Dennis Prager
DENNIS PRAGER I never heard a Jew say, "I cannot believe in God because God allowed two million Cambodians to be murdered. "Is God lovable? Atragic aspect of American Jewish life is the virtual...
...Second, only a Jew who is unaware of how horribly Jews suffered at the hands of Jew-haters in the past can hold that it is the Shoah that makes belief impossible...
...And we have done survivors of the Shoah a terrible disservice, too...
...Yet, as often as the question is posed, there almost seems to be a ban on offering answers to it...
...First, I am unaware of any Jewish source that holds that God has ever saved, or promises to save, every Jewish individual from persecution...
...But from the standpoint of a God who could stop the murder of one or six million equally easily, the question is perfectly valid...
...Children were slaughtered in their mothers' bosoms, and many children were torn apart like fish...
...Yet I have never heard a Jew say, "I cannot believe in God because God allowed two million Cambodians to be murdered...
...What God has promised is that God will save the Jewish people...
...At three million...
...The other major question concerning God and the Shoah is: How could God stand by and allow the Shoah to occur...
...God did not take most of the Jews out of Egypt...
...Atragic aspect of American Jewish life is the virtual removal of God-talk from Jews' lives...
...If that leaves us unsatisfied, consider the alternative—that God prevents every bad act from taking place...
...If you cannot believe in a God that allows six million innocent Jews to die, how can you believe in a God that allows one innocent Jew to die...
...They ripped up the bellies of pregnant women, took out the unborn children and flung them in their faces...
...We and our children pay the price for doing so...
...Man, not God, poses the great Shoah question...
...God was right...
...We perceive God as absent when people commit evil, and we perceive God most clearly when people perform beautiful deeds...
...Humans who loathed the God of Judaism built the gas chambers^—to destroy the people who gave mankind the God who loathes evil...
...But we have done contemporary Jews a terrible disservice by not attempting to answer this question...
...God is wherever we let God in...
...This may explain an otherwise incomprehensible passage in the Yom Kippur liturgy...
...The Shoah has been so traumatic and so hallowed that, as Elie Wiesel has often stated, the most appropriate response to the Shoah is silence...
...Does this challenge God less than the Shoah does...
...God never built a gas chamber...
...And God answered, "Keep silent, or I will destroy the world...
...God saves the Jewish people...
...So, too, most Jews never got out of Europe...
...Where is God...
...Third, claiming to lose faith in God because of God's allowing six million Jews to be killed can smack of racism...
...But why...
...The Reason For Anti-semitism (Touchstone, 1985...
...When a survivor says that God died in Auschwitz, other Jews offer sympathy...
...The numbers argument against God is meaningless...
...They tore open the bellies of some of them and placed a living cat within the belly and left them alive thus, first cutting off their hands so that they should not be able to take the living cat out of the belly...
...a chasidic rebbe told his followers...
...God begs us not to...
...The first argument concerns the number six million...
...Here is a contemporaneous description of a typical day during the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648-1653: "Some of the Jews had their skin flayed off them and their flesh flung to the dogs...
...From a human standpoint, killing six million people is six million times more grievous a sin than killing one...
...But survivors, their children and the rest of Jewry want and need answers much more than sympathy...
...At 265,000...
...To construct a world where people could only do good, God would have to destroy the world and create something entirely different...
...The Nazis did not let God in...
...The Shoah poses some serious questions for Jews: Is Jewish continuity worth the suffering it entails...
...By not answering the question, we appear to agree with its premise...
...Why does the murder of millions of innocent Jews challenge God more than the murder of millions of non-Jews...
...But it is a novel Jewish condition to deny or ignore God...
...There are three responses...
...Jews had been tortured and killed and Jewish children had been thrown into the Nile for hundreds of years...
...But it poses no intellectually honest arguments against God's existence...
...Of course, none of this argues against being angry at God about evil...
...But I do know that God allows people to commit evil...
...The Cambodian Communists murdered one of every three Cambodians, just as the Nazis murdered one of every three Jews...
...The hands and feet of others were cut off, and they were flung onto the roadway, where carts ran over them and they were trodden under foot by horses....And many were buried alive...
...I do not presume to know what God did during the Shoah...
...It is a long-standing Jewish tradition to argue with God...
...Together xuith Joseph Telushkin, he wrote Why the Jews...
...Demos Prager unites and publishes Ultimate Issues, a quarterly journal on personal, political and religious issues...
...Those of us who lecture about Judaism hear no question as often as "How can I believe in God after the Shoah...
...But you cannot be angry at a God whose existence you deny...
...There are many reasons for this, but I would like to focus on one—the oft-made claim that after the Shoah, belief in God is impossible...
...That is why abandoning faith in God while retaining faith in humanity is logically and Jewishly perverse...
...Its magnitude, it is argued, challenges God's existence...
...The next argument is, "How can one believe in a God who allowed six million Jews—God's own people—to be slaughtered...
...Jewish belief does not hold that God saves all Jews...
...Why is faith in God possible when God allows thousands of innocent Jews to die in Russian pogroms but not when God allows six million to die under the Nazis...
...But God's existence is no more in question when evil hides God than the sun's existence is in question when a cloud hides the sun...
...What kind of reasoning holds that if a Jewish family is killed by Nazis between 1939 and 1945, God does not exist, but if the same family were killed by antisemites at another time, God does exist...
...Hence during the Shoah we experienced an eclipse of the divine...
...Would we prefer to live in a world where God stopped every evil act from taking place or in a world where we were automatons that could not do evil rather than free human beings...
...The Talmud says, "Silence is like agreement...
...Would we really want to live in such a world...
...If we want a world in which hurting good people is impossible, the world in which we live would have to be destroyed...
...God allowed the Shoah because human beings are as free to build gas chambers as they are to build hospitals...
...At whatthumber does faith become impossible...
...In the story of the 10 rabbis the Romans tortured to death, the prayer book tells us that a heavenly voice screamed out, "Is this the Torah and its reward...
Vol. 15 • October 1990 • No. 5
