Słabość i siła w perspektywie doświadczenia granicznego. Casus: Zagłada
Weakness and Strength in Religious Experience of the Time of the Holocaust On “Jom Kipur” – an Essay by Icchak Berenstein

Summary/Abstract: An analysis of Jom Kipur, one of the essays written in the Warsaw ghetto by Icchak Berenstein (?–1942), discloses a specific type of religious experience within the domain of paradox, doubt, and rejection. Berenstein developed a personal theology of the Holocaust. The author of the article placed in the centre of his interpretation reflections on the concept of “helplessness”, crucial for the text. In Berenstein’s meditation helplessness brims with meanings that overlap each other and reveal their paradoxical nature. Here helplessness possesses a purely human, sociological, and historical dimension: everyone is helpless in the face of the horror of the ghetto. It also has a spiritual, religious dimension: it constitutes doubt, a process of turning away from God and forgetting the Ten Commandments. The dialogue between God and man expires. In the case of Berenstein we are dealing with the experience of theological inversion and are entitled to assume that this reversal allowed him to touch the untouchable mystery of the Holocaust. The forbidden (reaching for moral self-knowledge and the power of constituting independently what is good and what is bad) is now enjoined. Man becomes thrust into the hell of the knowledge of good and evil, enrooted only in him. This is the satanic temptation suggested to man by the serpent of the Book of Genesis. In Berenstein’s writings it is God who condemns man to enjoying knowledge reserved for Him. The phenomenon of essays by Icchak Berenstein consists of close relations between the present and eternity, material detail and universal sense, concrete event and exemplum, secular and holy history. The topography of the Warsaw ghetto, with which the author of the article is thoroughly acquainted, becomes part of eschatological topography.

• Details
• Contents