by Avi Feldblum

In May 1985, President Reagan's visit to the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany — where soldiers of the Waffen-SS were buried alongside regular Wehrmacht troops — provoked a fierce debate about memory, guilt, and forgiveness. Elie Wiesel had publicly implored Reagan not to go. Reagan went anyway. On net.religion.jewish, this collision of history and theology generated some of the most substantive writing the group had seen.

Avi Feldblum, a researcher at AT&T's Engineering Research Center in Princeton, posted this week's D'var Torah on Parshat Bechukotai — the portion in Leviticus 26 where God lays out the consequences of Israel keeping or breaking the covenant. Feldblum saw the parsha as the right lens for the Bitburg question: if the suffering of the Jewish people could be read as divine punishment carried out through human instruments, were those instruments themselves innocent? Were the Egyptians? The Nazis?

Feldblum works through two great medieval authorities — the Rambam (Maimonides) and the Ramban (Nachmanides) — who had already wrestled with exactly this problem in the context of Egypt. The Rambam's answer: individual choice remains, always, even within historical necessity. The Ramban's answer: intent and excess determine guilt. Both answers arrive at the same conclusion — complicity cannot be dissolved by appeal to Providence. Feldblum offers this not as a final answer but as a framework: these questions are old, and those who tried to answer them were greater than us.

This posting serves a dual purpose. First, it is the weekly dvar torah for this week's parsha (portion). It is also a reply to two topics which have been discussed recently on the net, which is why I did not simply use the Dvar Torah subject line. The two topics are antisemitism and the response to it (started by the egg-throwing incident), and the issues raised by the president's trip to Bitburg. What I hope to do, is try to identify some of the underlying issues, and show how these issues have been dealt with by the Rambam and Ramban.

First, to justify that this is related to this week's parsha, the Torah tells us in Leviticus, chapter 26 verses 3–46 that the destiny of the Jewish people is determined by whether or not the Jewish nation follows the commandments that Hashem gave us. In verses 3–13, the rewards for following the commandments are given. Verse 14 begins the section known as "the Rebuke," where the punishments for rejecting the law of Hashem are detailed. If one reads it carefully (and the associated passages in Deuteronomy 28:15–68) it is not hard to project it into the pogroms and even into the horrors of the Nazi holocaust.

If we accept the above, there are still quite a few questions that arise, some of which have been asked in one form or another on the net in the last few weeks. One class of questions deals with the issue of "Is it just that something happened to someone?" and various modifications of it. This is partly related to the issue dealt with in Job and other places of "a person does good and evil befalls him, another is wicked and good comes to him." This is a very difficult issue, and one that I am not going to deal with at this time.

A second class of questions deals with the status of the persons or nations who oppressed, killed, etc. the Jewish nation. If they are really the agents of Hashem's punishing the Jewish nation because of the sins of the Jewish people, should they themselves be punished for their actions? If yes, why are they to be punished, and what portion of the oppressing nation is guilty? This is the central issue behind the Bitburg question, as well as part of the issue behind the response to antisemitism.

The Rambam on Egypt

This same question is dealt with by the Rambam (Maimonides) in the sixth chapter of the laws of repentance. In particular, he asks that if Hashem told Abraham that his descendants would be enslaved in a strange land and oppressed there, then the Egyptians were only playing out their preordained role. The context of the Rambam's question is somewhat different than ours. He is concerned with predetermination versus free will, but in relation to Egypt the issues are very similar. Are the Egyptians responsible for what amounts to carrying out Hashem's will as foretold to Abraham?

The answer is clear: yes! They were clearly punished, as the Torah tells us. The question is why. The Rambam explains that each individual Egyptian had the choice to stand up and refuse to persecute the Jews. Since he did not, he is responsible as an individual for his actions, irrespective of his actions being part of some larger picture — the prophesized enslavement of the Jewish people.

If we examine the Rambam's statement, we can draw certain conclusions (which are supported by other statements of the Rambam). The first is that he rejects the two main defenses that are usually put forward to defend one's actions in cases like these. The first is not having taken an active part in the persecution — that one simply removed oneself in a figurative sense and just watched and did nothing. The second is that to have opposed the regime would have been dangerous, could have led to one's being killed.

If one looks at the Rambam in the end of chapter 9 of the laws of kings, he talks about why the people of the city of Shechem were killed by the sons of Jacob after their sister Dina was kidnapped and raped by the son of the ruler of the city. The Rambam says that it was the duty of the people to see that justice was maintained and the son of the ruler should have been brought to trial and executed. Because they did nothing — in a situation where action could very well have been dangerous — they were guilty of the death penalty.

One last point one sees from the Rambam is that in the context of free will and accountability, the fact that something may be very hard to do, that the cards may be stacked against you, does not relieve you of the responsibility of doing the right thing.

The Ramban: Intent and Excess

The Ravaad and the Ramban (Nachmanides) are not satisfied with the explanation of the Rambam. If indeed the Egyptian acted as the agent of Hashem, then he should not be liable to punishment. The issue is how to define "acted as the agent of Hashem."

In the case of the Egyptian, it is easy to argue that he was not individually appointed to be an agent. But what about Nevuchadnezzar, whom the prophets state clearly was the appointed agent of Hashem to destroy the Temple and ravage the city of Jerusalem in punishment for the sins of the Jews at the time? We are told in the prophets that he was punished for his actions, even more than the Egyptians were punished.

The real issues, according to the Ramban, lie in intent and degree. Some level of punishment was decreed to befall the Jews as a result of their sins. If some nation were to come and inflict that punishment, for no selfish reasons, just to carry out the will of Hashem, and limit their actions to what was decreed, they would not be liable to punishment. The Egyptians carried out the enslavement, which was decreed. The killing of the male children is given by the Ramban as an example of the excesses of the Egyptians which is mentioned in the Torah; and in general the making bitter of their lives is viewed as not being part of the divine decree. The later commentators who follow the Ramban's way of dealing with this issue add that once it is clear that they did not act simply as the agents of Hashem — and went beyond what was decreed — they were punished for everything that they did, because their motive was not selfless. Rather, they wanted to oppress the Jews. The same is true for the case of Nevuchadnezzar.

Conclusion

The issues are complex, and this by no means answers the questions. Maybe it raises more than it answers. The main points that I want to say are that these questions are not new — they have been around for a long time, and people greater than myself have struggled with them. As an orthodox Jew, I believe that we can profit by seeing what approaches have been taken by those we view as leaders of our people in our past. I do not believe in the slightest that we should simply accept things without asking and trying to understand. One of the commandments according to the Rambam is "To know that there is a G-d." The word "to know" does not mean to believe. There is a separate issue of belief. But besides for believing, one is commanded to understand to the extent that one is able.

I wish everyone a Shabbat Shalom — a good and peaceful Shabbat.

Colophon

Written by Avi Feldblum (A.Y. Feldblum, AT&T Engineering Research Center, Princeton, NJ; UUCP: {ihnp4,allegra}!pruxa!ayf or !erc3ba!gth). Posted to net.religion.jewish on Thursday, May 16, 1985. Message-ID: [email protected].

Parshat Bechukotai (Leviticus 26–27) covers the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience — a passage the rabbis call "the Rebuke" (Tochachah). Feldblum connects Rambam's analysis (Laws of Repentance, ch. 6; Laws of Kings, ch. 9) and Ramban's analysis of intent and excess with the live controversy of the Bitburg visit, making this one of the most theologically substantive posts in the early net.religion.jewish archive. Feldblum was posting weekly D'var Torahs during this period; this is the fifth preserved in the archive.

Preserved from the Usenet archive (UTZOO collection, batch b45) for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

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