Leadership Talk by the Rector of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano Buenos Aires

Abstract

The first thoughts and sentiments that came into my mind and heart when I had received the proposed theme of this panel was about the terrible silence which accompanies us Jews throughout the greater part of our history—both heavenly silence and human silence. Jews have had many opportunities to understand, since the very beginning of their existence, the meaning of suffering, such as they experienced during the slavery in Egypt. They questioned God about the suffering of the people and especially about the unjust suffering of the righteous. Jeremiah (Jer 12:1–5)1 posed the question and received an answer similar to the one God gave to Job: “Who are you, O mortal, that I should reveal my secrets to you?” When the Talmudic sages asked desperately why their colleagues were being tortured to death by Hadrian’s legionaries, the answer they received from God, from Heaven was: “Keep silent!”2 These were my initial reflections about the theme of this panel. In 1944, when the dimensions of the Shoah began to be known among Jews living outside of Europe, Yehudah Leib Magnes, then president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the opening address for its twentieth academic year, quoted Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev’s dramatic question: “I do not ask, Lord of the World [...] to know why I suffer, but only this: Do I suffer for Thy sake?”3 André Neher investigated this issue for years and wrote a masterpiece: The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz.4 However, it is not the silence of God toward Jewish suffering that we come to analyze today but the human silence and indifference towards the plight of their Jewish brothers and sisters. My father used to be a great reader of Yiddish liter-