1. THE FAILURE
The success with which the Nazis carried out the Holocaust represents the outcome of a massive failure by many institutions - political, legal, cultural and above all, religious. Any mass murder represents catastrophic failure both of the civilizational checks and balances as well as of the human solidarity and ethics which should have prevented such systematic evil practices from being carried out. Since religions and ethical traditions represent the claims of transcendent meaning and human values, they are particularly wounded by such failures. Furthermore, the genocides which have occurred subsequent to the Holocaust dramatize the bitter truth that despite extraordinary efforts to draw lessons from that tragedy and to redeem the promise of never again, little has been learned. The structural changes instituted to prevent recurrences are inadequate.

Among the religious breakdowns which stand out in analyzing the lessons of the Holocaust are the failure to communicate to every human being that quality which Jewish tradition calls the image of God which is in every human being. Proper teaching would evoke in every person respect and reverence for the three intrinsic dignities of infinite value, equality, uniqueness, which every human possesses by dint of being born human, i.e. by being so godlike a form of life. These dignities are universal but due to the tendency to communicate reverence for individuals only within a particular tradition (or within the sacred boundaries of the tradition), people feel free to act with disrespect or depraved indifference to the image of God of the other.

The Holocaust convicts religions of failure to teach and create solidarity across religious lines and between people so that they would stand together against degradation and murder. It reveals that various religions and ethical traditions treat others as Other - thereby distancing others from them. This reduction of respect encourages bystanding - that those not persecuted look out for themselves and make little or no efforts to check the aggressors. Yet, many studies (and most comprehensively and notably, Helen Fein’s study "Accounting for Genocide") show that the single most important determinant of Nazi success in murder was not the behavior of the murderers (who sought to destroy Jews everywhere) or Jewish behavior (generally unavailing in escaping or resisting the genocide). The key determinant of murder rates - which varied from 95% killed in Poland and Baltic countries to 95% saved in Denmark - was the behavior of the bystanders. Bystanders’ disapprove, condemnation, or active resistance made enormous differences in the outcome.

Christianity - the shaping religion in the zone of modernity within which the Holocaust was carried out - carries the burden of a distinctive failure within the general failure. The classic Christian teaching of contempt, a tradition which stigmatized Jews as practitioners of a degraded fossil religion, sustained by or characterized by demonic elements, created a penumbra of hatred around the Jews which set them up for isolation and murder. Although the Holocast occurred in a later, more secularized and technologically driven society, Christianity’s contributory scapegoating and negligence is in itself damning and devastating.
All religions and ethical systems in the zone of the Holocaust (and that of the Allies as well) are reduced in significance and credibility by the obvious fact that the various political, economic and military factors that governed the behaviors of the aggressors and of the bystanders overrode religious considerations. Further light on religion’s inadequacy is shed by the cruel fact that when it came to saving Jews or resisting the genocide, religious affiliation and commitment was not differentially productive of resistance efforts. (This is the burden of Camus’ critique of "being a Christian" in his talk to monastics in Southern France after the war in his Resistance, Rebellion and Death.)

The victims’ own religion is not free of failure either. For some Jews, it was a source of passivity, encouraging trust in miraculous rescues (which did not materialize) rather than motivating acts of resistance and/or escape. Perhaps the gravest failure was the inability of the traditional religions to facilitate interaction with the majority population in a way that would encourage solidarity. Thus most of the majority efforts to save Jews were done for Jews who by assimilation and/or interaction established friendship and bonds with gentiles; this placed them within the universe of moral obligations of the rescuers. While much of this onus is on the majority for stereotyping Jews, the fact is that the Jewish tradition also incorporates elements of contempt for Christianity and othering of others. This element represents a moral danger to Judaism in that it could motivate wrong behavior now that Jews have attained power. This negative stereotyping may weaken Judaism’s ability to resist ‘bystander behavior’ in its adherents.

Finally, the definition of which religions and ethical systems failed must include the culture of modernity. The Holocaust was made possible by some of the central characteristics, values and institutions of modern culture – including technology and concentration of power, bureaucracy, universality, and utopian ideology. All these forces were stimulated and made credible by the extraordinary processes of transformation set in motion by modernity but the checks and balances of modernity failed to restrain the excesses implicit in the culture.

2. FAILURE AND REBIRTH; REPENTANCE AND HEALING

The ability to recognize failure is the key to the religious and moral rebirth of religions. Repentance (which includes acknowledgment of past sins, firm resolution to change behaviors and actual deeds of contrition and correction) opens the door to healing the bystanders – as well as giving the victims some relief from the suffering which haunts them. The healthiest religious and ethical systems are those which have found the strength to confess their failures and thus were motivated to decisively change their behaviors and offending doctrines. Thus the focus on Christianity’s failure poses no obstacle to healing or to an honest, two way dialogue. The incredible post-Shoah Christian self-critique (including repudiation of supercessionism and caricaturing of Judaism) is witness to prophetic strength and religious vitality. This self-correction makes Christianity more credible, more humble before God, more fit to play a constructive role in the multi-cultural world which has emerged. (The repentance / revisions have not yet penetrated all levels and branches at the Church and that is an unfinished task.)

Judaism must look to its own agenda of self-correction, to assure that it give stereotyping and hatred no sanction. Those religious Jews who have used the Holocaust to demean Gentile faith and culture and to justify everything that Jews do, have been tempted into violent, even destructive, hateful and suppressive behaviors toward other religionists (including other Jews). Let the experience of Islam also be a warning. The clash of politics and destiny in the Middle East has led some Arabs to terrorism and even attempted genocidal actions. Due to the widespread feeling that the West is responsible for the Holocaust and the absence of guilt or feelings of failure, Islamic teachings have been widely used (misused) in support of these evil designs. The proponents of Islam have been largely silent in this situation since the feelings of guilt or of need to make amends were just not strong enough to neutralize inter-Arab solidarity. Again, the ultimate penalty for unchecked absolutism and the feeling of moral wholeness was paid by the religion (in loss of credibility) and by its own practitioners (in being oppressed by the same forces) as much as by the outsiders.

3. THE DEEPER CRISIS OF CREDIBILITY
The deepest crisis in the catastrophe is the fundamental challenge which such evil and innocent suffering pose to all belief in God, to religious visions of ultimate redemption, AND to ethical systems which affirm the meaningfulness of existence and the value of life. The successful mass murder in itself offers a continuous testimony to evil and human cruelty which strikes at codes which hold humans accountable to ethical norms.

This recognition means that all religions and ethical codes which seek to uphold meaning and value must undertake extraordinary efforts to restore the moral balance in society and in the world. This calls for all out efforts to increase life and to restore the infinite value and uniqueness of individuals. All institutions which deny equality and dignity and all teaching / traditions which skew or distort the image of God of the other must be reviewed and corrected at a new level of intensity. Self-criticism and unrelenting commitment to stop denigration or suppression of the other is a test of the integrity of each faith and system. All religious groups must move toward dialogue and sympathetic encounter with the other in order to create empathy in its own believers, an empathy powerful enough to generate solidarity and responsibility in the face of tyranny and oppression. This requires a deepening of the resources of love and compassion in every system sufficient to the point that doctrine and practice cannot distance from the other and the non-believer.

4. PLURALISM AS PROTECTION AGAINST RECURRENCE

The Holocaust program and its machinery of death were the outcome of a Gleichschaltung policy which brought all elements of society – political, economic, institutional, cultural – together in a centralized way behind one core authority / value system. The authority without limits and absolute commands which governed the Nazi War against the Jews, constituted idolatry, i.e., the partial which claims to be whole and unlimited which thereby becomes unlimitedly evil. Idolatry is an unfailing source of death. Therefore, we learn from the Shoah that all human implicated Absolutes must be reduced, made partial in order to support life rather than death. This truth applies to all systems including religious systems which proclaim the Absolute. Religions should work on recognizing their own ‘brokenness’ (see self-critique, item 2. above) and welcoming the presence of multiple value systems and sources of authority in society.

This emphasis is not to be confused with relativism. There is evidence that the growth of relativism weakened the ability to draw an absolute line of resistance to oppose totalitarianism. (After all, if there are no absolute rights or wrongs, why risk one’s life?) Rather we are speaking of pluralism which upholds absolute claims – there is right and wrong – but recognizes the limits of those absolute claims. Pluralism is an absolute that has recognized its own limitations and made room for the insights, dignities, equality of the other faiths / systems.

The most effective method of preventing pathological absolutism is to create the conditions of pluralism. Creating multiple political and economic mechanisms, wider distribution of power, ending religious and ethical monopolies, generating cultural criticism that breaks up unitary classic canons – these are all ways to create a situation where Gleichschaltung is never again possible.