From Rethinking the Holocaust --- Chapter Nine --- “Theology, or God the Surgeon”
I have not been reading theological responses to the Holocaust in quite some time. However Yehuda Bauer’s Rethinking the Holocaust provides such:
Jewish (and Christian) theological explanations of the Holocaust offer a variety of justifications for God’s action or inaction at the time, some more and some less grounded in Jewish (and Christian) religious tradition. That tradition has the concept of an all-powerful Being who cannot be asked for any explanation because humans are too puny to understand his leadership (hanhaga) of the world.
His ways are not our ways. God, then, can be removed from the argument altogether in consideration of Job’s submission at the end of his struggle with the Almighty: Job admits God’s infiniteness and his own capacity to understand it.
Indeed, with Job, God ultimately acts outside human morality; in other words, he is the ultimate cosmic power, beyond good and evil. Regarding the Holocaust, this might appear to solve the problem.
Most orthodox commentators (and many nonorthodox ones as well) are right to ask then counterquestion: Don’t ask where God was, because you cannot grasp his ways; instead, ask, where was Man?
The ball is, so to speak, in the human, not the divine, court. Of course, after having said that we cannot understand God’s actions, Jewish (and many Christian) religious thinkers then desperately try to do just that—namely, to understand them.
According to the second argument, all evil is grounded in the freedom that God has given humans to choose between good and bad. Punishment for evil was, in the Psalms, promised to the evildoers in this world. Later, punishment was transferred to the next world.
In any case, evil is again a human choice, not a divine one.
There is a tension, even a contradiction, between the two arguments; the first says that we cannot question God’s leadership of the world (because we are too puny), and the second says that there is no need to question it (because he decided long ago to give freedom of choice to humans, and he will reward and punish us in due course).
The second argument again creates a problem. If Man is given the freedom to choose between good and evil (and a God-fearing Jew knows what good is: to obey the 613 commandments of Jewish Law—halakhah, Torah), the freedom to choose may well apply to the Nazis: they chose, and they chose evil.
Did the victims have any choice?
Hardly.
And if they chose what generally accepted standards would categorize as “good,” were they saved?
Were they saved if they were observant Jews and followed all the commandments?
Were they saved if they were not observant Jews?
Survival rates indicate the contrary of what the religious argument would suggest. Among the largely unorthodox Jews of Western Europe—in France, Belgium, Italy and Denmark—a relatively high proportion of Jews survived, whereas among the orthodox Jews of Poland the proportion of survivors was minimal.
Vehadra kushia le’dukhta—“the question returns to its beginning,” to use a phrase common in talmudic discourse. In other words, the objection is not answered.
As to the first argument, orthodox thinkers, in contradiction of their own view (the “we are too puny” argument), still wonder what God’s purpose might have been, because obviously he who rules the world and determined that the Holocaust should happen.
After all, according to tradition, God occasionally told humans why he did what he did.
Is not the whole Jewish tradition based upon the assumption that it was inspired by God, if not more than that, and that if the moral commandments it contains come from God, was he not more than just a neutral cosmic power—is he not obliged to act in accordance with his own decreed morality?
Serious ultraorthodox or haredi thinkers—I use the term they use to describe themselves: haredi (hered means “[God]fearing")—addressed the question, and this is what they said and wrote after the Holocaust.
