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14 results

  • 14 - Evil, Suffering, and the Holocaust
  • Edited by Michael L. Morgan, Indiana University, Bloomington, Peter Eli Gordon, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy
  • Published online: 28 September 2007
  • Print publication: 04 June 2007, pp 277-299
  • View extract

    Summary

    As far as human eyes can judge, the degree of evil might have been less without any impediment to good.

    Samuel Johnson

    The need to account for the appearance of evil in a world assumed to be ruled by goodness and justice provoked Jewish religious and philosophical reflection long before the Holocaust. The 'problem' of evil, pointed most sharply in the phenomenon of human suffering and loss, figured in the very origins of Jewish philosophy (as in Saadya’s commentary on Job [c. 935 c.e.]), and Genesis itself provided an earlier view of the knowledge of good and evil in its synthesis of cosmology and genealogy - the entry into human nature of moral conscience, which ensured that man would then make his own way across the grain of historical contingency and face divine judgment for his actions. That second nature would then impel the Biblical narrative and subsequent Jewish ethical reflection.

    Motivation for philosophical and religious reflections on evil is ample in Jewish thought. On the one hand, the world was found 'good' at each stage of the Biblical creation, and except for scattered moments of mystical enthusiasm, subsequent Jewish commentary never disputed that judgment. On the other hand, a profusion of evidence attests to individual and group suffering in people who appear to deserve that condition no more (often much less) than contemporaries who fare better - often, much better. At least from the time of Rabbinic Judaism, in any event, the issue thus stated would recur in Jewish theological and philosophical discussion: how to reconcile misfortune, suffering or persecution – and exile – with the goodness of creation and the authority of an all-powerful and beneficent creator.

  • Gary Weissman. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 288 pp.
  • Berel Lang
  • Journal: AJS Review / Volume 29 / Issue 2 / November 2005
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2005, pp. 399-402
  • Print publication: November 2005
  • View extract

    This is a compelling, meticulously argued, subtle, and literate book on an important subject—although the question of what that subject is remains oddly open. Gary Weissman interprets a number of authoritative and popular representations of the Holocaust (principally those by Elie Wiesel, Lawrence Langer, Stephen Spielberg, and Claude Lanzmann) as evidence of their—and presumably their audiences'—post-Holocaust “efforts to experience the Holocaust” and somehow to recapture that horrific reality in feeling. These efforts, Weissman shows in a measured discussion that contrasts with the high-pitched register of much Holocaust writing, encounter what he sees as fundamental difficulties—and not only because of Primo Levi's chilling reminder that if direct experience is a requirement for authenticity, the only true witnesses of the Holocaust are not those who survived but those who died. The difficulties he identifies vary in the works discussed, and his book's concluding chapter, in which he ends up questioning the warrant for any “fantasies of witnessing,” provides only a brief conspectus. He thus leaves his readers to make their own way back to the Holocaust from the post-Holocaust—from which, when the survivors are gone, everyone will set out.