The Holocaust and the problem of evil

Overview

Recall questions on the theological question the Holocaust puts to Judaism, the rejection of catastrophe as punishment, doubt about G-d, Maybaum's providential plan, Berkovits on hiddenness and free will, the challenge to classical theism, and Progressive responses.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What theological question does the Holocaust put to Judaism?

   Model answer

   Between 1941 and 1945 the German state and its collaborators murdered around six million Jews, roughly two thirds of the Jews of Europe, in shootings, ghettos and purpose-built extermination camps, with the declared aim of destroying the Jewish people entirely. Judaism had long affirmed a G-d who is all-powerful and good, who acts within history and who has bound himself by covenant to protect this people in particular. The question is whether those affirmations can all be held together after Auschwitz. Earlier catastrophes had been absorbed by saying that suffering was punishment for sin, but applying that explanation to murdered children is something most Jewish thinkers regard as morally impossible. So post-Holocaust theology begins from a genuine impasse rather than from a puzzle.

2. 2

   Why is the traditional explanation of catastrophe as punishment for sin rejected by most Jewish thinkers after the Holocaust?

   Model answer

   Because of what it would have to mean. The victims included around a million and a half children, whole communities of the observant, and people murdered for having a Jewish grandparent regardless of belief or conduct; no account of sin can be made to fit them. To apply the explanation is to add a charge against the dead to what was done to them, and to place the theologian in the position of Job's friends, whom the text itself condemns. A few voices did use the framework, notably in attributing the destruction to secularisation, to the Enlightenment or to Zionism, and those claims caused deep and lasting anger. Most Jewish thinkers across the movements now regard the punishment model as unusable in this case, and look instead for accounts that do not require the victims to have deserved anything.

3. 3

   What form did doubt about G-d take among Jews during and after the Holocaust?

   Model answer

   It took several forms, and testimony from survivors records all of them. Some lost belief outright, and describe a precise moment at which it went. Some kept the practices while no longer believing that anyone was listening. Some retained belief but not trust, holding that G-d exists and has behaved in a way that cannot be forgiven, a position with precedent in a tradition that permits arguing with G-d and even putting him on trial. Some found their faith unaltered or strengthened, and Berkovits in particular built his argument on those witnesses. Doubt also settled on the survivors afterwards rather than at the time, and on the generation that came later, who inherited the question without the experience. Post-Holocaust theology is in large part an attempt to give an account of these responses rather than to overrule them, which is why several of its authors insist that only those who were there may say what is believable.

4. 4

   What role does Maybaum give to G-d's providential plan, and what does he say the destruction achieved?

   Model answer

   Maybaum retained a G-d who acts in history and holds to a purpose, and he read the third churban as part of that purpose. On his account the destruction ended the medieval world in which European Jews had lived, in the shtetl and the ghetto, and forced Jewish existence into modernity, with its centres in the western democracies and in the State of Israel. He held that G-d speaks to the nations through Jewish history, and that this event was such a communication. He drew on the passage in Isaiah about the servant who suffers on behalf of others, applying it to the Jewish people: their suffering, he argued, was vicarious, borne for the sins of a world that had to be brought out of its old order. He used the word sacrifice, and even the Christian term crucifixion, for what happened to European Jewry, and spoke of the survivors as the remnant through whom the people continues, a biblical category for the portion preserved after judgement.

5. 5

   How does Berkovits connect divine hiddenness to human free will?

   Model answer

   He argues that a world containing genuinely free and responsible human beings requires G-d to restrain himself. If every intended evil were prevented, there would be no real human choice, no moral responsibility and no human history; people would be managed rather than free. G-d's absence is therefore not indifference but self-limitation, the price of taking human beings seriously as agents. Berkovits presses the paradox rather than softening it: the same restraint that makes a good human act possible makes Auschwitz possible, and G-d's patience with the murderer is suffered by the victim. He also insists this makes the Holocaust a human and historical event, a crime committed by people who chose to commit it, so the primary question is about human responsibility, including that of the bystanders and of a Christian Europe that had prepared the ground over centuries.

6. 6

   What is the main objection to Berkovits's use of free will, and how does he answer it?

   Model answer

   The objection is proportionality: whatever value free will has, it is hard to argue that it outweighs the murder of a million and a half children, and a G-d who could intervene and does not looks worse rather than better on this account, since we would condemn any human bystander with that power. Critics also note that the biblical G-d is repeatedly said to intervene, so consistent restraint is not the tradition's own picture. Berkovits does not claim to have solved this. He holds that no explanation is available, that faith after the Holocaust must be a faith that argues with G-d in the manner of Abraham and Job rather than one that has understood him, and that only those who were there have standing to say whether they can still believe. He gives great weight to the testimony of Jews who kept faith inside the camps, and treats the survival of the Jewish people and the return to the land as evidence that the hidden G-d has not finally departed.

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