In permitting the Holocaust, God forfeited his right to further unquestioning worship
The best seller lists’ current cranky crop of atheists assume religion must be accompanied by a belief in God. But for me and many other committed Jews I know – observant, secular and somewhere in between – a belief in a personal God is not crucial or even necessary to a life in which religion plays a central role.
My own branch of Judaism, Reconstructionism, for example, its synagogues flourishing all over North America, is theologically agnostic. We often joke that we pray To Whom It May Concern. Reconstructionists are intellectually uncomfortable with the idea of a God who intervenes in human affairs, but we love Judaism, so we take a sociological approach to spiritual life: Community is necessary to people; humans are hard-wired to seek transcendence of the material world and solidarity with their fellows through historically meaningful rituals; and the impulse to pray – to express one’s hopes, fears, gratitude and remorse – is integral to the human estate.
Most important, the act of joining in rituals sanctified by time, and structured common worship built around prayers that encourage moral behaviour to one’s fellows is a positive spur to resolution on any number of personal and collective battlefields. People worshipping together To Whom It May Concern is more socially constructive than an individual with no community ties praying to a personal God.
Religions are like political systems: There are good ones … and less good ones. If a religion does not produce a recognizably healthy society among its adherents, then it is not a good religion. As a fictionalized version of the famous 1st-century BC Rabbi Akiva in a Reconstructionism-inspired novel says to a protégé torn between the moralistic Hebraic faith of his ancestors and the allure of logical Greek philosophy: “The purpose of life is to live well. Whatever contributes toward that end is right and true. My first and last criterion concerning my [religious] proposition is: Does it help man to live better? … There is a higher logic, a rationality that springs from the necessities of human nature … Doctrines in themselves are not important to me, but their consequences are … The first and ultimate consideration, I insist, must be of effects. If any doctrine enlarges life, then it possesses truth in realms beyond Aristotle’s logic.”
How to deal with evil is the great challenge to any religion. Amongst the world’s monotheistic religions, there are two different approaches. In Christianity (and Islam, too peripheral to my experience to discuss here), believers justify God’s unknowable purposes, which includes evil, to humans. In Judaism, believers defend humans’ rights to God. As Elie Weisel once said: “Jewish tradition allows man to say anything to God, provided it be on behalf of man. Man’s inner liberation is God’s justification.”
Indeed, nothing exemplifies the difference between the two religions so much as Judaism’s and Christianity’s respective understanding of the Holocaust, history’s greatest evil.
To Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz, the Holocaust was the bright line dividing a pre-Holocaust acceptance of God the King’s mysterious purposes from the indictment of God as a monarch no longer fit to govern humanity. In permitting the Holocaust, God had forfeited his right to Jews’ further unquestioning worship. Wiesel said of his feelings during a Rosh Hashanah service held in Auschwitz, “I was no longer capable of lamentation. I was the accuser, God the accused.” Wiesel remains a profoundly religious man, but he has replaced the idea of God with a renewed, passionate commitment to the Jews’ survival as a people.
Contrast Wiesel’s “J’accuse” attitude toward God with that of Catholic theologian Saint Edith Stein, a former Jew who died in Auschwitz. For her, the Holocaust not only preserved but confirmed her faith in God. Stein saw the Holocaust as God’s curse on the Jews for their rejection of Christ: “I spoke with the Savior to tell him that I realized it was his Cross that was now being laid upon the Jewish people … and that I would [carry it] if he would only show me how.”
In her final testament of 1939, she wrote: “I joyfully accept in advance the death God has appointed for me, in perfect submission to his most holy will.” Her understanding of her destiny was based on the Christian belief that suffering is redemptive: “Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it.”
I was born during, but thankfully not within, the Holocaust. Intellectually, I have never known the relatively innocent world before it. I understand and sympathize with Wiesel’s position perfectly. Devotion to a God who stayed Abraham’s knife-wielding hand over the bound Isaac because human sacrifice was repulsive to Him, yet who permits the sacrifice of half His “chosen” people, is beyond my imaginative grasp.
Like Wiesel, I can live without a belief in a personal God, yet I cannot conceive of a life in which Jewish moral precepts, Jewish peoplehood and Jewish destiny, whatever that may turn out to be, is not of existential importance to me. Conversely, in spite of the passion and integrity of her belief, if I lived to be a thousand, I could never understand or sympathize with the sacrifice-friendly faith of Edith Stein.
A religion that demands justice I can and do embrace, with or without God. A God who deems suffering redemptive is unacceptable. But a life without either God or religion is a desolate prospect. My choice – fidelity to the perpetuation of Jewish civilization – is a compromise that accommodates both my intellectual integrity and my spiritual needs.
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