NRR 179-181

A SURVIVOR’S SENSE OF GUILT

QUESTION:

A survivor of a concentration camp is under psychiatric care because of a deep sense of guilt. He and his wife were together in camp, and she became pregnant by him. Then the Nazis issued an orderthat all pregnant women be killed. Now the man feels that he was guilty of the death of his wife. What help can be given to the psychiatrist from the point of view of Jewish law? (Asked by Sonia Syme, Detroit, Michigan.)

ANSWER:

WHATEVER MISFORTUNE occurs to one dear to us, it is almost a natural impulse for us to feel guilty. We think that if we had only done something different or said something different, the misfortune to our dear one might never have occurred. In this manner, decent, kindly people embitter their own lives. The question here is, how can this husband, who survived while his wife was killed by the Nazis, emerge from this cloud of self-assumed guilt?

A person under this load of guilt must seek for a rational refutation of this pathetic emotion. If he is guilty because his wife was killed, who should be guilty for all the Jewish children who were led to the slaughter? If the parents of these murdered innocents are alive, should they feel that if they only had not had these children, the children would not have suffered? Or should the parents of the many adults who were killed, if any of those old people are alive, feel guilty that they produced these lambs for the slaughter? Such a pathetic sense of guilt of a parent generation for having brought children into a world of misery, or a sense of guilt imputed by the children to these parents for having brought the unhappy children into the world, is quite natural and, in fact, is found a number of times in Scripture. Job in Chapter 3 curses the day in which he was born and that his mother brought forth a man-child destined for misery. And also the Prophet Jeremiah (15:10) complains retroactively, as it were, “Woe that my mother bore me to be a man of misery and strife.” These emotional feelings of guilt or imputations of guilt are a natural reaction, although of course illogical, for how could parents know beforehand what might be the fate of the children?

So in this case, too, this couple did not know beforehand of the decree that pregnant women would be killed. Of course, had they known of this decree beforehand, and nevertheless ran the risk of pregnancy knowing that it would mean death, then some sense of guilt would be understandable and even justified. The case would then be like that of a wife whose life is endangered if she becomes pregnant. In that case, Moses Feinstein, the great Or-thodox authority of our day (Igros Moshe, Even Hoezer 13), decided that the couple should either refrain from sexual intercourse or use available contraceptive devices. But this is not the case here. The couple did not know beforehand of the murderous Nazi decree. It came afterwards.

Since the intercourse occurred between husband and wife before there was knowledge of any danger to life, then the very act of intercourse deserves praise. If in the very shadow of death for both of them in the concentration camp, they wanted to produce children, this indicates a blessed and noble sense of hope that there would yet be a future and a generation of Jewish children who could live happily.

Aside from their implied hopefulness, it must also be stated that from the point of view of strict Jewish law, the bearing of children is deemed to be a supreme mitzvah, a God-given mandate. In fact, the Talmud (Yevamos 63b) and Shulchan Aruch (Even Hoezer 1:1) say that he who refrains from the effort to produce children is as if he himself is a shedder of blood (i.e., he destroys the future). The verse upon which this Talmudic decision is based is of singular appropriateness to this special situation. It is based on the words that God spoke to Noah and his family when they emerged from the Ark. The verse in Genesis 9:7 says, “Be ye fruitful and multiply,” and the preceding verse to which this is appended is, “He that sheds a man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” In other words, precisely because there is murder and genocide in the world, it is a man’s mandate to participate in the preservation of the species.

We may say that Genesis 9:6 can refer to the murderous Nazis, and verse 7 refers to such as he and his wife. So let him not take on himself the guilt of the shedders of blood. What he did was his religious duty and a vote of hope in the human race and its future.