Alt+SHIFT: The Hope of Tamir Granot

Alt+SHIFT is the keyboard shortcut allowing us quick transition between input languages on our keyboards—for many readers of TRADITION that’s the move from Hebrew to English (and back again). Yitzchak Blau continues this Tradition Online series offering his insider’s look into trends, ideas, and writings in the Israeli Religious Zionist world helping readers from the Anglo sphere to Alt+SHIFT and gain insight into worthwhile material available only in Hebrew. See the archive of all columns in this series.

אמיתי גרנות הי”ד

Rav Tamir Granot, Rosh Yeshivat Orot Shaul in Tel Aviv, is the author of books on Sefer Devarim and Jewish thought about the Holocaust. Tragically, his son Amitai, an IDF officer, was killed this past week by a Hezbollah missile. Just days before, at the end of the war’s first week, R. Tamir published an essay in the Makor Rishon newspaper about the implications of the Hamas massacre. We present this summary with the hope that these efforts honor the Granot family and the memory of Amitai z”l.

In earlier Jewish history, pogroms played a traumatic but influential role in shifting Jewish consciousness. The decision to endorse Zionism and depart from exile was fueled by the 1881-82 pogroms in Ukraine (“ha-sufot ba-negev”) and in Kishinev in 1903, the latter immortalized by Bialik’s famous poem, “In the City of Slaughter.” Two pogroms in the Land of Israel, in 1921 and 1929, brought about the realization that the Yishuv needed organized defense forces.

The events of this past Simhat Torah will also serve as a watershed moment for the Jewish people. When Syria and Egypt attacked in 1973, they launched a war by fighting the Israeli armed forces. What happened this year, with Hamas terrorizing and abusing civilians, was akin to a pogrom but far worse because this pogrom occurred under the watch of the sovereign Jewish State of Israel—the very entity that was meant to render such pogroms unimaginable. And yet, like its historical predecessors, this pogrom should also bring about a shift in Jewish thinking.

Granot mentions his years dedicated to researching the Holocaust and his difficulty understanding why the Jews did not show greater resistance against the Germans. Deceit, secrecy, and propaganda all played a role but the Jews also had trouble believing how evil and destructive the Germans truly were. “Their refusal to believe in the satanic aspects of humanity protected their humanity and their belief in people but it tragically contributed decisively to the ease with which they were slaughtered by the accursed wicked ones.”

Ethical life requires the ability to recognize evil for what it is and to eradicate it. We have learned that Hamas “prefers the death of our children to the lives of theirs.” The thousands of murderers who penetrated the border fence to run amok in Israel, and kill and burn Jews, reflect “a society that prefers death to life, a society built on hatred, and a society lacking any ethical constraints.”

Rav Kook has a famously powerful pacifist passage in which he writes:

We abandoned world politics from a coercion that comes with an inner will, until a happy time arrives that it will be possible to govern without evil or barbarism…. It is not worthwhile for Jacob to engage in sovereignty when it requires immersion in blood (Orot ha-Milhama 3).

It is unusual for contemporary Religious Zionists to take issue with R. Kook, but R. Granot does so here. He writes that R. Kook is correct on a spiritually ideal plane but not in the real world which demands the spilling of blood if the Jewish State will continue to exist and we will see no further pogroms in Medinat Yisrael.

Beyond the identification of evil, R. Granot offers some further guidance. “The way to deal with a period of difficult crisis like the present is never to blame, retreat into oneself, or despair, but rather to believe, hope, think only positive thoughts, seek out the good in people, and to find ways to act, save, help, and fix.” We should look more positively on the Jewish people and not despair because of “the faulty ethics of the right or the exaggerated ethics of the left.”

The Jewish people have always responded to tragedy and catastrophe with building and renewal. We mentioned above examples of constructive responses to pogroms. In addition, the Second Temple’s destruction brought about the Judaism of the Mishnah, halakha, and prayer, and we responded to the terrible Holocaust by creating the State of Israel. Let us take note of the current unity, benevolence, and volunteering initiatives going on now and maintain this spirit after the war has concluded. We will overcome this crisis and rise up again since there is no nation like the nation of Israel.

Yitzchak Blau, Rosh Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem’s Old City, is an Associate Editor of TRADITION.