But if you do not obey the Eternal your God to observe faithfully all the commandments and laws that I enjoin upon you this day, all these curses shall come upon you and take effect…
The Eternal will make pestilence cling to you, thus putting an end to you in the land that you are entering to possess. The Eternal will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew; they shall hound you until you perish. The skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you iron. The Eternal will make the rain of your land dust, and sand shall drop on you from the sky, until you are wiped out. The Eternal will put you to rout before your enemies; you shall march out against them by a single road, but flee from them by many roads; and you shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.
Devarim 28:15, 20-25
When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I heard about a Jewish woman in Amsterdam who had spent years in Auschwitz Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka. She had been completely secular before the Shoah, but afterward, she became observant and deeply religious.
I had just read the classic work After Auschwitz, by Richard L. Rubenstein (1924-2021), a reform rabbi and an important theologian.[1]
His argument was devastating: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks describes it as follows: The attempt to give meaning to the Shoah leads to madness. Believing in the Jewish God requires that we see the Holocaust as an act of God and as a punishment for sin. But no sin, however bad, could ever justify the immense cruelty that befell the Jewish people in the Holocaust.
To accuse God of this would be the greatest chilul Hashem, the desecration of His name.
Rubenstein argued that there is only one way out of this dilemma: We must conclude that God is absent from history. Quoting Jewish Tradition describing heresy: he wrote. Leit din ve-leit dayan, there is no justice and no judge.[2]
Rubenstein may have been a kind of Spinozist in declaring that history is meaningless: “Omnipotent nothingness is Lord of all creation.”[3]
At the time, this argument made absolute sense to me. There is no way I could believe in the God of history after what happened in the Shoah.
That is, until I met this lady in Amsterdam.
A challenge to my certainty
I was shocked and upset when I heard that she had become religious after Auschwitz. How could that be?
What did she know that I did not know?
So, I went to see her.
After I accused her of believing in religious madness, she sat me down and said the following words to me:
Young man, never use the Holocaust to argue that God does not exist. I was there and you were not. And I can tell you that God was always with me in the concentration camps and even in the gas chambers. In the most miraculous ways, He pulled me through and saved my life. I met the angel of death tens of times and I constantly escaped him. It was completely absurd and inexplicable.
There is no rational explanation for this. And anybody who tells me that God does not exist is mad.
I do not know why others were not saved. I do not know why I was saved and not the others. But when the Holocaust was over, and I returned to Holland and realized what had happened, I felt such deep gratitude that I decided to become religious.
So, you, stop arguing that God does not exist. If you continue to do so, you are a liar and a hypocrite.
Well, this was perhaps the greatest accusation I ever received. It was a shock and a spiritual blow from which even today, I have not recovered.
In fact, it completely threw me off my equilibrium.
The question remains
Still, I could not make peace with what she had said. It terrified me. Why did the others not survive? What kind of God is this Who saves one person through open miracles but lets millions perish?
Anyway, I could not deny that the series of miracles that this woman described made my whole argument highly problematic. I never used it again, because it felt dishonest. Even if I were to argue that these miracles were mere coincidence, my argument was severely compromised.
What could I do when I, who had never experienced the Holocaust, was accused by a Holocaust survivor of telling a lie and being a hypocrite?
And so the question changed: Assume that God exists, but what kind of God is this?
Consequently, I started to read every book on the Holocaust that I could get my hands on, by great Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers. And what I found was fascinating.
For truly secular thinkers, there was no problem. Most of them did not even discuss it. They followed in the footsteps of Richard Rubenstein: There is no God. The world is an accident. There is no meaning to it. Omnipotent nothingness is Lord of all creation. So why even have a question about the Holocaust and the justice of God?
The biblical figures, however, such as—Avraham, Moshe, Yirmiyahu, Iyov—dealt with the question head-on, and so did the sages of the Talmud and later Jewish thinkers. All of them asked God why bad things happen to good people. But not one of them got a satisfactory answer!
Self-contradictory answers
Several important thinkers in recent times suggest mutually contradictory answers. The famous Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, (1887-1979) and Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner (1906-1980) argued, each in his own way, that secular Zionism taught Jews to reject Judaism, and this was responsible for God’s fury.[4]
Others argued that what lead to the Holocaust was the Jews’ eagerness to assimilate and their refusal to move to Israel when it became possible.
Neither of these arguments satisfied me, although I cannot deny that, at first glance, our parasha (and the one in Vayikra 26) clearly describes something akin to the Holocaust if Jews fail to observe the covenant given to them at Sinai.
But even in the days of the Torah, what could be so bad as to justify such a punishment??
Eli Wiesel argued that the evil done was so great and so absurd that it could not have been possible without God’s help. He described the Shoah as a kind of revelation, a demonic counterpart of the revelation at Sinai. Just as the Israelites at Sinai “saw and trembled and stood far off” (Shemot 20:15), so do we today when thinking of the cruelty at Auschwitz.[5]
But then I had the realization that the problem with these arguments is that they are all from the perspective of human beings attempting to understand God’s ways.
Spinoza famously said: “I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the Divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.” [6]
We first place God under the constraints of our minds, and then we ask our questions. But this is all wrong.
I am reminded of the statement of the prophet Yeshayahu (55:8) speaking in the name of God: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts nor My ways are your ways, says the Lord.”
What does this mean?
The other side of the Persian carpet
One way of looking at it was suggested by Rabbi Joseph Behr Soloveitchik[7], in his book Kol Dodi Dofek:
To understand God requires of us precisely what we cannot do.
It is like seeing a Persian carpet from underneath. All we see is a mess of disconnected threads without any logic, pattern, or purpose. It is all a huge clueless jumble.
But when we see the carpet from the other side, we see a beautiful, integrated design.
So it is with the Holocaust. We human beings are on the ground looking up. We cannot see the point of view of God, Who is looking down.
While this does not give us a complete answer, it does suggest that we are looking in the wrong direction and are not able to see what the Holocaust was really all about.
This is as far as I have come. It may be of some help when we read the curses in our parasha, and look back on how they have all come true.
Perhaps this is what the lady in Amsterdam was trying to tell me: You see the clueless jumble; I see the carpet.
Notes
[1] Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), esp. 61-81
[2] Vayikra Rabbah 28:1.
[3] Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 81.
[4] See Joel Teitelbaum, Vayoel Moshe (New York: Jerusalem Publishing Co., 1959); Yitzchak Hutner, “Holocaust—A Study of the Term and the Epoch It Is Meant to Describe,” The Jewish Observer 12, no. 8 (October 1977): 3-9; and Menachem Immanuel Hartom, “Hirhurim al ha-Shoah,” Deot 18 (Winter 5722/1961): 28-31.
[5] Jonathan Sacks attributes this formulation to Elie Wiesel, citing Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, 1978), 53. See Jonathan Sacks, “The Holocaust in Jewish Theology,” in Tradition in an Untraditional Age (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1990).
[6] Baruch Spinoza, Letter 56 to Hugo Boxel (1674).
[7] Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Kol Dodi Dofek, trans. David Z. Gordon (New York: Yeshiva University, 2006), section “The Righteous Suffer.”
