The Problem of Evil and the Holocaust

My name is David Tollerton.

I'm based at the University of Exeter where I'm an associate

professor in the department of theology and religion.

So in this lecture,

which is part of a sequence on the religious and philosophical

implications of the holocaust,

in this lecture we'll think about the relationship between

the holocaust and the problem of evil from the perspective of

Jewish religious thought.

So the problem of evil is a well known issue in

contemporary religion and theology.

It's this question of how can there be innocent suffering in

the world if there is a God that is all seeing and all

powerful and all knowing.

In Jewish religious thought,

this is played out in very specific ways in response to the Holocaust.

Traditionally, there is an idea that God is within a special covenant with

the Jewish people, and so it raises real questions of why

did God allow the Holocaust to take place.

Now one of the earliest and most influential thinkers in

this regard is a figure called Elie Wiesel.

So Elie Wiesel was a survivor of Buchenwald and

Auschwitz and passed away only in twenty

sixteen after, living, in the United States following the

holocaust.

Elie Wiesel was not a philosopher or a theologian in

a conventional sense.

He was a Nobel Prize winning writer of fiction, and he was

an essayist, and he was a public speaker.

His first book was called Night and talked about his own

experiences in Auschwitz.

And in that, he included a great deal of theological reflection

on the nature of God and why God had allowed the

holocaust to take place.

He talks about how when he first arrived in the camps that

the scenes that he confronted really caused him to question his belief.

Visell never became an atheist,

but he wrestled with his beliefs throughout his life and

talked frequently about the way in which he could not simply

believe piously, but he also could not simply abandon faith either.

Now thinking through these issues,

there was a whole sequence of Jewish theologians and rabbis

who wrote in a more kind of systematic way about problem of

evil in response to the holocaust.

And so I'll run through a sequence of them and then draw them together.

So the first is an orthodox rabbi called Rabbi Irving Greenberg

who was very influenced by Elie Wiesel

and shaped his thinking in very ways that were shaped

by this idea that one can you cannot simply abandon faith

or piously accept faith after the Holocaust.

He talked particularly about moment faiths,

this idea that sometimes you are a believer and sometimes you doubt.

Sometimes you accept the truth of Judaism and sometimes you reject it.

As a rabbi, this is quite a radical idea,

but he came to believe that after the holocaust,

people had to kind of oscillate between belief and doubt

because in his view, there was no simple,

neat answer to this problem of God's relationship with the holocaust.

Another very influential,

very radical thinker is called Richard Rubinstein.

In the nineteen sixties,

he produced a book called After Auschwitz,

in which he looked at Jewish religious tradition in relation

to the holocaust and came to solutions that many rejected,

many were shocked by,

but that nonetheless caused ripples throughout modern

Jewish thought.

Rubinstein looked at Jewish religious tradition,

particularly traditions in the Hebrew Bible,

what Christians would call the Old Testament,

and saw that again and again in those ancient texts,

suffering is considered a result of punishment,

punishment for sin.

He then looked at that in relation to the holocaust and

thought that if you apply that traditional view to the Holocaust,

you have to conclude that the Jewish people were punished for sin.

Rubinstein was so horrified by that idea that he thought that

Jewish religious thought had to be radically reconsidered,

that a new and different kind of idea of God had to be

created in its place.

Now as I say, not not everyone accepted his ideas.

They were very controversial,

but they stirred up a lot of debate in modern Jewish

religious thought.

One responder to him was a figure called Emil Fackenheim.

Fackenheim rejected the entire idea that there could be a

solution to the problem of evil after the holocaust.

He thought that it's impossible to ever find a coherent

religious meaning to this suffering.

So instead, he thought about,

the nature of religious life in a different way.

So traditionally in Jewish religious thought,

there's this idea that there are six hundred and thirteen commandments.

This was, a way of thinking about Jewish

tradition that was constructed by the medieval Jewish thinker,

Moses Maimonides.

Emil Fackenheim looked at this and said after the Holocaust,

there was a new commandment.

There was a six hundred and fourteenth commandment.

And this commandment is that the Jewish people must survive.

And this very simple response was to say,

we need to cast aside our doubts regarding the problem of

evil, and we need to focus on survival.

We need to not give Hitler victory over Jewish religious thought.

Later, another thinker, David Blumenthal,

published a book in the nineteen nineties called Facing

the Abusing God, which was again very controversial.

For Blumental, the solution to the problem of evil in response to the

holocaust is to doubt the goodness of god.

For Blumental, he toyed with the idea that perhaps god is not always good.

Sometimes god is complicit in evil or allows evil to

happen, but then nonetheless,

you have to maintain an ongoing relationship with this divine being.

Now his ideas are very controversial because they

imply this idea of worshiping a God who sometimes is good,

but by our categories of good and evil, sometimes is not.

And finally, a last religious thinker to mention is Melissa

Raphael.

Melissa Raphael thought about the problem of evil in relation

to the holocaust in terms of people's

grounded experiences during the event,

particularly particularly the experiences of women who,

suffered considerably in terms of kind of gender based

violence during the holocaust, but who thought of,

God's presence during the holocaust in terms of what's

traditionally referred to as Shekinah, the presence of God.

And for Melissa Raphael,

the way to think about the Holocaust religiously was not

to kind of solve the problem of evil in an intellectual way,

but to think about divine co suffering,

that God existed within the practices and the beliefs of

the Jewish people and that God suffered as the Jewish people suffered.

That's the way, she thinks,

to think about religion in response to the holocaust.

Now what you see across all of these thinkers is a sense that

the holocaust radically interrupts

Jewish history and that there needs to be a reconsideration

of the kind of foundational views of tradition and the

nature of God.

And that the problem of evil is not something that can

necessarily be straightforwardly solved, but

that nonetheless,

you have to find a way of religiously living even without

those resolutions.