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November 19, 2014

Let's be clear.

The attack on the synagogue in Jerusalem was not an attack against Israel. And not an attack against Israelis. It was an attack on Judaism itself — and perhaps even on God. Let me put it this way: I cannot believe that Allah is pleased.

The last time that we saw horror on this level was the Shoah. Despite the contention of many historians, the Shoah was not “the war against the Jews,” to quote the title of Lucy Davidowicz’s famous book. Nor was it even a war against Judaism.

On many levels, the Shoah was a war against the God of both testaments. For the Nazis, the only “true” gods were the ancient Teutonic gods of blood and fire. This explains the Nazi admiration of the composer Richard Wagner, whose son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was a key expositor of German racial theory. It also explains the ultimate Nazi fantasy: a Europe consumed in a bonafide Wagnerian Gotterdammerung  — a war of the gods that would ultimately bring an end to the world.

This Nazi war on God also explains something else: the savage glee with which Nazis destroyed synagogues, arks, and Torah scrolls. Who would have expected such a thing? Wasn't the Torah, aka the Pentateuch, the first past of the Tanakh, aka the Old Testament. At the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, an exhibit of the material remnants of Kristallnacht features the Ark of the synagogue in Essen, Germany. It bears the traditional words that appear before the Ark in a sanctuary: “Know before Whom you stand.” But Nazi thugs scratched those off the defaced, desecrated Ark. In the midst of the chaos of those events, they took the time to do so. It is as if they were saying: “There is no one before Whom you stand, or before Whom we stand, or before Whom the world stands.” It is as if they were saying that the Name of God, also, is a victim – and that, beyond that, God is also a victim.

This brings me to the philosopher George Steiner. In his1981 novel, The Portage To San Cristobal of A.H., Steiner imagines that Israeli agents had found the aged Adolph Hitler in the jungles of South America. They arrest him and bring him to trial, where he is allowed to take the stand in his own defense. Hitler says that he had to do what he did because the Jews invented not only conscience, but God: “Was there ever a crueler invention, a contrivance more calculated to harrow human existence, than that of an omnipotent, all-seeing, yet invisible, impalatable, inconceivable God?…The Jew invented conscience and left man a guilty serf.”

The hatred continues, and we might say that it has simply donned the mask of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. It is part and parcel of the European penchant for labeling Zionism as a new Nazism. Such labeling expunges guilt from the contemporary European psyche, as if to say, “We are tired of hearing about the Holocaust; tired of hearing about what our grandparents did or failed to do. Don’t call them Nazis – you Jews are the true Nazis!” In one deft move, the modern European simultaneously cleanses his or her own inherited conscience and thereby morally contaminates the Jewish people.

Consider the words of the historian Paul Johnson:

The Jews believed themselves created and commanded to be a light to the gentiles and they have obeyed to the best of their considerable powers. The results, whether considered in religious or in secular terms, have been remarkable. The Jews gave to the world ethical monotheism, which might be described as the application of reason to divinity. In a more secular age, they applied the principles of rationality to the whole range of human activities, often in advance of the rest of mankind. The light they thus shed disturbed as well as illuminated, for it revealed painful truths about the human spirit as well as the means to uplift it. The Jews have been great truth-tellers, and that is one reason they have been so much hated.

I return — painfully, nauseously — to the attack on the synagogue in Har Nof. As we now know, we did not only lose four sages of the Jewish people, but a Druze policeman also died in the horror. What could be a greater and grimmer testimony to Israel's diversity — that a member of a respected religious minority died while attempting to save Jewish lives.

And I return to the photo that will become the dominant icon of this horror — the photo of a severed, tefillin-clad arm. In the taxonomy of grisly, forced amputations, the severing of an arm is barely less grotesque than the ISIS style of severing heads

To be clear: this was not a Jewish arm in uniform. This was not a Jewish arm with, say, a briefcase or a back pack. This was a Jewish arm that was adorned with one of the oldest symbols of religious Judaism. The scorn and the fury that this arm evoked within the minds and souls of the murderers can barely be imagined .

As I said, this was not about Israel. It was not about the Jews.

It was about Judaism. And it might also be about God.

We have been here before. Who, if not we, will tell the world?

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