Where Was God in the Holocaust (And on October 7)? [Part 3]

Here's God's answer to Job.

A stunning rainbow seen en route to Majdanek. God asked Job about views like these, “where were you when I established the world?”

Dear Healthy Jew,

Tomorrow night, Jews all over the world will gather together to mourn our distance from God and the Land of Israel, and the millennia of persecution our nation has suffered as a result - like the Holocaust and the tragedies of the past year.

Where was God in all these catastrophes? How could a compassionate and just God allow such evil?

We’ve been working through this already for 2 weeks, and we still don’t have God figured out.

Where Was God in the Holocaust (And on October 7)? [Part 1]

Where Was God in the Holocaust (And on October 7)? [Part 2]

And yet, as we learned last week, our not-knowing God now has a purpose, because it’s placing us on a clear path toward God (or away from God).

Yet we’ll still wonder: 

Let’s say I choose that there is a God and this is God’s perfect justice. But if I can’t understand God’s justice, how is it relevant to my life? God is real, but so what?

Notice how our question has matured.

Instead of defiantly challenging God – “How dare You do this?” – we’re humbly asking what God wants from us.

The Torah’s unequivocal first answer is to cry out to God for help, which is the essence of repentance and will bring salvation. I’ve written about this both here on The Healthy Jew and in chapter 14 of my book, Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness.

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By the way, as I’ll share with you more in a few weeks, the book is being released now from Menucha Publishers in a revised and expanded edition. It’s already available on Amazon, and will soon be in bookstores all over the world:

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Facing God’s unfathomable justice also changes our worldview.

Let’s learn God’s answer to Job.

Whenever I think of the Book of Job, the first thing I remember is God’s first words to him “from inside a storm”:

“Where were you when I established the world?” (Job 38:4)

God continued to describe, as Job’s final friend Elihu had already begun (ch. 35-37), the wonders of the natural world: 

• The vast universe with its stars and planets 

• Powerful weather systems with thunder and lightning

• The immense diversity and details of the animal world

Everything is God’s handiwork, created by God with wisdom and care so boundless that we can only watch from the outside with wonder and awe.

God’s actions in Creation are of a completely different type than our actions in the created world – not the same thing just larger. We can see and know their presence, but never understand their essence. 

Just as we can’t comprehend the natural world, taught God to Job, we can’t understand God’s justice with us. We can only know the general principle that everything that happens to us, for better and for worse, is God’s response to our choices with perfect and compassionate justice.

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How did Job respond to God’s speech?

Until now I only heard about You, but now my eyes saw You. Therefore I’m repulsed and regret that [I sat in pain] in dirt and soot [and cursed God] (Job 42:5). 

God taught Job to not-know God, and how that not-knowing is the closest a person can get to seeing God. Life and death in God’s world, Job learned, happens on God’s scale, not our own. Therefore, he understood, good and evil, pleasure and pain, love and justice, aren’t about our individual tiny corners of the material world.

The experience made Job into a new person, horrified by the actions of the person he used to be. Indeed, after this encounter, the book concludes with Job’s cure and the great blessings God gave him, far more than he had before his afflictions.

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Let’s take a closer look at what Job learned, as taught by the Rambam (Maimonides).

God exists outside of any physical body, unconstrained by space or time. Human beings were “created in the form of God,” so even after our bodies are rotting masses of maggots, our souls live and thrive in eternal union with their Creator. Our lives and deaths aren’t only about this limited, earthly existence. 

On God’s scale - and, therefore, for us too - life means drawing close to the endless Source of life, drawing from His existence like a plant rooted in the ground. Death means detaching from the Source, falling like a wilting flower.

Therefore, it’s possible to be physically dead but truly alive – and to be physically alive but truly dead.

In the words of the Talmud (Berachos 18a):

“The righteous are called alive after they die, and the evil are called dead even while alive.”

God’s love and justice function in this larger context of life, a context so vast that we can’t begin to comprehend it from within our tiny, mortal bodies. Anything we experience in earthly pleasure and pain is only the smallest piece of the puzzle.

For this reason, explains the Rambam, our actions are “measured [in justice] in the mind of the Knowing God, and [only] He knows how to evaluate merits against sins” (Hilchos Teshuva 3:2).

The Rambam continues (ibid 6:1) to explain that “The Holy Blessed one knows how to give retribution: some sins justice requires to be paid back in this world… others only in the next world, and still others in both.”

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So whenever we question God in the Holocaust and our recent tragedies, we can choose to instead watch the immensity of God’s justice, an immensity as impossible to comprehend as the universe’s creation. 

But there’s a crucial difference between God’s creation and justice.

We don’t directly see God’s direct hand in the natural world’s daily affairs. But whenever something good or bad happens to us, no matter how big or small, we’re directly experiencing God’s personal relationship with every human being. 

We sit in silence, awakened and awestruck by God’s wondrous ways.

Waking up to this deeper reality, we might consider what it really means to be alive, and what’s really important in life. Then we can ask ourselves: are we alive today? If not, what can we do to join the truly living?

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One final thought…

Although we’re utterly incapable of understanding God ourselves, we’ve received many traditions from God about specific causes and conditions that guarantee life (and death) – all, of course, on God’s scale.

For example, the Talmud teaches that anyone who dies to sanctify God’s name has made such a cosmic choice that they’re ensured eternal existence at the highest levels of life, even if they lived a life full of wrong decisions (Pesachim 50a, see Igeres Hashmad pp. 51).

It’s also apparent from the Rambam’s writings that this classification includes, at least to some degree, the victims of every failed attempt to destroy the Nation of Israel, the bearers of God’s name in this world (Igeres Taiman).

I think of this tradition whenever I’m disturbed about the Holocaust and the victims of the past year’s tragedies.

I’ve heard it said that the heinous selections in Nazi extermination camps weren’t between life and death, but rather slow death and fast death.

But when I stood on the train tracks of Birkenau, I couldn’t help but notice that the selections that took place here there were really between life and life.

At the gate of Birkenau. Almost a million Jews passed through here to the gas chambers.

We don’t know why this dreadful suffering was those people’s path to life, and please don’t believe anyone who says they do. But we can choose to believe that God was there, holding every one of His children’s hands on their way to a life larger than this world.