I spent a week this past summer as a counselor dragging a gaggle of Jewish seventeen-year-olds through southern Poland. For those of you who have had your own Polish experiences, we saw all the major sights: Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka. On the day we went through the Auschwitz complex, we started our morning in Birkenau and then made our way to Auschwitz I. It was over 100 degrees that day, so by the time we were wrapping up our experience, we were practically peeling melting kids off the floor. The last stop on our journey was a gas chamber.
As we stood quietly in a circle inside the first room built to exterminate my people, we were going to sing the shema quietly, but right before we did, he said four words that have replayed in my mind since: “וְקוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה יִשָׁמַע and a thin silent voice shall be heard.” The line comes from the liturgy of the High Holidays, specifically the Unetaneh Tokef, an at least a 1000 year old piyut. The poem’s central idea speaks of the book of life, its signing on Rosh Hashanah, and finally the book’s sealing on Yom Kippur. The piyut details that Hashem not only chooses individually who will die in the coming year but also how.
“who shall live and who shall die, who in good time, and who by an untimely death, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by wild beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangulation and who by lapidation, who shall have rest and who wander, who shall be at peace and who pursued, who shall be serene and who tormented, who shall become impoverished and who wealthy, who shall be debased, and who exalted.”
So there I was, sweating through my shirt, standing in a room built to test ways to kill my friends and relatives most effectively, and all I could think about was Hashem’s role. How could I say that Hashem chose for each Jew whose life was stolen from them in the ghettos, train cars, forests, and gas chambers?
We are also told in the prayer that three things can lessen the burden placed upon us: “ ותְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה repentance, prayer and righteousness.” The linchpin of the theocratic dilemma in which I have been mired is how Hashem could have specifically chosen the gas chambers, bullets, illness, or malnutrition for each of the Jews who were murdered. What repentance, prayer, and righteousness could have saved them and averted their deaths at the hands of the Nazis?
I am not the first person to wonder about Hashem’s role during the Holocaust. In fact, religious scholars have been struggling with that question since Hitler marched on Poland, and three major pathways of explanation have been explored: G-d hiding, free will, and the ineffable. “Hester Panim” centers on the idea that, much like he did during slavery in Egypt, Hashem hid himself away from us.
Free will centers human autonomy rather than divine power. It’s not that Hashem couldn’t’ve subverted the Nazi regime or that he was unwilling to for reasons of benevolence, only that he cares too much about free will to intervene.
The last rationalization that is offered is that it is unfair of us to ask Hashem why. As humans, we are incapable of understanding the grand design for the world, and it would be incongruous to place our simple moral frameworks on an inconceivable divine being. Theologians ground this framework in the Book of Job. Despite the clear malevolence, or at best indifference, that Hashem shows toward Job, his faithful servant, Job is unwilling to abandon Hashem. As we once again approach our new beginning and the piercing blasts of the Sofar, how will you renew your relationship with Hashem and contend with the role he plays in your life?
