Rabbi, I have a problem ?

Question: If God was unwilling or unable to intervene during the Holocaust, why would we imagine that He cares for us individually, as we say He does, over the High Holy Days?

God’s apparent absence during the Holocaust is just one, albeit overwhelmingly powerful, example of what philosophers call the problem of theodicy. Theodicy is the result of our inability to square three traditional assertions about God; that God is omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-seeing) and omnipresent (all-present).

If God was all-powerful but not always aware of what was going on in our world, He could not be implicated when tragedy strikes. Likewise, if He was all-knowing but not all powerful, He would be beyond reproach, as it would not be in His power to intervene.

Some theologians (process theologians in particular) are comfortable with a God that is not all-powerful and for them the problem of theodicy is less acute. Those who hold to the more traditional Jewish belief in a God who possesses the three “omnis” are left with a serious theological problem when He does not intervene to save the innocent from impending disaster.

A crude solution to the problem of theodicy is to say that the suffering innocent are really not innocent. That their suffering is a punishment from God as justified retribution for sins committed. If ever an event in history proved the fallacy of this argument, it is the Holocaust. It is simply not possible to assert that the six million (among whom were a million and a half children) were sinners.

There are numerous other attempts at trying to explain away the theological problems posed by the Holocaust and they are too numerous to cite here. Suffice it to say they all fall short and many are outright offensive.

What we are left with is a burning question for which there is no satisfactory answer.

Does this mean that God does not care about us? I hardly think so. The miraculous birth of the state of Israel a few short years after the Holocaust indicates otherwise. I am not suggesting for a moment that the foundation of the state of Israel justifies the Holocaust. It most certainly does not.

But it does throw into question the easy assertion that God does not care about us. Life is a mystery. It contains blessing and tragedy, joy and pain, light and darkness. Just because we are unable to sense God’s manifestation in the darkness should not lead us to dismiss His presence in times of illumination.

You are right; some people find it problematic reading passages that declare God answers prayer, when we know that many have prayed for help without response, be it in the Holocaust or in recent tragedies, ranging from terrorist attacks to local earthquakes.

Equally difficult are prayers praising God’s care for those who, on the contrary, have had a terrible year, with cancer or bereavements blighting their lives.

But such prayers still have a role, and although you personally may not find satisfactory all of the following very different reasons, perhaps one will appeal to you. The first is that the prayerbook is for everyone: believers, doubters, the hurt, the content, the angry and many more.

Thus prayers which grate with some people will resonate with others and the liturgy has to have a wide range of passages, reflecting the different Jews who read them. Some will indeed feel they have been cared for or rescued, be it in recent times or during the Holocaust, and will gladly utter such words.

Second, the liturgy can be seen as aspirational; it is Godly or goodly (as in the ata gibor in the Amidah) to support the falling, heal the sick and free prisoners. The prayers remind us what we should be doing and act as a moral checklist for our own lives.

Third, talk of God’s care can be in pastoral terms rather than practical ones. People may endure hardships, but still feel loved by God and that sense of relationship helps them carry on, rather than give up in despair.

Fourth, by contrast, some view God as not having a personal role or intervening in individual lives, but being the power behind Creation. This may entail letting go of a long-held image, but is seen as more realistic. It means we pray to God to help us develop our own inner qualities, such as patience or courage, rather than changing external events in our favour.

Your point is also a good argument for updating the liturgy, so that it speaks to those with religious question marks. Thus the new Reform machzor has passages referring to the difficulty of understanding God or our place in the world and admitting that some issues can be hard to resolve.

Coming to High Holy Day services does not mean having all the answers, but reckoning that the search is worthwhile.

“Strange–people come to me sad and leave happy; whereas I . . .  I stay with my sadness, which  is like black fire . . Woe to the generation whose leader I am. . . I prefer a simple Jew who prays with joy to a sage who studies with sadness.”
–The Holy Sage of Lublin

“Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.” (“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”)
–Theodore Adorno 

“Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream . . . hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.”
–Theodore Adorno 

Jewish responses to the Shaoh, to the Holocaust, have been understandably multi-faceted: 

1. “God is dead.” If there were a God, he would surely have prevented the Holocaust. Since God did not prevent it, then God as traditionally understood either does not exist or has changed in some way. For some this means that God has abandoned them, while for others it means God never did exist. Jews must be in the world for themselves.  This may mean a turn to atheism or perhaps a turn to some more like pantheism. Sherman Wine holds that no God can possibly exist, while Richard Rubenstein has come to suggest a kind of neo-paganism as the best alternative. 
2. “The Eclipse of God.” There are times when God is inexplicably absent from history. Martin Buber made this phrase famous, suggesting that the 20th century was passing through a period where God, for reasons unknowable to us, refused to reveal himself.
3. A Distant God. The experience of the Holocaust calls for Jews to reinterpret their belief in God. God is obviously not a being who actually interferes with human existence in any tangible, measurable way. Arthur A. Cohen holds that God is so transcendent that he cannot be held responsible for the Holocaust.
4. A Limited God. God is not omnipotent. He does not have the power to bring to a halt such things as the Holocaust. Harold Kushner made this view popular in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
5. Free Will & God. Terrible events such as the Holocaust are the price we have to pay for having free will. God will not and cannot interfere with history, otherwise our free will would effectively cease to exist. Eliezer Berkovits, for example, stresses that God is all-powerful but that he curtails his own freedom to respect human freedom, even with such horrific consequences.
6. A Suffering God. Borrowing from Christian reflection on Christ and the passibility of God, Hans Jonas has suggested that God is limited in power but able to suffer with the pain of the Jewish people. Others stress the compassion and love of God, even if not understood in the Holocaust.
7. Jewish Survival.  The event issues a call for Jewish affirmation for survival. The rise of the nation of Israel is one way of reading this revelation. Emil Fackenheim speaks of the 614th commandment– “”Jews are forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victories.” He further states this as Jews are “commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish;” “to remember the victims of Auschwitz, lest their memory perish;” and they are “forbidden to despair of Man, lest they co-operate in delivering the world to the forces of Auschwitz;” nor “to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.”
8. Incomprehensible Silence. The Shoah exceeds human comprehension. It is a so horrific as to strip away any attempts at explanation. André Neher believes that there can only be silence after the Holocaust–God’s silence and our own.
9. A Theodicy of Protest. If the Holocaust is a mystery, it is nonetheless on the surface a clearly unjust and wicked horror that God should have prevented. What does this then reveal about the character of God? Perhaps God is capable of evil. David Blumenthal has argued that an analogy can be drawn between child abuse and the Holocaust. Children of abusing parents can learn to eventually make their peace with such a parent but should never be required to abstain from challenging the parent’s misuse of authority.
10. A Broken Covenant. The Holocaust is proof that God has broken his covenant with the Jewish people. One need not conclude, Irving Greenberg holds, that Jews can still not choose to hold to Jewish law, but it is now only on a voluntary basis. 
11. Providential History. Some have suggested the Shoah had the providential outcome of overturning old medieval Jewish structures and replacing them with modern Jewish life, and that this is what needed to happen. 
12. Vicarious Suffering. In the Holocaust, the Jewish people become the “suffering servant” of Isaiah, collectively suffering for the sins of the world. Ignaz Maybaum explored this shocking claim, holding that perhaps in the Holocaust Jews even atoned for humanity’s wickedness.
13. Coming Messiah. Sha’ar Yashuv Cohen has argued that the Shoah represents the birth pangs of the Messiah, that the Jewish people are in the final days before the Jewish savior finally comes.
14. “Because of our sins we were punished.” (mi-penei hataeinu)  Some  in the Orthodox community have taught that European Jews were punished for their sins, either for the heresy of liberal Judaism or for an unfaithful rejection of the Holy Land. In these views, the Shoah is God’s just retribution. 
15. One More Tragedy. Some would suggest that the Holocaust is not a singular event, but only represents one more horror in human history. From this viewpoint, Jews make too much of the Holocaust as a crisis event that changes everything. David Weiss has taken something like this position.
16. Jewish Reconstruction. The Holocaust is better understood as a historical tragedy, singular or otherwise, that must now be answered with Jewish commitment to the restoration of cultural and ethnic life. Those who survive must rebuild what has been violated and lost. 
17. Christian Responsibility. Christians need to face up to the their history of anti-Semitism and the role it played in the Holocaust. Ben Zion Bokser has suggested that Christianity’s exclusive view of itself rendered the German people numb to the moral repugnance of Nazi racial theories. Others argue that this culpability should put an end to any exclusive claims on Christianity’s part or to any assigning of “second-class” status to Jewish faith. Supersessionism is no longer a credible theology.
18. Jewish Responsibility. Marc Ellis argues that national Israel now uses the rhetoric of the Holocaust to justify the oppression of the Palestinian people. The Holocaust should become a reminder to care for the disadvantaged state of all colonized groups. In a broader way, the Shoah is a reminder that to be a Jew is to be a chosen people, one that must carry out the covenant and bring salvation to others in daily life.
19. Jewish Witness. Jews must not allow despair to shut their testimonies forever. Memory and writing is at the heart of what it means to be Jewish, and the Holocaust is a temptation to hopelessness and to the secular Enlightenment, a project wholly discredited by the Shoah. It is better to keep one’s Jewish identity and belief in the face of this. Even God cannot rob Jews of this loyalty.
20. God’s Female Face. God was not absent in the Holocaust, rather present in the face of female Jewish sufferers, who by covering themselves and holding to their dignity were bringing the Jewish God into Auschwitz. Melissa Raphael has made this position part of the current Jewish discussion.
21. No Theology nach Auschwitz. Any attempt at theology totalizes the ultimate horror, and by doing so, it lessens the suffering of what happened, as well as opening up humanity to ultimately excusing it and letting it happen again. For some this is a radical negation of any attempt to explain, while for others it is a simple dismissal of religious attempts at an answer. Any talk of God’s justice or love makes a mockery of what happened in the Shoah.

A question often prohibited, but always asked

Otto Dov Kulka’s writing considers how religious belief can exist in a world with no future. His answer comes in the form of a dream

‘Implicit in Otto Dov Kulka’s writing is the very disturbing question of whether he could have felt the safety he did in this sky without the yearning to escape from the horror that surrounded him below.’

One part of the immense distance that separates Gentiles from the Jewish experience of Auschwitz is the role of God there. Of course many atheists and many Christians died there, along with people who had believed in humanity and in the future. But there is a peculiar quality of claustrophobic horror in Jewish reflections on the matter, for they are the chosen people whose whole history is of wrangling with God; yet an omnipotent God singled them out for this dreadful fate. If we disregard the frankly disgusting suggestion that they deserved it, there is no explanation possible and certainly not one that does not sound glib. Yet that does not stop the conversation.

Otto Dov Kulka approaches this in two ways. The first is so indirect as to leave almost no traces. He talks about beauty: the most beautiful and innocent experience of his childhood, he says, was watching the skies of southern Poland where “silver-coloured toy aeroplanes carrying greetings from distant worlds pass slowly across the azure skies while around them explode what look like white bubbles. The aeroplanes pass by and the skies remain blue and lovely, and far off, far off on that clear summer day, distant blue hills as though not of this world make their presence felt.”

Yet these were seen from inside the camp. “I took in nothing but that beauty and those colours, and so they have remained imprinted in my memory. This contrast is an integral element of the black columns that are swallowed up in the crematoria, the barbed-wire fences that are stretched tight all around by the concrete pillars. But in that experience all this seemingly did not exist, only in the background and not consciously.”

Implicit in this is the very disturbing question of whether he could have felt the safety he did in this sky without the yearning to escape from the horror that surrounded him below.

This sense of almost entering something just out of reach seems a central religious experience. It is connected with George Santayana‘s claim that “another world to live in – whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no – is what we mean by having a religion.”

Against that, Kulka stresses over and over again the inescapable, totalitarian quality of Auschwitz. It was a world in which the future was completely absent, where any other world became impossible. That is one of the things that he means by “the immutable law of the Great Death”.

So religious belief, or even religious experience, becomes impossible in a way that is more profound than even the obvious and overwhelming fact of the suffering of innocents in the extermination camps. Where was God there? Because the question is unanswerable, some religious authorities pronounce it is forbidden to ask it: Kulka quotes two people saying that, one of them who was actually in the camp as a Sonderkommando, whose reply was: “It is forbidden to ask that question, those questions, there, and unto eternity.” It will be seen that this isn’t an answer.

The answer Kulka offers is a dream he had more than 50 years after the event, when Israel was braced for a chemical attack in the Gulf war. He dreamed then he was inside crematorium number 2, and there was God, also: “At first I felt Him (only) as a kind of mysterious radiation of pain, flowing at me from the dark void in the unlit part of the cremation ovens. A radiation of insupportably intense pain, sharp and dull alike. Afterwards He began to take the shape of a kind of huge embryo, shrunk with pain … He was alive, shrunken, hunched forward with searing pain … a figure on the scale of His creatures, in the form of a human being who came and was there … as a response to ‘the question they were forbidden to ask there’, but was asked and floated in that dark air.”

Even more than most dreams, this cannot have its meaning pinned down. It works like the Gate of the Law in the Kafka story: it is open for everyone but individual to each of us. The atheist might see in it that God is no more than the quintessence of humanity. It is not one answer but many, none of them sufficient. All it unarguably shows is that the question of God keeps being asked, no matter how often it is prohibited.

February 6
THE LOVE OF GOD
Words and Music by Frederick M. Lehman, 1868–1953
The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)
Never has God’s eternal love been described more vividly than in the words of this greatly loved hymn: “measureless,” “strong,” “evermore endure … ”
The unusual third stanza of the hymn was a small part of an ancient lengthy poem composed in 1096 by a Jewish songwriter, Rabbi Mayer, in Worms, Germany. The poem, entitled “Hadamut,” was written in the Arabic language. The lines were found one day in revised form on the walls of a patient’s room in an insane asylum after the patient’s death. The opinion has since been that the unknown patient, during times of sanity, adapted from the Jewish poem what is now the third verse of “The Love of God.”
The words of this third stanza were quoted one day at a Nazarene campmeeting. In the meeting was Frederick M. Lehman, a Nazarene pastor, who described his reaction:
The profound depths of the lines moved us to preserve the words for future generations. Not until we had come to California did this urge find fulfillment, and that at a time when circumstances forced us to hard manual labor. One day, during short intervals of inattention to our work, we picked up a scrap of paper and added the first two stanzas and chorus to the existing third verse lines.
Pastor Lehman completed the hymn in 1917. His daughter Claudia (Mrs. W. W. Mays) assisted him with the music.
The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell,
It goes beyond the highest star and reaches to the lowest hell,
The guilty pair, bowed down with care, God gave His Son to win:
His erring child He reconciled and pardoned from his sin.
When years of time shall pass away and earthly thrones and kingdoms fall,
When men, who here refuse to pray, on rocks and hills and mountains call,
God’s love so sure shall still endure, all measureless and strong:
Redeeming grace to Adam’s race—the saints’ and angels’ song.
Could we with ink the ocean fill and were the skies of parchment made,
Were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill and ev’ry man a scribe by trade
To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry,
Nor could the scroll contain the whole tho stretched from sky to sky.
Chorus: O love of God, how rich and pure! How measureless and strong! It shall forevermore endure—the saints’ and angels’ song.

For Today:

John 15:9; Ephesians 3:1, 19; 1 John 3:1; Revelation 1:5, 6

Consciously try to personalize and experience the truth of this hymn in every situation that comes your way. Carry this musical message with you realizing that—

February 5
IMMORTAL LOVE–FOREVER FULL
John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807–1892
To know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:19)
Love is Silence—when your words would hurt.
Love is Patience—when your neighbor’s curt.
Love is Deafness—when a scandal flows.
Love is Thoughtfulness—for others’ woes.
Love is Promptness—when stern duty calls.
Love is Courage—when misfortune falls.
—Unknown
The Bible teaches that the three cardinal virtues of the Christian life are faith, hope, love, with love as the greatest (1 Corinthians 13:13). These virtues in a person’s life are the most convincing evidences of a personal relationship with Christ. True faith must always lead to a life of love for God and others. It also gives purpose for this life and the glorious hope of spending eternity with our King of Love. Our love relationship with others should be characterized as sacrificial, sensitive, and sharing. We should relate to people even as Jesus did. He loved individuals simply for themselves and met and accepted them at the place of their personal need.
In 1867 John Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker and recognized as one of America’s finest poets, wrote a 38 stanza poem titled “Our Master.” This hymn text with its emphasis upon the constancy of God’s immortal love was taken from that poem. It was Whittier who once stated “a good hymn is the best use to which poetry can be directed.” The musical setting by William V. Wallace, a Scottish violinist and composer, was adapted from a longer love song, “Waft, Ye Winds,” written by Wallace in 1856.
Immortal Love—forever full, forever flowing free, forever shared, forever whole, a never ebbing sea!
We may not climb the heav’nly steeps to bring the Lord Christ down; in vain we search the lowest deeps, for Him no depths can drown.
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet a present help is He; and faith has still its Olivet, and love its Galilee.
The healing of His seamless dress is by our beads of pain; we touch Him in life’s throng and press, and we are whole again.
Thru Him the first fond prayers are said our lips of childhood frame; the last low whispers of our dead are burdened with His name.
O Lord and Master of us all, whate’er our name or sign, we own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, we test our lives by Thine!

For Today:

Psalm 139; Jeremiah 31:3; Romans 8:38, 39; 1 John 4:19

Reflect on the constancy of our Lord’s immortal love as you meditate on this thoughtful hymn text.