Comments on: My Lord; Why Have You Forsaken Me? http://benabuya.com/2008/05/02/my-lord-why-have-you-forsaken-me/ looking for alternative explanations Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:43:48 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Simon Holloway http://benabuya.com/2008/05/02/my-lord-why-have-you-forsaken-me/#comment-7740 Mon, 05 May 2008 06:39:51 +0000 http://deba.wordpress.com/?p=364#comment-7740 On the contrary, I would argue that the Israeli perspective (that the declaration of a state was a necessary corollary of the Holocaust) is a luxury and, hence, is completely untrue. I also don’t agree that mainstream scholarship views the Holocaust as inexplicable. There are too many examples in the world today of people treating other people with the same baseless contempt, and I do not believe that “my people” (a concept that I vacillate back and forwards as regards whether or not I believe in it) would – or are – exempt from that. But I do agree that Israeli scholarship on the Holocaust has a different timbre to scholarship outside of Israel, and that the belief in Israel’s declaration as a result of the Holocaust may have done much to inform that.

For my part, I’m more inclined that view history as a discrete series of events, the imposition over which of a narrative structure is arbitrary at best and propagandistic at worse. But, like most things I believe, I don’t live by it.

]]> By: Daniel http://benabuya.com/2008/05/02/my-lord-why-have-you-forsaken-me/#comment-7736 Sat, 03 May 2008 06:08:21 +0000 http://deba.wordpress.com/?p=364#comment-7736 Wow, harsh. I wonder if the Pope blogs (strangely, more* people seem to ask whether he is Catholic, which, to me, sounds like the somewhat simpler question).

Yom HaShoah, here, seems to be very different. Here, everyone has grown up with the knowledge of the Shoah and with a very clear connection between it and the importance of a Jewish state.

Even the physical structure of having a siren at 10am ordering one minute’s silence for the victims of the Holocaust, followed one week after by a siren at 10am ordering one minute’s silence for the soldiers killed in the wars of the Jewish State, followed the same night by a siren announcing the end of mourning and the commencement of celebration of the country’s independence, shows a clear (chrono)logical progression.

I think that in many ways, Holocaust scholarship outside of Israel has taken the view (which, depending on your view on my next sentence, may be considered, the “luxury”) that the Shoah was inexplicable and impossible to understand and integrate into the human worldview. One of the many odd things about this country was, I believe, that the opposite was the case, and it is possible that such opposite indeed was necessary in order to exist. But existential questions are a little beyond me, and I am left with a feeling that this may be yet another luxury lost.

* 54,300 Google results, as against only one result: http://voodootime.com/archives/22

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