by Madeleine Davies, Church Times
Former Archbishop of Canterbury was delivering a lecture in memory of Rabbi Lord Sacks
THE Holocaust and the attempt to destroy Jewish witness represent a “revolt against something of unique spiritual importance”, and should not be reduced to generalities about intolerance and racism, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams told a gathering at King’s College, London, this month.
Delivering the second annual lecture in memory of Rabbi Lord Sacks, Lord Williams acknowledged concerns that “the current culture of Holocaust education and the developing culture around Holocaust Memorial Day are at risk of being swallowed up by a set of generalisations about the evils of general intolerance, racism, and exclusivism.”
He recalled how a group of sixth-formers who had joined a visit to Auschwitz had spoken in generalities about their experience: “Hardly any had much sense of how the Shoah relates to the entire history of Jewish identity in Europe. It had become an instance of something: intolerance and prejudice. Shocking and terrible of course, but detached from everything that makes the persecution of Jews a distinctive thing.”
Such a response reflected a lack of awareness of the distinctive contribution that Judaism had made to the moral imagination of society, he suggested. “Jewish particularism is a sign of human action and interaction pervaded by a sense of conscious awe, by the expectation of finding significant life in every moment. It is a sign of what shared human life might look like in a world where transaction did not have the last word. . .
“This means that the mass slaughter of Jews is historically something distinct from genocide in a general sense or the killing of other minorities — which is most definitely not to say that other mass slaughters are somehow less serious or less in need of understanding against the specifics of their background, quite the contrary. . . The paradoxical twist in affirming Jewish particularity is precisely that it affirms the absolute commitment of God to every life in its unique location and ecosystem, and indeed every material element of the creation.”