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The Man Who Saved God from the Holocaust

Author(s): David Hazony

Source: Shofar , Vol. 31, No. 4, Eliezer Berkovits (Summer 2013), pp. 54-73

Published by: Purdue University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/shofar.31.4.54

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the man Who saved god from the holocaust1

David Hazony

aBstract Eliezer Berkovits was the first Jewish thinker to make a sustained philo- sophical attempt at reconciling the magnitude and specific horror of the Holocaust with a traditional Jewish approach to history. To achieve this, he first establishes the position of the questioner as "Job's brother," who has neither the immediate exposure to events of the suffering Job, nor the luxury of distance to view them as just another case of unjust suffering. Second, he rejects the concept of the Holocaust as a religious "singular- ity," and shows that while it may pose unique questions about the nature of modernity, it does not, in its extremity, undermine religious categories per se. Finally he addresses the problem itself, which is not so much one of logic as recognition—can we recognize the Jewish God in the ashes of Auschwitz? His answer is a qualified yes, and though he has to bend some of the classic theological categories to do so, he nonetheless makes a serious argument for faith after the Holocaust.

As soon as the magnitude of the Holocaust became known to the world, Jewish theological writing began suffering from a problem of articulation. For more than two decades following World War II, indeed, the only posi- tion for most religious thinkers was silence.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 alerted the stunned observer of Jewish theological history that the show was continuing, with or without him. This was magnified tenfold by the 1967 Six Day War, which began with a terrifying waiting period in which the words “second Holocaust” were on everyone’s lips, and ended with a victory so sweeping as to suggest once again the possibility of Jewish survival and even Jewish might.

Thus it was that in the late 1960s and early 1970s that a new wave of Jewish theological writing on the Holocaust appeared. Beginning with Ignaz Maybaum’s The Face of God After Auschwitz (1965), which portrayed the Jewish destruction as a kind of expiation of the sins of the gentiles, Jewish thinkers began to debate, to express, to turn their harshest questions on God. The following year, Richard Rubenstein’s controversial After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism declared the Holocaust to be evidence of the “death of God.” Emil L. Fackenheim published a seminal essay (1968), in which he asserted that regardless of whether one was a traditional or

54 | SHOFAR 31.4 (2013): 54-73

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The Man Who Saved God from the Holocaust | 55

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secular Jew, the death camps now filled the world with a divine “command- ing voice” that insists upon Jewish survival and life; there followed his first major work on the Holocaust, God’s Presence in History (1970), leading to To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (1982). Arthur A. Cohen’s The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, (1974) was a stirring exploration of the phenomenology of an unspeakable and unthinkable tear in the fabric which once bound man with God. These major works were accompanied by a series of important smaller essays and rebuttals, the most notable of which was probably Irving Greenberg’s “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire” (1974), which asserted that the Holocaust must be regarded as a fundamental, revelatory event that changes the na- ture of Judaism itself.

What unites these writings, and distinguishes them from what had appeared during and just after the Holocaust, was the sense that this was an event that could not easily be explained in traditional Jewish categories. The magnitude of the destruction, the cruelty, the innocence of a million children systematically exterminated—all these made it impossible to adopt familiar modes of theological justification.

The more one reflected upon the Holocaust, the more difficult it be- came to place it within a broader framework of Jewish history or traditional Jewish ways of thinking. In the past, the rabbis had interpreted catastrophe as punishment “for our sins.” Could anyone with a sense of moral decency view the Holocaust in this way? In the past, God was perceived as a redeemer, who preserved the Jews against even the most horrible enemies. Could any- one say the Jews had been redeemed? Any articulation, it seemed, pushed toward sacrilege. For what was at stake was not simply an unexplained event or an unjust evil, but the apparent betrayal by God of his covenant. The bedrock principle of Jewish faithfulness, articulated each year at the Pass- over Seder, was that “in each generation, they arise against us to destroy us, and the Holy One saves us from their hand.” This time there had been no redemption, and the obliteration of the Jews was revealed as possible, palpable, even partially successful.

Thus we may characterize the new genre of Jewish holocaust theol- ogy as theoretical inquiry into the very nature of evil. There still exists the traditional problem of theodicy, a logical problem involving the apparent contradiction of beliefs in a god who is both omnipotent and perfectly good, on the one hand, and the presence of radical evil such as the Holocaust, on the other. However, anyone who reads this literature is conscious of a more

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deeply emotional driving force: the reaction of the nationally conscious Jew to the apparent rejection of his own, “chosen” people by his creator. God, who had avowed in Deuteronomy never to abandon the Jews completely, had now done precisely that.2 The need for theological answers was driven not by curiosity or wonder or ordinary reflection, but by the anguish of in- explicable, overwhelming severance.

With the distance of two generations from the events, we may allow ourselves a certain dissatisfaction with both the questions posed and an- swers offered by Jewish post-Holocaust theology. These writers insist that any attempt to incorporate the Holocaust into the past evils which befell the Jewish people necessarily trivializes the Holocaust, and trivialization is sacrilege.3 But does not the insistence of absolute theological attention to the Holocaust, and its isolation from Jewish theological history, run the risk of trivializing the rest of Jewish suffering and redemption throughout the ages? And no less acutely: Is not the continued survival and even thriv- ing of the Jewish people in the last half century—including the creation of their own sovereign state—a complicating factor against a theological challenge based on unmitigated destruction?

Enter Eliezer Berkovits, whose works on the Holocaust were published at the height of the wave of writing in the 1970s, and which point in a dra- matically different direction. According to Berkovits, most of the works of post-Holocaust Jewish theology failed to appreciate the depth and nu- ance of the biblical and rabbinic traditions. Classical Judaism not only has room for the Holocaust and the most powerful questions that arise from it; Judaism itself cannot be properly understood without understanding the Holocaust and attempting, at least provisionally, to address the enormity of what happened from a traditional theological perspective. As a result, Berkovits’s approach, rather than presenting the Holocaust as a funda- mental rupture of Jewish history, incorporates it into the Jewish people’s millennial historical relationship with God. By trying to grapple with the horror, we may understand the entire history of God’s relationship to the world more clearly than ever before.

To understand why this is not simply an abdication of the challenge rather than its overcoming requires a deeper inquiry into Berkovits’s ap- proach. In what follows, I will explore the three claims which together make up Berkovits’s post-Holocaust theology: 1) that the proper perspective from which to view the Holocaust is not that of the awe-struck victim—whose ex- perience was unique and cannot be reconstructed for the purposes of theol-

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ogy—but rather that of the victim’s “brother,” who is both acutely aware of the tragedy and at the same time sufficiently detached to allow for analysis and reasoned discussion; 2) that a proper understanding of the Jewish theo- logical approach to history demands that the Holocaust be understood as a human evil which was perpetrated in a broader ideological and cultural context and that the questions it raises from a theological view are in fact the same as those raised by previous evils in Jewish history; and 3) that God’s refusal to prevent radical evil is a result of his highest aims for man- kind—the establishment of man as a responsible being, charged with the duty of fighting evil, advancing the good, and bringing God’s glory into the world; and for this reason, even if God cannot detach himself from human history, He must nonetheless “hide His face” to allow man the freedom to do evil if man is ever to take responsibility for the good.

The Holocaust is therefore not a justification for the abandonment of faith, but an extreme example of a conundrum that has plagued Jewish faith for millennia. Faith cannot offer a complete answer to evil, but neither is the presence of radical evil a compelling reason for faith’s abandonment. On the contrary: It is the Jewish faith in the transcendent value of human morals, in the meaning of creation and the centrality of human responsi- bility in history, which make it possible to understand an evil as horrible as the Holocaust, and to generate a moral, historical response to it.

In Berkovits’s view, the religious response to the Holocaust is to see it as neither the result of Jewish sins nor God’s abandonment of humanity or of the Jewish people. Rather, the correct response is to recognize that preventing evil and bringing the world to the good are the central respon- sibility which God has given to man; and that therefore the most important religious response to evil is its detection and defeat in the real world. “Since history is, first, man’s responsibility we should begin our examination by questioning and discussing man himself. Perhaps even more important than the question ‘Where was God?’ is ‘Where was man?’”4 The Holocaust is not so much God’s unique failure as that of Western man, raising pro- found questions about the moral qualities of the European enlightenment and its capacity to thwart, rather than unleash, mankind’s most destruc- tive qualities.

Is the Holocaust an irrevocable rupture of the covenant with God—thereby making traditional faith impossible? Or is it a chapter in a broader his- tory—indeed the most horrible chapter, but nonetheless within the fabric

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of covenantal history—thereby allowing the affirmation of Jewish faith in its classic sense? Berkovits understands and accepts the questions raised by modern Jewish thinkers in the wake of the Holocaust. Whereas the devas- tations of the past were interpreted as punishment for Jewish sinfulness, he joins other thinkers in refusing to interpret the Holocaust in this way.5 Yet, the thrust of his argument is ultimately a defense of traditional Jewish faith—one which tries to validate the covenant with God without trivial- izing the suffering of the victims. On the face of it, this is a nearly impos- sible task. The experience of the Holocaust caused many Jews to repudiate their faith in light of the horrors that unfolded before their eyes and on their own flesh. How may one who was not there—Berkovits escaped Ger- many in 1939—presume to preach about the theological meaning of the death camps?

Berkovits begins by drawing a sharp distinction between those who endured the ghettos and camps and those who did not. For someone who was there, it is the experience itself, rather than theological reflection, which forces itself into the center and effectively trumps all speculation. The victim of the Holocaust is like the biblical Job, who cannot endure the circumlocutions of his friends because his suffering is immediate, personal, and in some sense revelatory. Those Jews who rejected God in the midst of the terror, like those who affirmed their faith in it, inhabit a different plane. Their experience, their affirmations and rejections alike, possess a living authenticity, even a sanctity, which we who were not there cannot touch and dare not question. “In the presence of the holy faith of the crematoria,” he writes, referring to those who affirmed their belief in God, “the ready faith of those who were not there is vulgarity. But the disbelief of the sophisti- cated intellectual in the midst of an affluent society—in the light of the holy disbelief of the crematoria—is obscenity.”6 We who were not there have no right to say anything at all about faith in the presence of the victims. More than this: We have an obligation to affirm what flows from the affirmation of those who maintained faith, and an obligation to question God which flows from the questioning of those who did not:

We are not Job and we dare not speak and respond as if we were. We are only Job’s brother. We must believe, because our brother Job believed; and we must question, because our brother Job so often could not believe any longer. This is not a comfortable situation; but it is our condition in this era after the holocaust. In it alone do we stand at the threshold to an adequate response

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to the Shoa—if there be one. . . . It must come without the des- ecration of the holy faith or of the holy loss of faith of the Jewish people in the European hell.7

Berkovits’s immediate aim is to distance himself from the easy answers of the faithful—a distance which is doubly important given that his answer is ultimately an affirmation of traditional covenantal faith. He does not coun- tenance—indeed cannot even mention by name—the facile theodicies of his rabbinic peers who spoke of the Holocaust as a punishment for Jewish sins. “Those who were not there and, yet, readily accept the holocaust as the will of God that must not be questioned, desecrate the holy disbelief of those whose faith was murdered.”8 Having witnessed the rise of Nazism and the descent of Europe into darkness like the fall of a god, Berkovits cannot treat the horrors which ensued as an ordinary theological conundrum. By affirming the validity of the question of divine betrayal, Berkovits chooses the more difficult road.

Yet we may suggest a second aim, one that is crucial for the nature of his project. The image of Job’s brother is carefully chosen. It represents the combination of intimacy and distance necessary for offering a definitive Jewish theological response. We are not strangers to the enormity, nor are we its direct victims. Just as there is a danger in belittling the Holocaust by subsuming it automatically under preexisting categories, there is an equal danger in attempting to re-experience it as if we had been there ourselves. This is precisely what thinkers such as the Americans Richard L. Ruben- stein and Arthur A. Cohen, neither of whom experienced Nazi rule or the concentration camps directly, appear to be doing. It also seems to be the intention of Irving Greenberg, who insists, as a test for any Holocaust the- ology, that “no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.”9 Berkovits rejects such a view: The implicit meaning of Job’s brother is that our role is not to recreate the conditions of the Holocaust in our minds, but to recog- nize that we cannot do so, that our position is in some sense permanently deprived of the authenticity of direct experience, while never losing sight of the enormity of the event.

Moreover, the position of the brother carries obligations that are not incumbent upon the victim. A victim is not merely “above” rational thought, privileged in his understanding because of his proximity to the horror; he is also “below” it, excused by dint of his trauma from the duty to examine it objectively. The victim’s brother, on the other hand, is obligated to think

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about that which he did not experience: He must investigate the nature of the crime and try to make order out of life in its wake. This is a sacred duty, one which differs from that of the victim. We who are not Job, but Job’s brother, are not simply cut off from the direct experience of his suffering but in some way sufficiently distant that we may not excuse ourselves from grappling with it intelligently, from a distance. We who exist independently of the Holocaust must understand it from our unique perspective, rather than that of Job himself.

In order to begin to speak of the Holocaust from the perspective of Job’s brother, Berkovits finds it necessary to explore the Jewish understanding of evil, and of history considered more broadly—an understanding with pow- erful implications for the theological significance of human responsibility.

In Berkovits’s view, the greatest problem in dealing with the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective is the tendency of modern thinkers to view it in perfect isolation rather than as an event within history—a view that contra- dicts the fundamental historical outlook of Judaism. He writes, “both the literary achievement and the theological-philosophical attempts [to address the Holocaust] suffer from one serious shortcoming: They deal with the holocaust in isolation, as if there had been nothing else in Jewish experi- ence.”10 There are two dimensions to this critique. First, a Jewish theology of the Holocaust must take into account the millennia of Jewish history and Jewish suffering, which is the bedrock upon which classical Jewish theol- ogy rests; second, it cannot stand in ignorance of the restoration of Jewish sovereignty and the establishment of a new state—a phenomenon which, “looked upon as disconnected, apart from the rest of Jewish experience and teaching, . . . is even less explicable than the Holocaust.” 11

With regard to the past, Berkovits reminds us that the most terrible question of the Holocaust is not the quantity of the dead, but the very fact of the murder of innocents—many of whom were among the most pious, students of the Torah who went to their deaths with the affirmation of God’s greatness on their lips. Yet the theological issue this raises, painful and serious as it may be, is not new in Judaism.

It is of course true that in the magnitude of suffering and degra- dation, nothing equals the tragedy of the German death camps. Yet the problem of faith of the survivors of any of those [earlier] catastrophes was not different from the problem which confronts us in our days. . . . Surely there was no comfort for them in the

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fact that they had not known Auschwitz. Did the Jews massacred in the Rhinelands in the eleventh and twelfth centuries have less reason to ask where God was while those horrors descended upon them than the Jews at Auschwitz and Treblinka? Was the problem of faith in a personal God less serious during the Black Death than it is today because then only half of the half-million Jews of Europe perished and not six million as in our days? . . . While the Holocaust is unique in the objective magnitude of its inhumanity, it is not unique as a problem of faith resulting from Jewish historical experience. Indeed, one might say that the problem is as old as Judaism itself.12

This is an exceptionally difficult argument to make in the face of the extermination of European Jewry; it is either horribly blind or singularly courageous. We may suggest that it is the natural outcome of adopting the position of “Job’s brother.” It is, minimally, an attempt to place the Holo- caust into some semblance of perspective, written at a time when such an effort was considered by other writers to be a kind of sacrilege. Its effect, however, is not to diminish the theological problem but to affirm the inten- sity of the same questioning which the Jews have undertaken in the past: If we do not share the shock of the destructions in Kishinev or Worms, it is not because they were not shocking, even to the point of raising difficult theological questions, but because we have failed to preserve the memory of those events, whereas the Holocaust has occurred in our own time. The aim here is not to trivialize the Holocaust but to avoid the trivialization of previous sufferings, which naturally must occur when the Holocaust is considered in isolation.

This insistence that the Holocaust be viewed as part of a broader theological-historical context is perhaps the most controversial statement in Berkovits’s exposition. Indeed, what distinguishes the wave of Holocaust theology from the immediate responses of traditionalist rabbis—responses which Berkovits rejects—is its insistence that the Holocaust represents a theological singularity, a fundamental rupture of religious thinking, de- manding the creation of new categories.13

Suppose the Holocaust is a unique, unparalleled horror in human his- tory. Is its uniqueness sufficient to mark a reconsideration of fundamental theological principles? Here the scholar runs into grave difficulty. All agree that the issue cannot be simply quantitative: It seems intolerable that the test for whether God’s covenant is in force should come down to either the num-

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ber of Jews killed, or the proportion lost. Nor can it be the simple fact that this was the most horrible evil or moral failure or destruction: If there had never been a Holocaust, some other event in history would have deserved that title, and raised similar, though not identical, questions. For the theo- logian to focus on the Holocaust as a fundamental rupture, he must show that its uniqueness is not simply philosophically but theologically decisive.

Berkovits’s response is a development of classical Jewish theology that finds modernity suspect precisely because of its naive view of human nature and its failure to recognize the extreme evil of which humanity is capable. The main streams of Holocaust theology make the error of focusing on the destruction of European Jewry as a tremendum or caesura of history, a fundamental rupture which dwarfs all else and which makes all previous categories of interpretation meaningless. This is wrong, first, because we who were not at the camps do not have the same right to ignore all the long history of Jewish suffering as do those who endured the horror itself; we are not Job, but Job’s brother. Second, it is wrong because one cannot detach the Holocaust from the centuries of European hostility to the Jews which led up to it; nor may one retroactively render meaningless millennia of Jewish suffering by positing a radical break. Whereas the death camps pose a serious challenge to the optimism of modern European thinking, from the standpoint of Jewish theological thinking, the question of divine silence in the face of evil was no less harsh in the wake of previous horrors throughout history.

None of this, of course, addresses the fundamental problem of why God allows such evil in the first place. It is to this, the most difficult ques- tion raised by the Holocaust, that Berkovits now turns.

To address the question of God’s apparent silence in the face of the enor- mity of the Holocaust, we must first recognize that we are in fact talking about two separate questions. The first is purely logical or formal: Is there not a simple contradiction between the idea that God is all powerful and all good, on the one hand, and that evil exists, on the other? The second we may call substantive. Granted that such is possible—can we as Jews recog- nize this God in the wake of the Holocaust? Is it possible, after the destruc- tion of European Jewry, to speak of God as we have before, as redeeming us from our enemies? It is the latter question which drives the heart of Holo- caust theology. Still, it is worth addressing briefly the first, logical question, partly because most discussion of the Holocaust tends to conflate the two,

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and partly because the answer to the first is important in understanding Berkovits’s answer to the second.

Perhaps the most important analysis of the logical problem in our time has been that of Alvin C. Plantinga, whose 1974 treatise God, Freedom, and Evil has become a central text on the problem. His argument centers around what is called the Free Will Defense. According to Plantinga, the most difficult objection to the existence of an omnipotent, perfectly good God runs as follows: 1) Such a God could have made any world he pleased; 2) it would have been possible for him to make a world in which radical evil did not take place; therefore 3) the fact that he did not do so is indicative that he is either not omnipotent or not perfectly good.

In response to this, Plantinga argues that it is possible for a good God to create a world in which people are given complete freedom to make moral choices which in turn necessitates the possibility of evil in the world. God cannot simultaneously allow man to be completely free and make it impos- sible for there to be radical evil; therefore not only is it possible to reconcile a good and omnipotent God with the presence of evil, such a possibility is a necessary condition for humans to have free will. “The existence of God,” Plantiga concludes, “is neither precluded nor rendered improbable by the existence of evil.”14

Plantinga’s solution, however, only offers a resolution to the logical problem of theodicy. It does not solve the problem of theology after the Holo- caust, although it clarifies the nature of the substantive questions that remain.

According to Berkovits, Judaism is founded not on speculation and logical reasoning but rather on the memory of an encounter—on a spe- cific, covenantal relationship with a specific God.15 When a traumatic event casts doubt on an intimate human relationship, logical arguments or hy- potheticals do not address the issue; rather, we want to know whether we can still recognize our relationship in the wake of the event, or whether everything must be reconsidered. This is no less true for the Jews’ relation- ship with God. Perhaps some God, the Jew responds to Plantinga, may have allowed a Holocaust to happen to some people. But could our God have let it happen to us?

Berkovits’s answer, which constitutes the central chapters of Faith After the Holocaust, is a qualified yes. He arrives at his conclusion as the result of two discussions. The first concerns the meaning of human responsibility in Judaism, and the need for God to allow history to run its course, without overt intervention, in nearly all circumstances. The second concerns how

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one reads theological history of the twentieth century from a broader Jew- ish perspective—how, in particular, the establishment of the State of Israel affects our theological understanding of the Holocaust.

Berkovits’s first argument is that human freedom is necessary according to Judaism; and therefore God must remove himself from direct involvement in order to make room for human responsibility. Yet his argument goes sig- nificantly beyond that of Plantinga who only explains why absolute freedom necessitates evil but does not explain why freedom is worth it—that is, why moral freedom is so important that God would allow radical evil. Writing about this problem and Plantinga’s relation to Berkovits, Steven Katz has argued that “it would have been preferable, morally preferable, to have a world in which ‘evil’ did not exist, at least not in the magnitude witnessed during the Shoah, even if this meant doing without certain heroic moral at- tributes or accomplishments. . . . Better to introduce limits, even limits on that freedom of the will requisite to moral choice, than to allow Auschwitz.”16

This is a serious objection to Plantinga’s view of God and freedom. Yet Katz is mistaken when he applies this critique to Berkovits.17 To explain why, let’s distinguish between freedom, which is the belief that man’s ac- tions are the product of his own unforced choice—a necessary condition for morality—and responsibility, which means that man is to be considered accountable for the good and evil that take place in human history—an accountability which presupposes freedom but is not identical with it. In Berkovits’s view, human responsibility is nothing less than the central pur- pose of creation, and the central premise behind the possibility of sanctify- ing history. “History is man’s responsibility. It is one of the dimensions of sanctification. Here, within the God-given task of sanctification, is the source of man’s freedom as well as of his responsibility. The God who calls man to responsibility is the guarantor of his freedom to act responsibly. As man ac- cepts responsibility, he enters upon his God-given heritage of freedom.”18

Thus for Berkovits, freedom is the precondition for all responsibility, which in turn is the central purpose for which man was created, and that which distinguishes man from the rest of creation. Responsibility means accountability, and accountability is impossible without freedom.

One can now begin to understand why freedom would not be cur- tailed in order to ameliorate the effects of man’s actions. If man were not enabled to perpetrate evil, including radical evil, then he would not be truly responsible for its prevention, nor would he need to learn to understand the world in such a way as to institute safeguards against it. To whatever

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extent freedom is curtailed, so thereby is man’s meaningful responsibility for history—and thus, in effect, is his humanity itself:

God cannot as a rule intervene whenever man’s use of evil dis- pleases him. It is true, if he did so the perpetration of evil would be rendered impossible, but so would the possibility for good also disappear. Man can be frightened; but he cannot be bludgeoned into goodness. If God did not respect man’s freedom to choose his course in personal responsibility, not only would the moral good and evil be abolished from the earth, but man himself would go with them. For freedom and responsibility are of the very essence of man. Without them man is not human. . . . The question therefore is not: Why is there undeserved suffering? But, Why is there man? He who asks the question about injustice in history really asks: Why a world? Why creation?19

When man takes responsibility for history, for effecting that which is good and preventing or fighting the emergence of evil, he is fulfilling his central role as a human being. Responsibility is the aim of the creation of man. God’s involvement in history, such as it exists at all, cannot substan- tively hinder the assumption of responsibility by man. But this suggests that not only must minor evils be tolerated, so must major ones. It is for man, not God, to prevent Nazism, Soviet Communism, and other forms of radical evil from taking hold. It is man who must recognize the historical and ideo- logical roots of such movements, the processes through which they gather strength, and learn to identify them and fight them before they can take political and strategic form. Only this kind of man can be responsible for the good of the world. Only such a man can bring about redemption in history.

We may thus summarize Berkovits’s answer to the problem of God and the Holocaust in the following manner: God created man in order that he should take responsibility for history, to “work and keep” the garden. Yet responsibility presupposes freedom, which in turn presupposes the pos- sibility that man might choose evil rather than good. God must hide his face, as it were, so that man can fulfill his own destiny. Yet this means that evil, including radical evil, might take place; God cannot prevent it without thwarting the central aims of creation. God allows evil, even radical evil, because God’s intervention against evil is a direct affront to man’s respon- sibility for history—and human responsibility is itself the highest good with which God endowed man.

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This is the first step towards establishing that the God of the Holocaust is recognizable as the God of Israel, a God who places mankind as the aim of creation. But beyond this, Berkovits’s exposition also takes great care to find its expression in the Jewish sources.

The most important traditional term he invokes in this context is that of the “hiding of the face” (hester panim) of the divine. This term appears in many places in the Hebrew Bible, referring to divine passivity in the face of evil done to Israel. 20 In some cases the “hiding of the face” in the Bible refers to God’s anger in response to sin,21 but in other passages it is clear that it refers to something else. “In biblical terminology,” Berkovits writes, “we speak of hester panim, the Hiding of the Face, God’s hiding of his coun- tenance from the sufferer. Man seeks God in his tribulation but cannot find him. . . . [The Bible] speaks of the Hiding of the Face when human suffering result, not from divine judgment, but from the evil perpetrated by man. . . . God seems to be unconcernedly asleep during the tribulations inflicted by man on his fellow.”22 Here it is not the sins of Israel that have caused God to turn away his face in anger. There is no punishment here, but rather the same pained question about the unjust suffering of the righteous.

What exactly is meant by the “Hiding of the Face”? In Berkovits’s view, what is being described is more than the simple inaction by God in times of crisis. It is a more profound statement about what God himself is. In this context he quotes a peculiar phrasing which appears in the book of Isaiah:

Verily you are a God that hides himself (el mistater), O God of Israel, the Savior.23

Here God’s hiddenness is a source of the prophet’s praise. “For Isaiah,” Berkovits writes, “God’s self-hiding is an attribute of divine nature. Such is God. He is a God who hides himself. Man may seek him and he will not be found; man may call to him and he may not answer. God’s hiding his face in this case is not a response to man, but a quality being assumed by God at his own initiative. But neither is it due to divine indifference toward the destiny of man. God’s hiding himself is an attribute of the God of Israel, who is the Savior.”24

Berkovits, of course, is not the only modern Jewish theologian to speak of the hiding of God’s face during the Holocaust.25 For Berkovits, however, this image is meant to describe a very specific kind of divine withdrawal from history—an attribute of the divine, which enables the possibility of human flourishing.

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This idea, that God “hides his face” even in the presence of radical evil, raises the following problem: If intervention in history undermines respon- sibility, and thus God does not intervene, does this not render providence meaningless? Has Berkovits not, in essence, done away with the notion of a redeeming God? As Katz and other critics have asked, if God would not intervene even in a case as extreme as Auschwitz, does this imply that God never intervenes? How is the “hiding” God different from Rubenstein’s “dead” God, or the not-so-omnipotent God offered by the philosopher Hans Jonas?26

In Berkovits’ view, God’s limited intervention in history is triggered at key moments—not simply by the extremity of suffering as by the possibil- ity of utter destruction. God intervenes only when man’s responsibility has failed so utterly as to put his very survival—that is, the survival of God’s own highest creation—at risk. In such a rare case, and only then, does God’s own responsibility for creation take precedence over human responsibility:

God took a risk with man and he cannot divest himself of re- sponsibility for man. If man is not to perish at the hand of man, if the ultimate destiny of man is not to be left to the chance that man will never make the fatal decision, God must not withdraw his providence from his creation. He must be present in history. That man may be, God must absent himself; that man may not perish in the tragic absurdity of his own making, God must re- main present.27

In this, and similar passages, we detect a concern on Berkovits’s part that was highly characteristic of the time in which he was writing: The question of the survival of mankind, in its entirety, was at the forefront of many writ- ers’ minds. The combination of the Nazi death machine and the prospect of nuclear war triggered a flurry of new writing about the possibility that man would destroy himself through his own inventions—a destruction which many people came to call, appropriately enough, a “nuclear holocaust.”28 And yet it is here that Berkovits is forced ultimately to draw a line between God’s absence in human history and his intervention to preserve humanity. This is for Berkovits a matter of faith, but it is also consistent with his under- standing of the nature of Creation and man’s role in the universe. Complete destruction is not an option. God himself promised this in the wake of the flood at the time of Noah. God himself has taken ultimate responsibility for his own creation, just as He wishes man to take responsibility for history.

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God also takes responsibility for Jewish survival. The Jewish people is a crucial element in the call to human responsibility, for it is only through the example of a living people that the moral ideals of the Bible may be transmitted to humanity.29 Because the chosen people is crucial for the redemption of man, its survival is fundamental to the purpose of creation itself.30 Thus, just as God saved Abraham and his family from the hardships of life in Canaan, and just as he saved the Jews from spiritual and physical destruction in Egypt, so too does God intervene on behalf of the Jewish people throughout history when their survival is at stake. Only this can explain the unfathomable perseverance of the Jews throughout history, despite being among the smallest and weakest of peoples. God “reveals his presence in the survival of his people Israel. . . . Because of that, Israel could endure God’s long silences without denying him. Because of the survival of Israel, the prophets could question God’s justice and yet believe in him.”31

Berkovits therefore dedicates considerable effort to discussing the meaning of survival in Jewish theology. His second book on faith and the Holocaust, With God in Hell, is a paean to the spiritual fortitude that was dis- played by pious Jews facing the madness of the ghettoes and death camps. Berkovits’s emphasis on survival enables him to do something that no other Holocaust theologian could do: place limits on the meaning of the devasta- tion in the eyes of Jewish theology. Even the Holocaust, the most extreme evil ever perpetrated by man, is not an absolute—and the gap that separates it from the absolute is the starting point of Jewish thinking for the future. Jewish survival itself is not only possible but manifest after the Holocaust, and any theology that preaches God’s death or betrayal of his covenant has either ignored this salient fact or distorted the classical covenantal teaching.

It is for this reason that Berkovits chose to end his Faith After the Holo- caust with a chapter on the theological meaning of Zionism. In his view, no theological discussion of the Holocaust can take place without accounting for the dramatic reversal of 1948. The establishment of Israel represents nothing less than God’s redeeming affirmation in the wake of the Holo- caust, and an overwhelming refutation of those Holocaust theologians for whom the murder of Europe’s Jews is proof of God’s death or impotence. As he writes:

For the Jew, for whom Jewish history neither begins with Aus- chwitz nor ends with it, Jewish survival through the ages and the ingathering of the exiles into the land of their fathers after the Holocaust proclaim God’s holy presence at the very heart

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of his inscrutable hiddenness. We recognize in it the hand of divine providence because it was exactly what, after the Holo- caust, the Jewish people needed in order to survive. Broken and shattered in spirit even more than in body, we could not have been able to continue on our Jewish way through history with- out some vindication of our faith that the “Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.” The State of Israel came at a mo- ment in history when nothing else could have saved Israel from extinction through hopelessness. It is our lifeline to the future.32

Those who have argued that Eliezer Berkovits’s theology of human responsibility does away with the divine involvement in history have misread him. On the contrary, we have a combination of two contradictory winds, both of which have their source deep in Jewish tradition. On the one hand, God has created man as the pinnacle of all creation, that he may take re- sponsibility for creation. Because of this, God must remain aloof from his- tory, or else responsibility would lose all meaning. God must allow evil to carry through, or else man will never internalize his need to stop it. On the other hand, God cannot allow man to destroy himself in the process. It is destruction, not evil, that God intercedes to prevent. This is the meaning of God’s promise to Noah, the father of all men, that God would never al- low another flood to destroy humanity.33 And what is true for his covenant with Noah is also true for the covenant with Abraham: God will protect the Jewish people from destruction, even in the face of horrific evil. We have seen it in our own day.

Eliezer Berkovits’s response to the Holocaust draws the discussion back to a traditional framework but nonetheless represents a marked shift away from the old-guard responses. One such shift is his refusal to connect tragedy with Jewish sin—mipnei hataeinu—which has been a mark of Jew- ish self-understanding since the Bible. What makes mipnei hataeinu seem unacceptable today is at least as much a reflection of our changed moral sensibilities as it is of the unique horrors of the Holocaust. Berkovits is not the first Jewish thinker to shift the exegetical emphasis from one part of the tradition to another in response to changed historical realities. Yet it is a shift worth noting.

Moreover, Berkovits’s argument that God’s involvement in history is, in essence, relegated to preserving Jewish and human survival, must be rec- ognized as a substantive departure from a tradition that praises God for his

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thorough involvement in all of the world’s affairs—that he “remakes every day the works of Creation.”34 The Psalms he quotes, in which individuals speak of God’s “hidden face,” do so not out of detached reflection but out of frustration; they have an expectation that God indeed can and does in- tervene on behalf of the righteous. Indeed, the classical idea of personal intervention (hashgaha pratit) seems to be rendered ineffectual in Berkovits’s theology, for God in fact intervenes only in cases where human or Jewish survival are at stake. While such a position is not entirely without precedent in Jewish tradition, it is also not exactly reflective of the mainstream view.

Despite these caveats, it is important to recognize the major achieve- ment of Berkovits’s Holocaust theology. In the metaphor of “Job’s brother,” he has crafted a new frame of reference from which one may speak construc- tively about God and the Holocaust—one that allows for a broadening of the historical perspective without belittling or dismissing the independent meaning of the events. Most new theological writings have been predicated on the belief that the Holocaust must be seen as not simply the worst horror in Jewish history, but as a theological watershed, or even a singularity which may not be put into any broader context. As a result, they have suffered from a series of difficulties, including the unwillingness to incorporate the Holocaust into Judaism’s long history of tragedy and theological inquiry into the meaning of unjust suffering. Berkovits’ writings, by contrast, offer a path that leads away from the abyss, recognizing the magnitude of both the Holocaust and the theological questions it raises, while preserving the covenantal view of history.

But beyond the methodological departures, Berkovits also offers a powerful theological interpretation of the Holocaust in and of itself. God allows evil, even radical, unjust evil, so that humanity can be responsible for history; and human responsibility is the central aim of Creation. This does not mean that there is any justice whatsoever in the Holocaust, or in any other historical destruction of Jewish communities. Our anger at God is not out of place; but it has no bearing on the fundamental question of faith in Him. We may feel betrayed; yet we must recognize that this is not a new betrayal, and that whatever we say about the Holocaust and God must likewise be said about a great deal of Jewish history. God is the parent who allows his older children to fail, even to suffer gravely as a result of their failures, because only then will they learn the deepest realities of human nature and the true meaning of responsibility. Yet like the parent who sets limits to the danger he will tolerate, God will never “abandon completely”

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His creation, or people. For the sake of both he will intervene to ensure their survival. God is hidden but not absent.

This answer will be unsatisfactory to a great many people, who will instinctively revolt against any attempt to place the Holocaust in historical perspective. The questions raised by the Holocaust are not detached theo- logical inquiries; they are loaded with the deepest sentiments of betrayal, anger, and terror. What Berkovits’s approach to these questions offers are tools with which one who was not present may address questions of faith. This approach emerges from his deep acquaintance with the sources of Judaism and a willingness to confront the dissonance between faith in a redeeming God and the overwhelming facts of destruction in history. It re- fuses to drown out thousands of years of Jewish historical theology in the face of a philosophized reconstruction of the horror by those who were not there; yet he refuses similarly to accept the easy answers of the faithful which deny the depth of the problems raised. And he recognizes that from the perspective of Jewish theological history, the twentieth century cannot be looked at solely through a prism of destruction, but must also take into account the survival, reconstitution, and flourishing of the Jewish people in their sovereign land—a redemption unparalleled in Jewish history of the last two millennia.

This is a partial answer, because after the Holocaust there can be only partial answers. But for many Jews today it is precisely the kind of an- swer that can allow Jewish thinking and Jewish life to move forward into history, leaving the abyss while preserving it forever in memory, as we have done in the past.

notes 1. The present work is a much-shortened version of the third and final sec-

tion of the author’s doctoral dissertation, which has also appeared in digital format as Theodicy and Responsibility: Eliezer Berkovits’ Response to the Holocaust (Mata, 2012).

2. See Deuteronomy 4:31. 3. See, for instance, Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish

Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997; first published in 1970), x.

4. Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973),7. 5. Ibid., 94. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Ibid, 5-6. 8. Ibid., 5. 9. Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity,

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and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, edited by Eva Fleischner (New York: Ktav, 1977), 23.

10. Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 88. 11. Ibid., 88. 12. Ibid., 90 13. See, e.g., Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of

the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 1993); Greenberg, “Voluntary Covenant,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Responses to the Shoah, edited by Steven L. Jacobs, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 77-105.; Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence, 69; To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloom- ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); first published 1982.

14. Alvin C. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), 63; 54-64.

15. See Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man, and History, (New York: Jonathan David, 1959), 12-18.

16. Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: NYU, 1983), 274-75. It is worth noting that the challenge comes specifically in Katz’s critique of Berkovits’s Holocaust theology, in an essay entitled “Eliezer Berkovits’s Post-Holocaust Jewish Theodicy,” in Post-Holocaust Dialogues, 268-86.

17. Others who mistakenly accuse Berkovits of simply accepting Plantinga’s Free Will Defense and do not recognize Berkovits’s distinction between responsibil- ity and freedom include Dan Cohn-Sherbok, God and the Holocaust (Herfordshire: Gracewing, 1996), 65-67; Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jew- ish Thought in America (New York: Oxford, 2001), 114; Eliezer Schweid, Wrestling Until Day-Break, Searching for Meaning in the Thinking on the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 336, 349. The significant exception is Marvin Fox, who offers a more sensitive reading of Berkovits in his “Berkovits’s Treatment of Evil,” Tradition 14, no. 3 (1974), 116-24.

18. Berkovits, God,Man, and History, 61. 19. Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 105. 20. See, e.g., Psalms 44:24-27; cited in Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 97. 21. For an analysis of a range of biblical examples of God “hiding his face” in

anger, see Berkovits, Man and God: Studies in Biblical Theology, 196-205. 22. Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 94-95. 23. Isaiah 45:15; cited in Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 101. 24. Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 101. 25. See Jonathan Sacks, Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought After the Holocaust

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 35-41, on Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Norman Lamm; see Moshe Verdiger, The Holocaust as a Theological Turning Point (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan, 1998), 51-60 [Hebrew], where he discusses the debate between J. L. Magnes and S. H. Bergman.

26. Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” in Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 131-43.

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27. Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 107. 28. See Eliezer Berkovits, “Final Solution: Universal?” in Confronting Omnicide:

Jewish Reflections on Weapons of Mass Destruction, edited by Daniel Landes (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991), 259-67.

29. See the discussion of Zionism in chapter 2 of Landes, Confronting Omnicide. 30. See the teaching of Resh Lakish in Sabbath 88a: “The Holy One made

a conditioned agreement with Creation, saying to it: ‘If Israel accepts the Torah, you will continue to exist; if not, I shall return you to “unfilled and void.’”

31. Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust,107. 32. Ibid., 136. 33. Genesis 8:8-17. 34. BT Hagigah 12b.

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