by Menachem Z. Rosensaft
Pope Francis was, without question, the most important and most influential religious and theological figure of the 21st century, not just for Roman Catholics, not just for Christians, but for Jews as well. He was the human face of true faith in and commitment to the human and humanitarian values of nonsectarian monotheism writ large, and he embodied a compassion and empathy that reached far beyond his flock to encompass human-kind as a whole.
More than any pope, he embraced the Jewish people as equals and condemned antisemitism categorically and unambiguously. He told a delegation of the World Congress of Mountain Jews in 2018, “a Christian cannot be an antisemite; we share the same roots. It would be a contradiction of faith and life.” Francis also reached out to non-believers publicly.
In a letter to Eugenio Scalfari, the atheist founder of the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, the pope wrote that God’s forgiveness was not reserved exclusively for those who believe in Christ. The passing of Pope Francis is deeply personal for me. On the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in 2013, I delivered a guest sermon at Par k Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan in which I discussed my personal search for God in the horrors of the Shoah.
Specifically, I concluded that contrary to that day’s Torah reading, which speaks about God hiding his countenance from the Israelites during the moments of their greatest distress, God was in fact present during the Holocaust within all those who, even at Auschwitz and Treblinka, sought to save the lives of their fellow prisoners, or to alleviate their suffering. I took the liberty of sending a copy of that sermon to the pope. Most unexpectedly, I received a moving response from Pope Francis.
The very fact that Pope Francis reached out to me, the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, to express his empathetic understanding of my attempt to reconcile the existence of God with the nightmarish realities of the Holocaust is remarkable. The message I received from Pope Francis was and will always be a tremendous gift.
After celebrating the Jewish day of remembrance for the Holocaust, we must, as Jews, include Pope Francis in our prayers of mourning and remembrance. His unambiguous validation of a Jewish, rather than a Christological religious approach, toward the Holocaust resulted in a more broad-based interfaith dialogue about the consequences and implications of not just the Shoah but all genocides and other atrocities.
This will be one of his most enduring legacies. Baruch Dayan Emet. May his memory be for a blessing.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, and the author of “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.”