Remembering the Nuremburg Laws

"Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Deal Justly!"
Remembering the Nuremburg Laws
November 10, 2006
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

While I grew up in a very prim and proper public school system where misbehavior was immediately and strongly punished, I realized as a little boy that there was always something separating my classmates from me. It couldn't have been my overt Jewish identity because I didn't wear a kippah and was just like them in every way. But since I did not cross myself nor even recite the Lord's Prayer, with which my third grade teacher took issue, it was clear that I wasn't Christian. Ergo, I had to be Jewish. Yet, I could not begin to understand what it was of my being Jewish that caused the clear and virtually complete separation.

When I began reading children's books covering the sweep of Jewish history I absorbed a bifurcated vision of our existence. On one hand there were the glorious episodes of the patriarchs and the stoic strength of the people in slavery and the rejoicing of their redemption. Yet why did the Egyptians want to make us slaves anyway? The Torah's answer, that Pharaoh though that we would be a fifth column in Egypt, was not satisfying. As I read on I encountered splendid chapters in our history, kings David and Solomon, the building of the Temple. Yet these chapters were inevitably followed by those of destruction and dispersion. We were never a big people in a big piece of land. We didn't even have oil! Why not just leave us alone? That question plagued me, even as I shunted it aside because of the magnificence of the faith I was discovering and adopting. My parents bore me into the faith, now I was making it mine. I pushed the question aside.

Studying the modern era did not make my question go away. No matter how much Jews brought to host countries, setting up industries, money systems, commerce and creating great civilizations with literature, music and arts, eventually they would evict us from virtually all of them. It would await the 20 th century with its technology to enable them to murder us in mass numbers. After the Holocaust the question remains: Why?

The Rabbis say that we should study the Torah over and over because everything is in it. The Torah is an "oceanic gold mine" of ideas and thoughts. It is we who have to discover them. I did that with this week's Torah reading and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. From the first time I read it I was fascinated with Abraham's boldness to argue with God. I have even had tour guides show me alternate pillars near the Dead Sea, all purporting to be Mrs. Lot. Yet embedded in this story is THE answer to my question: Why Us?

In arguing with God Abraham has the audacity, the chutzpah, the nerve to ask Him: HaShofet Kol Ha-Aretz Lo Ya'aseh Mishpat? "Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Deal Justly!" That is the crux of the story and nucleus of our being.

Justice is the heart of the Jewish vision of human existence.

Not theology. Just and righteous behavior is what God demands.

And we are the messengers!

We are the divine heralds of that message!

Abraham did not argue with God that the people of the cities worshipped idols. Abraham did argue with God despite or in spite of the obvious that these people were not Hebrews! They weren't his family. They weren't his people and yet Abraham interspersed himself between them and God to defend them from destruction! It was an absolutist message – the world survives on justice- by God and – by man.

For all people.

All the time.

In every place.

Forever.

Thus Judaism stresses the rule of law and the equality of all people under that law. And that the law itself must be just.

That message was and remains a revolution to world thinking. We have been the Don Quixote of the world. We are Abraham's linear descendants. We represent him, his demand for God's justice, his demand for equality of justice, his demand for universal justice, as developed by the prophets. We have made that demand in every place that we have ever been. That message has often been ignored and rebuked. And they have taken their anger against the message, out on us, the messengers. And even more so, they turned law upside down and inside out. They have perverted the law to make it evil. And then we are even a greater threat, for our very presence contests their evil and repudiates their wickedness.

I have entered into this discourse tonight for several reasons.

1. I want to share this deeper reading of the Sodom and Gomorrah story. It is a profound text for development of human rights, equality under law and the protection of individuals according to the Jewish perspective. I will return to that subject.It is the mission of the Jewish people to scream, demand and work for justice for all people. We have been the ones to carry that banner. It is our defining character, whether anyone likes it or not; whether we like it or not.

2. This is the closest Shabbat to remember the enactment of the first Nuremburg Laws on November 14 th, 1935. That should never go unmentioned. The ordinance defined a Jew and was the fulcrum around which the German legal system revolved and constituted. There is a direct line between this perversion of law and the destruction of European Jewry. And still, the lessons of Nuremburg are ignored. I preached a sermon a year and a half ago about Darfur. Legal systems that enable the slaughter of human beings of any color, any religion, any gender or creed are immoral. That is what Abraham was screaming about to God. God! You can't allow the slaughter of innocent people! And neither can we. The Nuremburg laws deligitimized people from being human beings. The German legal system delegitimized Gypsies, the mentally incapacitated and physically unfit people besides the Jews. They used law to corrupt society and destroy humanity.

3. This is not a distant subject to Virginia. In took until May 2, 2002 for then Governor Warner to apologize for the eight decades of eugenics implemented in the Commonwealth by forced sterilizations and other means. All of it was legal, as enshrined in the law code of the Commonwealth. Where was Abraham? Where were his descendants? Where was anyone who read Genesis?

4. It is for this reason that I wrote and spoke against the Marriage Amendment and am distressed that it passed. In essence it enshrines the delegitmization of a group of human beings. It is almost irrelevant why this group of people. It is terrible precedent that one part of society can use the legal system to delegitimize any part of society. That is the legacy of the Nuremburg laws. And no matter what else, I am one son of Abraham that refused to be silent. I am one son of European Jewry who sees the terrible wrong not only to homosexuals being denied civil equality, but also the blindness to the evil use of law. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because they demonized the stranger, the other. And so did the Commonwealth of Virginia.

"Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Deal Justly!"

May we never forget why we are here as Jews.

May we never allow Abraham's banner to waver.

May we fight for the causes of just laws, equality under the law, and universal justice.

Then we will truly be Jews, descendants of a bold, brave and courageous nation.

Now I have the answer to my original question: "why?"

Shabbat Shalom