The Valley of the Shadow

Judaism has its silences, Elie Wiesel once said, but we don’t speak about them. After the Holocaust, the Shoah, there was one of the great silences of Jewish history.

A third of world Jewry had gone up in flames. Entire worlds – the bustling Jewish townships of Eastern Europe, the talmudic academies, the courts of the Jewish mystics, the Yiddish-speaking masses, the urbane Jews of Germany, the Jews of Poland who had lived among their Gentile neighbours for 800 years, the legendary synagogues and houses of study – all were erased. A guard at Auschwitz, testifying at the Nuremburg trial, explained that at the height of the genocide, when the camp was turning 10,000 Jews a day into ashes, children were thrown into the furnaces alive. When the destruction was over, a pillar of cloud marked the place where Europe’s Jews had once been; and there was a silence that consumed all words.

More had died in the Final Solution than Jews. It was as if the image of God that is man had died also. We know in retrospect that Jews – both victims and survivors – simply could not believe what was happening. Since the Enlightenment they had come to have faith that a new order was in the making. The age-old teachings of contempt for the chosen-or-rejected people were at an end, they believed, and in their place would come a rational utopia.

It is hard in retrospect to imagine that sense of almost religious wonder which German Jews felt for the country of Goethe, Beethoven and Immanuel Kant. That Christian anti-Judaism might mutate into the monster of racial antisemitism; that a Vatican might be silent as the covenantal people went to its crucifixion; that chamber music might be played over the cries of burning children; that the rational utopia might be Judenrein: these, for the enlightened Jews of Europe, were the ultimately unthinkable thoughts. Since the early nineteenth century, humanity had seemed to many Jews a safer bet than God; and it was that faith that was murdered in the camps. Where was man at Auschwitz?

But where, too, was God? That He was present seemed a blasphemy; that He was absent, even more so. How could He have been there, punishing the righteous and the children for sins, their own or someone else’s? But how could He not have been there, when, from the valley of the shadow of death, they called out to Him?

Jewish faith sees God in history. But here was a definitive, almost terminal, moment in Jewish history, and where was God’s hand and His saving, outstretched arm? It seemed as if the Shoah must have, yet could not have, religious meaning.

Wiesel has written of that time: “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.” But to whom could one speak of these things so much larger than man, if not to God? It was a crisis of faith without precedent in the annals of belief. If God existed, how was Auschwitz possible? But if God did not exist, how was humanity after Auschwitz credible?

Covenant and refutation There is a line of theological reasoning which argues that a single moment of innocent suffering is as inexplicable as attempted genocide. Abraham, faced with the proposed destruction of the cities of the plain, had prayed, “Far be it from You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, so that innocent and guilty fare alike. Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”¹ Abraham began his famous dialogue with the possibility that there might be fifty innocent individuals; he stopped short at ten. But logic would pursue the argument further. The death of one child is much a crisis for religious belief as the Shoah.

footnotes: ¹ Genesis 18:25.

That is true. But it is to miss an essential feature of Jewish belief. There is theology, but beyond that there is covenant, the bond between God and a singular people. The Torah – the Hebrew Bible – reveals a single universal God who created the world and sits in judgement over the whole of human history. But with Abraham and the exodus and the revelation at Sinai, God chooses to associate His name with the fate of a particular extended family: the seed of Abraham, the children of Israel, the Jewish people. It is through them that His presence would be peculiarly manifest. Their way of life would set them apart as a holy nation. Their history would seem to be more than the morally indifferent play of cause and effect. It would read as a succession of commentaries to the covenant. Its deliverances and exiles, sufferings and salvations, its sheer improbable persistence, would invite the adjective “miraculous.” The people of Israel would, in its own existence, bear testimony to the existence of God.

So the eternity of God is mirrored in the eternity of the Jewish people. The frightening sequence of curses at the end of the book of Leviticus ends with the verse, “Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject or abhor them so as to destroy them completely, breaking My covenant with them.”² The prophet Jeremiah declared, “This is what the Lord says, He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and the stars to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar – the Lord Almighty is His name: ‘Only if these decrees vanish from My sight,’ declares the Lord, ‘will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before Me.’”³

footnotes: ² Leviticus 26:44. ³ Jeremiah 31:35–36.

The faith of Israel cannot be summarised in a set of theological statements which might be true whatever happened in space and time. It is peculiarly tied to the physical existence of the people of Israel. Theological propositions normally resist falsification. They are ways of interpreting events; hence they are not given to refutation by events. But the central premiss of Judaism carries with it the risk of refutation. If there were no Jews, Judaism would have proven to be false. The survival of the Jewish people is the promise on which the entire covenant rests. An early rabbinic commentary put the point audaciously: “‘You are My witnesses, says the Lord, and I am God’ (Isaiah 43:12) – that is, if you are My witnesses, I am God, and if you are not My witnesses, I am, as it were, not God.”⁴ Psalms 123:1.

footnotes: ⁴ Midrash Tehillim to

Jews had faced inquisitions and pogroms before. They had even, in the book of Esther, known what it was to be condemned by Haman’s decision “to destroy, kill and annihilate all Jews – young and old, women and children – on a single day.”⁵ But redemption had always come, or if not redemption, refuge. In the Holocaust there was neither. Jews came face to face with a systematic programme of extinction.

footnotes: ⁵ Esther 3:13.

The demonic character of the Final Solution was not missed by Jewish thinkers. George Steiner has traced the intellectual progression from Nietzsche’s “death of God” to the planned death of the people of God.⁶ (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 29–48. Josef Mengele, the doctor of Auschwitz, openly joked that he had replaced God as the judge of “who shall live and who shall die.” Franz Stangl, the Treblinka Kommandant, insisted that pious Jews be made to spit on Torah scrolls, and that when they ran out of spittle more should be supplied by spitting into their mouths. In the ghettoes and camps, Jewish sabbaths and festivals were singled out for special actions of cruelty and extermination.

footnotes: ⁶ George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle

Emil Fackenheim has argued convincingly that the Holocaust eclipses all previous trials of faith.

The children of Auschwitz were tortured and murdered, not because of their faith nor despite their faith nor for reasons unrelated to the Jewish faith. The Nazis, though racists, did not murder Jews for their “race” but for the Jewish faith of their great-grandparents… At some time in the mid-nineteenth century, European Jews, like Abraham of old, brought a child sacrifice; but unlike Abraham they did not know what they were doing – and there was no reprieve. It is as if Satan himself had plotted for four thousand years to destroy the covenant between God and Israel, and had at last found the way.⁷ (New York: Schocken, 1978), 47.

footnotes: ⁷ Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History

The Shoah, then, did not simply raise six million times over the traditional question of theodicy: Why do the innocent suffer? It raised the ultimate question of Jewish existence. The covenant had promised that though individuals might be lost, the people as a whole would eternally survive. A Judenrein universe, a world free of Jews, would have refuted the ground of all Jewish hope from the days of Abraham. Not only the present and future, but the Jewish past too would have died.

So, for many years after the Shoah, the silence outweighed words. The questions were too painful to ask. It was as if, like Lot’s wife, turning back to look on the destruction would turn one to stone.

The search for explanation Nonetheless there were, even while the events were taking place, attempts to find theological meaning. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, one of the greatest representatives of the Eastern European yeshiva world, published a pamphlet setting forth the traditionalist response to catastrophe. Its title, “The Footsteps of the Messiah,” indicated its theme.⁸ (Jerusalem: E. S. Wassermann, 1963), 106–39. Jews were being punished for their sins. In the wake of the Enlightenment they had abandoned their holy destiny and pursued false gods. They had lost faith in providence and were turning instead to secular salvations: socialism, nationalism and Zionism. A momentous day of judgement was approaching, a period the talmudic sages had described as the “footsteps” or “birth pangs” of the Messiah. An early rabbinic teaching had portrayed this as a time when “insolence will increase, respect will diminish…the wisdom of the sages will decay, sin-fearing men will be despised and truth will be concealed.”⁹ 9:15. All these descriptions applied to the present. The suffering of Jews was a call from God to return to faith, the commandments and Torah study.

footnotes: ⁸ Reprinted in Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, Kovetz Maamarim ⁹ Mishnah, Sotah

Rabbi Wasserman remained true to his belief. Arrested by the Nazis in 1941, he went to his death with these words, addressed to those who were to be shot with him:

It seems that in Heaven we are regarded as righteous, for we are being asked to atone with our bodies for the sins of Israel. We must immediately repent, for the time is short… We must bear in mind that in truth we are among those who “sanctify God’s name” [the rabbinic description of martyrdom]. Let us go [to our deaths] with heads held high, and let us not, God forbid, have any improper thoughts, for an improper thought invalidates a sacrifice… The fire which will burn our bodies will be the fire that restores the Jewish people.¹⁰ (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1988), 26–27.

footnotes: ¹⁰ Reported by Rabbi Efraim Oshry, in Mordecai Eliav (ed.), Ani Maamin

But the traditional categories of punishment, sin, sacrifice and atonement came under increasing strain as the full implications of the Final Solution began to dawn on Jews. One writer reports a searing debate that took place in a synagogue in the ghetto on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. As the cantor pronounced the blessing, “Who has kept us alive, and sustained us and brought us to this time,” a pious Jew began to cry, “Lies, lies, it’s all lies.” A lapsed Jew, a former yeshiva student who had become an atheist, stood up and replied, “Jews, you know that I was a blasphemer, a mocker of Israel, a lost soul. And I tell you, yes, there is a God in Heaven. Here we have seen fulfilled the words of the prophets and their curses, all of which have fallen on us.” He opened the Torah and read: “And it shall come to pass if you will not hearken to the voice of the Lord your God, to take care to fulfil all His commandments and His statutes which I command you this day, that all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.”¹¹ But the pious Jew replied, “My teachers, you have heard that God destroys His people because of their sins. Isn’t it foolish to believe that? If this were a punishment from heaven because of our sins, why did all the rabbis, the pure and holy righteous ones who were full of Torah and good deeds, why did they die?”¹² (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1986), 3–4.

footnotes: ¹¹ Deuteronomy 28:15. ¹² Cited in Bernard Maza, With Fury Poured Out

It was not only that divine punishment failed to explain the deaths of the innocent, the children and the righteous. It also pointed in contradictory directions. For which sins was a generation being afflicted? The late Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, leader of the Chassidic community of Satmar and himself a survivor of Bergen Belsen, declared that the Holocaust was a punishment for Jewish political activism. The Jewish people had, according to the Talmud, taken an oath to wait patiently in exile until God Himself redeemed them. But secular Zionism had broken this promise by forcing the course of Jewish history and bringing a premature ingathering to the holy land. The Shoah was a punishment for Zionism.¹³New York: Jerusalem Publishing Co., 1959); Al ha-Ge’ulah ve-al ha-Temurah (New York: Jerusalem Publishing Co., 1967).

footnotes: ¹³ R. Joel Teitelbaum, Vayo’el Moshe (

An Israeli thinker, Menachem Hartom, pursued the same logic to its opposite conclusion. Throughout its history, he argued, the Jewish people had regarded exile as punishment, as not-being-at-home. That is, until emancipation. Then, for the first time, Jews argued that Europe was where they belonged. Some abandoned the hope for a return to Israel; others deferred it to a metaphysical end of days. For the first time Jews ceased to be Zionists. For this they suffered a devastating retribution. Germany, the country more than any other that Jews had worshipped, became the avenger. The Shoah was a punishment for anti-Zionism.¹⁴ 18 (Winter 5720/1961), 28–31.

footnotes: ¹⁴ Menachem Immanuel Hartom, “Hirhurim al ha-Shoah,” De’ot

Worse than this contradiction was the fact that traditional theodicy could be used, in Christian hands, to justify the concentration camps as punishment of Jews for remaining Jews. In 1948, a mere three years after the Shoah, a German Evangelical Conference met at Darmstadt. It proclaimed that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was the work of God. It issued a call to Jews to cease their rejection and ongoing crucifixion of Jesus. Genocide was the punishment for deicide.¹⁵ (New York: Ktav, 1977), 13 note 10. Nor was this sentiment restricted to Christians who approved of the Final Solution. The great Christian theologian Karl Barth, himself an opponent of the Nazi regime, wrote during the Holocaust that the fate of the Jews was testimony to the stark judgement of God. “This,” he wrote, “is how Israel punishes itself for its sectarian self-assertion.”¹⁶ (New York: Ktav, 1975), 43.

footnotes: ¹⁵ I owe this reference to Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Eva Fleischner (ed.), Auschwitz: Beginning of a new Era? ¹⁶ Karl Barth, “The Judgement and the Mercy of God,” in F. E. Talmage (ed.), Disputation and Dialogue

Such theodicy, as the Christian theologian A. Roy Eckardt has pointed out, inverts the values of God Himself. It fails to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. It comforts the comforted and afflicts the afflicted. Among those who died were 90 percent of East European Jewry, the last surviving strongholds of traditional Jewish piety. The machines of death indifferently consumed sages and saints, those who had devoted their lives to faith. More than a million children were gassed, burned, shot, tortured or buried alive. At some point the religious imagination rebels against adding to the evil of their death the indignity of saying that it was justified.

A broken covenant? Was Jewish faith, then, itself fractured by the Holocaust? There were thinkers who did not shrink from drawing this conclusion. Emil Fackenheim has argued that if the Holocaust is unique – and he has strenuously contended that it is – then it resists understanding through traditional categories. Because Judaism embodies a philosophy of history, it cannot make itself immune to “epoch-making events” which confront faith with experiences that it cannot fully assimilate. If we were to incorporate the Shoah into the narrative of Jewish history, as just one more chapter in the chronicle of exiles, destructions, inquisitions and pogroms of the past, we would be hiding from the singularity that made this experience like no other. The traditional hermeneutic of Jewish self-understanding is “ruptured.” After Auschwitz we can no longer speak of an unbroken continuity between the Jewish past and present.¹⁷ (New York: Schocken, 1982). Michael Morgan’s The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987), is a useful anthology of Fackenheim’s writings.

footnotes: ¹⁷ Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World

Irving Greenberg has drawn similar but more radical conclusions. May we, he asks, morally give voice to the old certainties of faith? “No statement, theological or otherwise should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”¹⁸ Believers and unbelievers alike are caught in a dialectical tension. We can no longer believe in God with a simplicity we once had. But having seen the brutalities of a demonic secularism, we can no longer not believe in God. We are condemned to oscillate between moments when the Redeemer is present, and moments when that vision is obliterated by memories of the blood and burning. Most strikingly, he has suggested that the very terms of the covenant have fundamentally changed. The mission to which God called the Jewish people turned out to be a suicide mission. Morally speaking, Heaven can have no further claims on the covenantal people. “If the Jews keep the covenant after the Holocaust, then it can no longer be for the reason that it is commanded or because it is enforced by reward or punishment.” It has become a voluntary covenant.¹⁹ (New York: National Jewish Resource Center, 1982).

footnotes: ¹⁸ Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” 23. ¹⁹ Irving Greenberg, Voluntary Covenant

But if faith is ruptured or momentary, why continue to have faith at all? One American Jewish theologian, Richard Rubinstein, drew the ultimate inference. If there is a God of history, he argued, we must see the Shoah as a punishment for sin. But there is no sin that could warrant the deaths of a million children. There can be no vindication of the ways of Providence. Therefore there is no God of history. For Rubinstein, an ancient heresy had been proved true: there is no justice and no judge.²⁰ (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).

footnotes: ²⁰ Richard L. Rubinstein, After Auschwitz

Few followed Rubinstein in his abandonment of faith. For even if a backward-looking explanation in terms of sin and punishment failed to do justice to the tragedy, there was another traditional approach, namely to look forward and attempt to understand the Holocaust not in terms of divine punishment but divine purpose. The Holocaust was not the end of the Jewish people. Three years later, a no less epic event took place, the creation of the State of Israel. Emerging from the shadow of death, Jews had returned to the promised land. And was this not precisely what the Torah had foretold? “When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations…then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you.”²¹

footnotes: ²¹ Deuteronomy 30: 1, 3.

The covenant had not been broken: it had been reconfirmed. To be sure, there were many different ways of understanding how. For some, the transition from exile to homecoming recalled the biblical model of the exodus. The twentieth century echoed ancient Egypt. There too there had been threatened genocide followed by redemption. For others it recapitulated the ending of the book of Job. Life had been taken away; now it was restored. These readings emphasised the divine presence in history. Others focused on the human response. The people of Israel had renewed its faith in the covenant by reconstituting its existence as a nation in the land of its beginnings.

The connection between the Holocaust and the State of Israel could be read in many ways, but that there was a connection seemed to many Jews inescapable. Jacob Neusner has spoken about Shoah u-gevurah or “Holocaust and [Israeli] heroism” as the decisive metaphor of contemporary Jewry.²² (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). This suggests that for the most part Jews have not discovered, in the events of the twentieth century, the meaninglessness of history or the shattering of the covenant. Instead they have found the meaning of the Holocaust in a wider historical context, in a narrative of exile and return.

footnotes: ²² See Jacob Neusner, Stranger at Home

More recently, others have discerned another narrative. For the Holocaust was followed not just by the return of Jews to the land of Israel but by a revival of religious observance and the study of Torah. Throughout the Jewish world there has been a renaissance of Jewish learning and of yeshivot, the traditional centres of study. Since the 1960s, too, there has been a movement among the young of teshuvah, journeying back to religious roots. Bernard Maza²³ (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1986). has suggested that the Holocaust be understood in this context and that the key biblical paradigm lies in the prophecy of Ezekiel: “You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world… But what you have in mind will never happen. As surely as I live, declares the Lord God, I will rule over you with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath.’”²⁴

footnotes: ²³ Bernard Maza, With Fury Poured Out ²⁴ Ezekiel 20:32–33.

The Holocaust drew Jews back to their religious destiny as a holy people after the ravages of assimilation. The talmudic sages in a similar vein had argued that the messianic age would be preceded by collective repentance, and if nothing else brought this about, providence would send a “ruler whose decrees will be as harsh as those of Haman” to bring Jews back to God.²⁵ 97b. What joins Maza’s reading to those that trace a connection between the Holocaust and Israel is the insistence that events disclose their meaning only in retrospect. Unlike those who speak of sin and retribution, they attach significance to what followed the Shoah, not what preceded it.

footnotes: ²⁵ Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin

The hiding of the face of God These views, ranging from affirmation to qualification or denial, turn upon a relatively straightforward view of the concepts of providence, punishment and divine action in history. However, the biblical and rabbinic literature is more nuanced and complex than these theologies suggest. This fact gave rise in turn to other approaches to the Holocaust.

One strand within rabbinic thought, for example, maintained that the problem of suffering is intrinsically unfathomable from a human perspective. In the mishnaic period, Rabbi Meir had said that Moses’ request to understand the ways of providence was denied by God.²⁶ 7a. Maimonides argued that the message of the book of Job was that there was an unbridgeable distance between God’s governance of the universe and human understanding.²⁷, 3:23.

footnotes: ²⁶ Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot ²⁷ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed

This in itself would not amount to an approach to suffering, but to it was added a deep tenacity of faith. A famous talmudic passage tells of how a group of rabbis, witnessing the devastation of Jerusalem and the ruins of the Temple, started to weep. Rabbi Akiva, however, comforted them, saying that the fact that the prophecies of destruction had come true was itself a guarantee that the prophecies of consolation would also come true.²⁸ 24a–b. To have faith in the midst of tragedy is to see it pointing, however obscurely, toward future redemption.

footnotes: ²⁸ Babylonian Talmud, Makkot

In this way, rabbinic Judaism learned to keep its mourning within bounds. The Talmud recalls a dialogue between R. Joshua and those who, grief-stricken at the destruction of the Temple, refused ever again to enjoy life. He said: “My sons, come and listen to me. Not to mourn at all is impossible, because the blow has fallen. To mourn overmuch is also impossible, because we do not impose a hardship on the community which the majority is unable to bear.”²⁹ 60b. We may not deny evil, but neither may we be overpowered by it.

footnotes: ²⁹ Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra

These themes are brought together in Michael Wyschogrod’s penetrating critique of Emil Fackenheim’s Holocaust theology:

The God of Israel is a redeeming God: this is the only message we are authorised to proclaim, however much it may not seem so to the eyes of non-belief. Should the Holocaust cease to be peripheral to the faith of Israel, should it enter the Holy of Holies and become the dominant voice that Israel hears, it could not but be a demonic voice that it would be hearing. There is no salvation to be extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can be revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can be found in it. If there is hope after the Holocaust, it is because to those who believe, the voices of the Prophets speak more loudly than did Hitler, and because the divine promise sweeps over the crematoria and silences the voice of Auschwitz.³⁰ 20:3 (Summer 1971), 293–94.

footnotes: ³⁰ Michael Wyschogrod, “Faith and the Holocaust,” Judaism

A second axis of Jewish thought stressed not the inexplicability of suffering but the centrality of human responsibility and free will. This implied a paradoxical notion of divine power. God, as it were, withdraws from the arena of human action to allow scope for human choice. In giving man the freedom to choose to be good, He necessarily gives him the freedom to do evil. God teaches us what goodness is. But He does not intervene to force us to do one thing or refrain from doing another. As Maimonides put it, God sometimes changes the course of nature, but never of human nature.³¹, 3:32.

footnotes: ³¹ Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed

This was no abstract principle. It had tragic implications, and these were reflected in a series of remarkable rabbinic interpretations of scripture in the wake of the Roman destruction of the second Temple. The mishnaic teacher Abba Chanan, for example, paraphrased the verse “Who is a Mighty One like You, O Lord?” (Psalms 89:9) to read, “Who is like You, mighty in self-restraint? For You heard the blasphemy and the insults of that wicked man [Titus], but You kept silent!” In the school of R. Ishmael, the verse “Who is like You, O Lord, among the mighty [elim]?” (Exodus 15:11) was amended to read, “Who is like You, O Lord, among the silent ones [illemim]?”³² 42b; Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 56b. God sees the suffering of His children and yet remains mute. Divine might consists precisely in a willingness to leave the stage of history to human freedom. Strength is self-restraint, and true power the renunciation of power. But because of this such tragedies as the destruction of the Temple can take place. Human freedom is conferred at a terrible price, but there is no alternative.

footnotes: ³² Mekhilta

Eliezer Berkovits chose this line of approach to the Holocaust. Seen in the religious context of freedom and responsibility, it tells us not about God but about man. ³³ (New York: Ktav, 1973); With God in Hell (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1979). For Berkovits, Auschwitz represented the moral disintegration of Western civilisation. It was the culmination of centuries of theologically inspired hatred of Jews as the bearers of God’s word. It disclosed what had always been present as a possibility: that men might choose ultimate evil. But it also revealed, at the same time, that in the face of ultimate evil individuals might choose ultimate good. Those Jews who went to their deaths “sanctifying the name of God” reached the highest possible religious affirmation. He who faces death because of his faith stands alone with God. “If at this moment he is able to accept his radical abandonment by God as a gift from God that enables him to love his God with all his soul, ‘even when He takes his soul from you,’ he has achieved the highest form of kiddush ha-Shem [sanctification of God’s name].”³⁴, 81.

footnotes: ³³ Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust ³⁴ Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust

The Holocaust taught the terrible vulnerability of those who believe that true strength is the renunciation of strength, but at the same time it revealed the awesome power of a faith that could not be murdered by the most systematic assault on it ever undertaken. The Jewish people is the “suffering servant” of God. It is the living witness to God’s presence in history. The attempt to eliminate the people of God was an attempt to eradicate the presence of God from the human situation. The fact that after Auschwitz the Jewish people still lives and can still affirm its faith is the most powerful testimony that God still lives.

Yet another dimension of Jewish thought spoke about the divine withdrawal from history not as a timeless feature of human freedom but as a specific phase in the history of the covenant. The Torah speaks of the “hiding of the face” of God. But it does so in a particular context, namely the exile of Jews from their land. From the opening chapters of Genesis to the closing speeches of Deuteronomy, human transgression is seen in terms of dislocation, moral and physical. Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden. Moses warns that if the children of Israel sin they too will be exiled. This in turn deepens the alienation between man and God, until man experiences God in His absence, not His presence. “Then My anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and I will hide My face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall come upon them, so that they will say in that day: ‘Are not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’ And I will surely hide My face in that day…”³⁵

footnotes: ³⁵ Deuteronomy 31:17–18.

Seen in this light, divine providence is not a timeless concept but part of the narrative of the unfolding of the covenant. When the people Israel is faithful to the divine word it lives securely in its land and experiences the providence of God. At such times one can speak of divine reward and punishment. But when it abandons God it is sent into exile which is not punishment as such but something worse, the withdrawal of providence. God “hides His face.” The moral distinction between these two states of affairs was spelled out by the medieval Jewish philosophers. When God punishes, He punishes only the guilty. But when He withdraws His providence, he “leaves man to chance,” in Maimonides’s phrase. At such times even the innocent may suffer, for tragedy is then the result not of divine but of human action. Exile is the absence of providence.

This had been the fate of the Jewish people. Only when constituted as a nation in their own land were their affairs governed by direct divine reward and punishment. Sent into dispersion with the destruction of the second Temple, Jews were handed over to the mercy or mercilessness of the nations with only this promise to console them: that a remnant would survive, and surviving, return to God and their land.

Traces of such a view are to be found in the writings of Maimonides, Nachmanides, Gersonides and Abarbanel between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and they have been tentatively explored in a post-Holocaust context by Rabbis Joseph Soloveitchik and Norman Lamm.³⁶ (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1979), 37. Norman Lamm’s are contained in his The Face of God: Thoughts on the Holocaust (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1986). From this perspective the Shoah was not the acting-out of a possibility of evil always latent in the human situation, but a kind of denouement of exile. The subsequent creation of the State of Israel, though not in any way a compensation for or redemption of the Holocaust, nonetheless marked the beginning of the end of that long chapter of Jewish homelessness. With the recreation of Jewish national life, not only Jews, but as it were God Himself, had re-entered history.

footnotes: ³⁶ R. Soloveitchik’s views are briefly set out in Abraham Besdin, Reflections of the Rav

Each of these strands in Jewish thought might be described as rationalist. But there were also profoundly mystical traces in the rabbinic literature. According to one talmudic passage, in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, God Himself wept and lamented, “Woe to Me for I have destroyed My house, burned My temple and exiled My children.”³⁷ 3a. Implicit in the idea of a personal God is the concept of divine pathos. God suffers in the suffering of man. Throughout the prophetic and rabbinic literatures there is a constant tension between God‘s justice and His compassion. Justice may require punishment, but God is with those who are punished and grieves with them. Exile may be decreed, but God’s presence is with His children even in exile.

footnotes: ³⁷ Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot

These sentiments received remarkable expression in mystical writings of Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro during the Holocaust itself. Imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto where he died in 1943, Rabbi Shapiro continued to deliver discourses to his disciples which he committed to writing and subsequently buried so that they would not be discovered and destroyed by the Nazis. They were eventually discovered and published under the title Esh Kodesh, “The Fire of Holiness.” In them he develops to the full the idea of divine weeping and pain. Because God is infinite, His sufferings are infinite and threaten to overwhelm the world. Drawing on rabbinic texts, Rabbi Shapiro speaks of a hidden place where God retreats to mourn in secret, for were a single tear of divine weeping to enter the world, evil could no longer exist. “This explains why the world remains standing on its foundation and was not destroyed by God’s cry of suffering over the afflictions of His people…because His great suffering never penetrated the world.” But just this fact of divine pathos means that man is not alone in his afflictions. Through the highest mystical striving, he can commune with God in the secret chamber of weeping. In the midst of evil, God mourns the fate of man and man mourns the fate of God.³⁸ 7:3 (October 1987), 253–70.

footnotes: ³⁸ Nehemiah Polen, “Divine Weeping: Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro’s Theology of Catastrophe in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Modern Judaism

These views testify to an important feature of Jewish thought, namely that not all theology of suffering is theodicy, an attempt to explain evil in terms of divine justice or providence. Because Judaism is a religion of morality and history, it has been absorbed by the problem of evil at every stage of its development. The sufferings of the righteous form the leitmotiv of prophetic and rabbinic reflection. But a religious response does not necessarily take the form of an explanation, let alone an explanation that presupposes insight into divine actions and intentions. Wyschogrod, Berkovits, Soloveitchik and Shapiro articulate different aspects of a faith that endures the paradox of a world in which evil is real and inexplicable and yet where God can be discerned and addressed.

The most profound expression of this faith is in the book of Job, where God speaks to a sufferer of pains he has not deserved in the form of questions, not of answers. Underlying these questions is a rejection of the idea that the world was created to yield to the devices and desires of man. Faith is not certainty but the courage to live with and for God in the presence of uncertainty and to hear the voice of God even in the heart of the whirlwind.

One writer on the Holocaust records that in his researches he met a rabbi who had been through the camps and who miraculously seemed unscarred. He could still laugh. “How” he asked him, “could you see what you saw and still have faith? Did you have no questions?” The rabbi replied, “Of course I had questions. But I said to myself: if you ever ask those questions, they are such powerful questions that God will send you a personal invitation to Heaven to give you the answers. And I preferred to be here on earth with the questions than in Heaven with the answers.” That too is theology of a kind, with roots deep in the biblical tradition.

Holocaust and halakhah But there was a further Jewish response to suffering, different in kind from those we have considered. It was best expressed by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who discerned two different stances through which evil could be experienced, one passive, the other active. Man suffers: he is an object to whom things happen. But he also acts: he is a subject through whom things happen. As object, he asks “Why has this happened?” As subject, he asks a quite different question: “What then shall I do?” The two stances generate two views of history, asgoral and ye’ud, fate and destiny. The first, in which man-as-object seeks to understand what has happened to him, has its place in Jewish thought as we have seen. But the second, in which man-as-subject seeks to discern how to act, is characteristic of what Soloveitchik sees as the primary mode of Jewish consciousness – halakhah or Jewish law. The halakhic personality refuses to be transformed by tragedy from subject to object. Instead it asks: “What shall the sufferer do to live in the midst of his suffering?”³⁹ (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organisation, 1981), 9–16.

footnotes: ³⁹ Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “Kol Dodi Dofek,” in Divrei Hagut ve-Ha’arakhah

In this context the most striking literature to have emerged from the Holocaust is not theological but halakhic: the considered rulings of Jewish law given by rabbis in the ghettos and concentration camps in response to never-before-imagined questions.⁴⁰, (New York: Ktav, 1976); Robert Kirschner, Rabbinic Responsa in the Holocaust Era (New York: Schocken, 1985). May a father purchase his son’s escape from the ovens, knowing that the quotas will be met and another child will die in his place? May a Jew in the Kovno ghetto recite the morning benediction, “Blessed are you, O Lord, Who has not made me a slave”? How should one celebrate Passover, the festival of freedom, in a concentration camp?

footnotes: ⁴⁰ See, for example, Irving J. Rosenbaum, The Holocaust and Halakhah

Over one who uninterruptedly studies God’s word, said the rabbis, even the angel of death can win no victory. Rarely can this proposition have been more poignantly vindicated than among the pious Jews of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen Belsen who discovered that even there the word of God was not silent. It had an awe-inspiring resonance.

One particular example is worthy of attention. On 29 October 1941, 30,000 Jews assembled from the Kovno ghetto to face selection for death. One of those present, Reb Elya, posed a question to a rabbi among the crowd, Rabbi Ephraim Oshry. What is the correct form of blessing to be said on going to one’s death for the sanctification of God? The rabbi considered two possible textual variants and gave his ruling. Reb Elya then went through the crowd teaching others the correct form of the blessing over martyrdom. In the presence of the Gestapo two Jews, disciple and teacher, were able to stand discussing the Talmud, concerned that the moment of death be dedicated to Heaven by the precise words of blessing.⁴¹, 61–8.

footnotes: ⁴¹ Rosenbaum, The Holocaust and Halakhah

Judaism had had its chronicles filled with martyrs before. But death then had held the dignity of choice. In the early Middle Ages Judah Halevi had remarked that throughout the religious persecutions of the past Jews could “escape degradation by a word spoken lightly,” but they refused to do so. What made the Holocaust different was that for the first time Jews had no choice. Yet by insisting on making a blessing over a death that seemed to defy all meaning, Reb Elya was making an ultimate affirmation. There is no point at which evil can turn man from subject to object, no situation which cannot be the occasion of a religious act.

Survival and redemption But there is one final theme in Jewish thought whose invisible presence is crucial to an understanding of post-Holocaust Jewish history. In this case, though, let us approach it obliquely through a dialectical encounter between modern theology and an historic moment.

It was in 1967, in the weeks surrounding Israel’s Six-Day War, that an extraordinary transformation took place in Jewish sensibilities. In the anxious weeks before the war, with Israel surrounded and apparently abandoned, facing the threat of being driven into the sea, it seemed as if a second Holocaust was in the making. It was then that the memory of the first, so traumatic for two decades, broke through with terrible force, in the form of an imperative: never again.

Israel’s sudden victory released a flood of messianic emotion. For some it seemed as if the beginning of redemption had arrived. When the mood subsided a deeper sense began to form: that the State of Israel was a powerful Jewish affirmation of life, a determination never again to suffer the role of victim. Virtues which had long been at the heart of Judaism in exile – powerlessness, passivity, martyrdom, trust – had been overthrown. They now seemed, in retrospect, to be unwitting compliance in genocide. A quite new way of speaking about the Holocaust began to emerge.

Its most articulate spokesman was Emil Fackenheim, and he gave the mood of the moment its most famous expression. The Shoah was not to be understood. But it was to be responded to. Auschwitz yielded a command. Fackenheim invoked the traditional concept of the 613 commandments that constituted biblical Judaism. There had now been added a 614th command: “The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.”⁴², 22.

footnotes: ⁴² Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History

The imperative was Jewish survival as such. He explained: “I confess I used to be highly critical of Jewish philosophies which seemed to advocate no more than survival for survival’s sake. I have changed my mind. I now believe that in this present, unbelievable age, even a mere collective commitment to Jewish group-survival for its own sake is a momentous response, with the greatest implications.” It was, he said, “a profound, albeit as yet fragmentary, act of faith in an age of crisis to which the response might well have been either flight in total disarray or complete despair.”⁴³ Fackenheim spoke to a new Jewish consciousness. There was a sense, shared by many, that the universalist vision that had driven Jews of the nineteenth century to “normalise” the Jewish situation was over. Jews had been singled out by the Final Solution, not for what they did or what they believed but for what they were. Israel itself had become isolated in the Middle East. A biblical phrase first uttered by the prophet Balaam suddenly came to seem an inexorable fate. Israel was “a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations.”⁴⁴

footnotes: ⁴³ Ibid., 21–22. ⁴⁴ Numbers 23:9.

Only after 1967 could this be seen as something other than a tragic fate. The State of Israel’s victory, her determination to survive and the intense involvement of Jews everywhere in her fate, all combined to place Jewish peoplehood and survival at the centre of the religious drama. It was as if, by re-entering history and exercising power, Jews had exorcised the ghosts of powerlessness. Successfully emerging from a second trauma they could at last articulate their thoughts about the first.

But there was a further stage in the dialectic. In the twenty years since Fackenheim’s commandment to survive, it has become clear that not all sectors of the Jewish world have heeded its call. In the Diaspora, Jewish birthrates fell to below-replacement levels. The momentum of assimilation has accelerated. Intermarriage rates have risen. Frustrating Hitler has failed as an effective rationale for Jewish survival.

One group of Jews, though, has obeyed Fackenheim’s command to the letter. They have had children in great numbers. They have rebuilt their lost worlds. They have proved themselves the virtuosi of survival. The irony is that they are a group who would deny the entire basis of Fackenheim’s thought. They are the ultra-religious, for whom piety, not peoplehood, is the dominant value, and to whom secular survival is not Jewish survival at all.

There is a point at which theology has direct bearing on demography. Fackenheim has written poignantly about what it means to have Jewish children after the Holocaust. More than a million children died, not because of who they were but because of who their grandparents were. “Dare we morally raise Jewish children,” asks Fackenheim, “exposing our offspring to a possible second Auschwitz decades or centuries hence? And dare we religiously not raise Jewish children, completing Satan’s work on his behalf?” He adds, “My soul is aghast at this impossible choice, unprecedented in the annals of faith anywhere.”⁴⁵, 48.

footnotes: ⁴⁵ Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History

But in this last statement Fackenheim is significantly mistaken. The Talmud records that just such a dilemma was faced by Jews in the second century CE, having experienced the destruction of the Temple, the brutal suppression of the Bar Kochba rebellion and the Hadrianic persecutions. A statement in the name of Rabbi Ishmael reads: “From the day that a government has come to power which issues cruel decrees against us and forbids us to observe the Torah and its commands…we ought by rights to bind ourselves not to marry and beget children, with the result that the seed of Abraham our father [the Jewish people] would come to an end of its own accord.”⁴⁶ 60b. This haunting passage tells us that there were profoundly religious Jews like Rabbi Ishmael who believed that on rational grounds one should not bring Jewish children into a world which had experienced nightmare. But Rabbi Ishmael added that were this to be issued as a ruling it would not be obeyed, for the faith of ordinary Jews transcends logic.

footnotes: ⁴⁶ Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra

Does this mean that it is an irrational faith? The rabbis implicitly posed the question elsewhere in the form of a projected dialogue between two biblical figures, Amram and his daughter Miriam, at the time of Pharaoh’s decree that every male Israelite child should be cast into the river and drowned.⁴⁷ 12a. Amram and the other Israelite men, according to rabbinic tradition, thereupon divorced their wives and refused to have children. Amram’s daughter protested. The decision, she said, was worse than Pharaoh’s decree. It condemned both boys and girls. It deprived them of both this world and the next. Amram relented and he and his wife had a son: Moses. The implication is clear. From faith comes redemption. Trust in the future is neither rational nor irrational. Rather it is, in crisis, the critical test of religious courage.

footnotes: ⁴⁷ Babylonian Talmud, Sotah

Against the backdrop of falling Jewish marriage and birthrates Orthodox Jews, in particular those of the Chassidic and yeshiva communities, have dedicated themselves after the Holocaust to having large families. This is surely not unrelated to the fact that they, above all, adhere strenuously to the traditional tenets of Jewish faith. They deny absolutely Fackenheim’s claims that the Holocaust is a novum in Jewish history, that it reveals a new 614th command, and that after the Shoah Jews are bidden to survive for survival’s sake. Precisely because the dilemmas raised by the Holocaust are not unprecedented, they invite the classic response of Jewish faith, namely to have trust in the future and to bring it into being.

Again we are reminded of the book of Job. Job, having heard God in the whirlwind, recovers faith, though it is a faith without answers. The book then ends with a concluding chapter in which Job’s fortunes are restored. At the beginning Job’s sons and daughters died. At the end, he has new sons and daughters. To some readers this epilogue had seemed unconvincing, as if Job’s sufferings could be unwritten by a happy ending. To a post-Holocaust generation the epilogue is disclosed in its full profundity. Job has no answers, but he has been lifted beyond his personal tragedy by the knowledge that he can still speak and be spoken to by God. This gives him the strength to go on living and have children after catastrophe.

That is the kind of faith manifest in traditionalist responses to the Holocaust. Rather than engaging in theological reflection on the Holocaust, the survivors of the Chassidic and yeshiva communities of Eastern Europe concentrated on having children to replace a lost generation and rebuilding their shattered townships and institutions in Israel and America, as if to say that death is redeemed only in new life.

The word “redeemed” brings us finally to the concept that has lain just beneath the surface of our discussion: the resurrection of the dead. Early rabbinic Judaism did not formulate principles of Jewish faith. Its energies went into the articulation of law, not dogma. Nonetheless a Mishnah rules that one who denies the resurrection of the dead has no share in the world to come.⁴⁸ The Mishnah goes further and rules that one who denies that the resurrection of the dead is derived from the Torah has no share in the world to come. This was, for the rabbis, an indispensable requirement of belief. Necessarily so, for Judaism was predicated on the idea of divine justice, yet the sages lived in a world from which it seemed to be absent. Halakhah rejected the mystical idea that evil, stripped of our veil of ignorance, would turn out to be good in disguise. To be sure, this idea is present in Judaism. But Jewish law rules that though one must pronounce a blessing over evil as well as over good, they are not the same blessing.⁴⁹ 9:2, 5. The fact of evil could not be denied. If there was justice, it lay in the future. But the existence of divine justice was the faith on which Judaism staked its very being. Therefore if anything was certain, it was that a time would come – in the form of the messianic age or the resurrection of the dead – in which the moral dislocation of the world would be righted. The past would be redeemed.

footnotes: ⁴⁸ Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:1. ⁴⁹ Mishnah, Berakhot

Whether we speak of the individual birth of Jewish children or the collective rebirth of Israel as a nation, the strongest metaphor to emerge in the wake of the Holocaust is that of resurrection. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s dying words have not ceased to reverberate, that “The fire which burns our bodies will be the fire that restores the Jewish people.” Another rabbi, Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal, shortly before his murder in Auschwitz in 1944, wrote in a similar vein. “Now if we shall arise and ascend to Zion we can yet bring about a tikkun [‘mending,’ restitution] of the souls of the people Israel who were murdered as martyrs since it is on their account that we are being stimulated to return to our ancestral inheritance… Thus we bring about their rebirth.”⁵⁰, 255.

footnotes: ⁵⁰ Quoted in Fackenheim, To Mend the World

To the biblical paradigms of the “suffering servant” of Isaiah and the book of Job must therefore be added the vision of Ezekiel who witnessed a valley of dry bones and saw them come to life again: “Then he said to me: Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off. Therefore prophesy and say to them, This is what the Lord God says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel.”⁵¹ This too has been part of the Jewish experience after the Holocaust. The messianic age has not come. The past has not been redeemed. The cries of the victims still haunt the Jewish imagination. But a kind of rebirth has taken place, nonetheless, and with it the start of the “mending” of a broken world.

footnotes: ⁵¹ Ezekiel 37:11–12.

Renewing the covenant An analysis of contemporary Jewry and Judaism must begin with the Holocaust because in it, the covenantal people came face to face with the possibility of its own extinction. It took several decades before theologians felt able freely to articulate their thoughts about it. In some circles, silence is still felt to be the best, perhaps the only, response.

The Holocaust reveals to the full the problematic nature of the religious interpretation of history. It has not yielded a single meaning but a vast multiplicity, of which only a narrow range has been touched on here. In the absence of prophecy there are no such things as events which carry with them their own interpretation. And yet Judaism must continue to wrestle with the problem. For one of its primary expressions is narrative: telling the story of the covenantal people through time. Judaism is not simply a faith. It is a faith embodied in a particular people, the way of life it lives and the path it takes through the complex map of history.

Reflection on the Shoah reveals two significant facts about contemporary Jewish existence. The first is the absence of a shared set of Jewish meanings which alone might have allowed the Holocaust to be incorporated into collective Jewish memory. For the religious believer, the Holocaust confirms his faith; for the unbeliever it confirms his lack of faith. For the radical it creates a novum in history; for the traditionalist it recalls earlier catastrophes. For the pietist it testifies to God’s suffering presence in the world; for the secularist it proves His absence. These variant readings have shown no tendency to converge over time.

The fundamental divide is between those who see the Holocaust as an unprecedented event which shatters our previous understanding of the covenant, and those who insist that the covenant survives intact even in the valley of the shadow of death. Those who take the first view see Yom ha-Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, as a seminal addition to the Jewish calendar, a turning point in history. Those who take the second see the Holocaust as a new dimension in an ancient grief, such as that expressed on the ninth of Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temples.⁵² (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 314–72.

footnotes: ⁵² For a discussion of this controversy, see Irving Greenberg, The Jewish Way

It is important to understand that the ambiguity of the Holocaust is not a feature of the event itself. It is a feature of the pre-understandings that different thinkers bring to it. For many centuries, from the destruction of the second Temple to the threshold of European emancipation, Jews shared a broad framework of belief that allowed them to understand their present situation, why it had come about and to what it eventually would lead. They were in exile because of their sins, and one day they would return to their land. That shared framework, which experienced stresses from the Spanish expulsion onwards, finally collapsed in the nineteenth century. Those who held to traditional beliefs were now not Jews tout court, but a subsection of the community known to their critics as “Orthodox” Jews. The multiplicity of responses to the Holocaust testifies to the still fragmented nature of Jewish consciousness, which lacks a common language through which a people might reflect on its fate. This preceded the Holocaust itself and has persisted since.

But the second fact is in sharp contradistinction to the first. For the Shoah confronted Jews with an inescapable reminder that though they might not share a common language, they shared a common fate. The Final Solution made no distinctions between Jews. The assimilated half- or quarter-Jew from Vienna or Berlin was cast into the same camp with the pious talmudist from Vilna and the bearded mystic from Berditchev. Jews had different self-definitions. But they were subject to the same other-definition. They might not see themselves, but they were seen by others, as members of the same people.

That fact has significantly shaped post-Holocaust Jewish awareness. The sense of being a people apart and alone, held together in a collective destiny and exercising collective responsibility, has grown. Its focus is the land and state of Israel, symbol and reality of the Jewish determination never again to be homeless, powerless victims. Israel, the land and state, has brought in its wake intractable problems, political, military and ethical; and over these, too, Jews have been divided. But this does not detract from its centrality in Jewish life worldwide. Nor is this a political proposition only. It is in its own right a theological proposition, albeit a controversial one. For the Bible and all subsequent Jewish thought had seen in the return of Jews to their land a new chapter – perhaps the ultimate one – in the covenantal story.

Jewish responses to the Holocaust, then, reveal not only the divisions that still exist in Jewish thought but also a new impetus towards unity: towards a clear and collective sense of peoplehood. For what is striking is that Jews of all kinds, religious and secular, have responded to their threatened destruction with a fierce determination to survive. “I will not die, but I will live,” says the Psalm,⁵³ and that has been the Jewish response to the journey through the valley of the shadow of death. There may be no common understanding of the Jewish destiny, but there at a common conviction that it must be continued. Faced with its eclipse, the Jewish people has reaffirmed its covenant with history. The story of contemporary Jewry begins with what in retrospect is a not unremarkable fact: that the people Israel lives and still bears witness to the living God.

footnotes: ⁵³ Psalms 118:17.