After the Holocaust

Like any sensitive person, even the sensitive believer must put his world (of faith) to the test of the Holocaust. The late Supreme Court justice Haim Cohen gave sharp expression to the feelings of many who lost their faith following the Holocaust when he wrote: "I came to an internal realization that I am being merciful to a God I do not believe in. If I believed in his existence, I would hate him."

This is not a necessary conclusion: The concept of God still has a place after Auschwitz, but its meaning must undergo deliberation and purification. It is doubtful there was ever room to adhere to the simple belief, which treats the Almighty as a sort of old grandpa who sits in heaven, and keeps constant watch over the world (the "Tate Tate" prayers of the Bratslav Hassidim are an example of this). But such faith is certainly extremely problematic after the Holocaust.

Theologians are indeed aware of this, but the masses of believers, including many of the rabbis, cling to the old concepts of reward and punishment, until they reach evil absurdities. And thus there is a prevalent claim within ultra-Orthodox circles that the Holocaust was punishment for the Jewish people becoming secular, and the ultra-Zionist Merkaz Harav circles also have widely held in the past few decades that the Holocaust is a divine punishment for another sin - abandoning Eretz Israel.

The difficulty of letting go of the accepted concepts is reflected not only in these exasperating answers, but also in the "nicer" answers that hide behind euphemisms, such as that "we cannot understand divine logic." That argument was not acceptable to Abraham, who pled even for the people of Sodom in terms of human morality ("Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?") and did not try to hide behind "divine logic." One rung up, but still euphemized, comes the phrase hester panim, or "hiding of the face," which refers to the notion that God's presence is hidden from human perception. In other words, the Lord chose to hide precisely during the Holocaust.

With all its euphemized wording, the phrase hester panim conceals behind it the real thing, which is: in the world known to us, there is no state of divine revelation. Regardless of our concept of God, it cannot include his revelation. Yeshayahu Leibowitz in his sharp manner put it well: Olam ke-minhago noheg (the world maintains its natural course) - that is the way in which God chose to run our world. In other words, he chose to run it as though he did not exist. The God of the disillusioned believer is an abstract code for all that is beyond our understanding.

In such a situation, what is the practical meaning of faith? Author Zvi Kolitz has his character Yosl Rakover (a fictional Ger Hassid, who settles accounts with God minutes before dying in the Warsaw Ghetto) express a possible meaning: "Now this Torah is the more sanctified and immortalized by the manner of its rape and violation by the enemies of God... I love Him [the Lord - Y.S.]. But I love His Torah more... God commands religion, but His Torah commands a way of life."

The two parts of the quotation contain two different meanings of Jewish adherence following the Holocaust. One is somewhat pragmatic, but of tremendous value: We must cleave to Judaism because abandoning it supposedly completes Hitler's actions.

Like the philosopher Emil Fackenheim, who after the Holocaust coined the 614th mitzva, which is more important than all the other 613 ritual duties - the Jewish people's duty to survive - it may be said that Judaism's existence after the Holocaust is also a central mitzva. And neglecting it, heaven forbid, says in retrospect that those Jews died in vain, since they died in the name of an identity that is pointless to maintain.

The second part expresses that same truth both negatively (to stick to Judaism so as not to violate the memory of those murdered), and positively: Even if faith in God, at least in his living, concrete image, lost its point after the Holocaust - the Torah, the Jewish way of life, the eternal aspiration for sanctification are worth adhering to even without God.