God Would Not Have Allowed the Holocaust to Happen

This is a curious denial argument because it concedes the entire moral weight of the events it claims to deny. It does not contest the documents, the testimony, the forensic record, the perpetrator confessions or the engineering. It contests the theology. The Holocaust did not happen, the deniers say, because if it had happened God would not have allowed it; God would have allowed it only if it could be reconciled with the covenant; it cannot be so reconciled; therefore it did not happen. The argument is a syllogism resting on a theological premise that the deniers cannot establish, applied to a historical event whose documentation does not depend on theology in any way.

The argument is also, taken seriously, an insult to the Jewish religious tradition. It assumes that Jews would have to abandon their religion in the face of the Holocaust. The actual response of Jewish religious thought to the Holocaust has been an extensive and continuing engagement with the theological question, conducted by rabbis, theologians and survivors who lived through the events. They have not abandoned the religion. They have written about the question with a depth and seriousness that the denier argument has not engaged with at all.

The classical Jewish theological response to catastrophe

The Jewish tradition has been answering the question of theodicy (the problem of evil in a world governed by a just God) for at least three thousand years. The Book of Job is the canonical text on the subject; the prophetic literature, particularly Lamentations after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and the rabbinic literature after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, develops the question further. The destruction of the Second Temple, the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 136 CE, the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (with the massacres of the Rhineland Jewish communities of Mainz, Worms and Speyer in 1096), the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648 to 1657 (in which approximately 100,000 Polish and Ukrainian Jews were killed), and the pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: each was a moment of Jewish theological reflection on catastrophe. The literature is extensive. The denier argument acts as if the Holocaust is the first time the Jewish tradition has had to consider the question.

The classical responses include: the doctrine of hester panim (the hiding of the divine face), in which God permits human evil to operate without intervention as part of the structure of the moral universe; the doctrine of yissurim shel ahavah (sufferings of love), in which suffering is given a redemptive meaning; the rejection of theodicy entirely (associated with the Book of Job’s final chapters, in which God’s response to Job is not to justify suffering but to refuse the demand for justification); and the kabbalistic doctrine of tzimtzum (the divine self-contraction that creates space for human freedom and therefore for evil). None of these responses denies the historical reality of catastrophe. Each is a theological framework for living with the historical reality.

Post-Holocaust Jewish theology

The systematic theological engagement with the Holocaust began during the war itself in the writings of the Hasidic rebbes who were murdered in the camps (notably Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczno Rebbe, whose Esh Kodesh sermons delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto were buried in milk cans and recovered after the war), and has continued in unbroken sequence since 1945. The principal post-war theologians include:

Richard Rubenstein, whose After Auschwitz (1966) argued that traditional theistic Judaism was no longer tenable after the Holocaust and proposed a reformulation of Jewish identity around peoplehood rather than the covenant theology.

Eliezer Berkovits, whose Faith After the Holocaust (1973) argued that the Holocaust was within the framework of hester panim and that traditional Jewish faith remained intact, citing the religious lives of survivors who had returned to observance after the camps.

Emil Fackenheim, whose God’s Presence in History (1970) and To Mend the World (1982) developed the concept of the “614th commandment”, that Jews are forbidden to give Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning their Jewish identity.

Irving Greenberg, whose The Jewish Way (1988) and earlier essays from the 1970s developed the framework of the “voluntary covenant”, in which the post-Holocaust covenant is sustained by Jewish choice rather than by divine compulsion.

Arthur Cohen, whose The Tremendum (1981) argued that the Holocaust was an event so unprecedented that it required a fundamental rethinking of Jewish religious categories, but did not invalidate them.

Ignaz Maybaum, whose The Face of God after Auschwitz (1965) argued for a sacrificial-redemptive reading of the Holocaust within the framework of Jewish covenantal theology.

The disagreement among these thinkers is substantial. Rubenstein’s position is on one extreme, the others on a spectrum from there to Berkovits and Maybaum. What none of them does, on either side, is deny that the Holocaust happened. The theological seriousness of their work consists precisely in their refusal to evade the historical reality. The denier argument that the Holocaust cannot be reconciled with the covenant is a position that no major post-war Jewish theologian has taken; the post-war Jewish theological tradition has done the reconciling work, in different directions, with full acknowledgement of what was being reconciled.

Survivor testimony on the religious question

The survivor literature engages directly with the theological question. Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958, English 1960) contains the famous passage in which Wiesel watches a young boy hanged in Auschwitz and hears a voice within himself answering the question “Where is God?”: “Here he is, hanging here on this gallows”. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947) and his later The Drowned and the Saved (1986) work through the question from a secular position; Levi’s conclusion is closer to Job’s than to Berkovits’s, but it is a conclusion arrived at through engagement with the events, not by denying them. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) is the locus classicus for the religious-existential reading: the survival of the spirit through Auschwitz being the central evidence of meaning in suffering.

The point is not that all survivors emerged with their faith intact (many did not, and many did) but that the engagement with the religious question is itself part of the literature of the Holocaust. The denier suggestion that the events are theologically impossible runs into a literature, written by the people who lived through them, in which the theological possibility is precisely what is being explored.

The historical record does not depend on theology

None of the foregoing is offered as theological argument. The historical reality of the Holocaust does not depend on its theological interpretation; it depends on the documentary record, the testimony, the forensic evidence and the perpetrator confessions. The point of the section is that the denier theological argument is not just bad theology (in that it ignores the literature on the question and assumes a position no major Jewish theologian has held), but bad historiography (in that it tries to use a theological premise to defeat a historical question). The historical question is settled by historical methods. The theological question is a separate question, and the people most qualified to address it have addressed it for eighty years without arriving at the conclusion the deniers’ argument requires.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it pretends to honour the Jewish religious tradition while in fact dismissing its actual content. It assumes Jews would have to abandon their religion in the face of the Holocaust; the Jewish religious response has not done so. It implies that the survivors who returned to observance, the Hasidic communities reconstituted after the war, the post-war yeshivas of B’nei Brak and Lakewood, the religious Zionist communities of Israel, are all internally inconsistent or in denial themselves. They are not. They have engaged with the question more seriously than the denier argument has. The claim is also harmful because it offers a theological cover for a historical denial, allowing the denier to appear to be making a respectful or sympathetic argument when in fact the argument depends on the very catastrophe it denies.

What does the post-war Jewish theological literature actually say about the Holocaust? Which Jewish theologians have argued that the events are incompatible with the covenant, and which have not? Why is a theological premise offered as an argument against a historical record?

See also

• The Hasidic Movement
• Viktor Frankl
• Elie Wiesel
• Primo Levi
• If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

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Sources

• Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (the Piaseczno Rebbe), Esh Kodesh: Sermons from the Warsaw Ghetto 1939-1942, English translation as Sacred Fire, Jason Aronson, 2000
• Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, Bobbs-Merrill, 1966; second edition Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
• Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, KTAV Publishing, 1973
• Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, New York University Press, 1970
• Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, Schocken, 1982
• Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity After the Holocaust”, in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, KTAV, 1977
• Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, Crossroad, 1981
• Ignaz Maybaum, The Face of God after Auschwitz, Polak and Van Gennep, 1965
• Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Oxford University Press, 1994
• Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman and Gershon Greenberg, eds., Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, Oxford University Press, 2007 (the principal anthology of primary sources)
• Elie Wiesel, Night, Hill and Wang, 1960
• Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books, 1988
• Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, 1959
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Religious Life and Resistance” and “Spiritual Resistance in the Camps”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org