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

11 / Seeking the Fire in the Ashes: A Chasidic Accounting for Evil from the Midst of Evil after the Evil of Auschwitz

11 Seeking the Fire in the Ashes A Chasidic Accounting for Evil from the Midst of Evil after the Evil of Auschwitz david patterson Jewish thought has been in a state of crisis ever since the evil of Auschwitz engulfed the world. While a number of Jewish thinkers have attempted to fathom the implications of that evil for Judaism, Michael Morgan rightly points out in A Holocaust Reader “how slim are the really superior Jewish contributions to the enterprise of rethinking Judaism after Auschwitz.”1 In a previous book, Beyond Auschwitz, Morgan examined some of the key “Jewish thinkers” who have responded to the event, such as Hannah Arendt, Richard Rubenstein, Arthur Cohen, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, and Emil Fackenheim. But Morgan has not raised the question of what would make a Jewish accounting for G-d and evil Jewish. The one Jewish thinker who so far has undertaken the most thorough post-Holocaust accounting for G-d and evil is Emil Fackenheim. Sensitive to the question of what makes Jewish thought Jewish, he points out that the Hebrew term Machshevet Yisrael “encompasses all ‘Jewish thought,’ from ancient Midrash to modern Zionist thought, including also Jewish philosophy. Philosophia Yehudit is the narrower category of the kind of thought that involves a disciplined, systematic encounter between Jewish heritage and relevant philosophy.”2 After Auschwitz, however , what comes to bear is an encounter between Jewish heritage and 272 Jewish history, which intersect in the sacred texts. What is needed, therefore , is an approach that entails the incorporation of the sacred texts into a careful philosophical investigation—something that might be termed Machshavah Yehudit. This term for Jewish thinking about the evil of Auschwitz after Auschwitz seems all the more appropriate when one recalls that the word for “thought,” machshavah, may also mean “troubled mind,” something that most post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers have in common. Its cognate cheshbon drives home the point: meaning “accounting” or “reckoning”—as in cheshbon hanefesh, or an “examination of the soul”—it suggests that we cannot engage in any thinking about G-d, evil, and the Holocaust without also undertaking a profound internal reckoning. machshavah yehudit and the response to the holocaust to date As already mentioned, Hannah Arendt and Richard Rubenstein are among the Jews who have responded to the Holocaust. While both are troubled by the Holocaust, neither has generated what I would define as a Jewish response to the post-Holocaust problem of G-d and evil. Morgan shows, for instance, that Arendt’s influences were Aristotle and Immanuel Kant (to say nothing of the Nazi Martin Heidegger), not Moses or Akiba, so that her thinking about G-d and evil is not based on anything Jewish .3 As for Rubenstein, chief among his influences are Sigmund Freud, Paul Tillich, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Arendt. Although Rubenstein does say that he believes the Torah is “sacred,” he also insists that in no sense is it from G-d, that there is no encounter between the Jews and G-d, and that Jewish religious life possesses no “superordinate validation.”4 In other words, the Jews are not chosen, and there is no Covenant. Such a position simply is not Machshavah Yehudit. What characterizes Machshavah Yehudit, as I define the term, is a philosophical understanding and questioning of G-d, world, and humanity that is grounded in the texts of the Jewish sacred tradition. Inasmuch as Hebrew is the holy tongue, and because language shapes thought, Jewish thinking about the Holocaust should also be informed by the Hebrew 273 Seeking the Fire in the Ashes language. The point is not that, in order to make a Jewish response to G-d and evil after the Holocaust, one must be an Orthodox Jew who thinks only in Hebrew, nor that non-Jewish responses to the Holocaust are illegitimate. But this does mean that if this thinking is to be distinctively Machshavah Yehudit, it must stand in some kind of informed, committed relation to the sacred tradition of Torah. And it must be characterized by the strife of the spirit that earned for Jacob the name of Yisrael , that is, “he who struggles with G-d.” Therefore, I take the response of Rabbi Bernard Maza,5 for example, to be Jewish, yes; but it does not fall into the category of post-Holocaust Machshavah Yehudit. While Rabbi Maza is no doubt deeply troubled by the Holocaust, his response to the problem of G-d and...