The Holocaust and the Eclipse of Thought

Any book concerned with Jewish thought and theology in the twentieth century, even one such as this focusing on engagements with a medieval Jewish thinker, would be incomplete without confronting the theological implications of the Holocaust (Shoah) in some meaningful way. This was a time when suffering and loss were of such catastrophic proportions as to overwhelm previous tragedies, which had by then become paradigms of suffering for Jewish history and theology. These former crises included the destruction of the two Temples, followed by various persecutions in the diaspora such as crusades, expulsions, and pogroms. As with the classic biblical example of an innocent sufferer, Job, all these crises provoked agonizing theological protests and struggles to wrest some sense out of innocent suffering, as well as posing challenges to the justness of a God who could preside over such suffering.

However, with the Holocaust, Jewish experience and theology crossed into uncharted territory. What kind of a deity, the ultimate subject of any theology, allows, or worse, orders, the systematic genocide of millions of human beings, including a million children, let alone that of his ‘chosen’ ones? In Jewish theology, can a covenant between a people and its God survive a time when the human partner to that covenant was nearly obliterated while the divine partner stood by? Can even Maimonides’ negative theology with its ‘solutions’ to the problems of suffering and evil in the world still be viable in the face of a God who was so consummately absent that hardly a theos remains about which any coherent logos can be conducted? The question ‘What would Rabbi Kook have thought?’, had he lived another ten years, is impossible to answer, as always with such exercises. Yet it would also be inconceivable that his supreme optimism about human nature, and his belief in a harmony of all existence working its way towards an ultimate unity, would not have been, at the very least, challenged, or even shattered by the events of the Holocaust.

The Maimonidean view of evil as a ‘privation’ or an absence of good, and therefore not attributable to any positive act of a Creator God is no longer tenable in the face of a million children systematically gassed and burned.