Responses to the Holocaust

Overview

Recall questions on Rubenstein and the death of G-d, Fackenheim and the 614th commandment, Maybaum's churban, Berkovits and Hester Panim, Job in post-Holocaust thought, Orthodox responses, whether any theological response can succeed, and anti-Semitism since the Holocaust.

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Questions from this subtopic

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1. 1

   What does Richard Rubenstein mean by the death of G-d?

   Model answer

   Rubenstein argued that after Auschwitz the G-d of history, who chooses a people, acts in events and rewards and punishes, can no longer be affirmed. His reasoning is that if such a G-d exists and is in control, then Auschwitz was in some sense his doing or his permission, and the only orthodox way to account for it is the punishment model, which he regarded as blasphemous towards the dead. Rather than defend that G-d he declared the belief itself finished, saying that we live in the time of the death of G-d. He was careful about what the phrase meant: not that a being had ceased to exist, but that the culture had lost the transcendent guarantor of meaning and that no honest Jew could any longer speak of a providential Lord of history. He put it starkly, that we live in a world without G-d and are alone in it.

2. 2

   If Rubenstein rejects the G-d of history, what does he put in its place?

   Model answer

   He did not become an atheist in the ordinary sense, and he objected to being described as one. Drawing on mystical strands in Judaism, he spoke of G-d as the Holy Nothingness: the ground out of which everything comes and to which everything returns, better imagined as an ocean of which individual lives are the waves than as a person who commands. This is not a G-d who chooses, promises or intervenes, and it removes the problem of evil by removing the agent. He also drew a further conclusion: with no covenant and no divine purpose in history, human beings are wholly responsible for themselves, and Jewish existence has to be understood in terms of nature, land, body and community rather than of a mission. He therefore valued Jewish ritual highly as the way a community marks birth, growth and death, and supported the State of Israel as a return to earth and ordinary existence after the illusions of history.

3. 3

   What is the strongest criticism of Rubenstein's position?

   Model answer

   Several are pressed. That a G-d described as the ground of being to which all things return is not obviously distinguishable from nature under a religious name, so the position may be atheism with mystical vocabulary. That to keep the rituals of a covenant one has denied is inconsistent, since the practices mean what they say. That the argument grants Hitler a theological victory by conceding the destruction of Jewish faith, which is Fackenheim's objection. That the survivors who did keep faith are not accounted for. And that Auschwitz, however unprecedented in scale and method, does not raise a logically new problem of evil, so a conclusion that no earlier suffering warranted may be a response to proximity rather than to argument. Rubenstein's defenders reply that this last objection concedes his real point, which is that the tradition's answers were never adequate and that Auschwitz merely made the inadequacy impossible to ignore.

4. 4

   What is Emil Fackenheim's account of the Holocaust as an unprecedented event?

   Model answer

   Fackenheim, who was himself interned after Kristallnacht and escaped from Germany, argued that the Holocaust is a rupture for which no existing category is adequate, and he used the term novum for it. His reasoning is that earlier persecutions had aims that Jews could in principle satisfy or evade: conversion, expulsion, plunder. The extermination programme had no such aim; it was directed at the existence of Jews as such, it was pursued at cost to the war effort, and it was carried out by a modern state with bureaucratic and industrial means. He also held that the resistance of its victims, and even the simple survival of some, constituted something equally unprecedented. Because the event is a rupture, he rejected every attempt to fit it into a scheme, whether of punishment, of divine plan or of ordinary theodicy: to explain Auschwitz would be to make it comprehensible, and therefore in some measure acceptable.

5. 5

   What is the 614th commandment, and what are its four parts?

   Model answer

   Jewish tradition counts 613 commandments given at Sinai. Fackenheim proposed that a further commanding voice speaks out of Auschwitz, and that its content is a prohibition on granting Hitler any posthumous victory. He set it out in four parts. Jews are commanded to survive as Jews, so that the Jewish people is not finished off after the event by assimilation and disappearance. They are commanded to remember the victims, so that their memory does not perish. They are commanded not to deny or despair of G-d, however furiously they must argue with him, so that Judaism does not perish. And they are commanded not to despair of the world as the place where the kingdom is to be built, lest it be handed over to the forces that made Auschwitz. Each part identifies a way in which the murderers could still succeed after their defeat.

6. 6

   What is the religious duty that Fackenheim derives from the Holocaust, and how does it relate to belief?

   Model answer

   The duty is to continue: to remain Jewish, to have Jewish children, to remember, and to keep working on the world. Fackenheim's striking move is to make this obligation prior to the question of belief. He addresses religious and secular Jews alike, and argues that a Jew who cannot believe is still bound, because the commandment is not to affirm a doctrine but to refuse the outcome the murderers intended. He also allows a great deal of latitude about G-d, saying Jews may contend with him and may be unable to understand him, provided they do not walk away. His later work developed this into the idea of tikkun, mending: the response to a rupture that cannot be explained is repair, in acts of resistance, in the rebuilding of Jewish life and in the founding of the state.

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