Part II
And in a landmark address delivered on 12 Sivan 5736 (June 10, 1976) to approximately one hundred Menahelim assembled at Mesivta Rabbi Chaim Berlin — later published in The Jewish Observer — Rav Hutner laid out his Torah perspective on the Holocaust with characteristic precision and daring.
He began with the principle that “The Jewish people and the Torah are one” (Zohar, Acharei Mos 73). Whatever happens in the world to Klal Yisroel must have a counterpart in the Torah itself — and whatever trajectory the Torah describes for the Jewish people will, inevitably, unfold in history.
If you want to understand what is happening in the world, you must study Torah. And if you study Torah honestly, you will find the present moment already written there.
With this lens, Rav Hutner identified two entirely new directions in Jewish history that converged in the Holocaust, the Churban of Europe — neither of which had ever occurred before in all of our millennia of exile.
The first he called the era of disappointment. Throughout history, Jewish persecution by the nations of the world was, while horrific, at least consistent. The oppressors announced their hatred and acted on it. And then he elaborated upon world history. Beginning with the French Revolution and continuing through the Treaty of Versailles, Lenin’s Soviet Minority Rights Law, the Balfour Declaration, and most catastrophically the emancipation edicts of Germany — Jews were granted equality, welcomed into the family of nations, and then betrayed. Rights were given legally and taken away legally. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were drafted using the very legal categories that had been used to emancipate Prussian Jews in 1812. What had been granted was rescinded — and the Jewish neshama was left with a shattering, irreversible disillusionment.
Rav Hutner zt”l found this pattern encoded in Devarim (31:16–17): “This nation will arise and fall prey to the lure of strange nations and trust in them… and great evils and troubles will come upon them.” Following Onkelos, who translates the key phrase not as “idol worship” but literally as “the temptation of the nations,” Rav Hutner reads this as a precise description of modernity: the seduction of the Jewish people by the promise of equality and acceptance among the nations, and the punishment — in the form of the nations’ own betrayal — that followed.
But the pasuk continues: “Then shall they declare: it is because my G-d has not been in my midst that these evils have befallen me.” This declaration, as the Ramban explains, is not yet full teshuvah. It is proto-teshuvah — the first stirring of return. The lowest rung of evil is the disavowal of wrongdoing; once a person or a nation stops saying “I have not sinned,” the road to repentance has been cleared. The era of disappointment, precisely because it shattered the Jewish people’s misplaced trust in the nations, removed the first and greatest stumbling block to teshuvah. Out of the ash and ruin came — quietly, unexpectedly — an entire generation of baalei teshuvah.
Rav Hutner once found himself in Eretz Yisroel among a group of confirmed leftists on Ben Gurion’s yahrzeit and was asked to speak. He turned to each person in the room and asked: “Do you recall a mechalel Shabbos in your city who had a son who became shomer Shabbos?” Each answered with an emphatic no. Ben Gurion had believed that time was on the side of the secularists — and by his era’s own logic, he was right. But he could only calculate chronological time, said Rav Hutner. He knew nothing of the eschatological movement of generations. The era of disappointment had torn a generation loose from “the temptation of the nations” — and the Pachad Yitzchak saw in that tearing the first light of the final geulah.
This brings us back to the hidden light that Rav Hutner zt”l believed still lives within every Jewish Neshama, dormant and waiting.
He found its key in the luchos, the stone tablets of Har Sinai. The tablets were broken when the people sinned with the Golden Calf. But Rav Hutner insists: the light was not extinguished. Both the broken tablets and the second tablets were placed together in the Ark. Drawing on Bava Batra 14b — “Be careful with a wise elder who has forgotten his learning, because the tablets and the broken tablets were both placed in the Ark” — Rav Hutner teaches that just as a scholar who has forgotten his Torah still carries all of it within him, waiting to be reawakened, so the pre-sin light of the first tablets remains hidden within the Jewish people. Through learning the Torah of the second tablets, the light of the first is recovered. The dormant fire can be lit again.
Specific mitzvos serve as the key. The shofar on Rosh Hashana — the very day when Adam’s full spiritual experience “turned into a remnant” — works in reverse: it takes the remnant and transforms it back into a lived experience (Pachad Yitzchak: Rosh Hashana #20). Teshuvah reconnects a person to their source, precisely as the second luchos reconnect to the light of the first (Pachad Yitzchak: Yom Kippur #25). And Shabbos — which Rav Hutner said directly represents the pre-sin world — gives every Jew a weekly taste of Gan Eden (Pachad Yitzchak: Shabbos 7:10–11).
“Du Bist Gerecht”
Let’s return now to that October in 1943. The Sukkah burning. Warsaw burning. The Rebbe weeping.
The bachur who approached him and quoted v’samachta b’chagecha was in a sense doing exactly what Rav Hutner’s entire Torah demands: he was pointing his Rebbe back toward the hidden light. The obligation of joy on Yom Tov is not a denial of suffering. It is the assertion — rooted in Torah, engraved like letters in stone — that even in the most broken moment, the fire is still there. The broken tablets are still in the Ark.
Rav Hutner composed himself. And in that composure, one sees, perhaps, the full arc of his life’s work. Warsaw burned — and the Rebbe carried it. But he also carried the luchos, the shofar, the Shabbos candles, and the radical conviction that the pre-sin greatness of Adam HaRishon still lives within every Jewish neshama — waiting, dormant, for the moment when someone with the courage to say v’samachta b’chagecha helps awaken it once more and for the courage to stand before Palestinian terrorists hijacking innocents. Today is Yom HaShoah, a name that Rav Hutner zt”l was not into at all. But it is perhaps a time when we can reflect upon the hashkafos and Torah of a remarkable Gadol B’Yisroel and how his entire life’s mission of rebuilding Torah, has succeeded. Look at Yeshiva Chaim Berlin. Look at its Talmidim and all the Torah that has flowed from it. Look at their yungeleit. Look at their Alumni. And you will see how he remarkably he has succeeded.
The author is indebted to Rav Pinchas Stopler zt”l who first introduced me to the depth of Rav Hutner zt”l’s writings, to Dr. Dov Finkelstein’s groundbreaking article, “The Psychology of Human Greatness: Rav Hutner Between Slabodka and Psychoanalysis,” published in Tradition 54:2 (2022), for its illuminating analysis of the relationship between Rav Hutner’s thought and modern psychoanalysis and to the article published in The Jewish Observer (October 1977, Vol. XII, No. 8), translated and transcribed by Rabbi Chaim Feuerman shlita and Rabbi Yaakov Feitman, for its penetrating Daas Torah analysis of the Churban Europa within the broader framework of Jewish history.
The author can be reached at yairhoffman2@gmail.com
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