H7: Responses to Holocaust

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Introduction

For almost twenty years after WW2, Holocaust survivors
spoke little about what they had experienced. The memories
were too painful and the thought of publicly relating them was too appalling. The world was sick of war and people wanted only to repair their lives. Thoughts were focused on building the future, not digging up and facing the past. When finally the silence was broken and the horror of the camps was revealed, the tidal wave of emotion was too overwhelming to propose any clear explanation of what had happened. Silence was more appropriate than words.

Only in the last few decades have Jewish thinkers begun to wrestle with the challenging questions raised by the Final Solution: How could so called 'modern civilization' have allowed the concentration camps? Where was humanity in Auschwitz? Where, too, was God? To think that He was there seems blasphemous, to imagine that He was not, even more so. How could the God of Life sanction so much death? This chapter addresses these difficult issues.

The Living Covenant

One approach to these issues is to say that they are essentially no different than the classic question: "why do the innocent suffer?". The death of even one child being as much a crisis for religious belief as the Holocaust. But this approach misses an essential feature of Jewish belief.

Judaism is not really a religion. It is more about sharing a covenant with God than about blindly obeying His will. Judaism speaks of a faithful relationship with God, not a simple faith in God. In the Torah, God chose to associate His name with Abraham and his descendants. The recognition of God is thus bound up with the fate of the Jewish people. Their existence is a testament to the existence of God. Whereas religions are based on a set of beliefs that are true no matter how many people adhere to them, Judaism is dependant on history. If there were no more Jews then Judaism would have proven to be false. The survival of the Jewish people is the promise on which the entire covenant rests. Says God: "If you are My witness, then I am God; and if you are not My witness, then I am, as it were, not God." (Midrash Tehillim 123:1)

So the Holocaust does not just ask the question: "Why are innocent people killed?" six million times. The fact that the Nazis brought the Jewish people to the brink of extinction means that the living covenant, the very heart of Judaism, was itself challenged. What, indeed, is Judaism after the Holocaust?

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