Wikio - Top Blogs - Religion and belief

Friday 3 April 2009

The suffering God (1)

Elie Wiesel was sixteen in 1944, the year he was deported from Hungary to the concentration camps of Auschwitz (where his mother and younger sister died) and Buchenwald (where his father died). Two of the stories that he tells from his horrific experiences within the camps encapsulate the Jewish responses to the holocaust that I wish first to explore in this series of posts and then to compare and contrast with approaches to understanding evil in Christian theology.

In the first, Wiesel’s mentor in Auschwitz convenes a rabbinic tribunal and accuses God:

“He had added two other learned rabbis, and they resolved to accuse God, in appropriate, correct form, as a proper rabbinic tribunal would, with witnesses, arguments, etc. … the proceedings of the tribunal went on for a long time. And finally my teacher, who was president of the tribunal, pronounced the verdict: ‘Guilty.’ Then silence reigned – a silence which reminded me of the silence of Sinai: an endless, eternal silence.

But finally my teacher, the rabbi, said: ‘And now, my friends, let us go and pray.’ And we prayed to God, who a few minutes beforehand had been pronounced guilty by his children”.

The second is related in Wiesel’s autobiographical novel Night and concerns a day when:

“… the SS guards hanged two Jewish men and a young boy in front of the entire camp. The men died quickly, but the child did not. Describing this scene, Wiesel wrote that he heard someone ask: ‘Where is God? Where is He?’ For more than an hour the child stayed there, dying in slow agony. Wiesel continued: I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: Where is He? Here he is – he is hanging here on the gallows.’”

Dan Cohn-Sherbok has spoken of the way in which:

“Jews are perplexed how to make sense of God’s seeming inactivity … How could God have brought about, or allowed, millions of innocent individuals to die in the most horrific circumstances? … Congregants are deeply concerned about the religious implications of the Holocaust, and in synagogues wish to gain some understanding of God’s nature and actions”.

For some, as Cohn-Sherbok notes, “Auschwitz was the final confirmation that there is no God”. Wiesel’s stories resonate with this depth of suffering that the Jewish people have experienced in and because of the Holocaust. In Night, Wiesel’s central character Eliezer appears to lose his faith in God after witnessing the hanging. He feels that he is God’s accuser, as do the Rabbi’s in Wiesel’s trial story. As a result, his thought that God is “hanging here on the gallows” has been read as meaning that this scene represents the death of belief in God in his life and, by implication, in Wiesel’s. But this is actually the reverse of Wiesel’s meaning – “an interpretation bordering on blasphemy” - as he has vehemently explained in his memoirs:

“I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it ... the texts cite many occasions when prophets and sages rebelled against the lack of divine interference in human affairs during times of persecution ... If that hurts, so be it. Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it. And if that makes the tragedy of the believer more devastating than that of the nonbeliever, so be it. To proclaim one’s faith within the barbed wire of Auschwitz may well represent a double tragedy, of the believer and his Creator alike”.

This statement of Wiesel’s could be a commentary on his trial story where the protest of the rabbis occurs within belief in and relationship with the God whom they pronounce as guilty. Jonathan Sacks argues that it is here that Judaism begins, “in the protest against a world that is not as it should be”. Sacks examines the great biblical dialogues between God and Abraham and Moses and Jeremiah and Job and states that they are both unique to and a never-ending feature of Judaism:

“They were even accentuated in the midrashic and aggadic literature. They exist if you read it carefully in the literature of lament of the medieval period, the things we call kinot and slichot. They exist in hassidic stories, especially … stories about the great hassidic Rebbe, Levi Yizhak of Berdichev. Many of his stories are that kind of dialogue with God. And they exist of course in the Holocaust literature, the most famous example the recently re-published dialogue or monologue … called ‘Yossel Rakover speaks to God’.

In other words, the dialogue over the existence of evil has been a non-stop feature of Judaism from biblical times to the present …”

Sacks calls this the dialogical imagination and he contrasts it with the logical imagination which he sees as characteristic of Greek thought. Christianity, he thinks, has been primarily influenced by the logical imagination. He also makes a further distinction that is important in this context and which he again sees as distinctively Jewish. This is the distinction between God’s perspective and the human perspective:

“In Judaism ... God does get involved but He also makes space for humanity to get involved. He does this by conferring integrity, legitimacy, dignity on the point of view of man. That means that in Judaism at the very least ... there are two viewpoints, never less than two: ultimately, the viewpoint of how things appear to God and how they appear to us. And in Judaism both of those are legitimate: truth as it is in heaven; truth as it is on earth”.

When these two distinctions are put together Sacks is able, in a post-Holocaust context, to set out the alternatives as follows:

“On the one hand, maybe Nietzsche was right, maybe there is no justice ... Maybe there is no god and no meaning to life ... In which case, any attempt to find moral meaning in the universe is destined to fail. All we have is the struggle for existence and what Nietzsche called “the will to power”. The strong crush the weak. The clever outwit the simple. The powerful dominate the powerless. And in such a world there is no reason not to expect a holocaust.

On the other hand ... Maybe the devout believer is right. Maybe all evil is an illusion. Maybe everything that happens happens because God willed it so. In which case we may not know why the Holocaust happened. But there is a reason for it: God’s reason. And we must accept it. We must accept the fact of the Holocaust as God’s unfathomable will.

I tell you that I as a Jew refuse to accept either alternative. I refuse to accept them because either of them would allow me to live at peace with the world and I believe it is morally impossible to live at peace in a world that contained an Auschwitz ... Therefore, ... this faith of multiple perspectives, of cognitive dissonance, which is lived out in time through the conversation between Earth and Heaven and lived out in dialogue, is the energising tension at the heart of Judaism. It is what drives us to act and try to change the world. If we see the dissonance between our world and God’s world ... between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, then we know that that tension can be resolved only by action which is inspired by revelation, which moves us closer to redemption.

... We call out to God and we find Him calling out to us saying, “You must fight the fire. You, human beings, must put out the flames and I will show you how”.”

Sacks’ view still leaves God in heaven though, albeit in relationship, in dialogue and involved and intervening particularly in the early years of His relationship with humanity. Not all Jews have been happy to leave the matter there. Cohn-Sherbok, for example, interprets Wiesel’s gallows story as Wiesel intended:

“For Wiesel, God is not an impassive presence in the universe. Rather, he suffers when his people endure misery and death ... Here in Wiesel’s vision of a suffering God is a response to those who maintain that religious faith has been eclipsed by the Holocaust ... suffering is central to God’s love”.

As Cohn-Sherbok points out Wiesel’s story of the ‘hanged God’ “can serve to draw Jews and Christians together in a quest to understand God’s action in the world”. This has been recognised by other Jewish artists and writers, both pre- and post-Holocaust. Marc Chagall, beginning with White Crucifixion in 1938, created a series of paintings in which Christ’s suffering on the cross was symbolic of the sufferings throughout history of the Jewish people of which he was part. George Steiner has used the three central days of the Passion narrative to symbolise humanity’s current state while Simone Weil saw affliction as that which fastens us at the centre of the universe, “the point of intersection between creation and Creator,” which is the Cross.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lou Reed - Sad Song.

No comments: