To that came the answer: Once we were given free will.. To think that somehow any God could override our own will is to deny the meaning of Genisis and our exit from our own innocence. The question, then, is not whether God could have prevented the Holocaust, but whether any of us could have, whether we can prevent the next one…or the genocides that are current to the world stage at this time. That is a more useful discussion and one that reveals, to my own thinking, the basis of our forever flawed sense of self-preservation that trumps all altruism.
I think that God my name for it is El E. Mental Elemental is a system. Yet it is elemental with the cause and effect knowledge, immensity and potential for ongoing and future creativity. I look at the cosmos and see the harmony of the spheres, the unheard music of all its majesty playing in its own sync, not ours. We can be in sync with it if perhaps we recognise we are within it not separate from it.
Elemental knowledge and creation is a powerful thing: The music of the moon in its elemental knowledgable relationship to our water and tides and moods. There is a certainty for all of us: At the point of our elemental transformation, for me, we meet our El E. For me, the consciousness lives on, its just a new physicality. They reflect time as well. Mental operating system we are and find ourselves within.
We are warned by the bible, by the prophets and by our teachers not to create or worship ANY other gods — not El E. Mental, not a man-made System, not Money, not Idol Worship, and so on. The prophets also foretold of the Messiah — Jesus Christ.
22 comments for “Where was God During the Holocaust?”
Through His birth, life and resurrection — he answered over prophecies in the Old Testament. The day he died on the cross, the veil was torn, and soon the Temple — which used to house God — was destroyed. Over the Millenia, the Bible tells of stories when Jews chose to reject God because of a catastophe or calamity. The horrific reality of the holocaust reminds me of an Old Testament story in terms of magnitude and the impact it had on the Jewish Nation.
Whatever the reason for the Holocaust, the lessons from the Bible tells us not to curse or reject God in these times, but to return to God and seek Him for insight and protection. Adizes, you are a brilliant man. I have applied your teachings on organizational theory with great success. But the most reliable system of management and practical approach to problem solving has come from the wisdom and teachings given to me within the Bible.
In addition, God gives me power through prayer and from the Holy Spirit — power available to us all to help overcome challenges that we are unable to deal with on our own individually or collectively. Over the past three weeks, you have commented on the Jewish condition and asked some pretty tough questions regarding God — the two topics obviously intertwined for good reason.
I pray that you actually seek God, His Word, and good teachers to assist you in your quest to truly understand who God is and what He can be in your life. Further, I hope that you fight your tendancy to relegate the God of the Torah or the Bible as a God who was never real and is not real today. We bury our heads in the sand, refusing to recognize reality truth , and clinging to hope beyond rationality. Steve, I thoroughly enjoyed what you wrote and can only add one thing that may shed some additional light on the current state of play in the spiritual world and its reflection into the material world we know so well.
If you are quoting from both the Old and New Testments, one revelation we must surely explain is the prophecy that Christ would return in the Time of the End, in the Glory of Carmel, the holiest mount in Israel. The question I always asked as a Christian child was: And no one had a precise answer, except that the prophecy said that He would return when the Ark of the Covenant was rebuilt on Mount Carmel, at which point, the Meek would inherit the Earth as Christ also foretold.
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Maybe time to turn the page? I mentally have a problem with idol worship myself. It seems to me that Ichak has not limited God but expanded It. The depersonaliation is vital, I believe, in order to become more humble regarding our place in physical life and particularly on earth. I look for the signs that El E Mental is showing me as I go about my daily life and keep in contact this way. In Revelations, there are a number of signs that point to His coming, among them the rebuilding of the Temple at the Temple Mount. The plans have been drawn, but the land is not currently controlled by Israel, and therefore the Temple has not been rebuilt.
In the meantime, we have a real Savior, one that we can know intimately and personally, just by asking Him into our lives and to forgive us for our sins. I understand this sounds like foolishness to those who have yet to ask Jesus into their lives. And yet the relationship I have with God is exactly as it is depicted and promised in the Bible. It is real, it is powerful, it is Truth and it is Love.
There will be a time when the meke shall inherit the Earth, but while on this Earth — at this time — we have an opportunity to have a living relationship with our God and our King. Our God is the Almighty Father — a perfect father — not an imperfect man or imperfect father. He is love and His love never fails.
His love is there for you and anyone who chooses to receive it. I read the bible — the Living Word — not books written about the bible. I pray to God — not to a middleman. My testimony is simple. I first had to answer the first primary question — Is there a God? I chose to review the major religions because it made sense to me that if He is God, I would not be the only one He would make himself known to — why would God be so exclusive? I ultimately decided that Christianity made the most logical sense out of all the religions I investigated.
NOW comes the most interesting part. The truth is that God expects us to seek Him — He is God! But, you must be seeking God to actually find him. Finally, I offer this warning. You shall have no other gods before me. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Both the Jewish and the Roman clocks were set by my God. My God has promised to reveal Himself to everyone who seeks Him. While some lay claim that He is exclusionary, the opposite is actually true. He is available to everyone who calls on His name.
When you follow my God, there is no question as to whether salvation is yours or not. My God is accessible through prayer, and His Spirit comforts my soul. No one really did, so here it is. Death is also metaphorical in the larger sense. We all know that bodies deteriorate, but the soul survives unscathed. Evil is not a force, but the null set, the absence of anything good, the absence of light or the presence of God.
God has made it clear that He can not reach us unless we request His presence. Maybe time that we did. I also agree that death is metaphorical, but we are promised a resurrection. Again, all this ties in with the appointed time God has given Satan to corrupt and influence mankind. We need to decide who we are following. I have read the blogs again and find the exchanges interesting and thought provoking. Having stated where I am coming from, I would like to get back to Dr.
Where Was God During the Holocaust? As already stated in Dr. Adizes opening, there is another question behind the question: Why would God be on vacation when this horrible event was taking place? Adizes perspective, in brief, is that God is a System that can self-manage and thus God can co-exist with evil. The blogs debating whether Dr. God and Evil have co-existed since the beginning of the human race. The underlying question behind the questions that started this blog is: If we have a loving and omnipotent God… why does Evil continue to exist?
Adizes states that both can co-exist. My view is that is a true but incomplete statement. The part that is incomplete is it does not allow for what we know from the Bible which is either the Word of God or it is a fanciful narrative, each person has to make that decision.
The point missing in this blog is that the God of the Bible is not interested in co-existing with Evil. Why do they not address the problem, or the elephant in the room that everyone else talks about daily? What we do not know is what the Chairman of the Board or the CEO truly knows, thinks and plans to do about it…employees and consultants are operating without a clear and complete picture of what the boss is going to do about the mess we see.
But the God of the Bible does not keep his plans to himself. The Bible has lots of themes, topics, facts, ideas and stories but the overall theme of the Bible is The Revelation of God about establishing His Kingdom organization who is invited to participate, how it is to function, who will lead it and what the end-game is. The end-game is Everlasting Righteousness and Peace when the King of Kings, Christ physically returns to earth to rule.
In short, the Bible reveals in extensive detail how and when the presence of Evil will be eliminated and the Kingdom of God fully realized here on earth. Why would a CEO allow anyone to work for their organziation when they are totally opposite in their mission, agenda, values and behavior? Those individuals may hang around a while but eventually they have to leave.
Co-existence of this type is not an option. Adizes point that God-System is governed by a formula. In light of the magnitude of depravity seen in the Holocaust, many people have also re-examined classical views on this subject.
Where was God During the Holocaust? - Adizes Insights
A common question raised in Holocaust theology is "How can people still have any kind of faith after the Holocaust? A scholarly literature, including a variety of anthologies and commentaries, has developed that reflects upon Holocaust theology as a religio-cultural phenomenon. Satmar leader Joel Teitelbaum writes:. Because of our sinfulness we have suffered greatly, suffering as bitter as wormwood , worse than any Israel has known since it became a people In former times, whenever troubles befell Jacob, the matter was pondered and reasons sought—which sin had brought the troubles about—so that we could make amends and return to the Lord, may He be blessed But in our generation one need not look far for the sin responsible for our calamity The heretics have made all kinds of efforts to violate these oaths, to go up by force and to seize sovereignty and freedom by themselves, before the appointed time And so it is no wonder that the Lord has lashed out in anger And there were also righteous people who perished because of the iniquity of the sinners and corrupters, so great was the [divine] wrath.
There were Messianist Zionists , at the other end of the spectrum, who also saw the Holocaust as a collective punishment for ongoing Jewish unfaithfulness to the Land of Israel. Mordecai Atiyah was a leading advocate of this idea. Zvi Yehuda Kook and his disciples, for their part, avoided this harsh position, but they too theologically related the Holocaust to the Jewish recognition of Zion.
Many Haredi rabbis today warn that a failure to follow ultra-Orthodox interpretations of religious law will cause God to send another Holocaust.
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Elazar Shach , a former leader of the Lithuanian yeshiva Orthodoxy in Israel, made this claim on the eve of the Gulf War , stating that there would be a new Holocaust for the abandonment of religion and "desecration" of Shabbat in Israel. Both Meir Kahane [7] and Avigdor Miller [8] have written extensively in defense of God during the Holocaust, while criticizing the European Jewish community's abandonment of traditional Jewish values.
According to Menachem Mendel Schneerson , the seventh Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch , no explanation that human reason can provide can afford a satisfactory theodicy of Auschwitz, especially no explanation along the lines of divine punition. In his published discourses, for example, the following critique of any rational Auschwitz theodicy is to be found.
In our own times, the destruction of six million Jews that took place with such great and terrible cruelty—a tremendous desolation the likes of which never was and never will be, may the Merciful One save us! There is no rational explanation and no elucidation based on Torah wisdom whatsoever for the Devastation, nothing but the knowledge that "thus it arises in My [God's] Mind! It is but "for a small moment that have I forsaken thee" [Is. And most certainly there is no explanation in terms of punishment for sins. On the contrary, all those who were killed in the Desolation are called kedoshim [holy ones] The same approach, in which all forms of rational theodicy are categorically rejected, is adopted by Schneerson in his correspondence with Elie Wiesel R.
Schneerson, Iggerot Hakodesh, no. At the same time, Schneerson also suggested on occasion that the Holocaust could be compared to surgery. Not all human beings are able to perceive it, but it is very much there. So it is not impossible for the physical destruction of the Holocaust to be spiritually beneficial.
On the contrary, it is quite possible that physical affliction is good for the spirit. As Bauer notes in his article, Chaika Grossman, a former Knesset member, had published an article in Hamishmar on 22 August quoting Schneerson and expressing her profound shock at his surgery analogue. On 28 August , the Rebbe sent her a reply on his personal stationery in which he confirmed the substance of the analogue—albeit not the import drawn by her. Whether the citation of the analogue, taken out of context and of dubious authority, indicates a "justification of God's ways to man" remains unclear, in any case, especially in light of Schneerson's authorized published works.
What systematic scholarly studies of Schneerson's philosophy do show is that such questions in general must be understood in their specifically epistemological character.
As the Rebbe explained in his letter to Grossman, it is because we have no understanding why the Holocaust had to happen that we must believe, as a matter of faith or trust in God emunah , that it is ultimately for the benefit for those who perished as well as Jews and humanity at large. The Rebbe does not attempt to explain what the benefit is. But it is evidently eschatological - messianic. As is the rationale for the "surgery. The analogue only works if human beings in their present state of understanding are compared to an unwitting person who has never heard of surgery who suddenly sees, for the first time, surgeons cutting open an apparently "healthy" human being.
Somewhat in the spirit in Immanuel Kant 's essay on theodicy, [13] the only "Holocaust theology" clearly propounded and endorsed by the Lubavitcher Rebbe is practical, rather than theoretical, messianism. It is within a pragmatic-messianic framework of thinking that emunah "faith" shows itself to be the transcendental condition of the very questioning and prosecution of God and the indignant revolt against God.
For it could in no way be otherwise. If only the problem is meant with truth, and it is the expression and product of a true feeling of justice and uprightness, then it is logical that such a deep feeling can only come from being convinced that true justice is the justice that stems from a super-human source, that is, from something higher than both human intellect and human feeling.
Moreover, he must—after a rattling outrage and a thorough grieving—ultimately come to the conclusion: Nevertheless I remain confident [ ani maamin ]. Modern Orthodox rabbis such as Joseph Soloveitchik , Norman Lamm , Randalf Stolzman, Abraham Besdin, Emanuel Rackman , Eliezer Berkovits , and others have written on this issue; many of their works have been collected in a volume published by the Rabbinical Council of America in a volume entitled: Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust.
Richard Rubenstein 's original piece on this issue, After Auschwitz , held that the only intellectually honest response to the Holocaust is to reject God, and to recognize that all existence is ultimately meaningless. There is no divine plan or purpose, no God that reveals His will to mankind, and God does not care about the world. Man must assert and create his own value in life. This view has been rejected by Jews of all religious denominations, but his works were widely read in the Jewish community in the s. Since that time Rubenstein has begun to move away from this view; his later works affirm a form of deism in which one may believe that God may exist as the basis for reality and some also include Kabbalistic notions of the nature of God.
No man can really say that God is dead. How can we know that? Nevertheless, I am compelled to say that we live in the time of the "death of God". This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God.
Where was God During the Holocaust?
The death of God is a cultural fact When I say we live in the time of the death of God, I mean that the thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken Emil Fackenheim is known for his understanding that people must look carefully at the Holocaust, and to find within it a new revelation from God. For Fackenheim, the Holocaust was an "epoch-making event". 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.
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. 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. 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.