Holocaust Memorial Day

Here is the speech I gave today at the Holocaust Memorial Day event in Redbridge:

Last year I was fortunate, through my sabbatical visits and through the Tour of the Holy Land organised by the East London Three Faiths Forum, to see a wide variety of artwork in churches and synagogues by the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall. Chagall was controversial as a Jewish artist for painting images of Christ’s crucifixion.

Chagall’s church commissions were created, ‘In the name of the freedom of all religions’ while, for him, ‘Christ ... always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.’ He depicted this perception most famously in White Crucifixion painted in 1938 in response to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, including Kristallnacht. Central to this painting, among scenes of anti-Jewish violence which included the torching of a synagogue, is Jesus on the cross with a tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl, draped around him as a loin cloth. For Chagall, ‘Jesus on the cross represented the painful predicament of all Jews, harried, branded, and violently victimized in an apparently God-forsaken world.’

A similar perception is described by Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, in his book Night. There he writes: ‘The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. "Where is God? Where is he?" someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice in myself answer: "Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.’

Seen by Elie Wiesel in the context of Judaism and of the humiliation of God in going with Israel into exile and suffering, for Christians this moving story has a striking resonance because of the crucifixion. For Jews and Christians alike, the face of desolation wears another aspect, that of the presence and providence of God.

In Christian vocabulary this could be described as the prayer of incarnation. This is a prayer of presence; a prayer which recognizes that God shares our pain, frailty and brokenness. We pray acknowledging that God suffers with us. From Christ’s life, Christians also recognise two other types of prayer: the prayer of resurrection in which we pray for a miracle; and the prayer of transfiguration where, as Samuel Wells has written, ‘we see a whole reality within and beneath and beyond what we thought we understood.’ In times of bewilderment and confusion we pray that God might reshape our reality, to give us a new and right spirit to trust that even in the midst of suffering and hardship, truth can still be experienced and shared.

At Yad Yashem, on the East London Three Faiths Forum Tour of the Holy Land, I saw examples of this prayer in the words of Aharon Appelfeld who said, ‘From among the horror grew another morality, another love, another compassion. These grew wild – no one gave them a name.’ Similarly, on the Yad Vashem website I read of survivors, ‘dazed, emaciated, bereaved beyond measure,’ who ‘gathered the remnants of their vitality and the remaining sparks of their humanity, and rebuilt.’ ‘They never meted out justice to their tormentors – for what justice could ever be achieved after such a crime? Rather, they turned to rebuilding: new families forever under the shadow of those absent; new life stories, forever warped by the wounds; new communities, forever haunted by the loss.’

I also saw pages from the illustrated Bible which self-taught artist Carol Deutsch loving crafted in 1941 in Antwerp, during the turmoil of the Second World War, as a gift for his daughter’s second birthday. Carol Deutsch and his wife Fela were informed upon and murdered in the extermination camps. However, their daughter Ingrid, who was hidden with a Catholic family in the countryside, survived, as did the Bible, which miraculously remained intact. Deutsch, who died in Buchenwald, left behind a vital estate - a stalwart resistance to everything the Nazis had attempted to obliterate.

Finally, for those who are Christians, Karen Sue Smith has noted that ‘Chagall’s genius was to use Jesus’ crucifixion to address Christians, to alert them by means of their own symbol system to the systematic cruelty taking place in the Holocaust.’ For Christians then, our response should, I think, be in line with the words of Pope Francis from an interview in 2013. There he spoke of his admiration for White Crucifixion praising Jews for keeping their faith despite the Holocaust and other “terrible trials” throughout history (by implication, including those for which the Church is cupable), reaffirmed Judaism as the “holy root” of Christianity saying that, where this understood and affirmed, a Christian should not ever be an anti-Semite because “to be a good Christian it is necessary to understand Jewish history and traditions.”

I pray that this will be so for my own faith community and that God might reshape our reality, to give us a new and right spirit to trust that even in the midst of suffering and hardship, truth can still be experienced and shared.

See here and here for reports and photographs from the Redbridge event.

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Azamra - Shuvi Nafshi.

The suffering God (2)

Thomas Weinandy has identified three arguments within twentieth century Christian theology for the suffering of God:

• God suffers in himself: the incarnation was the consequence of “God’s passible pathos towards and empathy with humankind (see John 3: 16);


• The Son of God suffers as a man: Jesus suffers as a divine-human person, what pertains to his humanity also pertains to his divinity; and


• The Father and the Son suffer in their relationship: “the abandonment on the cross which separates the Son from the Father is something which takes place within God himself”.

Weinandy points out that the traditional emphasis in Christian theology has, because of the legacy of Platonism, been on the impassibility of God. He notes that this change in emphasis has been the result of a re-evaluation of scripture brought about, in large part, by the impact of Auschwitz on theology. He cites the frequency with which Wiesel’s gallows story is told in books exploring God’s passibility and paraphrases Jurgen Moltmann to suggest that there “can be no theology ‘after Auschwitz,’ which does not take up the theology in Auschwitz i.e. the prayers and cries of the victims”.

As we have seen those prayers and cries also included the argument with God that is encapsulated in Wiesel’s trial story and Christianity has taken up those prayers and cries too. This protesting dialogue with God can be seen, for example, in the work of the poet-priests George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In ‘Bitter-sweet’, Herbert says that if God is going to be contrary in his relationship with him then he will reciprocate and complain, praise, bewail, approve, lament and love. Hopkins’ poems of lament and protest have been called the ‘terrible sonnets’. In ‘Carrion Comfort’ (which he described as ‘written in blood’) he wrestles with God, while a line from ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ - “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,/How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost/Defeat, thwart me?” - could be a summary of Wiesel’s protest within relationship.

Christian theology has also taken up these prayers and cries. Karl-Josef Kushel consciously aims to do theology in the sphere of Steiner’s ‘Easter Saturday’ and by paying attention to the art that arises in this sphere. He notes that, “the rebellion of human beings against God can be their form of prayer; quarrelling their form of saying yes; protest their declaration of love to God”.

Walter Brueggemann is another theologian to have tackled these issues and in ways that are similar to Sacks, as the following description of his Old Testament theology will show:

“A somewhat different ... dialectic is found in his proposed structure for understanding Old Testament theology - the dialectic between the majority voice that is creation-oriented, a voice that assumes an ordered world under the governance of a sovereign God and so serves to legitimate the structures of the universe, and a minority voice that is in tension with the legitimation of structure, a voice embracing the pain that is present in the world and protesting against an order that allows such to be. Brueggemann’s dialectical approach, which assumes an ongoing tension between voices “above the fray” and those “in the fray” is fundamental to his reading of the Old Testament".

Brueggemann’s minority voice, the counter-testimony to the core testimony of the Old Testament, equates to the protest in relationship of Sachs and Wiesel. It is a “radical probe of a new way of relationship that runs toward the theology of the cross in the New Testament and that runs in our time toward and beyond the Holocaust, as Elie Wiesel and Emil L. Fackenheim have seen so well”. Brueggemann views the tension between the core- and counter-testimony as unresolved in the Old Testament and therefore views God as ambiguous, always in the process of deciding “how much to be committed to the common theology, how many of its claims must be implemented, and how many of these claims can be resisted”.

Protest within relationship and ideas of a suffering God are, therefore, common to both Judaism and Christianity. This is only to be expected as Christianity’s roots are in Judaism and, although the influence of Greek thought has undoubtedly been great, the extent to which Jewish thought has been sidelined in Christianity is by no means as great as Sacks implies. In fact, as we have seen, the latter half of the twentieth century has seen a significant revision of the relationship, in part because of the Holocaust, and this has impacted significantly in theology. Finally, the fact that the Hebrew scriptures are such a significant part of the Christian scriptures means that the influence of Jewish thought in Christianity should never be underplayed as, for example, in the template that the Psalms provided to Herbert and Hopkins well before the Holocaust.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams - Five Mystical Songs, Part 2: Love Bade Me Welcome.

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.

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Lou Reed - Sad Song.