The massive destruction of European (and some non-European) Jews leading up to and during World War II has brought massive unbelief to the Jewish world and led to the creation of radically new theologies of God. During those times, millions of Jews were murdered, tortured, and agonizingly brutalized. Those who survived were marked with scars far deeper than the heart can reach. The suffering of the surviving parents has in many cases been handed down to the second generation and even to the third. The destruction, dislocation, and desolation of the Jewish people in the European Destruc- tion have constituted, for many, a devastating attack on the very idea that there is a God who is morally perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent, let alone a God who loves the Jewish people. Many agree with Rabbi Irving Greenberg when he eloquently declares concerning the Holocaust discourse that: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children” (I. Greenberg 1977: 23).
Various revisionist theologies have appeared in response to the European Destruc- tion. These include that God abandoned the Jews, that God “hid his face,” that God withdrew from history for good, that God is far from being perfect, and that God vio- lated the covenant, as a result of which Jews are no longer bound by the covenant. Such theologies tend to associate the Holocaust with a profound, disappointing, change in God, of one sort or another. As a result, such theologies agree that a radical change must be wrought in the Jews’ concept of God. On the other hand, some Ultra-Orthodox continue to insist that no change in the concept of God is necessary, since the murder of six million Jews was punishment . . . for the sins of Jews who were not Ultra-Orthodox (G. Greenberg 2004).
A Vulnerable God
One thinker who endured the suffering of the Warsaw Ghetto and was murdered in the Majdanek death camp in Poland, adopted for himself a theology of a vulnerable God. This was Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro (1889–1943), the Hasidic “Rebbe” of Piececzna, Poland. For him the Destruction was too enormous, too grotesque, too inflicting of human misery, to be explained as an event in the history of God’s relation to the Jews.
So the Rebbe has no recourse but to say, “There are travails that we suffer with Him. . . . ‘Save those who suffer your suffering!’ For Israel also suffers His suffering” (Shapiro 1960/61: 191). What was happening could have been nothing less than a catastrophic upheaval within the very being of God, a heartbreaking earthquake taking place in the ground of all being. Only that could explain the enormity of the tragedy. It must be that God was violently shaken-up in the innermost places within himself. And so, God must
be enduring great suffering. And the Jews, aye, the Jews, God’s “chosen people,” are the place in God’s creation where the waves of Divine suffering vibrate most violently, felt far beyond mortal endurance. The Shoah is a reverberation of God’s suffering in crea- tion, with Jewish suffering a figuration of a catastrophic upheaval in God. (The Nazis were not to be exonerated on this theology, just as Pharaoh was not exculpated for car- rying out God’s earlier decree of slavery and exile to Abraham’s descendants.)
Perhaps, indeed, a fragility exists somewhere very deep in (a di-polar?) God that requires loving care on the part of God’s creatures and a sharing by them in God’s suffer- ing. The ultimate mutuality between GodY and his creation would come to expression exactly there.
Conclusion
Meanwhile, as the philosophers and the theologians, the mystics and the rationalists, were propounding their ideas of Jewish theism, over millennia prayer to YHVH contin- ued, for wisdom, for grace, for health, for rain, and for redemption of the Jewish people. YHVH has been for us a most personal being who listens to prayers and, at times, finds our prayers worthy of positive response. YHVH is a God who continues to accompany God’s people through history, going into exile with them. As far as the Jewish people were concerned, the God of the Jews was a Jewish God.
Related Topics
Chapter 1: Western Philosophy; Chapter 20: Philosophy of Religion
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Recommended Reading
Buber, M. (1970) I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufman, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Buber’s most cel- ebrated statement of his dialogical philosophy.
Cohen, H. (1972) Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. S. Kaplan. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Company. Cohen’s massive defense of Judaism in the modern age.
Dorff, E. N. and L. E. Newman (eds), (1999) Contemporary Jewish Theology, A Reader, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. A collection of adventurous contemporary Jewish theologies, mostly by liberal Jews. Ha-Levi, J. (2008) The Kuzari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel, trans. H. Hirschfeld, New York: Schocken
Books. The classical medieval work on behalf of the God of Abraham and against the God of Aristotle. Katz, S. T. (ed.), (2005) The Impact of the Holocaust on Jewish Theology, New York and London: New
York University Press. A collection of Jewish responses to the Holocaust, some of which have become classics.
Kook, A. I. (1978) The Lights of Penitence, The Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems, trans. B. Z. Bokser, New York: Paulist Press. A selection from the writings of one of the twentieth centu- ry’s greatest Jewish mystics.
Lamm, N. (ed.), (1999) The Religious Thought of Hasidism, New York: Yeshiva University Press and Ktav Publishing House. A useful collection of Hasidic sources with explanations, with a leaning to the con- servative side of things.
Maimonides, M. (1963) The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. The greatest work of Jewish philosophy ever by a person of whom it is said, “From Moses to Moses, there has been none like Moses.”
Muffs, Y. (2005) The Personhood of God: Biblical Theology, Human Faith, and the Divine Image, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing. A theology of God’s personhood.
Neusner, J. (1997) The Theology of Rabbinic Judaism. A Prolegomenon, Atlanta: Scholars Press for South Florida Studies on the History of Judaism. An introduction to the thought of the Rabbis of the Talmudic age. Rosenzweig, F. (2005) The Star of Redemption, trans. B. E. Galli, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
A monumental work of modern Jewish philosophy centered on the triangle of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption.
Saadia ben Joseph (1948) The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. S. Rosenblatt, New Haven, CT: Yale Uni- versity Press. The first systematic work of Jewish philosophy, one influenced by Arab philosophy. Scholem, G. (1969) On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, trans. R. Manheim, New York: Schocken Books. A
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Solomon, N. (2000) “Picturing God,” in S. D. Kunin (ed.), Themes and Issues in Judaism, London: Cassell. An outstanding essay on anthropomorphism.
Spinoza, B. (2000) Ethics, trans. G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spinoza’s metaphysi- cal philosophy, including his concept of God, and ethics.
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