Faith after destruction

ROBERT MERMELSTEIN

This is the continuation of a series coordinated by the Isaac Waldman library and the Independent, featuring community members reviewing books they’ve recently read.

Wrestling with God has been a challenge and responsibility that has kept Jews and Judaism alive and thriving since its origin. From Abraham to Job and from Jacob to Zvi Kolitz, Jewish thinkers have been confronted with the dilemma of evil in the world in the face of an all-powerful God.

Following in that tradition, Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman and Gershon Greenberg, the editors of Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press), assembled from the writings of 44 authors, a monumental nearly 700-page volume. These contributions are organized into three broad sections of responses during and after the Second World War: ultra-Orthodox, Israeli, and European and American.

Each section is introduced by one of the editors and each contribution is preceded by brief biographical information and an overview of the author. The volume is extensively annotated and this carefully edited book is likely to appeal most to academics and rabbis whose most powerful instrument is a retro-spectroscope, providing the full spectrum of theological responses from Jewish sources to those who ask: Where was God? How could He have allowed such a catastrophe to occur?

Jews in exile have been oppressed, persecuted and tolerated for 2,000 years, since the destruction of the second Temple. The destruction of European Jews in the 20th century shook the faith of the few who survived. Survivors’ reactions vary across the spectrum, from reconfirming their faith, to the abandonment of their Jewish identity. Jews in the United States responded to the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel through a strengthened political identity, political action and diminished religious observance.

Several responses from Orthodox sources on the Holocaust point to assimilation and a lack of observance as an explanation for the suffering Jews experienced. They have not, however, explained why pious Torah observant Jews experienced the same fate as their non-practicing neighbors. Others, like Jospeh Isaac (Y.Y.) Schneerson, suggested that the magnitude of the disaster was an indication that redemption was imminent. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, in his book Man is Not Alone, that a “hiding God” forsakes his people only after they turn away from Him.

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Britain, in his essay, The Holocaust in Jewish Theology, provides a chronological description of Jewish history and commentary, devoting considerable space to the arguments of two prominent rabbis: Yoel Teitelbaum (the Satmar Rebbe) and Yitchak Hutner (Agudat Israel). According to Teitelbaum, the Holocaust was the punishment for the sins of the Jewish people, with Nazi Germany as the instrument of God’s anger. Teitelbaum wrote that, according to a passage in the Talmud, the Jewish people had taken an oath not to rebel against the nations of the world in their exile and not to hasten the end of dispersion by premature attempts to regain the land of Israel; as long as Jews lived passively in exile, the nations were bound by an oath not to oppress them excessively. Teitelbaum states that the Zionist movement was a “rebellion of unprecedented dimensions against God.” It captured the imagination of religious Jews and, more importantly, Teitelbaum wrote, it shattered the terms of Jewish existence in the Diaspora.

Hutner disagrees with the premise that the Holocaust was solely the product of Christian Europe. He refers to meetings between Nazi officials and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and attributes Zionist pressure in Palestine as the cause of the mufti’s turn against the Jews.

Perhaps the most inspiring essay is that by Zvi Kolitz: Yossel Rakover Talks to God. Kolitz wrote this famous article for a Yom Kippur issue of a Yiddish newspaper a couple of years after the Holocaust. In this work, set during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, a Holocaust victim engages in a dialogue with God regarding his fears, doubts and accusations. He remains ultimately faithful to God despite all that has happened to him, his family and his people. “You, my wrathful God.... You have done everything to make me renounce You, to make me lose my faith in You, but I die exactly as I have lived, a believer!”

There are innumerable essays and books dealing with the experiences and memories of survivors recounting the terrible events that engulfed them, their families and communities, and how they managed to survive and regain their humanity and faith. I would hope that each survivor might find some hope and consolation from at least one of the essays in this volume.

Abraham’s words, pleading with God, cry to the nations of the world: “Is it worthy of You to act in this manner, to put to death the righteous with the wicked.... Shall the Judge of all the earth not act justly?”

Dr. Robert Mermelstein is a child survivor of the Holocaust.

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