Rav Dov Fischer

Sermons
On Denying Passover and the Holocaust

 The Jewish Journal has revisited the story pertaining to Jews who question the veracity and authenticity of the Torah's account of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. We are told that Conservative Jews are being taught -- at a temple named for Mount Sinai -- to reject the history our parents taught us, as their parents taught them, that G-d revealed Himself before our Nation at Mount Sinai. After twenty years serving in Jewish religious and community leadership, I believe that such a Temple Sinai exists.

When anyone questions whether my nation really were slaves in Biblical Egypt and whether my people really departed from Egypt en masse, on an exodus of freedom amid miracles and wonders, with the Red Sea splitting and a national assemblage at Mount Sinai, there is reason to comment.

The Torah-observant world believes that G-d commanded the Torah laws to Moshe our Teacher at Mount Sinai, instructing him for 40 days and nights, a period during which Moshe neither ate nor drank nor slept. We believe that Moshe descended Mount Sinai not only with two tablets bearing Ten Pronouncements but also with The Teaching -- the Torah law -- of 613 commandments, and that Moshe our Teacher proceeded to teach these laws orally to the Jewish nation. Aspects of these 613 laws subsequently were documented for the nation in the Written Torah, which we call by several names including the “Chumash,” the “Five Books of Moses,” and the “Pentateuch.” Torah-observant Jews believe that the Written Torah was authored by the word of G-d as dictated to Moshe, letter-by-letter. And that is Torah Judaism 101.

The new division stemming from Temple Sinai, suggesting that the Jews were not slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and did not exit en masse as the Torah says my ancestors did, marks an historic turning point for Conservative Judaism as the movement nests in the philosophical womb of Reform Judaism.

A century ago, non-Jewish Bible critics with anti-Jewish axes to grind propounded that the Torah’s account is apocryphal. They denied there was a Jewish nation of slaves in Egypt chosen by G-d. They denied there were Ten Plagues. They denied that G-d assembled our Nation at Mount Sinai to reveal His law to us. Instead, they reinterpreted our Torah as "inspirational tales" that set the framework for other faiths and nations. Those critics knew that once the history of our nation and our forebears was converted from factually authentic to "inspirational," and that once the laws that define us as a people became equally "inspirational" rather than Divinely ordained, then our essence was stripped. And it was for that reason that Solomon Schechter, often perceived as the father of Conservative Judaism, knowingly described Bible criticism as the “Higher Anti-Semitism.”

Christians also have inspirational accounts; in fact, they reprint all of our "inspirational" accounts in their book, too, and they add other ones. Christianity also advocates ethical behavior, moral behavior. Mother Theresa was said to be kind. Father Damien cared for the lepers. So this "inspirational" stuff deserves some thought. If Jews did not literally receive the Torah from G-d, by the Word of G-d at the hand of Moshe, then why be Jewish and why not be Christian or something else? If there was no Divine Revelation at Sinai, why raise hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to maintain an edifice called Temple Sinai and to pay a rabbi there? Why not be a Christian devoted to ethical humanism, to kindness, to justice? Why worship supposedly false stories that commemorate things that never happened, including certain stirring events like the death of a nation's first-born males? Why mark the Sabbath on Saturday instead of Sunday? Why face discrimination as a minority when the majority opens its doors so readily here? Why is a supposedly false tale about Jewish slaves to Pharaoh more inspiring than the story of the Spartacus rebellion from Roman slavery or stories of Cinque, the American revolution, Frederick Douglass, or Harriet Tubman?

More than that. If Jews were not an enslaved nation in Biblical Egypt, who ultimately were led to the Land of Israel by the Word of G-d, then why promote Zionism? In fact, if the G-d of my ancestors did not give the Land of Israel to my people's ancestors as a treasured possession, what business do Jews have being there? What justifies refugees from the persecutions of Christian Eastern Europe settling amid Moslems in Palestine? Questions to ponder.

If the story is a fable -- albeit with a nice lesson or two, in the tradition of the best of fables -- then our existence as a people with a unique message loses meaning. Because we are then built on a lie.

Jews in America invest so much trying to perpetuate a civil-religion based on the murder of six million Jews in the Twentieth Century, fighting the Holocaust Deniers every step of the way. Yet, the same people would join with those who deny the very essence of our Being as a nation conceived in holiness at Mount Sinai. We vigorously take the Holocaust Deniers to court in France. We pummel them in court when they sue us for libel. We lobby and insist that the United States devote tax dollars and federal space to memorialize a horror that was perpetrated by Europeans in Europe against Europeans, even though there is no museum of that kind in Washington, D.C. to mark the persecution and decimation of Native Americans. (To learn about the “Trail of Tears,” for example, one needs to visit locations along a stretch from Oklahoma, continuing eastward through southwest Kentucky, and on into Cherokee, North Carolina.)

So we Jews have no tolerance for those who would deny the Holocaust. But let someone deny that Jews were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, that there was an exodus from Egypt as described in the Torah, that the nation assembled at Mount Sinai and that G-d Almig-ty revealed Himself there to the nation -- and that denial is acceptable because it is “scholarship.”

Well, the David Irvings and Arthur Butzes also publish “scholarship.” Some Holocaust Deniers claim that their research and their excavations at the concentration camps prove that Zyklon B could not possibly have been used against Jews because the traces are not found as would be expected. Others say that their "scholarly findings conclusively prove" that there was not enough room in all the ovens and gas chambers of the camps to account for the murder of the millions of Jews said to have been murdered there. Each of the Deniers’ claims is based on “scholarship” that parallels the best Biblical archaeological scholarship. They search for traces of evidence, but they cannot find any. They measure space to gauge how many people could have fit there and find the Jewish accounts grossly inflated.

We Jews won’t put up with that kind of “scholarship.” We know better, and we do not care what anyone says to the contrary. Yet we curiously abide the “scholarship” built on the “evidence” that is “missing” or “lacking” in archaeological digs in ancient Egypt. We can rationalize away our entire essence. That’s OK -- as long as we preserve the authenticity of the Holocaust.

Someday, in ten thousand years -- maybe much, much sooner -- future historians and scholars will debate whether any Jews really were killed in a WWII Holocaust. And “scholars” reviewing texts from ancient Palestine-circa-2002 will uncover the Arab textbooks with maps of the region that show no State of Israel. Maybe someone will find a copy of a magazine that omitted a State of Israel on its map, maybe other maps from the internet with such omissions. And scholars will wonder and eventually deny whether there were Jews in Palestine-circa-2002.

As for me, I am satisfied with Mohammed’s teachings that there was a Moses and an exodus of Jews from Egypt, and -- going back to our very beginnings -- also an Abraham and an Ishmael. I am satisfied with Christianity’s acceptance of the factual underpinnings of the Torah. And I marvel at a people who build expensive and expansive edifices named for Sinai -- temples named for Sinai, even hospitals named for Sinai -- but who further would deny the fundamental truth of their national ancestry at Sinai and who even cleave to that identity of the persecuted minority, willingly incurring hatred and vilification and mass genocide for so adhering. I marvel at a people who devote more energy to documenting suffering and murder in Europe sixty years ago than to promoting the life-enriching values, beliefs, and fundamental teachings that emerge from the nation’s life blood and from the greatest of all our teachers, Moses the Prophet, who led us from Egypt to Sinai to receive the Torah when G-d revealed Himself to our nation.