Fire in the Ashes: God, Evil, and the Holocaust

8 / Some Fundamental Doubts about Posing the Question of Theodicy in the Post-Holocaust World

8 Some Fundamental Doubts about Posing the Question of Theodicy in the Post-Holocaust World leonard grob The post-Holocaust theologian Irving Greenberg urges upon us the realization that in our time “neither faith nor morality can function . . . unless they are illuminated by the fires of Auschwitz or Treblinka.”1 In the spirit of Greenberg’s claim, it is more than appropriate for an essay in a volume exploring the post-Holocaust relation between God and evil to address the legitimacy of posing the question of theodicy. The term theodicy refers to a family of religious theories linked by the desire to justify God’s providence in the face of ever-present instances of evil. Most postHolocaust theologians see the Holocaust as a rupture in history, calling into question the entire Western ethical/religious tradition. According to these thinkers, theodicy after Auschwitz—the attempt to reconcile the evil of the Holocaust with an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent deity—must certainly be rethought. Few thinkers, however, are as bold as the contemporary French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in proclaiming the “blasphemous” nature of theodicy. For Levinas, theodicy’s “entry into thought” is “epoch making,” exerting an “empire . . . over humankind.”2 The realization that theodicy’s rule is “scandalous” is cast into bold relief after Auschwitz: in the post-Holocaust world, theodicy reveals itself as nothing short of “the source of all immorality.” Levinas demands an end to the theodical project itself; any hint of an eªort to justify the ways of 189 God to humans is morally reprehensible. It is to Levinas’s radical critique of the very enterprise of theodicy that I turn in this essay. In so doing, however, I will not understand Levinas’s dismissal of the legitimacy of the theodical undertaking as some facile endeavor to remove from our post-Holocaust lives all talk of a morality that arises from a divine command. Levinas is insistent in posing the question of the survival of “absolute” morality in the post-1945 world: “Can we speak of an absolute commandment after Auschwitz? Can we speak of morality after the failure of morality?”3 In the course of this essay I will argue, with Levinas, that a response to these questions is a (highly nuanced) yes. Levinas contends that in a post-Holocaust world we are summoned not to justify God’s ways to humans but rather to recall that our essential humanity consists in living in a manner that may be deemed godly. We are called upon, in other words, not to ask questions regarding the presence or absence at Auschwitz of a benevolent and all-powerful God but rather to busy ourselves doing God’s work by building, at the heart of “the ruins of creation,” a world in which goodness will prevail. Levinas’s corpus—indeed, his life itself in its entirety—is haunted by the events of 1933–1945. Himself a prisoner of war under the Nazis, Levinas describes his life as “a disparate inventory . . . dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.”4 That memory, which “refuses any forgetting,” casts into bold relief an oft-repeated and central concern of Levinas: “It is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.”5 The Holocaust, for Levinas, is a limit case, summoning us either to reclaim our status as moral beings or to give in to the harsh reality of l’univers concentrationnaire. Levinas will not allow us to remain, unthinkingly, the “dupes” of the preachers of morality after Auschwitz. We must face head-on the most urgent of questions: “Either . . . [God’s letting the Nazis do what they wanted] means that there is no reason for morality and hence it can be concluded that everyone should act like the Nazis, or the moral law maintains its authority.”6 It is within this line of tension that Levinas’s work, and this essay, stand. What is it about the Holocaust that compels us to face the stark alternatives noted above? Though Levinas clearly does not wish to set forth any “hierarchy of suªering”—he speaks of a century replete with the horrors of genocide, all of them still present when he utters the word 190 Part Two: Searching Traditions “Auschwitz”—it is nevertheless the case that the Holocaust is for him “the paradigm of gratuitous human suªering.”7 It is an event that manifests “the disproportion between suªering and every theodicy . . . with glaring, obvious...