Wrestling with God: A powerful, must-read on how Jews have confronted the Holocaust

Can anything “new” be written and published about the Shoah? With hundreds of films, thousands of histories, seemingly countless memoirs, one may have thought that the subject is near exhaustible: as eternal and endless as the capital-E evil which led to its creation of horrors and mass murders.

Yet I have just finished Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocuast (Oxford University Press, 689 pages, $54 paperback), and I know that I shall return to it dozens of times in the years I have left on this earth. What an astonishingly important collection of essays this is!  (Not to be confused with the similar-sounding title and worthwhile volume: Godwrestling by Arthur Waskow which  introduces and explores the Jewish renewal movement). 

What scholars Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman and Gershon Greenberg have done is extraordinary: nothing less than collect dozens of the most thoughtful minds of our time in Part III (“European and American responses during and following the War”), from Buber and Heschel to Fackenheim,  “Yitz” Greenberg to Eli Wiesel; and Part II’s “Israeli Responses during and following the War (Pinchas Peli, Alexander Donat, Yehuda Bauer and others); but something which still has me both chilled and deeply moved:  many precious, shocking, even devastating “Ultra-Orthodox Responses during and following the War” in Part I:  great rabbis and scholars in both Europe and Israel, many translated from the Yiddish and Hebrew for the first time, whose reactions range from classic theodicy (“we were being punished for our sins”) to sickening hatred of Zionism (“because we place the nation of Israel ahead of God, we deserved to be slaughtered”) to powerful changes of heart and mind (“these mass murders are different than all the Amaleks and Hamans and Crusades through history, and I have finally come to recognize this!”)  I have not wept so much, nor had my mind so shaken to its core, since I first read Wiesel’s Night or saw Alain Renais’s heartbreaking French documentary Night and Fog as a teenager. While the $50-plus cost of this 2007 anthology may frighten you, its $198 hardcover should not scare any librarian away, since the essays it contains come from texts (both famous and obscure and often previously unavailable) which would cost thousands of dollars.

The organized, technologically-astute, cold-blooded slaughter of nearly six million Jews—which included over a million children and over 80% of its Eastern European, most religious and scholarly of our people—has been the spiritual “elephant in the room” of modern thought:  how could a good and loving Creator give the Torah to this people (who, in turn, mothered both Christianity and Islam, changing the faith and focus of world civilization over the past three millennia), and then allow their descendants to be so mercilessly wiped out? Several of the essays (or well-chosen selections from classic books) should be known to most of us:  the Holocaust shows that the God who gave the Torah to us 3500 years ago must surely be dead (Richard Rubenstein).  Or “eclipsed” (Buber). No, quite the opposite: the Shoah provides a new “Commanding Voice,”  coming from the death camps this time, not Sinai, ordering the Jews “to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world, and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. They are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.”  (Toronto’s, and later Jerusalem’s, Emil Fackenheim.)

Book reviews on the internet must, by their very electronic nature, be brief. This profoundly important anthology makes me long to quote tens of thousands of words, because every thinking soul will be moved, inspired, horrified, even shattered by much of this. To read the (never-before-seen) sermons of deeply religious, scholarly rabbis—buried in burning ghettoes after they  had watched their own spouses and children killed, dug up decades later, sent to families in Israel, and finally translated and published—in which their thoughts change from “Hitler was sent by God because of our sins and the evil of Zionism” to “we need a Jewish State to never allow this to happen again” is emotionally, intellectually and spiritually stunning, like a taser to one’s soul

Yes, there have been many genocides, especially over the past century-plus: the Armenian, the Hutu and Tutsis, the Jews, the present one in Darfur. But as editor Katz showed in his powerful, brilliant The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1, back in 1994, the Turks never tracked down the hundreds of thousands of Armenians in California, as they had no desire nor plans to kill every Armenian on the face of the earth. We all know the nearly successful plans of Hitler and his henchmen, which went far beyond those of the Crusaders (which allowed Jews to convert to Christianity rather than be killed; what martyrdom was available to an infant with one Jewish grandparent in Eastern Europe in 1942?) The Holocaust has been endlessly cheapened and vulgarized by Hollywood (what a stupid, morally vacuous and meaningless movie The Reader is!), and it has rarely been confronted in a meaningfully religious sense, quoting generously from some of the finest Jewish minds—ranging from ultra-religious to secular—of the past half-century. Now, in a single, unwieldy volume, it has been.  Read this book, and, like the Sabbath day, keep it, for it is holy.