On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> Well the notion that the Holocaust was divine punishment is not peculiar to
> the Neturei Karta but is in fact pretty much the standard view of the subject
> within Orthodox Judaism.
This simply isn't true, Jim. Orthodox Judaism, like all other forms of Judaism, views the holocaust as the epitome of evil. Conceived as such, it's become, for both better and for worse, a touchstone of modern Jewish identity. And as such, it's pretty much impossible for Jews of any stripe to attribute to God. God can be lots of things, but he can't be evil. By definition. If you believe in him.
> Lord Immanuel Jakobovitz, who was then the Chief Orthodox Rabbi of Great
> Britain and the Commonwealth, asserted that the Holocaust was divine
> punishment for the apostasy of the German Jews who founded assimilationist
> Reform Judaism. "This idol of individual assimilation," he wrote, "exploded
> in the very country in which it was invented, to be eventually melted down
> and incinerated in the crematoria of Auschwitz."
>
> Likewise the revered Chabad leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in his
> 1980 book, Faith and Science (Emunah v' Madah), argued that, in permitting
> the Holocaust, God had cut off the gangrenous arm of the Jewish people. On
> this basis, he concluded that the Holocaust was a good thing
Afaict, both of these cites are spurious. Afaict, Schneerson wrote over 70 books, but none with that title. And Jakobovitz's argument that assimilation didn't protect German Jews from getting singled out and killed (a point that by itself is rather impossible to gainsay) has zero to do with interpreting the holocaust as divine retribution. The first sentence of that paragraph has nothing to do with the second. It's purely putting words in his mouth. By Gruenberg, from whom I assume you got this, directly or indirectly.
In short, this is an atheist's old wive's tale. There may be a few whackos in the world who have views like this because there is almost no view so whacko that someone doesn't believe it. (My dear Tante Ina, for example, a holocaust refugee who believes in reincarnation and used to regularly communicate with my dead uncle and omi, explains the holocuast using her unique theory of collective karma. She thinks in a former life the Jews must have been the crusaders.) But to call this the "standard view" is about as a wrong as wrong can be. It's about the equivalent of saying the standard view among atheists is that the weak should be allowed to die off.
Your arguments in general are very careful and I'm sure this creeped in in all good faith -- you should excuse the term :o)
Michael