THE SILENCE OF GOD

On a wall in a cellar in Cologne, Germany, where Jews had hidden from the Nazis, there was found an inscription. The anonymous author who perished with his fellow victims left behind these words: "I believe in the sun even when it's not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when He is silent."

Of all the difficulties Jews had to endure during the Holocaust, perhaps the hardest of all was the apparent absence of God. Jews cried, and their Creator did not seem to hear. Jews prayed and there was no response. Jews died al kiddush Ha-shem, sanctifying the name of the Lord with their last breath on earth, and the heavens only responded with silence. How could the Jews continue to believe? Is it conceivable for a compassionate God and the concentration camps to co-exist?

"Is There a God After Auschwitz?"

The wonder is not that there were Jews who lost their faith in Auschwitz. Far more remarkable is the fact that many Jews continued to cling to their faith and maintain their belief in their divine Ruler of the Universe. After the war, Richard Rubinstein pronounced God dead in his daring work, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. He pointedly asked the question that would remain to this day the single greatest challenge to the monotheistic faith that the Jews had championed since their father Abraham:

I believe that the greatest single challenge to modern Judaism arises out of the question of God and the death camps. How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz? Traditional Jewish theology maintains that God is the ultimate, omnipotent actor in the historical drama. It has interpreted every major catastrophe in Jewish history as God's punishment of a sinful Israel. I fail to see how this position can be maintained without regarding Hitler and the S.S. as instruments of God's will. The idea is simply too obscene for me to accept.

How, then, has God survived in the face of this rational onslaught? To believe that the Jews suffered as punishment for sin is indeed brutal insensitivity compounded by ignorance. It is, as Jewish theologians have suggested, destroying European Jewry yet one more time, besmirching these Jews after their death even as they were degraded and murdered in life.

Jews have been able to maintain their faith because the Holocaust affirmed a fundamental belief of Judaism that makes religion all the more necessary. The Holocaust proved the failure of man, not the failure of God. In giving man free will, the option to do either good or evil, God effectively ties His own hands to prevent humankind from becoming merely puppets. What the world witnessed in the 1940's was how low it could sink when it forsakes ethics and law, and that moral conscience is the greatest gift of the Jews to mankind. Far from delegitimating God, the Holocaust made clear that without Him and His teachings, the earth could not survive.

from: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History and Culture," pp. 263-264, by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, Alpha Books, New York, 1999

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