Why do the Jews not take revenge now against the Germans?

Answer 1

Answer #1:

They have no quarrel with the Germans now. The Holocaust, as its survivors termed it, was driven by Adolf Hitler's warped ideology, and to take revenge now would be pointless and cruel. Once WW2 was over, with Hitler dead and the Nazi High Command's most senior officers either imprisoned or hanged for what they had done, Germany was no longer under Nazi rule.

Answer #2:

While the above is factually and perhaps logically sound, it misses another important point: Judaism, and Jews by and large, are not vengeful, plain and simple.

Even in prayers that call for revenge, there is never a plea that God, let's say, should protect us and strengthen us when we go out to take revenge, for ourselves, or for Him, or in His name etc. This may be too subtle for some, but there is never any such call in Judaism.

What you DO find on the subject in Jewish prayer is: "Why should the nations say [of Israel] 'Where is their God?' ", and the plea that God Himself work the revenge where it is just and proper.

To illustrate ...

Case #1:

Rockets are fired, almost daily, from Gaza into civilian neighborhoods inside Israel. At some point, the Israeli air force is assigned to strike in Gaza. Are the aircraft sent to vengefully level a part of an Arab city and kill civilians ? On the contrary, the civilian population in the vicinity of the targets are warned in advance, with leaflets and telephone calls, and the Israeli aircraft attack only the rocket-launchers and the factories that manufacture them.

Case #2 ... in June/July, 2014:

Day #1 ... The bodies of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers are found hidden under a pile of rocks in the West Bank, and are brought to Tel Aviv.

Day #2 ... The three boys are buried, with a public funeral attended by thousands and followed by demonstrations by thousands more, in a display that some say has united the nation as nothing else within memory ever has.

Day #3 ... An Arab teenager is found murdered on the streets of Jerusalem, in what appears to have been an act of vengeance. Within hours, the father of one of the three Israeli boys ... who could be excused for vengeful feelings if anyone could, and who, in other societies not very far away, would be a leader in calls for revenge ... rises from his grief and goes public in the midst of his shiva, to say that the murder of the Arab boy in Jerusalem is a heinous and unforgivable act.

It is not dreamy-eyed kumbaya idealism. It is a bedrock fact ... too subtle for many, but vital to be understood when people talk about "tit for tat" in the Middle East: Judaism, and as a result Jews by and large, are not vengeful.

Jesus probably understood that, having learned it from the Rabbis he met during his childhood, when he talked about turning the other cheek.