Open Wounds: The Crisis of Jewish Thought in the Aftermath of the Holocaust

10. Conclusion: No Closure

10 Conclusion No Closure On the occasion of Jacob’s wrestling with the Angel, Rabbi Shimon said: “This dust was not ordinary dust, but ashes, the residue of fire.”—Zohar I, 170a Nearly two thousand years ago, our sages of the Talmud raised the question of why both Jeremiah and Daniel tampered with the original text of Moses’ invocation of the Lord’s attributes: Hael hagadol, hagibor, vehanora, “God, the Great, the Mighty, and the Awesome” (Deuteronomy 10:17). Having witnessed the destruction of the First Temple, Jeremiah cried out to God, “O great and mighty God” ( Jeremiah 32:18) and left out “awesome.” Having witnessed the enslavement of the Jewish people after the destruction, Daniel cried out to God, “O great and awesome God” (Daniel 9:4) and left out “mighty.” The sages asked, “How could Jeremiah and Daniel tamper with the text received through Moses?” Rabbi Eliezer explained that since they had experienced such horrific events and knew that God insists upon truth, they would not ascribe to God false attributes. That is to say, since they could not address God with all the praises of His mercy and kindness in view of what they had seen, they skipped these attributes because in those cases these attributes were hidden . Thus, says Rabbi Eliezer, there is no reason not to be honest with the God who demands honesty (see Yoma 69).1 But in order to be hon253 est with God, we must remain in a relation to God. While the biblical prophets and the talmudic sages had the courage to sustain that covenantal relation, it has eluded many of us in the post-Holocaust era. Thus left with nothing to say to Hashem, we are left only with the echoes of our empty outcry. One way in which the relation to the Holy One has eluded us lies in our turning either to theodicy or away from theodicy in our response to the Shoah. Theodicy has no place in Jewish thought, in either a positive or a negative sense. It is not that theodicy is right or wrong from a Jewish standpoint; it is simply unintelligible. For Jewish thought, the question “Where was God?” is not a question concerning His absence or presence, His intervention or lack of intervention. It is a question concerning the Nazis’ radical assault on the relation to God, for the living God abides in the lived relation. Here one may recall the assembly of prisoners forced to witness the hanging of a child in Elie Wiesel’s Night. There the young Eliezer hears a Jew next to him asking, “Where is God? Where is He now?” And from within his soul comes the terrifying reply: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on these gallows.”2 He is not absent—He is assailed. And He commands even as He is assailed, from within the very core of the assault. Theodicy’s question is a question concerning the lack of Divine intervention , a question rooted in the assumption that God is manifest not in holiness, goodness, truth, or meaning but rather in power. Jewishly speaking, God neither intervenes nor fails to intervene—He sanctifies through His holiness. Theologies of intervention that try to explain why God did not manipulate the situation at hand rest on assumptions tainted by ontological thinking, which is a power-based thinking, not a holinessbased thinking. One can speak of providence, yes. One can speak of a destiny to which God summons us, over against a fate to which “the gods” doom us. But this providence and this destiny, this form of Divine “intervention ,” lies not in the stopping of evil but rather in the determination of evil as evil. God does not stop the Holocaust; He simply makes it matter that humanity did not stop it. At least not soon enough. Unable to escape the assumptions of theodicy, many modern and postmodern thinkers insist that there is no judgment and no judge. Judgment, they maintain, is a projection of our own psychological agenda, and when 254 Conclusion it is applied to the Holocaust, they rightly understand, it falls apart. All we have left, then, is the agenda, which is a system of signs and illusions, of cultural convention and class envy, of racial tension and gendered power struggles—everything except the acknowledgment of an assault on a transcendent holiness that, precisely because...