My PH.D.-Thesis, 1966-1982, delivered in Hebrew to the Jerusalem University 1972
Original Theme,1966 : The Idea of VICARIOUS SUFFERING as an ANSWER to INNOCENT SUFFERING
(i.e. my coping with the holocaust).
Final Hebrew Title 1972: "The  PERCEPTION    of    SUFFERING    and    SOLIDARITY    with the    SUFFERERS
in the Thought of the Jewish Sages from the time of the second Commonwealth till the End of the Talmudic Era"
(i.e. in Bible, Apocryphes, Qumran, New Testament, Talmud, Midrash)

 

My Life's Testimony
to
my Life's Learning

1982

2003

2011

 

"Moshe agreed
to settle down
with the man,
and he gave Tzippora
his daughter
to Moshe.

"She gave birth
to a son,
and he called
his name:
Gershom/
Sojourner
There,
for he said;
A sojourner
have I become
in a foreign land."
Exodus 2:21-22 Fox

p. 360 in the Hebrew edition of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other"

[continuation from p. 359] as an absolute "secure/certain" truth, thus I met - since the completion of this research - with many people, in life and in books, which posed "queries" about the message in it. One of the sharpest queries was, for instance, that of Talli, one of my pupils, who said: "Through all the year you educated us towards responsibility! But the only result is, that now we have feelings of guilt, since we still don't do anythng!"
As a result of the queries the understanding of reality "expands by itself " and new ways to cope with reality become clear.
In this last chapter I wish to hint at such an expansion. But before that it's worthwhile to one other time phrase the extract of the message in the book:

'And you choose life'' i.e.: be free! How can I be free despite being dependent on others? I can be free, a) if I acknowledge the fact of dependency and guarantorship and don't delude    myself as if I'm a kind of unit in itself, separate from others; b) if I -from this fact- draw the first consequence, that I must be solidary with the    people on whom I am dependent, including those whom I deem as "evil"; c) if I'll be responsible for all my dependencies, or in the language of the Ancients,     if  I am "a guarantor" - in an active way - for my-other and for the members of     my community.

Here are some hints at additional dimensions:
When I talked - based on the tradition about life and about freedom, about the worth of the individual, about solidarity and responsibility, my eyes saw only the three-dimensional world of this life on this planet. As if the mutual dependency would be suddenly cut off where the domain of humans and of time ends. This reduction to three-dimensionality was and still is very functional, as I'll explain soon. But it's worthwhile to see some of the claims which derive from tha , in an additional perspective:

- I claim in the book, that theology is a mirror of anthropology, i.e. that everything I said about "God" or in his name, is a projection of what is in the human soul (s. p. 105). Yet - isn't there a divine reality beyond human projections? Is it, that Moses, for instance, created "YHWH'', the dmut = figure of a solidary God (s. p.106-111) in the image of Moses, who was the epitome of a solidary human? Or can it be that there is a reality beyond Moses' imagination and it is possible to discern a bit of it in his experience with the "bush that is burning with fire and the bush is not consumed" (Exodus 3:2)? What does the metaphor which integrates between one thing and its opposite, tell us? Isn't it similar to

 

 

 

From the video "the Burning Bush" in "Prince of Egypt"

p. 361 in the Hebrew edition of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other"

the metaphor of "a voice of fine silence" in the mystical experience of the prophet Eliyah (Kings I 19:12)? How can a burning bush not be burned, how can silence have a voice?

- I argued against "the too high morale" (s.p. 153-154), which outstanding thinkers preached, in Judaism as well as in Christianity. But perhaps it's possible to reach a new understanding concerning the claim of tradition that the human was created 'in the image of God' ["Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness", Genesis 1:26 Fox] and that therefore s/he is able to behave towards his/her-other as "God" behaves towards the human?

- From the teaching of guarantorhsip of the Sages I conclude, that the worth of the individual is determined by his/her potential power "to keep alive an entire world or to loose an entire world." But why ist it that I saw a contradiction between this claim and the claim of Rabbi Akiba for instance, who said, that "loved (of value) is the human created in the image, exceeding love (value) is bestowed (noda'at) on whom is created in the image." (Pirke Avot 3:14; see for instance p. 143)?

In all those concepts which can be included under the title "life beyond life", I did not see but a rationalistic solution for the tribulations of people who did not succeed in coping with the law of guarantorship and therefore suffered from what they coined: "the lot of the righteous is bad and the lot of wicked is good" (so far - Aug. 10, 2011 - I can't find this proverb in the Bible itself!!) and searched for an individual compensation beyond this life. And indeed, even today I think, that most of the concepts about "God" and about "The Coming World" etc. are quite transparent projection of human needs and human greeds. But even the simple logic (not to talk about the experience of the mystics) demands that mutual dependency exists not only between human beings, but also between humans and the plants and the water and the soil and the air on this planet and the sun and the stars in space. These are mutual relations beyond place and time, and it's difficult to assume, that exactly death will interrupt them or is standing outside their validity.

- A multidimensional view on reality also enables us to dispute the most basic assumption in the book, that "suffering" is something bad in itself and that one has to prevent it in each case; the uninterpreted assumption, that suffering, without any distinction, should not exist and ought not exist; and from there the claim, that the teaching that "sufferings are valuable" is nothing but an escape from coping. The need to fight suffering is, once again, just one aspect of the truth, only one color in the rainbow and I pointed this out that already (s. 336-7)


As I said, at this stage of my life I cannot but hint at additional dimensions in which to see the results of the esearch. But it's important to explain, why also the three-dimensional view from which my book was written, is functional, i.e. has a task. "To everything there is a purpose..

2003_06_09

I like the vertical composition on the left side of Boticelli's painting:
Moses takes off his sandals in awe of the God
who makes himself known to him as his peer,
and acts as a sounding-board for all the feelings and thoughts,
which had been troubling Moses ever since he had deserted the slaves in the city,
through all those years of shepherding the sheep of Tzipporah's father in the desert.

Beneath are seen two burdened slaves, with fierce and furious looks,
against their oppressors? or against Moses, who worsens their status?

At the base of the vertical triptych there are again two persons, women,
oppressed by the shepherd men, worried, but talking to each other.
Two women, two men, and the one above them who reconciles all.

 

The scene I remembered, when I fastened the Tzippora poster to my door in June 2001,
was this:
I hadn't seen the father of my child all through pregnancy, birth and his first 7 months.
Then, when it was decided, that we should marry and I and Immanuel be legitimized,
Rafael came for a week to Germany - secretly - and we met, the three of us - secretly.
It was there in a simple village lodging, where we talked about us becoming Jewish.

"And what would be your name?"
Rafael pondered and suggested:

"Tzipporah!"

I was surprised and even a little bit taken aback,
because the name, which means a female "bird",
didn't sound nice and had no "profound' meaning.
And the one woman with this name,
the "not-exactly-white" Persian-Jewish wife of Rafael's cousin, had not yet come into my life.

I discarded it, contrary to my usual servile acceptance
of every proposal and demand from Rafael.

"It has to be Rachel", I said,
my name

[Jeremia 31,15] - see the song in SongGame A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping Rahel weeping for her children and she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are not there (anymore) Thus says YHWH: Refrain your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears: for your work shall be rewarded, says YHWH, and they shall return from the enemy's land; And there is hope in your end, says YHWH, that your children shall return to their territory.

and sang him the song of the weeping Mother of Israel,
and told him how this name had been given to me by my university roommate
for my bottomless suffering during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961.


The rest of the Tzipporah story for me is mystical, not to be dealt with here.
Except that I want to mention, that I believe, that Moses had partners after all:
One was God, of course, and the other was Tzipporah,
and sometimes Miryam,and sometimes even old Aharon.

p. 362 in the Hebrew edition of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other"

under heaven.' in order to quote one other time Qohelet (3:1 - see Pete Seeger's famous song "To every thing, turn, turn"), or as was said 400 years later by Shimon ben Azai:
"Do not be contempting towards any human, and don't be exaggerating in any thing,
for there is no human who does not have an hour, and no thing that does not have a place!" (Pirke Avot 4:3)
For too long people escaped towards "God", towards "life beyond life", in order to find in Heaven, who and what would give worth to humans and meaning to life and solutions for all problems, instead of creating all these in this life and on the earth of this planet. It is so tempting to flee to the far heaven and not take responsibility for the close earth.

The rainbow connects between heaven and earth and there is no contradiction between them. But there was a time in my life when I saw a need to see only the earth and to ignore Heaven:
On April 9, 1945, 3 weeks before the suicide of Hitler and Goebbels, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed. He was a professor for theology in Berlin and imprisoned for 2 years, and the message which is contained in his letters from prison was destined to have a great influence on the renewal of the church after the war. He demanded, that the world and the Christians in it have "to grow up"' as a child has to grow up and go out from the house of his father. The sentences which influenced me especially, were written on July 16, 1944
(I'm translating into English, what I once translated into Hebrew:

"We'll not be honest, if we don't acknowledge the fact, that we must live in this world "as if God did not exist" (Bonhoeffer quotes a verse in medieval Latin: utsi deus non daretur). This we achnowledge - before God! God himself forces us to acknowledge this!Thus our growing up brings us to the true acknowledgement of our situation before God. God lets us know, that we have to live as people who have to manage life without God. The God that is with us is the God that deserts us (Markus 15, 34) ---- [there is a passage in Godchannel>A Letter from God to Those Doing the Healing Work who talks about this too] --- [see now - in 2011 - a good article about Bonhoeffer]

The deeper I explored the different causes for the holocaust, the more it seemed to me - and seems to me today - that here, too, the root of the problem with the people who wanted to prevent it or reduce its dimensions, was, that because of their leaning on "God" they did not take responsibility for themselvs and for the world on whom they were dependent. And as then, so today: though we, Israel, already learnt to make our wars alone, as to making peace, we prefer to pray: "he makes peace upon us", "God", not "We!" As I said, the desire of the girl to not grow up and not part from the father in order to be independent and responsible for the coping with every personal or universal problem, characterized me, as well,

Flossenbürg April 9 1945 Memorial

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
Images from the Hebrew article in Wikipedia!
"Bonhoeffer with his pupils in 1932",
"the sculpture of Bonhoeffer in the St. Petri church in Hamburg".


An article in the Jewish Library website quotes a sentence,
that contrasts the sentence, which so influenced my life;
"Who stands firm?
Only the one for whom the final standard is
not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue,
but who is ready to sacrifice all these,
when in faith and sole allegiance to God
he is called to obedient and responsible action:
the responsible person,
whose life will be nothing but an answer to God's question and call. "

p. 363 in the Hebrew edition of "All Israel vouchsafe for each other"

till that night in November 1960 in Jerusalem, when from the mouth of the man I loved came this sentence: "You have first to become strong yourself, before you are allowed to take the hand of a stronger one!"
In that week also that conversation with Martin Buber took place. I began it with the question: "Why is it that only week people are in need of God?" Buber who felt the torment behind the question, said:

"There are no strong people at all. Even those who think of themselves as strong - may wake up sometimes at night and feel all their weakness! And yet -" , and there he sat up in his chair and sent sharp arrows from his blue eyes over to me: "One thing the human must contribute himself - a bit of a sense of humor!" It took about half a year till I weaned myself from the pathetic prayer concerning every tiny or big need, and four years more were necessary till I managed to live "as if God did not exist" (it can be assumed, that also that sense of humor I'll learn in the next forty years...). It was vital for my growing up "to give up" 'God' till I learnt on my own flesh what it meant - to take responsibility for what I am and for what happens to me. The law of guarantorship is valid for the life of any human in general and for the life of the people of Israel in particular, also today, and the need to show ways to coping with this law is definitely functional also today. Therefore I did not change the three-dimensional approach in the book. But the mental understanding in the research, and my experience with its practical application about which I told in this testimony, are nothing but the steps of a beginner. In order to be able to "dig wells" to the power of a person, the power to responsibility and to freedom, I must expand the dimensions of my view of reality. I explored and I activated mental and emotional and physical powers, and also spiritual powers are not foreign to me. But how to integrate between all these, how to "walk-to-and-fro" between the opposites and the poles and to be "whole", this is the divine command of the Torah: "you shall be whole with YHWH your God!" (Deuteronomy 18:13) This is what was said to Israel by the one whose "work is whole" (Deut. 32:4) and this was also said to Abraham, the individual: "walk to-and-fro before me and be whole !" (Genesis 17:1) What does it mean to be "whole"? how is it possible to live this? To that my thoughts and my deeds and all my life today are dedicated.         Rachel Bat-Adam, Bet-El St 9, Ramat-Gan. [Little did I know, that in 2001 I would establish a website with this very aim: "to heal myself into wholeness and - by extension - all of creation!"