the Jewish tradition in general, perhaps they should reconsider how they operate and interpret some parts of the history of our people, starting with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
