(God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought
Web, Tablet, Phone, eReader. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders. A Report on the Banality of Evil. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling and unsettled issues of the twentieth century.
True Tales From a Grotesque Land. From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness. Writing twenty years after her liberation, she recreates the events of a dark past which, in her own words, would have driven her mad had she tried to relive it sooner.
But while she records unimaginable atrocities, she also richly describes the human compassion that stubbornly survived despite the backdrop of camp depersonalization and imminent extermination. Commemorative in spirit and artistic in form, Auschwitz convincingly portrays the paradoxes of human nature in extreme circumstances. With consummate understatement Nomberg-Przytyk describes the behavior of concentration camp inmates as she relentlessly and pitilessly examines her own motives and feelings.
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In this world unmitigated cruelty coexisted with nobility, rapacity with self-sacrifice, indifference with selfless compassion. This book offers a chilling view of the human drama that existed in Auschwitz.
From her portraits of camp personalities, an extraordinary and horrifying profile emerges of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose medical experiments resulted in the slaughter of nearly half a million Jews. Nomberg-Przytyk's job as an attendant in Mengle's hospital allowed her to observe this Angel of Death firsthand and to provide us with the most complete description to date of his monstrous activities.
Not knowing the fate of the journal's author, Pfefferkorn spent two years searching and finally located Nomberg-Przytyk in Canada. Subsequent interviews revealed the history of the manuscript, the author's background, and brought the journal into perspective. The War Against the Jews, — In contrast to Richard Rubenstein's views, Fackenheim holds that people must still affirm their belief in God and God's continued role in the world.
Fackenheim holds that the Holocaust reveals unto us a new Biblical commandment: He said that rejecting God because of the Holocaust was like giving in to Hitler. In a rare view that has not been adopted by any sizable element of the Jewish or Christian community, Ignaz Maybaum has proposed that the Holocaust is the ultimate form of vicarious atonement. The Jewish people become in fact the "suffering servant" of Isaiah. The Jewish people suffer for the sins of the world. Eliezer Berkovits held that man's free will depends on God's decision to remain hidden.
If God were to reveal himself in history and hold back the hand of tyrants, man's free will would be rendered non-existent.
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This is a view that is loosely based on the kabbalistic concept of nahama d'kissufa bread of shame - the idea that greater satisfaction is achieved when one becomes deserving of a blessing rather than when it is given as a gift. Kabbalah teaches that this is one of the reasons God created man with free will and with obligations, and that in order to maintain that free will, God reduces the extent to which he manifests himself in the world tzimtzum.
Harold Kushner , William E. Kaufman and Milton Steinberg believe that God is not omnipotent, and thus is not to blame for mankind's abuse of free will. Thus, there is no contradiction between the existence of a good God and the existence of massive evil by part of mankind. It is claimed that this is also the view expressed by some classical Jewish authorities, such as Abraham ibn Daud , Abraham ibn Ezra , and Gersonides. David Weiss Halivni , a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, says that the effort to associate the Shoah and sin is morally outrageous.
He holds that it is unwarranted on a strict reading of the Tanakh. He claims that it reinforces an alarming tendency among ultra-Orthodox leaders to exploit such arguments on behalf of their own authority. In "Prayer in the Shoah" he gives his response to the idea that the Holocaust was a punishment from God:. What happened in the Shoah is above and beyond measure l'miskpat: There is no transgression that merits such punishment Irving Greenberg is a Modern Orthodox rabbi who has written extensively on how the Holocaust should affect Jewish theology.
Greenberg has an Orthodox understanding of God, he does not believe that God forces people to follow Jewish law; rather he believes that Jewish law is God's will for the Jewish people, and that Jews should follow Jewish law as normative. Greenberg's break with Orthodox theology comes with his analysis of the implications of the Holocaust.
Holocaust theology
He writes that the worst thing that God could do to the Jewish people for failing to follow the law is Holocaust-level devastation, yet this has already occurred. Greenberg is not claiming that God did use the Holocaust to punish Jews; he is just saying that if God chose to do so, that would be the worst possible thing. There really is nothing worse that God could do. Therefore, since God cannot punish us any worse than what actually has happened, and since God does not force Jews to follow Jewish law, then we cannot claim that these laws are enforceable on us.
Therefore, he argues that the covenant between God and the Jewish people is effectively broken and unenforceable. Greenberg notes that there have been several terrible destructions of the Jewish community, each with the effect of distancing the Jewish people further from God.
According to rabbinic literature, after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the mass-killing of Jerusalem's Jews, the Jews received no more direct prophecy.
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After the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem and the mass-killing of Jerusalem's Jews, the Jews no longer could present sacrifices at the Temple. This way of reaching God was at an end. After the Holocaust, Greenberg concludes that God does not respond to the prayers of Jews anymore.
Thus, God has unilaterally broken his covenant with the Jewish people. In this view, God no longer has the moral authority to command people to follow his will. Greenberg does not conclude that Jews and God should part ways; rather he holds that we should heal the covenant between Jews and God, and that the Jewish people should accept Jewish law on a voluntary basis. His views on this subject have made him the subject of much criticism within the Orthodox community.
A Hungarian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel was the author of 57 books, including Night , a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Wiesel's play The Trial of God is about a trial in which God is the defendant, and is reportedly based on events that Wiesel himself witnessed as a teenager in Auschwitz. Over the course of the trial, a number of arguments are made, both for and against God's guilt.
Wiesel's theological stance, illustrated through the intuitive possibilities of literature, is a theology of existentialist protest, which neither denies God, nor accepts theodicies. The ending sees the hope of renewed mystical reconciliation with God. Blumenthal, in his book Facing the Abusing God , has drawn on data from the field of child abuse and has proposed "worship of God through protest" as a legitimate response of survivors of both the Holocaust and child abuse.
Another writer addressing survivors of the Holocaust and child abuse is John K. Live Options in Theodicy The traditional notion of an impassible unmoved mover had died in those camps and was no longer tenable. Moltmann proposes instead a crucified God who is both a suffering and protesting God. This is in contrast both with the move of theism to justify God's actions and the move of atheism to accuse God.
Moltmann's theology of the cross was later developed into liberation theologies from suffering people under Stalinism in Eastern Europe and military dictatorships in South America and South Korea. In the address given on the occasion of his visit to the extermination camp of Auschwitz , Pope Benedict XVI suggested a reading of the events of the Holocaust as motivated by a hatred of God himself. Nonetheless, he proposes that the actions of the Nazis can be seen as having been motivated by a hatred of God and a desire to exalt human power, with the Holocaust serving as a means by which to erase witness to God and his Law:.
Most coverage of the address was positive, with praise from Italian and Polish rabbis. The Simon Wiesenthal Center called the visit historic, and the address and prayers "a repudiation of antisemitism and a repudiation of those A few Jewish commentators have objected to what they perceive as a desire to Christianize the Holocaust. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.
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(God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought
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Tanakh Torah Nevi'im Ketuvim. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. March Learn how and when to remove this template message. Death of God theology. Niewyk and Francis R. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, Gershon Greenberg, eds.
Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust: The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors. Langton, 'Theology' in Writing the Holocaust, D. Langton and J-M Dreyfus, eds London: University of Exeter Press, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism. The World of Jewish Fundamentalism.
Kehot, , pp. Memoirs vol 1 , Elie Wiesel, Schocken Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest.