Faith After the Holocaust is Orthodox rabbi and theologian Eliezer Berkovits’ most comprehensive and systematic work on the Holocaust.[i] It describes both his major Jewish theological contribution to the study of God and evil and his response to the abundance of post-Holocaust literature that developed during the 1960s and 1970s. According to Berkovits, the Holocaust must be addressed through the lens of normative Jewish perspectives. The Holocaust was undoubtedly horrific, but it was not a fundamental rupture in Jewish history; rather, it was a chapter in the broader history of the Jewish people and their millennial and covenantal relationship with God. Berkovits argues for the acceptance and defense of traditional faith while remaining acutely aware of the turpitude and significance of the Holocaust.
Before addressing Berkovits’ position, it is essential to first review contemporaneous trends that pervaded Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust. Berkovits attacks these positions, while not naming the scholars that he challenges.[ii] During the first generation after the Holocaust, Jewish scholars primarily responded with silence. However, after the Eichmann trial (1962) and the Six Day War (1967), the floodgates of theological responses to the Holocaust were opened. These responses generally argued that the Holocaust cannot be explained through traditional Jewish perspectives because of the magnitude of destruction and cruelty of the Holocaust. The Reform thinker Emil Fackenheim was of this opinion, arguing that “no precedent exists either within Jewish history or outside of it.”[iii] The modern Orthodox scholar Irving Greenberg expressed a similar view arguing that “the Holocaust is obviously central for Jews” because the magnitude of destruction necessitates a “basic reorientation in light of it by the surviving Jewish community.”[iv] One contemporary philosopher reasons that the reorientation that Greenberg refers to involves “rethinking the meaning of the covenant and the requirements for its survival and performance… The ‘magnitude of suffering’ and the Nazi process of dehumanization are evils that cannot be dealt with by traditional categories and require revision and absolute opposition.”[v] Similarly, novelist and theologian Arthur Cohen expressed that “we must return again and again to break our head upon the tremendum of the abyss…. We must create a new language in which to speak of this in order to destroy the old language which, in its decrepitude and decline, made facile and easy the demonic descent.”[vi] According to Cohen, traditional theological categories cannot be applied to the Holocaust because of its enormity and singularity; because of this, the classical understanding of God as omnipotent and omniscient must be revised. All of these formulations are, in part, predicated on the earlier work of Conservative rabbi and theologian Richard Rubenstein, who famously declared the “death of God” after the Holocaust. Arguably, it was Rubenstein’s explication of Jewish radical theology in his After Auschwitz that initiated the explosion of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust.[vii] Rubenstein, more than any other Jewish theologian, is the likely recipient of Berkovits’ attack in Faith After the Holocaust.
Post-Holocaust theology of the 1960s and 1970s delves beyond the theoretical and intellectual investigation of why God allows injustice to persist in the world. In classical theodicy, there exists a logical problem of evil, involving the seeming contradiction between the belief in an omnipotent and omniscient God and the presence of evil. However, the literature extant on the Holocaust seems to go beyond this formulation. At stake are the betrayal of God and the notion of choseness (by gray). God, who affirmed in Deuteronomy to never forsake His chosen people, did exactly that during the Holocaust![viii]
Eliezer Berkovits articulates a different position. Berkovits begins Faith After the Holocaust by drawing a distinction between those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand and those who did not. He writes, “Those who were not there and, yet, readily accept the holocaust as the will of God that must not be questioned, desecrate the holy disbelief of those whose faith was murdered. And those who were not there, and yet join with self-assurance the rank of disbelievers, desecrate the holy faith of the believers.”[ix] This is an odd way to begin a book that presumes to talk about the Holocaust and affirm traditional faith; it entirely undermines any response by those who did not experience the Holocaust. However, Berkovits has good reason for doing this. Firstly, in positing that only those who experienced the Holocaust can authentically respond to it, what he later refers to as “authentic faith” and “authentic rebellion,” Berkovits distances himself from the facile rabbinic justification that the Holocaust represents divine punishment for Jewish sinfulness, mipenei hataeinu.[x] Secondly, Berkovits is critiquing Jewish theologians who use the Holocaust to throw off the yoke of traditional Judaism and redefine the contours of Jewish life. Berkovits subtly alludes to these theologians when he writes that “those who were not there, and yet join with self-assurance the rank of disbelievers, desecrate the holy faith of the believers.”[xi] Later, he explicitly refers to them, writing “the disbelief of the sophisticated intellectual in the midst of an affluent society—in the light of the holy disbelief of the crematoria—is obscenity.”[xii] Almost all of the post-Holocaust writers of the 1960s and 1970s did not personally experience the concentration camps; Berkovits himself escaped Nazi Germany in 1939.[xiii]
These contentious comments set up Berkovits’ post-Holocaust theology. Berkovits emphasizes that Jews of the post-Holocaust era are euphemistically similar to Job’s brother.[xiv] According to Berkovits, we must recognize that we are the victim’s sibling and not the victim. The position of those who did not experience the Holocaust is by nature deprived of the authenticity of personal experience; however, at the same time, those who did not experience the Holocaust cannot lose sight of the Holocaust’s significance. Job’s brother today must try to make order out of the wake of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Job’s brother represents a philosophical step away from the destruction of the Holocaust. This distance makes Job’s brother fundamentally different than Job himself. Therefore, “In our generation, Job’s brother, if he wishes to be true to his God-given heritage, ‘reasons’ with God in believing rebellion and rebellious belief.”[xv] In this way, Berkovits conceives of a post-Holocaust theology which affirms faith.
Berkovits discusses the Holocaust as a human and historical event. History, according to Berkovits, is man’s responsibility. He expresses this, in part, through the story of creation; Adam is placed by God into the Garden of Eden “to work it and to guard it.”[xvi] In his most central work of Jewish philosophy, God, Man and History, Berkovits first articulates the notion that God’s main concern for humanity is to take responsibility for history. In line with the medieval philosophical positions of Sadiah Ga’on and Judah ha-Levi, Berkovits writes that “the foundation of religion is not the affirmation that God is, but that God is concerned with man and the world; that, having created this world, he has not abandoned it, leaving it to its own devices; that he cares about his creation.”[xvii] The world, in this view, is created for humankind, and as the capstone of God’s creation, humankind is thus responsible for the world. The greatest question for Berkovits is therefore not “Where was God?” but rather “Where was Man?”[xviii] According to Berkovits, the Holocaust represents humankind’s moral failure before God and not God’s failure before humankind. In Berkovits’ words, “The Jewish experience in the ghettos and the death camps made manifest in our days the collapse of man as a moral being.”[xix] Berkovits thus moves culpability away from God onto humanity.[xx], [xxi]
According to Berkovits, most post-Holocaust theologians failed to address the Holocaust through the lens of biblical and rabbinic literature. Judaism itself has always believed in the possibility of evil. This is expressed acutely in Genesis, where it states “Man’s heart is evil from his youth.”[xxii] “Great prophets of Israel did not shy from acknowledging ultimate divine responsibility for evil in the world.”[xxiii] Berkovits cites from Isaiah, where God reveals Himself with the words, “I am the Lord, and there is none else; I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I am the Lord that doeth all these things.”[xxiv] Berkovits emphasizes that the theological significance of this statement is its rejection of dualistic interpretations of the universe; Manichean dualism believes that the universe is affected by two independent principles which continuously struggle with one another, good and evil. Isaiah illustrates that the belief in one God who is the only creator, excludes such a position, for God creates both good and evil. But, how is one to find meaning in a God who also creates evil? Berkovits first proposes and subsequently rejects the medieval position of Maimonides that evil is privation. That is, evil is the absence of good. Clearly, evil as privation does not accurately represent Isaiah for God creates both good and evil definitively. Berkovits further denies the theory of privation any validity as a legitimate position towards the Holocaust: “The evil that created the ghettos and the death camps and ruled them with an iron fist was no mere absence of good. It was real, potent, absolute.”[xxv] How then, does a person understand the God of Isaiah, a personal God, as the same God of Auschwitz, a God of evil?
The next step in Berkovits’ approach is to understand that “the problem of faith presented by the holocaust is not unique in the context of the entirety of Jewish experience.”[xxvi] “Each generation had its Auschwitz problem.”[xxvii] Horror, misery, torture, and death are not new to Jewish experience and neither is the problem of evil. There were two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, Crusades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Rhinelands, the Black Death massacres in the fourteenth century, the destruction of Spanish Jewry in the fifteenth century, and the Chmelnicki massacres in the seventeenth century. All of these historical events inspired theological questioning. Despite the quantitative enormity of evil in the Holocaust, the victims of all of these tragedies had to grapple with the same problem of evil. From a qualitative and emotional experience, it is impossible, according to Berkovits, to claim that previous Jewish catastrophes were less intense and did not inspire theological crises and questioning.[xxviii]
This, however, does not directly answer the problem of evil; it merely sidesteps it. Let us grant that (a) as much as the Holocaust presents theological problems for belief in an all-powerful God, it is equally problematic for humanity, (b) Judaism recognizes the possibility of radical evil, and (c) the Holocaust is not unique in the sense that there have been other instances of Jewish catastrophe. Factually, the Holocaust happened in the face of a supposed omnipotent and omniscient God. Humanity may be responsible, as Berkovits holds, but God did not prevent humanity from destroying European Jewry in the 1940s.
Berkovits’ answer is the concept of hester panim, whereby God hides His countenance from those suffering. The hester panim which Berkovits refers to should not be confused with the hester panim of Deuteronomy.[xxix] In Deuteronomy, hester panim refers to divine judgment and punishment. However, there is a second meaning to hester panim found in the Prophets and the Talmud, which, according to Berkovits, is seldom realized. This is the hiding of God’s Face “when human suffering results, not from divine judgment, but from evil perpetrated by man.”[xxx] Berkovits argues that God’s hiding of His face is a divine attribute, which is an essential feature of His permanent involvement in the world. God’s permanent involvement with humanity is realized through His silence. God is present during man’s suffering. The prophet Isaiah illustrates this seeming paradox when he says to God, “‘Indeed, You are a God Who conceals Himself, the God of Israel the Savior!’”[xxxi] For Isaiah, “God’s self-hiding is an attribute of divine nature. Such is God. He is a God, who hides himself. . . In some mysterious way, the God who hides himself is the God who saves.”[xxxii] Isaiah is thus able to also proclaim “And I will wait for the Lord that hideth His face from the house of Jacob and I will hope for him.”[xxxiii]
Why must God silence Himself? How does God save by remaining silent to innocent suffering? Part of hester panim is that God must restrain and silence Himself so that humanity has freedom; human freedom only results from divine self-restraint. Thus, God is still present but must hide His face. Consequently, we face a great paradox. If God were to curtail freedom and prevent man from doing evil, then by virtue of preventing evil, He would also prevent man from doing good. As Berkovits writes:
This is the ultimate tragedy of existence: God’s very mercy and forebearance, his very love for man, necessitates the abandonment of some to a fate that they may well experience as divine indifference to justice and human suffering. It is the tragic paradox of faith that God’s direct concern for the wrongdoer should be directly responsible for so much pain and sorrow on earth.[xxxiv]
Berkovits is doing more than simply describing a free will defense of evil, which is subject to certain problems.[xxxv] Rather, within God’s hiding of His face in history, Berkovits establishes humankind’s responsibility for history. Berkovits reiterates this when stating, “If man is to be, God himself must respect his freedom of decision. If man is to act on his responsibility without being continually overawed by divine supremacy, God must absent himself from history. But man left to his freedom is capable of greatness in both—in creative goodness and destructive evil.”[xxxvi] To question the creation of evil is to question the creation of humanity. Berkovits is thus consistent with his earlier theological emphasis on human responsibility in God, Man and History. The purpose of creation is for humanity to take responsibility for history. God wants humankind to do good, but only if freely chosen. Humanity can only be responsible for history if it has the ability to make free choices. Removing radical evil from the world would thus make humanity’s purpose on this earth meaningless: “God himself could eliminate moral evil and the suffering caused by it only by eliminating man, by recalling the world of man into nothingness.”[xxxvii]
Despite hester panim, Berkovits does not dismiss the Jewish theological tenet that God will not allow the Jewish people to be destroyed. Although this seems like a contradiction, it is actually part of his understanding of hester panim. According to Berkovits, the Jewish people are a crucial element in the call for human responsibility; only through the example of a living Jewish people can the ethical and moral standards of the Bible be transmitted to humanity. Berkovits refers to this as “faith history,” and it is the task of the Jewish people to cultivate faith history and not “power history.”[xxxviii] Jewish history testifies to the “supra-natural dimension jutting into history.”[xxxix] The mysterious persistence of the Jewish people to survive in power history, despite their powerlessness, testifies to God’s presence in the world. The Jewish people remain while many of its persecutors are no more. This, according to Berkovits, is the reason for Jewish perseverance and continuity, despite the horrific suffering throughout Jewish history. Because of this, the Jewish people can withstand God’s silence in history while still affirming belief in Him. God is thus both absent and present at once; “He is present without being indubitably manifest; he is absent without being hopelessly inaccessible.”[xl]
For Berkovits, there is no greater proof for God’s continual presence in the world than the establishment of the State of Israel. Though the destruction of the Holocaust was unparalleled, there was a salvation. The emergence of Israel testifies to Hitler’s defeat. It was the Jew who prevailed and hunted and tried the Nazi for his crimes against humanity in the Jewish State. Judaism has risen from the ashes of the Holocaust and seen a revival in Jewish learning and economic and political realities that were never possible in Europe. The State of Israel is proof for Berkovits that Jewish history did not end with the Holocaust; “statehood is the repudiation of powerlessness in exile,” and refutes those theologians who contend that God is dead.[xli] God was silent during the Holocaust, but in the end, he did not betray his chosen people; God reaffirmed His commitment to His people. For Berkovits, the emergence of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel in 1948 and its reunification in 1967 is truly an historical miracle. The State of Israel is “a smile on the face of God” after Auschwitz.[xlii]
In summation, Eliezer Berkovits’ Faith After the Holocaust explicates six aspects of a post-Holocaust theology that remains faithful to Judaism: (1) Those who did not experience the Holocaust are not in a position to judge the “authentic faith” and “authentic rebellion” of those who experienced the Holocaust. We today are only Job’s brother. (2) Humankind is responsible for history and thus the Holocaust represents a colossal failure of humanity and not God. (3) Judaism through the lens of the prophets and rabbinic literature has always believed in the possibility of radical evil. (4) The Holocaust should not be viewed in singularity. The Holocaust, undoubtedly horrific, is part of a broader Jewish history of suffering. (5) God must hide His face so that human agents can act and choose freely, taking responsibility for history, for both good and bad. (6) The persistent survival of the Jewish people throughout history testifies that God will not destroy the Jewish people and that God is in fact present even when His face is hidden. For Berkovits, this has never been more true than with the establishment of the State of Israel after the Holocaust, which affirms that God did not betray the Jewish people.
As a man of faith, Eliezer Berkovits “questions God because of his faith.” [xliii] While wrestling with the problems of evil, Berkovits provides a modern framework to approach the Holocaust with the metaphor of Job’s brother; his work is thus titled Faith After the Holocaust, “after” being of great importance. By endorsing the biblical and rabbinic concept of hester panim, Berkovits takes a courageous theological position pitting him between liberal theologians and the facile theodicy of mipenei hataeinu. Berkovits affirms traditional Jewish faith while respecting the power of history and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Jonathan Zisook, YC ’13, is a master’s student in Modern Jewish History at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies.
[i] Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973). Berkovits also authored an additional full length book and numerous articles pertaining to the Holocaust. See, for example, Eliezer Berkovits, “Death of God,” Judaism 20.1 (1971): 73-86; “Crisis and Faith,” Tradition 14.4 (1974): 5-19; and With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Death Camps (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1979).
[ii] Perhaps because of his sensitivity to the subject material, Berkovits does not cite by name those who he attacks. This is, however, quite uncharacteristic for Berkovits because he generally attacks practically every Jewish philosopher that he believes misrepresented an authentic philosophy of Judaism. Berkovits has full length critiques of the philosophies of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mordecai Kaplan in his Major Themes in Modern Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Ktav, 1974). For a defense of Heschel against the criticism of Berkovits and a response more generally to Berkovits’ treatment of these philosophers, see Shalom Carmy, “Modern Jewish Philosophy: Fossil or Ferment?” Tradition 15.3 (1975): 140-152.
[iii] Emil L. Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment,” in A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination, ed. by Michael L. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 115. Fackenheim’s earlier work criticized liberalism and counseled a return to a traditional view of God. Like Berkovits, Fackenheim suggested that liberal Jewish theology was far too optimistic about humanity, and faith in God must be reasserted. However, in his later works, Fackenheim rejected supernatural theism on account of the Holocaust and supported a survivalist position of ethnocentricism, in which he abandoned his earlier and more traditional approach. This is already evident in his formulation of the 614th commandment in “The 614th Commandment,” Judaism 16 (1967): 269-273. For elaboration, see Ellen Z. Charry, “Jewish Holocaust Theology: An Assessment,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 18.1 (1981): 128-139.
[iv] Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. by Eva Fleischner (New York: Ktav, 1977), 8.
[v] Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 126.
[vi] Arthur A. Cohen, “Thinking the Tremendum: Some Theological Implications of the Death Camps,” in A Holocaust Reader, 195.
[vii] Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz is considered the Jewish compatriot to radical Christian theology, which developed Nietzsche’s notion of “the death of God.” Berkovits refers explicitly to radical Christian theologians Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton and their Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), but does not refer explicitly to Rubenstein.
[viii] Deuteronomy 4:31; 31:6. This review of post-Holocaust theology is by no means comprehensive, but it suffices in contextualizing the backdrop to which Berkovits was writing. An excellent overview of post-Holocaust theology in the context of Berkovits’ position which I have utilized is David Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil and the Holocaust,” Lecture, University of Chicago and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago, Illinois, March 6, 2011. http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/eliezer-berkovits-conference/recordings/
[ix] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 4-5.
[x] Ibid., 69. Berkovits is aware of the classical rabbinic tradition of mipnei hataeinu as a framework for confronting the existence of Jewish suffering. However, as a sensitive man who lived in Germany until 1939 and whose family and friends perished in the Holocaust, he refuses to believe that their death, and the death of six million others, was divine retribution for Jewish sinfulness. In this regard, Berkovits agrees with the aforementioned liberal theologians. See Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xii] Ibid., 69, my emphasis.
[xiii] On November 11, 1938, as Berkovits was leaving his home to go to Shaharit at his synagogue in Berlin, he received a phone call warning him not to approach because the Nazis were desecrating thousands of synagogues in Germany. This was the morning after Kristallnacht. Fortunately, soon after, Berkovits was able to escape to Leeds, England, where he served as the rabbi of Leeds during the war period. See Berkovits, “Crisis and Faith,” 5; Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xiv] Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, 69.
[xvi] Genesis 2:15 (Artscroll translation).
[xvii] Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man and History: A Jewish Interpretation (New York: Jonathan David, 1965), 14. See also Saadya Gaon, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, trans and ed. by Alexander Altmann (Oxford: East and West Library, 1946), 115-121;Judah Halevi, Kuzari 2:48.
[xviii] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 7.
[xix] Ibid., 36; David Hazony, “Berkovits, Eliezer,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd edition (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), Vol. 3, 438-439.
[xx] Similarly, Maimonides shifts the onus from God onto humanity in Guide of the Perplexed, 3:12. There, Maimonides describes three types of evil in the world. 1) Natural evil. 2) Social evil. 3) Evil that people cause to themselves. For Maimonides, and unlike Berkovits, this does not necessarily entail a full formulation of the free will defense. However, Maimonides does seem to take such an approach in Hilkhot Teshuvah 5:1-4, and Shemonah Perakim, chapter 8. But, it must be noted that freedom in Hilkhot Teshuvah may only be important for Maimonides as a justification for sekhar ve-onesh and not evil.
[xxi] In the first chapters of Faith After the Holocaust, Berkovits describes the failure of Western civilization and Christian Europe for standing by while millions of Jews were murdered. He implicates the west, and specifically the Catholic Church, as “active accomplices in the greatest crime in history” (13). I have not included a full exposition of Berkovits’ critical portrayal of Christian culpability for the Holocaust in this article because it would take us far afield.
[xxii] Genesis 8:21 (Artscroll translation).
[xxiii] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 89.
[xxiv] Ibid., and 76-85. Isaiah 45:6-7, my emphasis and Berkovits’ translation. Berkovits also cites rabbinic examples of kiddush Hashem, such as R. Akiva who died a martyr’s death reciting the shema as the Romans scraped his flesh off with an iron comb. R. Akiva, among other Tannaim, understood the possibility of radical evil and fell victim of such evil. See Berakhot 61b; Sanhedrin 13b-14a.
[xxv] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 89. See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:10.
[xxvi] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 90.
[xxix] For example, Deuteronomy 31:17-18.
[xxx] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 95. Berkovits cites extensively from the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Job, and Psalms, and tractates Hagigah and Gittin to illustrate this second meaning of hester panim.
[xxxi] Ibid., 101, Isaiah 45:15 (Artscroll translation).
[xxxiii] Ibid., Isaiah 8:17 (Berkovits’ translation).
[xxxiv] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 106.
[xxxv] The free will defense may only satisfactorily address the logical problem of evil and not the evidentiary problem of evil, which is a problem of scale. For example, if there is a choice between having radical evil and not having free will, arguably it would be better to not have free will. Free will may outweigh some amount of evil but not the suffering of six million Jews! This argument was presented to me by Rabbi Shalom Carmy. See also Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xxxvi] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 107.
[xxxvii] Ibid., 105-106. According to Hazony, Berkovits’ ultimate theological goal is not freedom, but rather, human responsibility. Therefore, Berkovits’ concept of hester panim is not synonymous with the classical free will defense. See Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xxxviii] According to Berkovits, “power history” represents the terror and destruction brought about through political conquest and especially European nationalism, culminating in World War II and the extermination of European Jewry. It is the task of the Jewish people, however, to cultivate “faith history,” in which they are a called upon to lead by example in taking responsibility for human actions by exemplifying the ethical and moral standards of Judaism. See Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 128-143, 164; Berkovits, God, Man and History, 137.
[xxxix] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 111.
[xli] Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xlii] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 156.
Eliezer Berkovits’ Post-Holocaust Theology
Faith After the Holocaust is Orthodox rabbi and theologian Eliezer Berkovits’ most comprehensive and systematic work on the Holocaust.[i] It describes both his major Jewish theological contribution to the study of God and evil and his response to the abundance of post-Holocaust literature that developed during the 1960s and 1970s. According to Berkovits, the Holocaust must be addressed through the lens of normative Jewish perspectives. The Holocaust was undoubtedly horrific, but it was not a fundamental rupture in Jewish history; rather, it was a chapter in the broader history of the Jewish people and their millennial and covenantal relationship with God. Berkovits argues for the acceptance and defense of traditional faith while remaining acutely aware of the turpitude and significance of the Holocaust.
Before addressing Berkovits’ position, it is essential to first review contemporaneous trends that pervaded Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust. Berkovits attacks these positions, while not naming the scholars that he challenges.[ii] During the first generation after the Holocaust, Jewish scholars primarily responded with silence. However, after the Eichmann trial (1962) and the Six Day War (1967), the floodgates of theological responses to the Holocaust were opened. These responses generally argued that the Holocaust cannot be explained through traditional Jewish perspectives because of the magnitude of destruction and cruelty of the Holocaust. The Reform thinker Emil Fackenheim was of this opinion, arguing that “no precedent exists either within Jewish history or outside of it.”[iii] The modern Orthodox scholar Irving Greenberg expressed a similar view arguing that “the Holocaust is obviously central for Jews” because the magnitude of destruction necessitates a “basic reorientation in light of it by the surviving Jewish community.”[iv] One contemporary philosopher reasons that the reorientation that Greenberg refers to involves “rethinking the meaning of the covenant and the requirements for its survival and performance… The ‘magnitude of suffering’ and the Nazi process of dehumanization are evils that cannot be dealt with by traditional categories and require revision and absolute opposition.”[v] Similarly, novelist and theologian Arthur Cohen expressed that “we must return again and again to break our head upon the tremendum of the abyss…. We must create a new language in which to speak of this in order to destroy the old language which, in its decrepitude and decline, made facile and easy the demonic descent.”[vi] According to Cohen, traditional theological categories cannot be applied to the Holocaust because of its enormity and singularity; because of this, the classical understanding of God as omnipotent and omniscient must be revised. All of these formulations are, in part, predicated on the earlier work of Conservative rabbi and theologian Richard Rubenstein, who famously declared the “death of God” after the Holocaust. Arguably, it was Rubenstein’s explication of Jewish radical theology in his After Auschwitz that initiated the explosion of Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust.[vii] Rubenstein, more than any other Jewish theologian, is the likely recipient of Berkovits’ attack in Faith After the Holocaust.
Post-Holocaust theology of the 1960s and 1970s delves beyond the theoretical and intellectual investigation of why God allows injustice to persist in the world. In classical theodicy, there exists a logical problem of evil, involving the seeming contradiction between the belief in an omnipotent and omniscient God and the presence of evil. However, the literature extant on the Holocaust seems to go beyond this formulation. At stake are the betrayal of God and the notion of choseness (by gray). God, who affirmed in Deuteronomy to never forsake His chosen people, did exactly that during the Holocaust![viii]
Eliezer Berkovits articulates a different position. Berkovits begins Faith After the Holocaust by drawing a distinction between those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand and those who did not. He writes, “Those who were not there and, yet, readily accept the holocaust as the will of God that must not be questioned, desecrate the holy disbelief of those whose faith was murdered. And those who were not there, and yet join with self-assurance the rank of disbelievers, desecrate the holy faith of the believers.”[ix] This is an odd way to begin a book that presumes to talk about the Holocaust and affirm traditional faith; it entirely undermines any response by those who did not experience the Holocaust. However, Berkovits has good reason for doing this. Firstly, in positing that only those who experienced the Holocaust can authentically respond to it, what he later refers to as “authentic faith” and “authentic rebellion,” Berkovits distances himself from the facile rabbinic justification that the Holocaust represents divine punishment for Jewish sinfulness, mipenei hataeinu.[x] Secondly, Berkovits is critiquing Jewish theologians who use the Holocaust to throw off the yoke of traditional Judaism and redefine the contours of Jewish life. Berkovits subtly alludes to these theologians when he writes that “those who were not there, and yet join with self-assurance the rank of disbelievers, desecrate the holy faith of the believers.”[xi] Later, he explicitly refers to them, writing “the disbelief of the sophisticated intellectual in the midst of an affluent society—in the light of the holy disbelief of the crematoria—is obscenity.”[xii] Almost all of the post-Holocaust writers of the 1960s and 1970s did not personally experience the concentration camps; Berkovits himself escaped Nazi Germany in 1939.[xiii]
These contentious comments set up Berkovits’ post-Holocaust theology. Berkovits emphasizes that Jews of the post-Holocaust era are euphemistically similar to Job’s brother.[xiv] According to Berkovits, we must recognize that we are the victim’s sibling and not the victim. The position of those who did not experience the Holocaust is by nature deprived of the authenticity of personal experience; however, at the same time, those who did not experience the Holocaust cannot lose sight of the Holocaust’s significance. Job’s brother today must try to make order out of the wake of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Job’s brother represents a philosophical step away from the destruction of the Holocaust. This distance makes Job’s brother fundamentally different than Job himself. Therefore, “In our generation, Job’s brother, if he wishes to be true to his God-given heritage, ‘reasons’ with God in believing rebellion and rebellious belief.”[xv] In this way, Berkovits conceives of a post-Holocaust theology which affirms faith.
Berkovits discusses the Holocaust as a human and historical event. History, according to Berkovits, is man’s responsibility. He expresses this, in part, through the story of creation; Adam is placed by God into the Garden of Eden “to work it and to guard it.”[xvi] In his most central work of Jewish philosophy, God, Man and History, Berkovits first articulates the notion that God’s main concern for humanity is to take responsibility for history. In line with the medieval philosophical positions of Sadiah Ga’on and Judah ha-Levi, Berkovits writes that “the foundation of religion is not the affirmation that God is, but that God is concerned with man and the world; that, having created this world, he has not abandoned it, leaving it to its own devices; that he cares about his creation.”[xvii] The world, in this view, is created for humankind, and as the capstone of God’s creation, humankind is thus responsible for the world. The greatest question for Berkovits is therefore not “Where was God?” but rather “Where was Man?”[xviii] According to Berkovits, the Holocaust represents humankind’s moral failure before God and not God’s failure before humankind. In Berkovits’ words, “The Jewish experience in the ghettos and the death camps made manifest in our days the collapse of man as a moral being.”[xix] Berkovits thus moves culpability away from God onto humanity.[xx], [xxi]
According to Berkovits, most post-Holocaust theologians failed to address the Holocaust through the lens of biblical and rabbinic literature. Judaism itself has always believed in the possibility of evil. This is expressed acutely in Genesis, where it states “Man’s heart is evil from his youth.”[xxii] “Great prophets of Israel did not shy from acknowledging ultimate divine responsibility for evil in the world.”[xxiii] Berkovits cites from Isaiah, where God reveals Himself with the words, “I am the Lord, and there is none else; I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I am the Lord that doeth all these things.”[xxiv] Berkovits emphasizes that the theological significance of this statement is its rejection of dualistic interpretations of the universe; Manichean dualism believes that the universe is affected by two independent principles which continuously struggle with one another, good and evil. Isaiah illustrates that the belief in one God who is the only creator, excludes such a position, for God creates both good and evil. But, how is one to find meaning in a God who also creates evil? Berkovits first proposes and subsequently rejects the medieval position of Maimonides that evil is privation. That is, evil is the absence of good. Clearly, evil as privation does not accurately represent Isaiah for God creates both good and evil definitively. Berkovits further denies the theory of privation any validity as a legitimate position towards the Holocaust: “The evil that created the ghettos and the death camps and ruled them with an iron fist was no mere absence of good. It was real, potent, absolute.”[xxv] How then, does a person understand the God of Isaiah, a personal God, as the same God of Auschwitz, a God of evil?
The next step in Berkovits’ approach is to understand that “the problem of faith presented by the holocaust is not unique in the context of the entirety of Jewish experience.”[xxvi] “Each generation had its Auschwitz problem.”[xxvii] Horror, misery, torture, and death are not new to Jewish experience and neither is the problem of evil. There were two destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, Crusades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Rhinelands, the Black Death massacres in the fourteenth century, the destruction of Spanish Jewry in the fifteenth century, and the Chmelnicki massacres in the seventeenth century. All of these historical events inspired theological questioning. Despite the quantitative enormity of evil in the Holocaust, the victims of all of these tragedies had to grapple with the same problem of evil. From a qualitative and emotional experience, it is impossible, according to Berkovits, to claim that previous Jewish catastrophes were less intense and did not inspire theological crises and questioning.[xxviii]
This, however, does not directly answer the problem of evil; it merely sidesteps it. Let us grant that (a) as much as the Holocaust presents theological problems for belief in an all-powerful God, it is equally problematic for humanity, (b) Judaism recognizes the possibility of radical evil, and (c) the Holocaust is not unique in the sense that there have been other instances of Jewish catastrophe. Factually, the Holocaust happened in the face of a supposed omnipotent and omniscient God. Humanity may be responsible, as Berkovits holds, but God did not prevent humanity from destroying European Jewry in the 1940s.
Berkovits’ answer is the concept of hester panim, whereby God hides His countenance from those suffering. The hester panim which Berkovits refers to should not be confused with the hester panim of Deuteronomy.[xxix] In Deuteronomy, hester panim refers to divine judgment and punishment. However, there is a second meaning to hester panim found in the Prophets and the Talmud, which, according to Berkovits, is seldom realized. This is the hiding of God’s Face “when human suffering results, not from divine judgment, but from evil perpetrated by man.”[xxx] Berkovits argues that God’s hiding of His face is a divine attribute, which is an essential feature of His permanent involvement in the world. God’s permanent involvement with humanity is realized through His silence. God is present during man’s suffering. The prophet Isaiah illustrates this seeming paradox when he says to God, “‘Indeed, You are a God Who conceals Himself, the God of Israel the Savior!’”[xxxi] For Isaiah, “God’s self-hiding is an attribute of divine nature. Such is God. He is a God, who hides himself. . . In some mysterious way, the God who hides himself is the God who saves.”[xxxii] Isaiah is thus able to also proclaim “And I will wait for the Lord that hideth His face from the house of Jacob and I will hope for him.”[xxxiii]
Why must God silence Himself? How does God save by remaining silent to innocent suffering? Part of hester panim is that God must restrain and silence Himself so that humanity has freedom; human freedom only results from divine self-restraint. Thus, God is still present but must hide His face. Consequently, we face a great paradox. If God were to curtail freedom and prevent man from doing evil, then by virtue of preventing evil, He would also prevent man from doing good. As Berkovits writes:
This is the ultimate tragedy of existence: God’s very mercy and forebearance, his very love for man, necessitates the abandonment of some to a fate that they may well experience as divine indifference to justice and human suffering. It is the tragic paradox of faith that God’s direct concern for the wrongdoer should be directly responsible for so much pain and sorrow on earth.[xxxiv]
Berkovits is doing more than simply describing a free will defense of evil, which is subject to certain problems.[xxxv] Rather, within God’s hiding of His face in history, Berkovits establishes humankind’s responsibility for history. Berkovits reiterates this when stating, “If man is to be, God himself must respect his freedom of decision. If man is to act on his responsibility without being continually overawed by divine supremacy, God must absent himself from history. But man left to his freedom is capable of greatness in both—in creative goodness and destructive evil.”[xxxvi] To question the creation of evil is to question the creation of humanity. Berkovits is thus consistent with his earlier theological emphasis on human responsibility in God, Man and History. The purpose of creation is for humanity to take responsibility for history. God wants humankind to do good, but only if freely chosen. Humanity can only be responsible for history if it has the ability to make free choices. Removing radical evil from the world would thus make humanity’s purpose on this earth meaningless: “God himself could eliminate moral evil and the suffering caused by it only by eliminating man, by recalling the world of man into nothingness.”[xxxvii]
Despite hester panim, Berkovits does not dismiss the Jewish theological tenet that God will not allow the Jewish people to be destroyed. Although this seems like a contradiction, it is actually part of his understanding of hester panim. According to Berkovits, the Jewish people are a crucial element in the call for human responsibility; only through the example of a living Jewish people can the ethical and moral standards of the Bible be transmitted to humanity. Berkovits refers to this as “faith history,” and it is the task of the Jewish people to cultivate faith history and not “power history.”[xxxviii] Jewish history testifies to the “supra-natural dimension jutting into history.”[xxxix] The mysterious persistence of the Jewish people to survive in power history, despite their powerlessness, testifies to God’s presence in the world. The Jewish people remain while many of its persecutors are no more. This, according to Berkovits, is the reason for Jewish perseverance and continuity, despite the horrific suffering throughout Jewish history. Because of this, the Jewish people can withstand God’s silence in history while still affirming belief in Him. God is thus both absent and present at once; “He is present without being indubitably manifest; he is absent without being hopelessly inaccessible.”[xl]
For Berkovits, there is no greater proof for God’s continual presence in the world than the establishment of the State of Israel. Though the destruction of the Holocaust was unparalleled, there was a salvation. The emergence of Israel testifies to Hitler’s defeat. It was the Jew who prevailed and hunted and tried the Nazi for his crimes against humanity in the Jewish State. Judaism has risen from the ashes of the Holocaust and seen a revival in Jewish learning and economic and political realities that were never possible in Europe. The State of Israel is proof for Berkovits that Jewish history did not end with the Holocaust; “statehood is the repudiation of powerlessness in exile,” and refutes those theologians who contend that God is dead.[xli] God was silent during the Holocaust, but in the end, he did not betray his chosen people; God reaffirmed His commitment to His people. For Berkovits, the emergence of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel in 1948 and its reunification in 1967 is truly an historical miracle. The State of Israel is “a smile on the face of God” after Auschwitz.[xlii]
In summation, Eliezer Berkovits’ Faith After the Holocaust explicates six aspects of a post-Holocaust theology that remains faithful to Judaism: (1) Those who did not experience the Holocaust are not in a position to judge the “authentic faith” and “authentic rebellion” of those who experienced the Holocaust. We today are only Job’s brother. (2) Humankind is responsible for history and thus the Holocaust represents a colossal failure of humanity and not God. (3) Judaism through the lens of the prophets and rabbinic literature has always believed in the possibility of radical evil. (4) The Holocaust should not be viewed in singularity. The Holocaust, undoubtedly horrific, is part of a broader Jewish history of suffering. (5) God must hide His face so that human agents can act and choose freely, taking responsibility for history, for both good and bad. (6) The persistent survival of the Jewish people throughout history testifies that God will not destroy the Jewish people and that God is in fact present even when His face is hidden. For Berkovits, this has never been more true than with the establishment of the State of Israel after the Holocaust, which affirms that God did not betray the Jewish people.
As a man of faith, Eliezer Berkovits “questions God because of his faith.” [xliii] While wrestling with the problems of evil, Berkovits provides a modern framework to approach the Holocaust with the metaphor of Job’s brother; his work is thus titled Faith After the Holocaust, “after” being of great importance. By endorsing the biblical and rabbinic concept of hester panim, Berkovits takes a courageous theological position pitting him between liberal theologians and the facile theodicy of mipenei hataeinu. Berkovits affirms traditional Jewish faith while respecting the power of history and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Jonathan Zisook, YC ’13, is a master’s student in Modern Jewish History at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies.
[i] Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust (New York: Ktav, 1973). Berkovits also authored an additional full length book and numerous articles pertaining to the Holocaust. See, for example, Eliezer Berkovits, “Death of God,” Judaism 20.1 (1971): 73-86; “Crisis and Faith,” Tradition 14.4 (1974): 5-19; and With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Death Camps (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1979).
[ii] Perhaps because of his sensitivity to the subject material, Berkovits does not cite by name those who he attacks. This is, however, quite uncharacteristic for Berkovits because he generally attacks practically every Jewish philosopher that he believes misrepresented an authentic philosophy of Judaism. Berkovits has full length critiques of the philosophies of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mordecai Kaplan in his Major Themes in Modern Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Ktav, 1974). For a defense of Heschel against the criticism of Berkovits and a response more generally to Berkovits’ treatment of these philosophers, see Shalom Carmy, “Modern Jewish Philosophy: Fossil or Ferment?” Tradition 15.3 (1975): 140-152.
[iii] Emil L. Fackenheim, “Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment,” in A Holocaust Reader: Responses to the Nazi Extermination, ed. by Michael L. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 115. Fackenheim’s earlier work criticized liberalism and counseled a return to a traditional view of God. Like Berkovits, Fackenheim suggested that liberal Jewish theology was far too optimistic about humanity, and faith in God must be reasserted. However, in his later works, Fackenheim rejected supernatural theism on account of the Holocaust and supported a survivalist position of ethnocentricism, in which he abandoned his earlier and more traditional approach. This is already evident in his formulation of the 614th commandment in “The 614th Commandment,” Judaism 16 (1967): 269-273. For elaboration, see Ellen Z. Charry, “Jewish Holocaust Theology: An Assessment,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 18.1 (1981): 128-139.
[iv] Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. by Eva Fleischner (New York: Ktav, 1977), 8.
[v] Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 126.
[vi] Arthur A. Cohen, “Thinking the Tremendum: Some Theological Implications of the Death Camps,” in A Holocaust Reader, 195.
[vii] Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz is considered the Jewish compatriot to radical Christian theology, which developed Nietzsche’s notion of “the death of God.” Berkovits refers explicitly to radical Christian theologians Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton and their Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), but does not refer explicitly to Rubenstein.
[viii] Deuteronomy 4:31; 31:6. This review of post-Holocaust theology is by no means comprehensive, but it suffices in contextualizing the backdrop to which Berkovits was writing. An excellent overview of post-Holocaust theology in the context of Berkovits’ position which I have utilized is David Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil and the Holocaust,” Lecture, University of Chicago and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago, Illinois, March 6, 2011. http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/eliezer-berkovits-conference/recordings/
[ix] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 4-5.
[x] Ibid., 69. Berkovits is aware of the classical rabbinic tradition of mipnei hataeinu as a framework for confronting the existence of Jewish suffering. However, as a sensitive man who lived in Germany until 1939 and whose family and friends perished in the Holocaust, he refuses to believe that their death, and the death of six million others, was divine retribution for Jewish sinfulness. In this regard, Berkovits agrees with the aforementioned liberal theologians. See Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xi] Ibid., 4-5.
[xii] Ibid., 69, my emphasis.
[xiii] On November 11, 1938, as Berkovits was leaving his home to go to Shaharit at his synagogue in Berlin, he received a phone call warning him not to approach because the Nazis were desecrating thousands of synagogues in Germany. This was the morning after Kristallnacht. Fortunately, soon after, Berkovits was able to escape to Leeds, England, where he served as the rabbi of Leeds during the war period. See Berkovits, “Crisis and Faith,” 5; Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xiv] Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust, 69.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Genesis 2:15 (Artscroll translation).
[xvii] Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man and History: A Jewish Interpretation (New York: Jonathan David, 1965), 14. See also Saadya Gaon, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, trans and ed. by Alexander Altmann (Oxford: East and West Library, 1946), 115-121;Judah Halevi, Kuzari 2:48.
[xviii] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 7.
[xix] Ibid., 36; David Hazony, “Berkovits, Eliezer,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd edition (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), Vol. 3, 438-439.
[xx] Similarly, Maimonides shifts the onus from God onto humanity in Guide of the Perplexed, 3:12. There, Maimonides describes three types of evil in the world. 1) Natural evil. 2) Social evil. 3) Evil that people cause to themselves. For Maimonides, and unlike Berkovits, this does not necessarily entail a full formulation of the free will defense. However, Maimonides does seem to take such an approach in Hilkhot Teshuvah 5:1-4, and Shemonah Perakim, chapter 8. But, it must be noted that freedom in Hilkhot Teshuvah may only be important for Maimonides as a justification for sekhar ve-onesh and not evil.
[xxi] In the first chapters of Faith After the Holocaust, Berkovits describes the failure of Western civilization and Christian Europe for standing by while millions of Jews were murdered. He implicates the west, and specifically the Catholic Church, as “active accomplices in the greatest crime in history” (13). I have not included a full exposition of Berkovits’ critical portrayal of Christian culpability for the Holocaust in this article because it would take us far afield.
[xxii] Genesis 8:21 (Artscroll translation).
[xxiii] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 89.
[xxiv] Ibid., and 76-85. Isaiah 45:6-7, my emphasis and Berkovits’ translation. Berkovits also cites rabbinic examples of kiddush Hashem, such as R. Akiva who died a martyr’s death reciting the shema as the Romans scraped his flesh off with an iron comb. R. Akiva, among other Tannaim, understood the possibility of radical evil and fell victim of such evil. See Berakhot 61b; Sanhedrin 13b-14a.
[xxv] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 89. See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:10.
[xxvi] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 90.
[xxvii] Ibid., 98.
[xxviii] Ibid., 90.
[xxix] For example, Deuteronomy 31:17-18.
[xxx] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 95. Berkovits cites extensively from the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Job, and Psalms, and tractates Hagigah and Gittin to illustrate this second meaning of hester panim.
[xxxi] Ibid., 101, Isaiah 45:15 (Artscroll translation).
[xxxii] Ibid., 101.
[xxxiii] Ibid., Isaiah 8:17 (Berkovits’ translation).
[xxxiv] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 106.
[xxxv] The free will defense may only satisfactorily address the logical problem of evil and not the evidentiary problem of evil, which is a problem of scale. For example, if there is a choice between having radical evil and not having free will, arguably it would be better to not have free will. Free will may outweigh some amount of evil but not the suffering of six million Jews! This argument was presented to me by Rabbi Shalom Carmy. See also Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xxxvi] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 107.
[xxxvii] Ibid., 105-106. According to Hazony, Berkovits’ ultimate theological goal is not freedom, but rather, human responsibility. Therefore, Berkovits’ concept of hester panim is not synonymous with the classical free will defense. See Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xxxviii] According to Berkovits, “power history” represents the terror and destruction brought about through political conquest and especially European nationalism, culminating in World War II and the extermination of European Jewry. It is the task of the Jewish people, however, to cultivate “faith history,” in which they are a called upon to lead by example in taking responsibility for human actions by exemplifying the ethical and moral standards of Judaism. See Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 128-143, 164; Berkovits, God, Man and History, 137.
[xxxix] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 111.
[xl] Ibid.
[xli] Hazony, “Eliezer Berkovits on Evil.”
[xlii] Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, 156.
[xliii] Ibid., 68.