Outline and Explain the Theological and Philosophical Responses to the Holocaust.

University Degree Historical and Philosophical studies

The word Holocaust comes from the Greek word meaning ‘sacrifice burnt offering.’ ‘Shoah’ is the Hebrew word meaning ‘whirlwind or catastrophe’ and is always used by Jews because they reject the suggestion that they were willingly sacrificed. The Holocaust was an event that took place during the Second World War. It was the annihilation of millions of people who were regarded by the Nazi party, and Hitler in particular, as not worthy of living. The Jews in particular suffered, with six million of them being wiped out at a series of concentration camps. These camps were specifically designed for killing as many people as possible which was the quickest and easiest way. Jews were taken from their homes in trains, sorted out into groups of those that could be worked to death on one side and those who would be killed immediately on another side. Those selected for immediate death were then told they were having showers. Their hair was cut, clothes were removed and they were herded like animals into gas chambers. In addition their culture too had disappeared with many of their books, paintings, music and architecture having been destroyed.

Before the Jews were sent to concentration camps, they were held in ghettos. Disease killed many Jews at ghettos. Many people died of starvation. Jews were treated in this way because of anti-Semitism. One of the reasons why the Nazis hated them was because they were different as the Jews were a minority group in Germany. They were accused of killing Jesus Christ and were jealous because many were wealthy and owned businesses. Also after WWI, the Nazis blamed the Jews for being defeated.

The holocaust posed a problem for the Jews because it was hard to understand how a loving God could have allowed so many innocent people to be murdered in this brutal way. In the past God had made a covenant to His chosen people the Jews. He parted the Red Sea for them, stopped the sun from rising in order for them to win a battle etc. Where was He when the Nazis came to kill the Jews? Where was Moses to lead them out of Germany as he led them out from Egypt? It seemed that God had abandoned them.

However many Jews disagree that God abandoned them. In fact many of them who survived all the horrors of the shoah still came out of it believing in God. One survivor. Many would agree with Blech’s response. He said that the holocaust wasn’t God’s fault but human’s own fault. This is because God gave us free will to do either good or bad, so He wont just take our free will away if we use it for evil purposes.

Other Jews believe that God cannot intervene in human history. Berkovits described the holocaust as the ‘tragedy of existence’ and said that God’s love, tolerance and forgiveness for all mankind including the Nazis meant that God has to put up with evil things happening to innocent people. However other Jews disagree and argue that

If God cannot intervene it means that He is powerless and so what sense is He God? A God who is an all-knowledgeable, all-suffering being may exist, who can watch but is unable to help?

The teaching of the book of Job says that no one can understand God’s plans so Jews must simply trust that He has a plan and also mentions that God loves His people despite appearances to the contrary.

Some Jews believe that the holocaust occurred so that God can test their faith. On the other hand the Haredi, a small group of very orthodox Jews who have a very different response seeming to think that the shoah maybe have been God’s punishment of the Jews for turning their backs on Him.

Other Jews have agnostic responses to the holocaust. Weisel for example couldn’t reconcile his experience of the holocaust with a loving God. He ended up hating God so much rather than not believing in Him.

‘for a Jew, it is difficult to escape from God’

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‘for a Jew, it is difficult to escape from God’

This suggests that it is hard for any Jew not to believe in God because a Jew is defined by his relationship with God.

Blech’s response can be argued with the Jews who believe that God exists yet hated them and did not care for His own people, for example Rubenstein’s response;

‘The thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth has been broken… After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?’

He explained that if God was good, all-powerful and loving then he should have stopped the holocaust from happening, so He was to blame not evil. An anonymous poem from the Vilna Ghetto is another example to show that Jews were not sure if God was present with them or not;

‘I think I just thought of a prayer,

But I can’t imagine who might be there,

Sealed in a steel womb.

How can I pray? To Whom?’

For some Jews however God has remained impossibility. Primo Levi, a Jew who was never a strong believer refused to believe that He ever existed.

‘I know there is no God, I see his absence everywhere’. Levi also experienced survivors’ guilt, which was a feeling that he didn’t deserve to survive the holocaust at all which led to suicide. After the holocaust some Jews changed faith, from once believing in God to not believing in Him anymore and say that He isn’t all powerful because if He were all-powerful then he wouldn’t have let this happen to them. Ruth Foster didn’t believe in anything during the holocaust and only believed that she wanted to sleep in a clean bed, have a bath and eat food.

However not all of the responses to the holocaust were religious ones. Many Jews believed there was a deep connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. Zionism was the movement, which sought to establish the Jewish homeland, Israel. The holocaust proved that the Jewish people must have a land of their own because it was felt it was absolutely necessary to have a safe refuge for any Jew, anywhere in the world, threatened by anti-Semitism. USA and Britain supported this movement because they felt guilty about how little was done to prevent the holocaust.

After the holocaust, many Jews sought to revive the use of the Hebrew language for everyday living and as a spoken language. The Hebrew language had always been a religious language for the Jews and is still used in synagogues as well as in the Torah, which is written in Hebrew. Yiddish is another language that Jews used. It was a medieval dialect of German and was taught extensively in Jewish school known as Yeshivot to prevent the language from dying out.

Culture is and important aspect of Jewish responses. Jews felt that if they stopped practising their religion then their culture would die out and also they would too. So a Jewish way of life is to preserve its culture and not let Hitler’s victory beyond the grave.

There are also non-Jewish responses such as the Holocaust denial. The holocaust denial denies the deaths of the Jews and denies the fact that the Holocaust ever occurred despite all the testimonies given by survivors, which Jews are not happy about.

How might the Holocaust affect the lives of Jewish Communities and individuals today?

The holocaust continues to affect Jewish communities and individuals today including those who haven’t had any personal experience of it. Many Jews have their own ways of reacting to the holocaust as an individual, family, synagogue and wider community, also as a country in the case of Israel. As Wiesel once said that ‘not all victims were Jewish, but all the Jews were victims’ which suggests that all the Jewish communities have been affected because of the enormous scale of catastrophe.

The holocaust affects the lives of individuals today but mostly has a massive impact on the survivors of the catastrophe as it leaves horrific memories of the event with them. Also most of them carry guilt along with the memories for example, one survivor, Levi, who hated God so much for what had happened and no longer believed in Him, and later committed suicide because he couldn’t handle the guilt and torment of the memories. Survivors with guilt wonder why they survived when so many of their family and friends did not. It is hard for them to relate to and trust those people who have not lived through the experience. Some want the world to forget that the holocaust happened. It brings back too many painful memories. The sight of the dying, the dead, the filth, and sickness was just too much. Some of them want to forget, but they cannot. Others want the Holocaust to be remembered and by doing this they talk to family members, other Jewish communities and to people around the world about the holocaust ensuring that the memory of the shoah still lives on. There are some survivors who have dedicated their whole life to finding the Nazis who have committed the crimes during the holocaust. One of them is called Simon Wisenthal who drew pictures of the Nazis in his concentration camps on paper stolen from the factory. After the war he dedicated his life to finding the Nazis and bringing them to justice. Many survivors are often physically affected by the holocaust for the rest of their lives because of the terrible damage done to their mental and physical health during the holocaust. They have to live through the events that they’ve witnessed. They often have tormenting dreams. To have lived through the camps, the Jews had to have spirit and inner strength. This keeps survivors going today.

Survivors are not the only ones who are affected by the holocaust but Jewish individuals who did not experience it are nevertheless affected too. For example, Steven Spielberg who is Jewish made a film called Schindlers’ List which was his own personal response to the holocaust. Other Jews who have been affected by the holocaust but not experienced it respond by writing poetry or creating art such as sculptures to remember those that died.

Many individual Jews visit concentration camps and museums such as the Imperial War Museum in London to learn and understand the Holocaust and reflect upon it.

Jewish communities cannot forget the tragic loss of lives. Family for instance is the fundamental unit of the Jewish people. Jewish families celebrate the Shabbat each week and also celebrate Pesach each year. At these gatherings, the holocaust and family members who died there are remembered. Also elders tell Jewish children about the shoah so that they can learn and reflect upon those who sacrificed their lives for Israel.

Another way Jewish families reflect upon the shoah is by attending Yad Vashem, which is the holocaust memorial of the Jewish people in Israel. In this place are all the names of all the concentration camps engraved in Hebrew and English. The name ‘Yad Vashem’ comes from a passage in the Book of Isaiah 56:5:

‘And to them will I give in my house a memorial. An everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’

During the memorial, candles are lit from an ‘eternal flame’ and are kept burning constantly and are never allowed to go out.

A holocaust remembrance day is also held in order to remember all those lost during the holocaust. This special day is held in different countries on different days, as it is not a religious day. However, the remembrance day in Israel is on the 27th day of the Jewish month of Nissan. On this day many Jews make a pilgrimage to Yad Vashem to show their respect and reflect upon those who died.

Jewish communities across the world are affected by the holocaust. After the war, there was a stunned silence; an inability for the Jewish community to confront the holocaust, as the number of Jews in Europe was very low, and many surviving families could not bear to return to their old homes that they were living in before the catastrophe. This caused dispersion of Jews across the globe and this is known as Diaspora.

The Jewish community has also split into a number of groups from Ultra Orthodox, Orthodox, Reform, and Liberal to non-religious partly because of differing responses to the holocaust.

In conclusion, the duty that most Jews feel is important in order to keep the memory of the holocaust alive is to tell their children about it so that their children can too pass it on to theirs when the time comes. It is very important for the Jews to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive today so that future generations can learn of the terrible deeds of previous generations, and hopefully learn to live in peace with one another. It will help them to be able to empathize, reflect, and understand the shoah. In Deuteronomy it clearly states that Jews have a responsibility to tell their children all the things they need to know such as the holocaust because many other Jews are still affected by it.

‘Only take heed, and keep your soul diligently.

Lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen,

And let them depart from your heart.

All the days of your life make them known to your child

And your children’s children.’

Is it possible to believe in God after the events of the Holocaust? Give reasons to support your answer and show that you have thought about different points of view.

The Holocaust is possibly one of the most horrendous events in human history - the amount of suffering inflicted on the victims of the Nazis makes it difficult to believe in a loving and powerful God who did not prevent the Holocaust to occur. Looking at Berkovits’s response.He said that it is possible to believe in God after the holocaust because despite all the sufferings that people endured and as a Christian, in my opinion I agree with him, I too think that it is possible to believe in God after the Holocaust event because I believe that it is essential to trust in God in any circumstance, good or bad. I agree with Blech’s response that God is not responsible for human faults such as the Holocaust that took place because He gave us free will. God made man to have the power to choose peace, humility and righteousness…but in this case of the Holocaust, man had chosen hatred, war and pride. I also believe that God will step again into history and bring it to a close. The promise is that He will judge all people with absolute justice and fairness. Every moral evil will be judged. There will not be one act of exploitation or even unkindness that will escape His notice. This proves that God is all-powerful, loving and that He cares for everyone including the Jews who suffered. Personally I can understand why a Jew would not agree with my opinion because the Jewish relationship with God is very different from that of a Christian because of the Covenant.

Going through the viewpoints in Part 1 of my coursework, I strongly disagree with Rubenstein’s response who said that God no longer has any control over what happens in the world. But I believe that God does have control and He respects human freedom He gave us free will, which makes us valuable moral agents. If God were to take our freedom away, human society would be like an assemblage of robots or puppets and so the Holocaust is man’s fault for choosing to do evil.

Another possiblity that may have happened is that God may have been testing the Jews to see how close they can get to God in time of suffering by using the holocaust as a test of faith for Jews just like God tested Abraham when He told him to go and sacrifice his only son.

My view about the Haredi’s response that the holocaust was a punishment for the Jews is that I think it’s not fair to say that because what they’re trying to say is that if someone suffers, that is because they committed a sin that merits such suffering which I think is totally wrong as everyone commits sins and that doesn’t mean people should be punished in such brutal way. Suffering is educational. It makes us better people.

However I believe that my opinion about believing in God after the holocaust may have changed completely if I had experienced the trauma myself. By looking at some of the survivors’ opinions about God before and after the holocaust I noticed that there is a radical change to their faith. What if it had been my country? My family? What if my parents and two younger brothers had been taken from me and murdered? The very thoughts of this are frightening and putting myself in a survivor’s position and witnessing all the drastic events during the holocaust, I don’t know what to have believed in if I was in that situation.

In conclusion the holocaust is like all other horrific tragedies yet the tragic loss of lives cannot be forgotton and still many Jews and also non-Jews struggle to understand why such a loving God could have possibly allowed this to happen.