Those who hold to the more traditional Jewish belief in a God who possesses the three "omnis" are left with a serious theological problem when He does not intervene to save the innocent from impending disaster. A crude solution to the problem of theodicy is to say that the suffering innocent are really not innocent.
That their suffering is a punishment from God as justified retribution for sins committed. If ever an event in history proved the fallacy of this argument, it is the Holocaust. It is simply not possible to assert that the six million among whom were a million and a half children were sinners.
There are numerous other attempts at trying to explain away the theological problems posed by the Holocaust and they are too numerous to cite here. Suffice it to say they all fall short and many are outright offensive.
Does this mean that God does not care about us? I hardly think so. The miraculous birth of the state of Israel a few short years after the Holocaust indicates otherwise. I am not suggesting for a moment that the foundation of the state of Israel justifies the Holocaust.
It most certainly does not. But it does throw into question the easy assertion that God does not care about us. Life is a mystery. It contains blessing and tragedy, joy and pain, light and darkness. Just because we are unable to sense God's manifestation in the darkness should not lead us to dismiss His presence in times of illumination.
You are right; some people find it problematic reading passages that declare God answers prayer, when we know that many have prayed for help without response, be it in the Holocaust or in recent tragedies, ranging from terrorist attacks to local earthquakes. Equally difficult are prayers praising God's care for those who, on the contrary, have had a terrible year, with cancer or bereavements blighting their lives.
But such prayers still have a role, and although you personally may not find satisfactory all of the following very different reasons, perhaps one will appeal to you.
The first is that the prayerbook is for everyone: believers, doubters, the hurt, the content, the angry and many more. Thus prayers which grate with some people will resonate with others and the liturgy has to have a wide range of passages, reflecting the different Jews who read them.
Where was God there? Because the question is unanswerable, some religious authorities pronounce it is forbidden to ask it: Kulka quotes two people saying that, one of them who was actually in the camp as a Sonderkommando , whose reply was: "It is forbidden to ask that question, those questions, there, and unto eternity. The answer Kulka offers is a dream he had more than 50 years after the event, when Israel was braced for a chemical attack in the Gulf war.
He dreamed then he was inside crematorium number 2, and there was God, also: "At first I felt Him only as a kind of mysterious radiation of pain, flowing at me from the dark void in the unlit part of the cremation ovens.
A radiation of insupportably intense pain, sharp and dull alike. Afterwards He began to take the shape of a kind of huge embryo, shrunk with pain … He was alive, shrunken, hunched forward with searing pain … a figure on the scale of His creatures, in the form of a human being who came and was there … as a response to 'the question they were forbidden to ask there', but was asked and floated in that dark air.
Even more than most dreams, this cannot have its meaning pinned down. It works like the Gate of the Law in the Kafka story: it is open for everyone but individual to each of us.
The atheist might see in it that God is no more than the quintessence of humanity. It is not one answer but many, none of them sufficient. All it unarguably shows is that the question of God keeps being asked, no matter how often it is prohibited.
This article is more than 7 years old. Just a few months after the liberation, my parents, Moshe Yosef Daum and Fela Nussbaum, were married in a displaced persons camp in occupied Germany. They named me Menachem which means consoler or comforter. Apparently, they hoped I might be able to restore some happiness in their lives. My mother told me she retained the pure faith of a Beis Yaakov girl until she got off the train at Auschwitz, but she never spoke about what actually happened on the train ramp that forever shook her faith.
My mother had arrived at Auschwitz with her sister, Bluma. Many years later, my aunt Bluma revealed to me that my mother had her infant son in her arms. As they were roused out of the train, a veteran Jewish prisoner hurriedly came up to them. He knew mothers who were together with their young children would soon be directed to the gas chambers.
He urged them to do the unthinkable. We know what we are doing. Give away the child. You are still young trees. You can have more fruit. Because of the child you too will go.
She felt the child being taken from her.
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