Shaarei Yosher, sec. 3: Self-Interest – part 2
For His Holiness is greater than ours. His Holiness is only for the created and not for Himself because nothing was ever added to or could ever be added to the Creator through the actions He did or does. Therefore all His Desire could only be to be good to the created, but what He wants from us is not like this. As Rabbi Aqiva taught us, “your life comes first.” [Our sages] left us a hint of it when they interpret the scripture “Love your neighbor as yourself” in a negative sense, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your peers.” In terms of obligation, it is fitting for a person to place his own good first.
As Rav Shimon had just said, Hashem has no needs, and therefore his Qedushah doesn’t involve separation from needs. However, Hashem did make us needy, and therefore we must have a concept of self-interest so that we get those needs met. The separation of qedushah is not separation from self-interest, but separation from those things which distract that self from its mission.
Bestowing good on the created begins with being good to oneself. That is how one has the capacity to give. And when operating from within that context, self-interest is a positive thing.
This is why, when someone is faced with a moral dilemma where he has to choose between two lives to save, one is not obligated to sacrifice one’s own life for the sake of another. The person who has the canteen in the middle of the desert doesn’t have to share the water. Rabbi Aqiva learns this from the verse “and your brother shall live with you” (Leviticus 25:36), which implies that the obligation to save another is only where he can then live “with you”.
(In an earlier blog entry, I explored how this idea would have applied in cases of the Holocaust. When Victor Frankl asserted that the Holocaust cost us our most idealistic people, that anyone who survived had to have the ability to place saving themselves and their own ahead of others, had he slipped from Jewish to Christian ethics? Was Rudolf Kasztner wrong in giving priority to getting his own friends and people in his political camp over other Jews onto his train to freedom? And I looked at R’ Tzevi Hirsch Meisels’s heart-rending words about a father whose son was one of 1,400 children placed on a train for extermination; was he permitted to risk his own life to save his son’s?)
“Was Rudolf Kasztner wrong in giving priority to getting his own friends and people in his political camp over other Jews onto his train to freedom?”
Rudolf Kasztner doesn’t belong to the above narrative. He is faulted with much more than saving his pals over other Jews. He knowingly kept quiet of the Nazis’ plans to deport Hungarian Jews to their death in order to facilitate the rescue operation of his friends and those whom his camp (the Zionists) found useful to save. Tens of thousands of Jews would have escaped by crossing the border on foot to Romania, had they known what Rudolf Kasztner knew and willfully withheld from them. Both sides of the border were guarded by border police, eager to take bribes, small or big. I know this from my mother who lived just a few miles from the border. Stealing at night across the border was doable. Rudolf Kasztner made Nazis’ job possible and easy to carry out.
Dovid and other comment misinformed – Kasztner did not knowingly keep quiet of the Nazis plans to deport Jews. He sent young Zionists to warn, and they were told to keep quiet and not frightening the community. Some rabbis threatened to excommunicate the messengers. He also didn’t save only friends and family (100 of his family perished in Auschwitz) but orphans, rabbis, Zionists, women, children and elderly.
You should really read history and the very informed books written now instead of continuing these untruths.
There is a book, Perfidy by Ben Hecht, that describes Rudolf Kasztner’s trial in EY. The mashgiach of a chashuve yeshiva told me the book by-and-large is emmes.
Besides, I had an elderly neighbor on Monsey, Mr. Frey, who worked with Rabbi Weissmandel in Slovakia to save Jews. When I asked him about Kasztner, he responded: Reb Michoel Ber (Weissmandel) was and ehrliche Yid. Thinking he didn’t hear me well, I asked him again about Kasztner. He told me again: “Reb Michoel Ber was and ehrliche Yid”.
What’s your source that 100 of his family died in Auschwitz?
What’s your source that Kasztner sent messengers to alert Jewish communities, and that rabbis threatened to put them in cherem?
Could you two please take this elsewhere? This post has nothing to do with a historical analysis of Katzner. Just whether or not one particular accusation — his favoritism toward his own “kind of Jew” — is a fair one, or if such favoritism is within moral norms.
Rav Shimon’s words seem to me to imply that looking out for your associates more than for other people is appropriate. Not that it absolves us of looking out for everyone else second.