This is PART 2 of Rabbi Yonassan Gershom's FAQ on reincarnation and the Holocaust. It contains Frequently Asked Questions regarding his work with people who believe that they died in the Holocaust during World War II and have been reincarnated.
(If you have already read this intro material in one of the other FAQ sections, you can skip to the list of Questions for Part 2. If are new to this FAQ, please read on...)
PART 2 (which you are reading now) discusses general issues of Jewish reincarnation beliefs about "karma," how they relate to Jewish mysticism and the Holocaust, who comes back as who, some thoughts on healing the karma of the Holocaust, forgiveness, etc.
PART 1 discusses issues directly related to the content of his two books Beyond the Ashes (1992) and From Ashes to Healing (1996) (which you can buy in our online bookstore.) This FAQ discusses which Jewish groups believe in reincarnation, some common misconceptions and media distortions about Reb Gershom's work, the concept of the Jewish soul, some controversies regarding this work, etc.
Part 3 continues the discussion about karmic issues from Part 2, with answers to questions regarding the reactions of specific groups and individuals -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- to this work, some controversial Orthodox beliefs, the novel "Night of Broken Souls" by Monteleone, etc.
All answers in this FAQ are direct quotes by Yonassan Gershom and represent his current beliefs and opinions at the time of writing. This FAQ can be used as a news release: Copyright permission is hereby given to quote from it in reviews, articles, books, etc. (Journalists: Please read this entire FAQ before contacting Rabbi Gershom for an interview or reference question.) Webmasters please do not copy to your own site -- link instead, to be sure your readers have access to the latest version. This update replaces all previous versions of the FAQ.
His latest book on reincarnation, Jewish Tales of Reincarnation, was published in November 1999 and was featured by the Jewish Book Club that month. This is not on the Holocaust per se. Rather, it is a collection of 70 Jewish teaching tales from both classical and modern texts and folklore sources, retold in user-friendly language for the general public, with notes, commentaries, bibliography, etc.
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Q-2: What about karma as a learning experience?
Q-6: What do you think the karma of the Holocaust really is?
Q-7: How can we heal the karma of the Holocaust?
Q-9:Why can't the Jews just forgive and forget?
I believe that the individual soul must always atone for its own sins, and that reincarnation is only one of many ways that this can happen. I also believe that there is a Heavenly Court that judges the soul according to its deeds. In the next world, the soul will experience all the suffering it has ever caused to others as if it is happening to itself (I refer you to the the book, Saved by the Light by Dannion Brinkley, a former US military agent who experienced the effects of his violent actions toward others during a near-death experience life review.) But I also believe that repentance, grace, and forgiveness are possible, too.
It is my opinion that what the parapsychologists and New Agers call the life review is the same thing as Divine Judgment. According to Jewish beliefs, the individual soul must face up to its own actions, and make amends to all the other souls it has harmed. We believe it is much easier to do this before we die, which is why Judaism places such great importance on repentance. If we wait until another incarnation to make amends, it can be very, very difficult to accomplish, because we will not remember clearly what we have done. Plus we may not be able to find the other souls we must make amends to, because they have incarnated in new bodies also.
So yes, in a sense I do believe in karma, in that we are all responsible for our actions. However, I do not believe in the mechanistic kind of "karmic law" which says that "whatever you did to me, I must do to you in the future," and vice versa.
I realize that there are many people who interpret karma in a sort of robotic, automated way, and claim that everything done to the Holocaust victims was something that they themselves once did to somebody else. However, this interpretation is very shallow and simplistic. It does not account for religious martyrs who did nothing to deserve persecution. (I have not, for example, heard anyone in Christian or New Age circles claim that Jesus was crucified because of his bad karma!) Karma has to start someplace -- we can't always assume that a victim is being paid back for past karma. Maybe an event is generating new karma on the part of the perpetrator, who was unknown to the victim in the past, etc.
Ironically, although Judaism is often stereotyped as being "eye for an eye," the Jewish concept of Divine Justice is more complex, more compassionate than many New Age teachings. The Heavenly Court weighs all of one's deeds -- good and bad -- together in the balance, to determine what the next life will be. So it is possible that a good deed can offset a bad one. A seemingly minor act of kindness can set into motion a whole series of events that generates enormous amounts of good karma for the person who did the original good deed.
It is also possible that repentance before death can, as the Yom Kippur liturgy says, wipe the slate clean. Dannion Brinkley, in his book Saved by the Light, describes two near-death experiences where he saw his childhood as a bully. In the first, his acts of cruelty were all that he had on the record -- in his whole life, he had never cared for anyone but himself. Seeing the impact of his deeds made him sincerely repent, and when he recovered, he devoted his life to helping others. When a second brush with death later brought him again to the life review, he saw the same childhood scenes as before, but, in addition, there were now the positive actions he had done later in life. The sum total of all these deeds throughout his life was his new "karma."
There are many Hasidic stories about how a soul was about to be sentenced to Gehenna (Purgatory) but was saved by a seemingly minor act that set into motion a heap of good karma that outweighed the bad. Conversely, there are also Hasidic stories about how one seemingly minor sin started a series of events that led to a person's downfall. In the end, only God knows the real value of each and every action. This is why the Sages of the Talmud teach us to "Be as careful with a minor mitzvah (commandment) as with a major one, because you do not know the true value of a mitzvah." (Pirkei Avot.)
No, I do not believe that the Holocaust victims "chose the Holocaust" before being born. The very idea of such a thing is obscene to me. Life on earth is not a pre-planned script and we are not robots. If this were the case, there would be no room for free will, no room for repentance, no room for creativity. And there would be no room for martyrs -- innocent people who suffer because of the bigotry of others. Did Joan of Arc pre-plan to be burned at the stake? Did Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi decide before birth that they would be assassinated? Did Anne Frank come to earth to die in a concentration camp? I think not.
I do believe that we might choose the general outline of our next incarnation -- where and when we will be born, who our parents will be, what culture and religion, etc. And maybe we do come here with the general goal of learning some type of lesson. (Even atoning for a sin carries the implication that one will learn not to do it again.) But that is very different from saying that the Holocaust victims sat up there in Heaven and specifically planned to be shot, tortured, beaten, starved to death... To write off the horrors of the Holocaust as a mere "learning experience" trivializes the moral responsibility for those who did the torturing and killing.
To be frank, these types of theories sound like the old Calvinist argument for predestination -- something that Judaism rejected then and still rejects now. Calvin (a Protestant Christian in the period of the Reformation) taught that everything was pre-destined by G-d in advance so, if a person was rich, that was the will of G-d and, conversely, if a person was poor, that's how G-d meant it to be. Although Calvin did not believe in reincarnation, I think that some of his attitudes about predestination have carried over into modern reincarnation circles, especially in Western esotericism, which comes primarily out of European Christianity.
Some of the current theories also sound too much like the excuses we hear from rapists and abusers: "she really wanted it, she chose it, she enjoyed it, she learned something from it..." One new age writer recently claimed that the Holocaust victims were in altered states of consciousness in the camps so they did not feel the pain. Try telling that to the living survivors.
If these types of excuses showed up in a therapy group for sex offenders, we would immediately see them for what they are: rationalizations for the abusers to get away with more abuse. But somehow, when it comes to the Holocaust, many people think it is OK to talk about the victims choosing the experience as if they were merely signing up for a college course. Sorry folks, I don't buy it. We do not create reality; God creates reality. But God also gives us free will -- and the moral responsibility that goes with it -- to decide, right here on earth, from moment to moment -- how we treat one another as fellow human beings.
Over the years, I have spoken with hundreds of past-life therapists about case histories, and they are not finding very many cases of Jews and Nazis who reversed roles in their next life. A tiny minority, perhaps. But in the vast majority of cases, what they are finding is that like attracts like and that souls are attracted to what is familiar, not its opposite. I refer you to the works of Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, author of the classic study, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (out of print) and his more recent 1997 book, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, which show this pattern of like attracts like. Dr. Stevenson has spent over 35 years studying cases of children who not only remember their past lives, but are still attracted to foods, clothing, social patterns, etc. from their previous lives in those cultures.
Similarly, Dr. Bruce Goldberg, in his book, The Search for Grace, (Llewellyn 1997) gives a very convincing case history of a woman he calls "Ivy," who appears to be the reincarnation of a woman named Grace Doze, who was murdered by her boyfriend in the 1920's. Under hypnotic regression, Ivy described 46 different past lives leading up to the previous one as Grace Doze. In 20 of those lives, the same soul that was now her current boyfriend had also been the murderer who killed her in the past life. In other words, the same two souls had played out essentially the same two roles for 20 incarnations! This and similar cases suggest that we do not "flip-flop" back and forth from victim to perpetrator to victim again. Rather, we tend to pick up where we left off in the last life, with essentially the same role(s), at least until we make conscious decisions to change.
Another similar case -- of two souls acting out the same roles over several lifetimes -- is told in my second book, From Ashes to Healing. Linda Thieman, in her autobiographical essay, "To Triumph Over Evil," describes three lives in which she and her ex-husband had abusive relationships: as master and slave in Rome, as a Jew and a Nazi in WW II, and in the present lifetime. Her healing came when she was able to break the pattern of this toxic relationship and move on.
However, this does not mean that all re-enactors are necessarily reincarnated from the periods of history they choose to re-enact. Some people are just interested in "living history" events as a form of experiential theater.
There are also similar accusations about negative Jewish karma and Canaanites in the works of theosophist Alice Bailey, whose 1940's book, Esoteric Healing, is still widely read. Judging from her books, Bailey was a blatant antisemite, and in her theories on the karma of the Jews she presents many negative stereotypes which sound as if they were written by Adolf Hitler. In 1996 I publicly opposed the falseness of her theories at the national convention of the Association of Past-Life Regression and Therapy (APRT) conference in Washington DC. I received a standing ovation. Go to my essay on Alice Bailey's Antisemitism for more discussion on this topic.
To be perfectly frank, I believe it is time for the New Age and occult movements to take a long, hard look at their own attitudes about Jews and Judaism. Many of these supposedly New Age groups are really very old age in their teachings about Jews. Many are still using books that were written during the first half of this century, when antisemitism was considered to be an acceptable part of Christian and esoteric theology.
Many of the classic occult authors from that time -- whose writings are still studied today -- believed in the old Christian dogma of the Wandering Jew who, according to a medieval legend, was supposedly cursed to suffer forever because he rejected Jesus. This belief, in turn, often became a self-fulfilling prophecy: when Jews suffered at the hands of gentiles, then the gentiles justified it by saying that the Jews had brought it on themselves. This resulted in more persecution of Jews by gentiles.
Nowadays the same type of dogma re-appears in many New Age philosophies under the guise of karmic payback theories. I have received numerous letters from people who are supposedly channeling the one-and-only cosmic explanation to the karma of the Holocaust. These letters are always from gentiles who are abysmally ignorant of Judaism. Invariably they want to blame the Jews for the Holocaust, or else lecture us about how they think our religion is limited and outdated and why they think we should change to their religion. In most cases, they are either parroting some dogma that they heard elsewhere, or else clothing their own negative attitudes about Jews in New Age vocabulary.
Regarding psychic channeling, we must always keep in mind that just because something seems to come from the the spirit world, that does not mean it is necessarily true. There are negative spirits as well as positive ones. Being dead does not make one all-knowing or even very wise. It is perfectly possible that some of these tit-for-tat theories about the Holocaust are coming from the souls of deceased Nazis who are earthbound on the lower astral planes, and who still beIieve in the racist dogmas of Nazism.
In short, there are many issues we must take into consideration when we evaluate past-life regression materials. for more of that from a scientific approach, read my speech, Multi-Cultural Aspects of Reincarnation, which explores the possibilities of psychological and sociological biases we should all be aware of.
Of course, I do have my theories like everyone else, and some of them are presented here. But I believe it would be arrogant and presumptuous to post my personal theology as some kind of public statement on the "true karma" of the Holocaust, because I am neither G-d nor a prophet. Yes, we all have our pet theories on the meaning of evil in the world, but they are only that -- theories. I don't think anybody besides God really knows the full meaning of such events. God is the only true Judge of another person's karma. Everything else is only guesswork.
I will say this much, however: I do know what the Holocaust was not. It was not a punishment of the Jews for refusing to accepting Jesus, nor was it a rejection of the Jews by God for some other reason, nor was it a failure of the Jews to be spiritual, etc. (So please, people -- don't waste your time, energy, and money sending me tracts about why I should convert to your religion/philosophy/channelings/new-age group, etc. You are only generating more junk mail and wasting landfill space because I have heard it all before, and I do not waste my time reading missionary materials!)
If anything, the Holocaust was caused by 2000 years of Christian hatred directed toward Jews, which finally manifested on the physical plane in European/Christian nations slaughtering Jews. Hardly surprising, because if you put enough energy into teaching that a group of people killed your god so they are now cursed and should disappear from the face of the planet, then sooner or later, somebody is going to take the energy in those thoughts, and try to manifest it on the physical plane. 2000 years of antisemitic dogma about how Jews are supposedly outdated finally resulted in Hitler trying to carry it out. This was not the work of God -- it was the work of human beings who arrogantly thought they could take the will of God into their own hands to decide who should live and who should die.
Regarding all these pet theories about Holocaust karma, I wrote in my second book, From Ashes to Healing:
We are still much too close to the Holocaust to define its true spiritual meaning, and I, for one, prefer to avoid dogmatic statements -- New Age or otherwise -- about Holocaust karma. Because World War II was such an enormous event, involving so many millions of souls on so many different journeys, we could probably find a few cases to prove just about any theory imaginable.
Why did the Holocaust happen? There is no single answer, no pat reply that will put it to rest forever. Was it a karmic payback, a divine punishment, a learning experience, a fulfillment of prophecy, a mass martyrdom, or the birth pangs of the Messianic Age? Could all of these explanations have some measure of truth in different cases?
Perhaps the answer lies within the very process of asking the question. Like a Zen koan, "Why the Holocaust?" forces us to examine our hearts over and over, from all possible angles. Each time we ask the question again, we break through another layer of old thought patterns to confront the world in new ways.
Neti, neti -- "not this, not this" -- every rational answer is always incomplete, Like the sound of one hand clapping, "Why the Holocaust?" can never be explained in ordinary terms. When all is said and done, the only true reply is the no-answer of silence. In the words of Elie Wiesel: "Perhaps someday, on the level of man, we will understand how Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will remain forever the most disturbing of mysteries." (excerpted from From Ashes to Healing, pp. xxvi-xxvii.)
My point is, that when we are dealing with so many millions of cases, no single theory is going to fit all of them. If we find a few dozen, even a few hundred, even a thousand cases which seem to fit our own theories, that is still a very small percentage within the total number of victims. So naturally, there are going to be a lot of different theories, because there are a lot of different types of cases. This was not a "one size fits all" event.
There are really two questions here: the karma of individuals, and the "karma of the Jews" as a group. I have no objection to an individual claiming that his or her own death in the Holocaust was due to some type of individual karma. If that is his/her inner experience and if it helps a soul to heal, then fine. But I do have objections to karmic theories which paint Judaism itself as some type of negative hell designed to work off bad karma, or which portray "the Jews" in a totally negative light. The difference is sometimes very subtle, but it is there.
On the collective level, if we eliminate the antisemitism which caused the Holocaust in the first place, then the karma will begin to heal -- on the surface. But the deeper healing requires even more. The karma of the Holocaust will not be truly healed until Jews and Judaism are honored by the non-Jewish world as being equally beautiful and just as spiritual as all the other religions and paths. As the Bible says, he who curses Abraham will be cursed, he who blesses Abraham will be blessed. The Holocaust was based upon cursing and degrading the Jewish people -- therefore it will not be completely healed until the world begins to bless the Jewish people and recognize that our religion is valid and complete in its own right.
Right now, we are very, very far from that goal. Even in so-called enlightened circles, negative stereotypes about Jews still abound and are taught as if they were cosmic truths. My mailbox is full of antisemitic theories which try to blame the victim, and unsolicited channelings from New Agers telling me how their spirit guides (or their own egos!) think my religion is narrow and limited -- even though it is clear from their letters that the closest they have ever come to meeting a Hasidic Jew is watching Fiddler on the Roof.
It is very clear to me as a practicing Jew that these so-called channelings -- if they really are such -- represent little more that the ignorant, subconscious thoughts about Jews which are bouncing around inside the channeler's own head. Just because something comes from the beyond does not mean it is true or spiritual -- there are deceiving spirits out there, too. How do these channelers know that they are not getting messages from the souls of Nazis? Test every spirit to see if it is really from G-d, they say.... My test is very simple: if it sounds like an ignorant antisemitic stereotype, then that's what it is.
Judaism teaches that, in order to be forgiven, the perpetrator must apologize directly to the person who was harmed, and make any necessary amends. Naturally, this is very hard when both individuals are dead. However, I do believe it is possible for two souls to reincarnate and meet again to work things out, but the issues are not always clear while we are here on the earth plane. However, I will say that attempts to blame the victim and/or find reasons why the Jews were meant to die in the Holocaust are not steps toward making amends to the victims. Jews will be able to forgive when they see the gentile world taking responsibility for the antisemitism which was at the root of the Holocaust, and taking serious steps toward changing their attitudes about Jews.
At the same time, I also think it is time for Jews to begin letting go of the anger, because it is becoming self-destructive. We are now three generations -- going on four -- away from the Holocaust, and it is time to move on. I do not think the victims would want us to remember them by continuing to pass our anger from generation to generation. It might even be that anger here is hindering the souls on the other side. There is an interesting story, The Wisdom of the Martyrs, about the Baal Shem Tov (founder of Hasidism in the 1700's) which addresses this theme from the standpoint of reincarnation.
We must keep in mind that each of those millions of victims was a unique individual with a name, an occupation, a family and friends. Each one of the people in those horrible piles of bodies and skeletons had unique talents, hopes, and dreams. To forget their memory is to dishonor the dead --would you be willing to forget your family history like that? Just what would you tell your children about their origins if you did?
Frankly, I do not know of a single family or nation on earth who would be willing to wipe out their entire history just for the sake of making the outside world feel less guilty about a genocide. Almost always, it is the oppressors who want the victims to forgive and forget -- whether those victims be black slaves, Native American warriors, Armenians in World War I or Jews in the Holocaust. But forgive and forget is not really possible, and would not be healthy even if it were possible. Forgive and forget is denial, not karmic healing. By linking forgive with forget, we are actually hindering the healing process. Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.
Much of past-life therapy is about remembering what happened in a previous life and working it through in this life. Only after the past-life traumas are remembered are they finally healed. This process is very similar to the methods used in more mainstream therapy for healing the traumas associated with rape, assault, child abuse, etc. The victim does not heal until he or she can begin to talk about the abuse, have the pain acknowledged, and then to work it through.
The Holocaust is no different in this respect. It was horrific torture and abuse on a mass scale. Living Holocaust victims continue to suffer daily from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder -- even now, over fifty years later, the horrors of the camps affect their lives. (I know this from experience because I used to be a chaplain in a Jewish nursing home.) Many Holocaust survivors did try to forget and move on with their lives, but ended up having the trauma re-surface decades later in terrifying nightmares and flashbacks. Trauma which is stuffed down does not heal.
So no, I do not believe that we should forgive and forget. But perhaps, if we can finally begin to take the bull by the horns and face the issues squarely, then we might be able to work the pain through together. At that point, it may be possible to forgive and move forward -- by remembering what happened, squarely facing up to it, and learning from the mistakes, so that it does not happen again.
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