Hiddenness and Alterity: Philosophical and Literary Sightings of the Unseen

ELEVEN: Abraham and Isaac: A Question of Theodicy

A b r a h a m a n d I s a a c : A Q u e s t i o n o f T h e o d i c y 1 7 5 175 ELEVEN Abraham and Isaac: A Question of Theodicy Theodicy and Auschwitz he word “theodicy” comes from the Greek words for God (yeÒw) and justice (d¤kh). Although coined by Leibniz, the attempt it represents is far older. In the Jewish tradition, it stretches to the beginning — that is, to the stories of Genesis with its attempt to explain how evil could exist in a world created by God. God, after each creative act, sees that his creations are “good.” Women, however, bear their children in pain (Gen. 3:16), and the ground, sprouting “thorns and thistles,” can at times appears “cursed” to the farmer (Gen. 3:18). How do we explain this? How is it compatible with God’s justice? Is it, in fact, possible to “justify God’s ways to man”? Beginning with Genesis’s account of man’s disobedience, there is a whole tradition of efforts to answer this question. It includes Isaiah’s notion of the “suffering servant” — the person who suffers for the sins of others — and the Maccabean notion of the “martyr” — the innocent and just sufferer who serves as a witness for the truth. T 1 7 6 H i d d e n n e s s a n d A l t e r i t y As the philosopher Hans Jonas observes, the “event of Auschwitz ” marks an important challenge to this tradition. “Auschwitz” names not just the setting in which over a million Jews, Gypsies and Poles perished. It also signifies the dehumanization of its victims . In the “factory-like working of its machine” for extermination, even the gesture of martyrdom and witness was not left to the dying. In Jonas’s words, “Not fidelity or infidelity, belief or unbelief, not guilt or punishment, not trial, witness and messianic hope, nay, not even strength or weakness, heroism or cowardice, defiance or submission had a place there. . . . Of all this,Auschwitz, which also devoured the infants and babes, knew nothing. . . . no glimmer of dignity was left to the freights bound for the final solution, hardly a trace of it was found in the surviving skeleton specters of the liberated camps” (Jonas 1996, 133). Jonas asks, “And yet God let it happen. What God could let it happen?” (33). Eli Wiesel, the writer, raises the same question in his story of the lector who reads the service in a synagogue. He begins each service with the biblical words of response, “Here I am, Lord.” The times, however, are bad. Each time a pogrom sweeps through the village, still fewer Jews are left to come to the service. At the end only the lector remains. As always, he begins with the words, “Here I am, Lord.” This time, however, he adds the question: “Where are you?” The question is about the absence of God. It is intimately involved in the question of how God could let such things happen. In Jonas’s words, “one would expect the good God at times to . . . intervene with a saving miracle. But no saving miracle occurred. Through the years that ‘Auschwitz’ raged God remained silent” (ibid., 148). Where was God? Where was his presence during that period? The “agonizing problem today,” Jonas claims, is to explain “God’s lordship.” The question one faces afterAuschwitz is “how to rethink the traditional concept of God” so as to understand God’s presence.1 In what follows, I shall add my own effort toward this end. In examining the problem of theodicy — of the justification of God’s ways to man — in the light of Auschwitz, I shall first look to the A b r a h a m a n d I s a a c : A Q u e s t i o n o f T h e o d i c y 1 7 7 traditional (Christian) ways in which this problem is posed. I shall then turn to the story of Abraham and Isaac to reformulate the problem and find a possible solution to the question of where God was during the Holocaust. The Privative Nature of Evil Mani, the Persian founder of Manichaeism, gave one of the basic alternative...