Rabbi Andrea’s Sermon 5th September / 23rd Elul 5786

THE WORD KAPO AND THE LOVE FOR ISRAEL

There is a word which, whenever I hear one Jew use it against another Jew, makes me very, very

upset. That word is kapo.

Go on social media and you see how often it happens. Someone takes a political position that

somebody else regards as shameful, and is called a kapo. Someone signs a letter criticising Israel,

and in the comments is called a kapo. Someone associates with somebody who happens to be

particularly unpopular, and immediately is called a kapo.

The word is supposed to settle the argument. Because once you have called another Jew a kapo,

there is no longer any need to understand them. You have already decided what role they would

have played in the darkest chapter of Jewish history.

And that is what troubles me.

Because, as everyone who has studied Jewish history knows, or should know, a kapo was not

simply a traitor. Kapos were prisoners in Nazi concentration camps whom the SS placed in

positions of authority over other prisoners. Some became notorious for appalling brutality; some

beat and even killed fellow prisoners. Others used whatever limited discretion their position gave

them to protect prisoners or help them survive. But above all, kapos were themselves prisoners

within a system deliberately constructed to force prisoners to become part of the machinery of

domination.

We, who were not in the camps, should be very careful indeed before imagining that we know

what we would have done. We do not know how courageous we would have been when

starvation had reduced our bodies to almost nothing. Perhaps we too would have become kapos if

that had seemed the only possibility of survival. We do not know what choices we would have

made if refusal meant our own death, or somebody else’s death. We do not know whether we

would have become heroes, cowards, saints, collaborators, or some terrible mixture of all four.

The Nazis deliberately created this moral distortion within the camp system: what Primo Levi

famously called “the grey zone”, in which the ordinary categories of guilt and innocence became

horribly blurred, and people could be forced to become complicit in the destruction of other

human beings simply in order to survive.

Which brings me to a famous argument between two of the greatest Jewish intellectuals of the

twentieth century: Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt.

In 1963, after the publication of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Scholem wrote her an

extraordinarily painful letter. They had known one another for many years. Scholem respected

Arendt’s intelligence, and he did not simply dismiss the difficult questions she had raised in her

book about the Shoah and its perpetrators.

What disturbed Scholem profoundly, however, was the confidence with which Arendt appeared to

judge other Jews.

The most controversial example concerned the Jewish Councils, the Judenräte, whose leaders had

been forced by the Nazis to administer Jewish communities under occupation and, eventually, to

participate in the implementation of deportations. Arendt believed that their cooperation had

contributed significantly to the efficiency of the destruction.

Famously, Scholem did not try simply to defend the Judenräte. Quite the contrary. Some of

their members, he wrote, had been swines. But Scholem could not accept the ease with which

people living afterwards, including Hannah Arendt, could calmly distribute moral verdicts

upon decisions taken in circumstances they themselves had never experienced.

And then Scholem wrote the sentence which should be remembered whenever a Jew casually

calls another Jew a kapo:

“I do not know whether they were right or wrong. Nor do I presume to judge. I was not there.”

I was not there.

I do not know who I would have been. And therefore, I have no right to turn somebody else’s

catastrophe into a means by which I demonstrate my own virtue.

Arendt’s argument about the Jewish Councils was part of the wider argument of Eichmann in

Jerusalem. The book has been controversial ever since its publication, and later scholarship has

challenged important parts of Arendt’s historical interpretation.

Scholem questioned Arendt’s assumptions primarily from an ethical point of view. Arendt

argued that Jewish organisations had facilitated Nazi administration. Scholem believed that

Arendt’s treatment of them betrayed a disturbing lack of proportion and compassion. And his

criticism went deeper than a disagreement about historical interpretation.

He told Arendt that there was something in Jewish tradition, difficult to define, but

nevertheless real, which Jews called Ahavat Israel: love of the Jewish people. And, he told

her, he could find very little trace of it in her book. That accusation struck Arendt deeply,

because her response was not to say that Scholem had misunderstood her. On this point, she

effectively told him that he was right.

She famously replied that she had never loved any people or collective, neither Germans,

Frenchmen, Americans, nor the working class. “I indeed love ‘only’ my friends,” she wrote.

The only love she really understood was the love of particular persons. There is something

initially attractive about that answer, particularly to the modern liberal mind.

People are real. We are capable of loving individual people. And perhaps we cannot love an

abstraction such as “the Jewish people”, “the German people” or “the working class” in quite

the same way. Why, after all, should I love millions of people whom I have never met simply

because history has placed us within the same collective? Yet, if you think about it carefully,

you can see Arendt’s limitations.

Yes, she was certainly capable of love, of intense personal attachment. We need only think of

her complicated lifelong relationship with her former teacher Martin Heidegger, a man who

would later become closely associated with Nazism. How a young Jewish student could

remain so deeply attached to such a man, while insisting that she was unable to love the Jewish

people, is of course a fascinating question in itself.

But the assertion that it is impossible to love something as abstract as the Jewish people misses

the point. Because Ahavat Israel is not simply affection. It is an obligation. Ahavat Israel,

love for the Jewish people, is different from affection for this or that particular Jew. It is

actually more demanding. It is an expression of Jewish peoplehood. Jews are not simply

individuals who happen to share a religion. We are bound together by history, memory,

responsibility and destiny. We are, indeed, a people.

This does not mean that Jews must always agree with one another. Far from it. But our

criticism takes place within a relationship. The person whom I criticise remains part of my

people, and therefore cannot simply be turned into a symbol of everything I despise.

Nowadays, Jewish peoplehood itself is sometimes treated as morally suspect.

To say that Jews constitute a people, that Jews have particular obligations towards one another,

or that something happening to Jews thousands of miles away concerns me because they are

my people, is often dismissed as tribalism. And Arendt’s sceptical response to Ahavat

Israel can sound remarkably contemporary.

But there is a problem with this. Human beings need communities. We need to belong.

Ironically, those who reject Jewish peoplehood quite often find themselves embracing another

collective identity instead.

We can see this, for example, in some anti-Zionist Jewish spaces.

People who regard identification with the Jewish people as morally suspect may instead

identify very strongly as anti-Zionists. They become part of an anti-Zionist community, a

community which, like every strong community, has its rituals, its symbols, its declarations of

loyalty and, inevitably, its heretics.

The demonstrations are rituals of that community. The insults and the threats against Jews, are

the rituals of the anti-Zionist community. The watermelon, the inverted red triangle, the

Palestinian flag, the paraglider and other horrific items of similar kind, are the symbols of that

community. The obsessive repetition of the buzzwords such as genocide or war crimes, are

declarations of belonging to such a community. And those who question the accepted language

are treated as heretics.

Such a community can provide precisely the intoxicating sensation that every strong collective

identity can provide: the feeling that I belong, that I know who stands with me, and that I know

who stands against me.

At this point Hannah Arendt would possibly have commented that yes, it is ironic that anti-

Zionist, those who deny the existence of a Jewish community, ended up building a community

by themselves. Nonetheless she would point out, we still have not answered her question.

Where, she asked Scholem, does this idea of Ahavat Israel actually come from?

Scholem never really supplied the genealogy Arendt had requested. Their argument instead

contributed to the breakdown of a friendship that had lasted for decades. Nevertheless, Ahavat

Israel, and the idea that a Jew carries responsibility for other Jews, is deeply embedded in

Jewish ethical literature.

Consider the Mesillat Yesharim, written by Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the Ramchal, in the

eighteenth century. For Ramchal, genuine chasidut, genuine piety, cannot be concerned only

with one’s own spiritual perfection. The truly pious person must be concerned with the

spiritual welfare of the entire community.

And on this Ramchal is very clear:

“The Holy One, blessed be He, loves only the one who loves Israel.”

Let this powerful statement sink in, God loves only those who love Israel.

And Ramchal continues: the more a person increases their love for Israel, the more God’s love

for that person increases. So, in Ramchal we find an answer to Arendt and an help for us to

understand what Ahavat Israel means.

Ramchal speaks explicitly about Jews who need forgiveness and Jews who need repentance.

And he explains that, precisely out of love, out of Ahavat Israel, we desire their teshuva, their

return. When another Jew fails, my first response should not be the satisfaction of having been

proved morally superior. My first response is, or at least it should be, that I want that person to

repent.

We remain connected even with those who go astray.

And this, I think, brings us to the season we enter this evening with the Selichot. With

Selichot we enter the season of teshuvah: The word means repentance, but also return.

And teshuvah itself is one of the most profound manifestations of Ahavat Israel.

One of the prayers we will recite over the coming days is Ashamnu —

“we have sinned”.

Pay attention to that word. We do not say: “You have sinned. You have betrayed. You have stolen.

You have spoken falsely” We say: “We have sinned. We have betrayed. We have stolen. We have spoken wrongly.”

Of course, I have not personally committed every sin contained in the Vidui, and neither have

you. Yet Judaism places these words into my mouth so that I cannot stand outside the

community while judging it. This is our answer to Hannah Arendt. This is Ahavat Israel.

I do not need to pretend that I personally know and love every Jew in the world. Ahavat

Israel demands something else: that I recognise that these people remain my people. Their

failures cannot become opportunities for my self-righteousness, just as their suffering cannot

become somebody else’s problem.

Before using a word like kapo we must remember the words of Gershom Scholem: I was not

there. And the teaching of Ramchal: our task is not to prosecute our generation, but to plead

for it. And the liturgy of Selichot, with that single word: Ashamnu.

Not “they have sinned”. We have sinned. Because, after all our disagreements, our anger and

our accusations, we still possess enough Ahavat Israel to stand together before.

Notes and Further Reading:

On the definition of kapo, see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Kapos and Other Prisoner Functionaries in Nazi Concentration Camps.”

On the concept of the “grey zone”, see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), chap. 2, “The Grey Zone.”

On the correspondence between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt, see “Eichmann in Jerusalem: An Exchange of Letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 240–251

On Eichmann in Jerusalem and its critics, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963) provoked immediate controversy, particularly over her depiction of Adolf Eichmann and her treatment of the Judenräte. Subsequent historical research has challenged important elements of her account.

On the Jewish Councils, see Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

On Eichmann’s ideological commitment, antisemitism, and self-presentation at his trial, see David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), and Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin (New York: Knopf, 2014).

On the personal and intellectual relationship, including the love affair, between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), and Antonia Grunenberg, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: History of a Love, trans. Peggy H. Breitenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

On Heidegger’s involvement with and support for National Socialism, see “Martin Heidegger,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, section 3, “Nazi-Era Writings.”

On Ramchal and Ahavat Israel, see Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, chap. 19. A useful English edition is Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim: The Path of the Upright, trans. Mordecai M. Kaplan, with an introduction and commentary by Ira F. Stone (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010). Chapter 19 contains Ramchal’s discussion of responsibility for the Jewish people and his statement that the ”Holy One, blessed be He, loves only the one who loves Israel."