Because Jewish and Christian monotheism has traditionally held that God is omnipotent and benevolent, it has always had to explain the existence of evil and the suffering of the innocent. This is the problem of “theodicy,” which came into especially sharp focus in the wake of the Holocaust. Some Jewish thinkers have argued that the only response to the Holocaust is to declare the death of God. Others see the Holocaust as one more in a long line of historical traumas that Jews should address by traditional means. Still others see the Holocaust as something unique in history and, thus, demanding new approaches to the problem of evil. For many in this latter group, including some Christians, the effort to defend God intellectually is misguided. They argue that the appropriate response is to explore how Jewish and Christian traditions can support practical responses to evil and suffering.
Outline
I. World War II, and particularly the implacable demand placed on thought by the Holocaust, radically changed religious thought, but where the post-World War I generation raised new suspicion about human possibilities, human reason, and human progress, after the Holocaust, religious thinkers were forced to ask questions about God.
II. Theological efforts to explain evil and give an account of God’s justice go under the name of “theodicy.”
A. Traditionally, the biblical God is a God who is benevolent and omnipotent, that is, all-good and all-powerful.
1. How could such a God allow the presence of evil in the world? In particular, how could God allow‘ apparently innocent people to undergo horrendous suffering at the hands of others?
2. Theodicy tries to show how evil -- moral and natural -- is in some ways part of God’s plan.
B. These kinds of questions were being asked by Christians, Jews, and critics of religion long before the Holocaust; indeed, one can read the Hebrew Bible as an extended series of reflections and confrontations with such questions.
C. Jewish and Christian thinkers have grappled with the question of theodicy and have produced answers that can be divided into five general categories.
1. Thinkers of the past and still today hold to the idea that suffering is punishment for sin.
2. The free-will defense of God argues that God created human beings with free will and, thus, the ability to do evil because a world with human freedom is better than one without.
3. A third approach is to view suffering as somehow redemptive in the sense that it makes us better people or that it is a test that serves to draw us closer to God. Thus good comes out of evil.
4. A fourth paradigm for thinking about theodicy is what we might call “eschatological”: Essentially, all suffering will end and God will vanquish his enemies, the evil ones, at the end of time.
5. Finally, thinkers often invoke God’s mystery as a way of saying that we can’t always understand why certain things happen even though we should have faith that it all fits into a plan and turns out for the best.
III. The kinds of senseless, wasteful, and horrendous sufferings that Dostoevsky confronts us with at the end of the 19th century are only magnified when we consider the Holocaust.
A. One of the things we need to consider even before talking about the religious responses is the problem of being able to acknowledge and confront what happened.
1. Primo Levi claimed that the only ones who truly witnessed the Holocaust in all its evil were its victims.
2. But he also says that it remains imperative to resist the inevitable process of forgetting, to keep in front Of us the Stark and terrifying thought that human beings can do this kind of thing to one another.
3. Levi’s perspective has also been articulated by the Christian thinker R. M. Brown in the preface he wrote to Elie Wiesel’s Night.
B. Responses to the Holocaust are wide-ranging.
1. Richard Rubenstein argues that after the Holocaust, Jews must acknowledge that the God of their traditions is dead: There is no defense for the Holocaust.
2. Some argue that the Holocaust, though obviously a great evil, is not qualitatively different from other tragedies of Jewish or human history and that traditional resources of the Jewish tradition for dealing with questions of evil are adequate.
3. Eliezer Berkovits proclaims the traditional Jewish notion of Kiddush ha-shem, which refers to the maintenance of faith and its proclamation even in the most terrible of circumstances.
4. Emil Fackenheim argues that the attempt to fmd an explanation for the Holocaust is blasphemous. Nonetheless, a voice speaks from Auschwitz that issues the 614th commandment: that the Jewish people should survive as a people who keep their covenant with God.
IV. In some ways, Fackenheim gives up the project of theodicy and, instead, focuses on resisting evil and on the ways in which our relationship to God can be part of this resistance.
A. This is also a response taken by a number of Christian thinkers to the Holocaust and the problem of evil more generally. They argue that theodicy intellectualizes and generalizes evil and, thus, cannot focus on the concreteness of particular evils.
B. In this view, we take a more practical approach to the question of evil, using the resources of the Christian and Jewish traditions to resist evil and respond to those who are suffering. One Christian example of such an approach is the so-called “political theology” that emerged in Germany after World War II.
V. We see a trajectory taking shape in these responses to the Holocaust. From the conceptual effort of classic theodicies, we end up with the practical effort to bear with, witness, and resist human evil. From the conceptual distance of theological and philosophical reflection, we move to political engagement with the world.
Suggested Reading:
Berkovitz, “Faith after the Holocaust” in A Holocaust Reader.
Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History.
Leaman, Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy.
Rubenstein, After Auschwitz.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are two traditional approaches to the problem of theodicy?
2. What does Fackenheim mean when he refers to the 614th commandment?
Lecture Twenty-Eight -- Transcript
Post-Holocaust Theology
Over the past few lectures, I’ve mentioned a couple of times that the trauma of World War I radically changed Jewish and Christian thought-leading both of them to more sober, suspicious, and God-centered theologies. World War II, and particularly the implacable demand placed on thought by the Holocaust, also radically changed religious thought. But where the post-World War I generation raised new suspicion about human possibilities, about human reason and human progress, after the Holocaust religious thinkers were forced to ask questions about God. In the face of the Holocaust, can any kind of recognizable biblical God be defended? This is the question I want to explore in this lecture. I’ll start with a general discussion of what Christian theologians have called “theodicy,” the theological effort to defend God’s justice in the face of evil and suffering. I’ll devote the rest of the lecture, then, to exploring responses to the Holocaust in terms of this idea of whether God can be defended after something like this. I’ll consider the fundamental, pre-theological question of how we witness and remember the Holocaust, and then I’ll discuss a range of theological responses, Jewish and Christian, to the Holocaust.
The word “theodicy” comes from the Greek-theo for God, dike for justice-and generally refers to the effort to give a conceptual account of God’s justice. The basic issue is this: Traditionally, the biblical God is a God who’s benevolent and omnipotent -- that is, all-good and all-powerful. This is the God of the covenant who promised to bless Abraham’s heirs, to bring the Jews to the “Promised Land.” This is the God who sent his only Son to die for the sins of humankind, according to Christians. How could this God allow the presence of evil in the world? How could this God create human beings who could commit acts of evil that most of us can barely imagine? Perhaps even more incomprehensible, how could a God allow the apparently innocent to undergo horrendous suffering at the hands of evil people or in events of seemingly random accidents or natural disasters?
Theodicy is the effort to answer this question-to show how evil and the suffering that results from that evil is, in some sense, part of God’s plan; to show that evil and suffering in some understandably way fit into a scheme of things consonant with the workings of Divine Providence. The term “theodicy” was first used in the late 17th century by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, who argued that God created this world after deciding which of all the possible worlds contained the maximum of perfections and the minimum of defects. After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Voltaire satirized Leibniz in his play Candide with the ridiculous professorial character, Pangloss -- who in the midst of destruction, and death, and horrific suffering continues to explain to Candide that this is, still, the best of all possible worlds. Of course, Christians and Jews had been grappling with the question of evil long before the 17th century, all the way back to the dawn of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible -- which we can read as an extended series of reflections on this question.
We’ve already rehearsed the story: God leads the Jews out of slavery and reaffirms his covenant with Abraham: “Worship me, and you will be my chosen people, and I will bring you to a land of milk and honey. This seems to work for a while. God brings them to Canaan. They establish the kingdom of Israel, and they build the Temple. But then things go wrong. There is political dissension. There is exploitation and injustice. There is conquest at the hands of Assyria and Babylon, and the destruction of the Temple, and the exile so one way to read the Hebrew Bible is to see it as the story of a people who are constantly breaking their covenant with God and being punished for it. On this reading, the Torah itself is a kind of theodicy. It's an explanation of how God could have allowed such terrible things to happen to the Jews based on the idea that suffering, and the suffering of the Jews, is the punishment for their having sinned. So, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, would be instruments of God’s punishment on this reading.
Of course, this is one dominant way that both Christians and Jews have understood theory suffering as punishment for sin, but this theodicy, this way of explaining suffering, has its limits. How for instance, do you understand the suffering of innocent people? Should we assume that when innocent people suffer that they must have done something to deserve it? This problem is perhaps most famously addressed in the Bible’s book of Job where God allows Satan to visit all sorts of terrible sufferings on Job -- who, we learn at the very beginning of the book, has long been favored by God for his righteousness.
So, all sort of terrible things are visited on poor Job -- loses his land, his family; he’s afflicted with awful skin diseases. Throughout all of these trials, Job is complaining to his friends, saying that he hadn’t done anything. He couldn’t understand why this was happening to him-where his friends, often referred to as “Job’s comforters,” uphold this punishment paradigm; that is, they all insist “Well, look, this has happened to you. You must have done something. You must be a sinner.” Job continues to protest: “No, I’m not.” The story seems to recognize the limits of this punishment paradigm, for in the end, we’re not really given an explanation for why human beings suffer -- we’re only given a somewhat frustrating sense of the mystery of God’s ways. So, there’s no easy answer in the story of Job to why Job had to suffer.
Beyond the Bible, Jewish thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria in the first century C.E., and Maimonides in the 12th century, and Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas, grappled with questions of evil and suffering from philosophical and theological perspectives. We can identify five very general sorts of answers that thinkers from these traditions have produced in thinking about this problem. The first-as we’ve seen, and this is, again, a major biblical paradigm for theodicy -- centers on the idea that humans suffer as punishment for their sins. Despite the problem of innocent suffering, this response is still to be found among religious thinkers today-even to the extent that some very few Jewish rabbis have attributed the sufferings of the Holocaust to Zionism, which they see as un-bibilical since, on their reading of the Bible, Jews are only supposed to recover their homeland after the coming of the Messiah.
A second powerful paradigm for defending God’s justice is the so-called “free-will defense,” which basically argues that God created human beings with free will, because a world with human freedom is better than one without. Thus, human beings are free to commit acts of evil, and such evil cannot be attributed to God. We can still think on this paradigm, even in the midst of great human evil, of God as all-powerful and all-good. This has been a dominant approach to theodicy in the Christian tradition, going back to Augustine, and it’s also played an important role in Judaism.
At least two questions can be raised about this approach. The first is that it does not help us to understand why innocent people suffer due to accidents or natural causes. It also forces us to ask whether human freedom is worth the immense amount of evil and suffering that has taken place during human history. Is such a world really better than the alternative worlds an all-powerful, all-good creator could have created? What about a world with free will, in which humans were created in a way that they remain in harmony with God and are not driven to commit acts of evil?
A third approach is to view suffering as somehow redemptive in the sense that it makes us better people or that it serves to draw us closer to God. In both cases, the idea is that somehow good comes out of evil. Along these lines, one explanation of the Holocaust is that it created the conditions that made possible the establishment of the state of Israel. A variant on this approach can be traced back at least to Irenaeus, a Christian bishop of the second century and what some have called his “soul-making theodicy.” This is the idea that God creates us with the potential-but not the full capacity -- for a free, loving relationship with God -- and that human history, including human efforts to understand evil and suffering, is a process in which human beings are being formed and are forming themselves into creatures who have such a relationship with their God. By this reasoning, God could have created the world without evil, but wanted us to come to freedom and perfection on our own -- so placed us in an ambiguous, difficult world, where we would come to know ourselves and God through our own efforts, but, of course, some of these efforts would be misguided and would result in great evil.
A fourth paradigm for thinking about theodicy we might call “eschatological” -- that is, having to do with the end of time. Essentially, all suffering will end, and God will vanquish his enemies-the evil ones -- at the end of time. In some respects, this is a variation on the punishment paradigm -- though it adds the idea that those who may have suffered innocently will be rewarded with eternal bliss in the end.
Finally, a fifth way of thinking about theodicy is that some thinkers will invoke God’s mystery, his incomprehensibility, as a way of saying that we can’t always understand why certain things happen -- even though we should have faith that it all fits into a plan and will turn out for the best. There are at least a couple of things to notice about these strategies. First, the approach I just mentioned-which we can refer to as “mystery” -- and to some extent the eschatological approach, the fourth approach that I mentioned, do not really explain why evil exists or why the good suffer, but only reassert that God does have a plan for it all. So, these are marginal kinds of theodicies, they’re not really explanations. The other responses all also depend on the idea that God has a plan, but do try to give us some insight into how this plan works-why things have to be as difficult as they are. All of them, then, want to fit evil and suffering into a kind of divine economy -- whereby evil and suffering are necessary for God’s purposes.
But then we might ask ourselves: What kind of God is this? Even if we grant that there needs to be some challenge to human beings to enable them to develop into genuinely virtuous and religious creatures, does this necessitate the vast amount of evil and suffering the human race has inflicted upon itself and experienced. This idea of the utter wastefulness of human suffering was expressed especially vividly by the Russian novelist Dosteovesky in his towering work The Brothers Karamazov. There, Ivan Karamazov; explains to his brother Alyosha, a novice monk, why he can't accept what he takes to be the Christian perspective on suffering. Ivan focuses particularly on what he regards as innocent suffering and offers as examples graphic accounts of children being abused and tortured.
Rejecting a version of the soul-making theodicy, Ivan says: I'd rather not know about their damned good and evil than pay such a terrible price for it.” He rejects the eschatological approach to theodicy as well, which he describes as the idea that when it all ends the scales will be removed from our eyes, we will experience divine harmony, and we will all just cry out: “Thou art just, O Lord.” Ivan has this to say about that scenario:
I have no wish to be part of their eternal harmony. Its not worth one single tear of the martyred little girl who beat her breast with her tiny fist, shedding her innocent tears and praying to “sweet Jesus” to rescue her [and this is one of the scenes that he had related to his brother a few minutes ago]. ... It’s not worth it, because that tear will have remained unatoned for. And those tears must be atoned for; otherwise there can be no harmony. But what could atone for these tears? How is it possible to atone for them?”
There is no atonement as far as Ivan’s concerned, nothing that Could make up for what happened to these children, no explanation -- and so as far as he’s concerned, the world is not created by a good and loving God, but is, as he puts it: “founded on absurdities.”
These kinds of senseless, and wasteful, and horrendous sufferings that Dostoevsky confronts us with at the end of the 19th century or that led Barth and Rosenzweig to rethink theology after World War I, they’re only magnified when we consider the Holocaust. In Germany, which along with France had been the very heart of the Enlightenment, this turn to reason, the resources of modem rationality and technology were harnessed for the murder of whole groups of people. The Jews were the major target of this extermination, and the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish thought was enormous; 6 million of the 12 million murdered were Jews -- this was one-third of the Jewish population of the world; 90 percent of eastern European Jews were murdered; 80 percent of all the rabbis in the world were murdered.
One of the things that we need to consider even before talking about religious responses to these events is the problem of actually being able to acknowledge and confront the events. What does it mean to be a witness to the Holocaust? In 1997, the novelist and essayist Cythia Ozick wrote an article in the New Yorker magazine entitled “Who Owns Anne Frank‘?” In this piece, Ozick questioned the uses of Anne Frank’s diary as a so-called Holocaust document-and especially the use of Frank’s famous line where she wrote: “I continue to believe that all people are truly good at heart.”
Has this diary, Ozick asks, been used in a way that allows us to come away from this encounter with the Holocaust without really thinking about Anne Frank’s actual death in the camps? Are we so inspired by Frank’s faith in humanity that we aren’t able to really dwell on the meaninglessness of the suffering in the camps? The Italian writer Primo Levi has reflected deeply on this issue in his writing. He claimed that the only ones who truly witnessed the Holocaust in all its evil were the victims that were murdered by the Nazis. Nonetheless, he says, it is still imperative for those, like himself who survived the camps to witness and so resist the inevitable process of forgetting-a process that goes on even in and through our efforts to remember. So Levi writes:
the gap that exists and grows wider every year between things as they were “down there” and things as they are represented by the current imagination fed by approximative books, films, and myths. It slides fatally toward simplification and stereotype.
“We are prone,” Levi goes on to say, “to assimilate [the experience of the victims] to related ones, as if the hunger in Auschwitz were the same as that of someone who has skipped a meal.” The point for Levi is not to explain the Holocaust, but to keep in front of us the stark and terrifying thought that human beings can do this kind of thing to each other--and, maybe to push it even further, that sometimes evil can win. This perspective has also been articulated by the Christian thinker Robert McAfee Brown, who in the preface he wrote to one of the most harrowing books about the Holocaust -- Elie Wiesel’s Night -- writes about the need to linger with Wiesel on what Brown describes as “his painful journey through the darkness,” and then Brown goes on to say this:
But we must not make the journey too quickly. We must linger with this starting point and not rush on too soon, seeking relief from its horror. How long must we linger? An eternity, perhaps -- Wiesel’s chronometer for measuring the time between Auschwitz and the first emergence of hope. Those who hope for hope -- after an eternity -- are entitled to do so only if they have measured that which has the power to obscure hope, only if they have lived in the shadow of utter denial.
In the face of such principled, resolute, courageous witnessing, and in the face of the denials of hope and even of God that such witnessing forces us to consider, how can Jewish or Christian thinkers make some sense of the God who, it seems, did not or could not intervene? The answers to this question have been varied, and I’ll begin with some Jewish responses. One well-known response was offered by Richard Rubenstein in his book published in 1966 called After Auschwitz. There, Rubenstein argued that after the Holocaust, Jews and Christians must acknowledge that the God of their traditions is dead. Rubenstein states: “To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, anti-human explosion of all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purposes.” Rubenstein, for one, refuses to do this. He goes on to argue that such a refusal does not entail the end of Judaism, but rather the beginning of a Judaism without God. He thus answers the question of theodicy by saying there is no defense for the Holocaust and that we must give up God. There is no God’s justice.
Many other Jewish thinkers, of course, don’t go this route. Of them, we can distinguish between those who on the one hand think that the Holocaust, though obviously a great evil, is not qualitatively different from the other tragedies of Jewish history or of human history for that matter; and then on the other hand those who argue that the Holocaust is unique. It is a kind of explosion as Rubenstein puts it: “the most demonic, anti-human explosion of all history.” So, it is, in this sense, unique.
But for those who do not see it as unique say traditional resources of Judaism for dealing with questions of evil are adequate. One example of this approach is Eliezer Berkovits. He proclaims that traditional Jewish notion of Kiddush Hashem, which refers to the maintenance of faith and its proclamation even in the most terrible of circumstances. If we think about the Holocaust in the context of Jewish history, we see that while it is quantitatively different in the number of people affected, it’s not qualitatively different -- that even the death of a single innocent child, to allude back to Dostoevsky, brings up the same problems as the Holocaust.
Berkovits brings up another traditional notion -- heater panim, which means “hiding his face” to point to the idea that sometimes God mysteriously hides himself and thus allows evil things to happen. Essentially, this is a version of the free-will defense of God, because, for Berkovits, it is this hiding of God that allows human beings to act freely, and so to be moral creatures. Even further, he argues, in cases like the Holocaust, Jews -- both martyrs who died and those who remain and come after -- serve as witnesses of the role of God in history, even if this role is to sometimes remain hidden. Jews suffer so as to make God’s reality manifest -- and this, for Berkovits, is one reason Hitler sought to exterminate them.
An example of a thinker who argues for the uniqueness of the Holocaust is Emile Fackenheim. For him, one of the major elements of this uniqueness is that the evil of the Nazis was not pursued for some greater end, but for its own sake. Fackenheim presents cases of Nazis inflicting terrible forms of suffering just for the sake of increasing the suffering. Thus, he says, there can be no adequate explanation and that, indeed, the attempt to find an explanation for the Holocaust is blasphemous. Fackenheim writes that Auschwitz is “the rock on which throughout eternity all rational explanations will crash and break apart.”
So, Fackenheim’s approach is not to explain the evil, but rather to argue that Jews must respond to the Holocaust by refusing to grant Hitler a posthumous victory. He says that a commanding voice speaks from Auschwitz, indeed, a voice that has issued what he describes as the 6l4th commandment to the Jewish people -- which is that they should survive and, and here he is in opposition to Rubenstein, they should survive as a people who keep their covenant with God. One of the changes that Fackenheim thinks needs to be made is that Jews should not simply see themselves as those who suffer to make God’s Work in the world visible, but should be active in resistance to evil.
He invokes the idea of tikkun, which means “mending,” to talk about the role of Jews as resisting the evil in the world. For him, the new state of Israel is important for playing this role. Fackenheim looks to examples of those who actively resisted the Nazis during the Holocaust to argue that we see in such resistance signs of a new way of being for Jews -- divine signs, as it were, that are God’s way of telling the Jews to embark on a new role in history.
Fackenheim’s response is an interesting one on a number of levels, but one thing I want to emphasize here, and we’ll take up also in our next lecture, is that, in essence, Fackenheim gives up the project of theodicy. His approach to the Holocaust does not focus on explaining evil or acquitting God, but rather focuses on resisting evil and on the ways in which our relationship to God can be part of this resistance. This approach raises questions that we cannot deal with adequately here, such as: What kind of God is this that we relate to -- is it no longer an omnipotent God who can intervene in situations of great evil? Indeed, some post-Holocaust theologies have, in fact, suggested that we can no longer think about God as omnipotent.
But what I want to pursue here a little bit more is that Fackenheim’s response is also one that has been taken by a number of Christian thinkers in their reflections on the Holocaust and on the problem of evil more generally. So, the contemporary Christian thinker Kenneth Surin, for example, has argued that the project of theodicy is fundamentally misguided, because what it does is intellectualize and generalize evil. It is an abstract intellectual exercise rather than a real response to real evils. So, Surin argues that we should be taking a more practical approach to the question of evil -- using the resources of the Christian and Jewish traditions to resist evil and to help those suffering from it, rather than seeking to defend God or seeking to console ourselves that, in fact, our theism is still coherent.
One Christian example of such an approach is the “political theology” that emerged in Germany after World War II and is associated with Christian thinkers such as Johann Baptist Metz and Jurgen Moltmann. Both Metz and Moltmarm criticized Christian thinkers for having failed to deal adequately with the question of the Holocaust. Metz’s response was to construct a theology around the recovery of and the concrete memory of, those who suffered in the Holocaust. As we saw in Levi and in Fackenheim, Metz is arguing for the necessity of keeping alive the depths of suffering that were experienced -- and, in some sense, insisting that Christians need to participate in this suffering. For Metz, as a Christian, this suffering with follows the pattern of Christ’s suffering with humanity on the cross. As such, it can serve as a position of critique and resistance to current forms of evil and the forgetting of those who suffer.
We see a trajectory taking shape in these responses to the Holocaust. We see a move from the conceptual effort of classic theodicies to a practical effort to bear with, witness, and resist human evil. We move from the conceptual distance of theological and philosophical reflection to political engagement with people in the world. We’re going to see this similar response to evil and suffering in the next lecture, when we deal with liberation theology, and we’ll see there that the effort to deal with questions of evil and suffering takes another step in this direction towards practice in the world.
