"Where was God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood in Auschwitz last week. "Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"
It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them Jews. "In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. "In the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?"
News reports emphasized the pope's question. Every story noted that the man who voiced it was, as he put it, "a son of the German people." No one missed the intense historical significance of a German pope, on a pilgrimage to Poland, beseeching God for answers at the slaughterhouse where just 60 years ago Germans broke every record for shedding Jewish blood.
And yet some commentators accused Benedict of skirting the issue of anti-Semitism. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League said that the pope had "uttered not one word about anti-Semitism; not one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews." The National Catholic Register likewise reported that he "did not make any reference to modern anti-Semitism."
In truth, the pope not only acknowledged the reality of Jew-hatred, he explained the pathology that underlies it. Anti-Semites are driven by hostility not just toward Jews, he said, but toward the message of God-based ethics they first brought to the world.
"Deep down, those vicious criminals" -- he was speaking of Hitler and his followers -- "by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world."
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| Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first destroyed Judeo-Christian values. | |
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The Nazis' ultimate goal, Benedict argued, was to rip out Christian morality by its Jewish roots, replacing it with "a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful." Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first destroyed Judeo-Christian values. In the Thousand-Year Reich, God and his moral code would be wiped out. Man, unencumbered by conscience, would reign in his place. It is the oldest of temptations, and Auschwitz is what it leads to.
"Where was God in those days?" asked the pope. How could a just and loving Creator have allowed trainload after trainload of human beings to be murdered at Auschwitz? But why ask such a question only in Auschwitz? Where, after all, was God in the Gulag? Where was God when the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was God during the Armenian holocaust? Where was God in Rwanda? Where is God in Darfur?
For that matter, where is God when even one innocent victim is being murdered or raped or abused?
The answer, though the pope didn't say so clearly, is that a world in which God always intervened to prevent cruelty and violence would be a world without freedom -- and life without freedom would be meaningless. God endows human beings with the power to choose between good and evil. Some choose to help their neighbor; others choose to hurt him. There were those in Nazi Europe who herded Jews into gas chambers. And there were those who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Gestapo.
The God "who spoke on Sinai" was not addressing himself to angels or robots who could do no wrong even if they wanted to. He was speaking to real people with real choices to make, and real consequences that flow from those choices. Auschwitz wasn't God's fault. He didn't build the place. And only by changing those who did build it from free moral agents into puppets could he have stopped them from committing their horrific crimes.
It was not God who failed during the Holocaust or in the Gulag, or on 9/11, or in Bosnia. It is not God who fails when human beings do barbaric things to other human beings. Auschwitz is not what happens when the God who says "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" is silent. It is what happens when men and women refuse to listen.
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look at history - G_d is waiting for us to open the door
People have looked at the Holocaust and asked "Where was G_d?" The painful truth is that it took a holocaust to make us start asking where G_d was. G_d wants to be part of our daily lives, part of our homes, synnagogues and study halls, schools, offices.. in fact He wants to be truly, vividly and personally included and involved everywhere Jews go. G-d's wish is to be able to be with every Jew at every moment. What does this mean? It does -not- mean merely paying lip-service or merely having religious symbols, yes even mitzvot. It means living in a way that G-d feels happy to live with you so that G-d does not feel exiled, pushed away. The mitzvot are certainly a foundation for this - keeping the positive mitzvot and even more so avoding the prohibitions such as dishonesty in business and immodesty etc. But wonderfully there are further degrees possible in this with the perfection of actions, speech, thought and emotions and Jewish unity which can enable increasing degrees of G-d living with you in your house with your family. Look back in Jewish history to the times of the Temples, to the times of Tanach, G-d definitely made His presence very obvious amongst us then with clearly obvious miracles such as the plagues of Egypt, daily miracles in the Temple and the overnight slaying of an enemy army of 185,000 outside the walls of Jerusalem. But those are just some of the 'big' miracles. Many numerous small miracles also took place for individuals to the detais of clouds spot watering their crops and the already harvested grain abundantly increasing in granaries. It was very clear exactly where G_d was in those times. So really, the question "Where was G-d in the Holocaust" is part of a much bigger important and life-changing question - "Where was G-d in the many hundreds of years since the destruction of the first Temple?". The answer I suggest is that we need to radically alter our thinking. We have been used to thinking that we were exiled from our Temple, our land and our G-d. I suggest the exact opposite is true - it was us who exiled G-d from our lives, and the destruction of the Temples, and all the tragedies that followed were consequences of that exiling of G-d. And yes that includes the Holocaust for it was no different from the other tragedies only more recent, and better documented. The glorious past of Temple times when there were open miracles amidst peace and prosperity and the tragedies of the recent past should instruct us. If you think about it, this is the most important lesson there is in life. The lesson is - when G-d feels able to live amaongst us us then abundant blessings and miracles follow, and when G-d was exiled by us then we suffered horribly bitterly and terribly lo aleinu. The Kotzker Rebbe zt'l summarised this concept beautifully - "Where is G-d? Wherever you let Him in."
(2) Anonymous 5/21/2007 10:36:00 PM
G-D Controls The World Not Hitler
As religious Jews we believe that Hashem controls the world not bechirah where G-D enabled us to choose. I'm not arguing on the concept of free will, however I am crying out in the name of G-D - some more on can't kill six million Jews because he's not a puppet, - as you put it. God reigns and always will. Come up with a knew answer to explain g-d's ways. Nice try anyways.
(3) Anny Matar 4/21/2007 12:11:00 PM
not convincing
A pope who thinks of sanctifying Pope Pius a well known supporter of Hitler isn't a man I can trust even if he were to speak of present anti semitism (it's not modern anti semitism it's as old as we are). Christianity promoted that hatred so let them not accuse others they did it themselves (read Paul Johnmson's A History of the Jews to get your answer