36 righteous

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The legend of the 36 righteous ( Hebrew : lamed-waw zadikim; Yiddish also: lamed-wownikess) says that there are always thirty-six righteous people in the world for whose sake God does not let the world perish, despite its sinfulness. The thirty-six are nameless, no one knows whether they are poor or rich, water carriers, janitors, shoemakers, soldiers or merchants - but without their selfless works the world would have been destroyed long ago. The thirty-six rarely appear - especially in emergencies when Jews are in danger. Then a tzaddik is supposed to fulfill God's mandate and save the Jews with a sudden miracle - and then immediately disappear again, because his identity must never be revealed. As soon as one of the 36 righteous dies, another righteous will be born.

This idea of Jewish mythology goes back to the Babylonian Talmud . The corresponding passages can be found in the Sanhedrin treatise . There the following Tanach passage from Isaiah 30:18 is commented on: “That is why the Lord waits for him to be gracious to you, and he rises up that he may have mercy on you; for the Lord is a God of justice. Well all who wait for him! ”The Hebrew word for“ for him ”in the last sentence of this verse is“ lo ”. This is written with the Hebrew letters " Lamed " and " Waw ", which also mean numerical values: "Lamed" has the numerical value 30, "Waw" the numerical value 6, because they are in these positions in the Hebrew alphabet .

The legend of the 36 righteous appears in many literary works in the 20th century, for example by Max Brod ; In 1959 André Schwarz-Bart thematized in his successful novel The Last of the Righteous ; In 1967 Rose Ausländer named a cycle of poems after the 36 righteous. In the Israeli Holocaust -Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem there is the " Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations ," whose name recalls also the legend of the 36 righteous.

Hannah Arendt wrote in 1948 about the relationship between politics and morality, in memory of the pacifist Judah Leon Magnes :

"The old Jewish legend of the 36 unknown righteous people who are always there and without whose presence the world would fall to pieces, ultimately says something about how necessary such 'noble' behavior is in the normal course of things. In a world like ours, in which politics in some countries has long since ceased to be disreputable infidelities, but has climbed a new level of criminality, uncompromising morality suddenly has its old function of merely holding the world together, changed and is has become the only means with which actual reality - in contrast to facticity distorted by crimes and basically only short-lived - can be recognized and systematically designed. Only those who are still in a position not to let themselves be swayed by the fog that emerges from nowhere and then vanishes from fruitless violence can be entrusted with such weighty things as the ongoing interests and the question of the political survival of a nation become."

- Hannah Arendt

The piece Tzaddhik of Terry Swartzberg directed by Barry Goldman with Swartzberg, Bernd viewfinder and André Herzberg showed the just as (St.) fools. The work of the saint remains hidden from anyone in the play. For 5,000 years and 10,000 wars, he has been approaching the mostly unwilling people, complaining, lamenting, cracking jokes and proclaiming the only truth that people cannot stand but urgently need: that the urgent need to forget warlike atrocities is the next Wars gives birth.

literature

  • André Schwarz-Bart: The last of the righteous . Übers. Mirjam Josephsohn. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1960 (first: Le Dernier des Justes. Édition du Seuil, Paris 1959)
  • Mirjam Schmid: Representability of the Shoah in novels and films. Kulturgeschichtliche Reihe, 12. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2012 ISBN 978-3-933264-70-1
  • Rose Foreigners: 36 righteous. Poems. Gilles & Franke, Duisburg 1975 ISBN 978-3-921104-21-7 (first: Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1967)
  • Gregory & Tintori: The Book of Names. rororo, Hamburg 2006 ISBN 978-3-499-24481-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, Folio 97a. In: Sefaria. December 25, 2002, accessed May 30, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Susanne Kailitz: Warning and Hope: The Yad Vashem Memorial has been commemorating the Holocaust for 50 years. In: The Parliament 50–51 / 2004. December 6, 2004, accessed February 16, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Hannah Arendt: Peace or Armistice in the Middle East? In Hannah Arendt: Israel, Palestine and anti-Semitism, Wagenbach. Berlin 1991, pp. 39-75, here p. 68
  4. ↑ in German frequent editions in various publishers, in FRG and GDR. The editions at Volk und Welt with an afterword by Henryk Keisch
  5. ↑ On Schwarz-Bart's aforementioned novel and on Night and Fog