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Arthur Cohen wrote that in the Holocaust “martyrs are all saints, Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Karl Gerstein or six million Jews, but the slayers were all baptized”2 This seeming absurdity shifts the Holocaust from the realm of more typical violence, which can at least theoretically be justified by some sort of causal logic (you hurt me, so I hurt you), into the realm of nonsense. The Holocaust was an event during which the baptized, i.e., the saved by God, murdered those chosen by God3. Here is but one absurdity enacted in the camps though a crucial one. It vividly demonstrates the inadequacy of a monotheistic theodicy writ large.
Theodicy attempts to find theological answers to the questions posed by human suffering. Therefore, in some sense the ultimate project of theodicy is to justify suffering. We want God to be good, and we want God to be powerful. But suffering, especially the suffering of the blameless, requires us, voluntarily or not, to question God’s goodness and power. Since the Shoah, theologians (especially Jewish ones) have been forced to ask how one can even attempt to justify God’s goodness and power after the Holocaust.
I will closely read a passage from Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz that describes a victim of the Nazis praying in Auschwitz. In doing so, I will think about what prayer to God can look like after the Holocaust. I reject theodicy, attempts to explain suffering, but I also reject atheism as an equally unsatisfying answer. Suffering and God must both be taken seriously. Auschwitz was a meaningless event, a nonsense event. But what does that mean? And what does that teach us about suffering in general and our relationship to God when suffering? Knowing what we know, we must talk to patients and congregants who themselves are suffering deeply without explaining it away or rejecting prayer as a resource.
Midway through his book Survival in Auschwitz, Levi describes witnessing a man in his bunk thanking God that he had not been selected to go to the gas chambers the next day. The man, Kuhn, prays next to other men who have been selected. Levi asks a series of questions:
Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.4
These are theodicean questions. The first question, the one about whether Kuhn realizes that he is next, is especially interesting. Whether Kuhn will be next is not a matter of opinion. The overwhelming majority of Jews deported to Auschwitz were murdered. Levi says many times that he himself survived by luck alone. The question is therefore not about prayer when faced with the possibility of extreme suffering and brutal murder but rather prayer when faced with the certainty of suffering and brutal murder.
The second set of questions, those about Kuhn’s understanding, is a more subjective response. Here Levi proposes that “nothing at all in the power of man” can create any sort of redemption in the face of selection. He places prayer in the category of actions humans can take to respond to suffering. In doing so, he implicitly suggests that it is possible for prayer to have power and for God to respond to prayer. However, selection is too powerful, and mitigation, redemption, or reversal of the event is impossible. The event itself contains its own beginning and end: the basic reality of selection—not who was chosen to die—remains the problem. According to Levi, the fact that such a thing has happened forecloses the possibility of creating meaning, hence his anger at Kuhn’s incomprehension.
There is another reason for Levi’s anger at Kuhn: Kuhn is no more worthy or unworthy of salvation than any other man in the barracks. When Kuhn prayed in thanks for his salvation, it was a callous act: the twenty-year-old in the bunk next to him had been chosen for no reason at all. In the same way, Kuhn escaped for no reason at all. Life and death become completely meaningless categories because the cause for life and the cause for death are the same. All is arbitrary. Not only did life and death have the same senseless cause, but in Auschwitz Levi did not experience life and death as distinct. He describes the group of prisoners selected to take a chemistry test as “us who are no longer alive […] gone half-crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing.”5 They expected death, but they remained alive, expected life, but received death. For Levi and many others in his situation, these categories felt interchangeable. If death is arbitrary, then so too is salvation from death.
Jews live now in a world in which this selection has happened again and again. Now, there can be no justification, no saying that everything happens for a reason, that everything is a part of God’s plan, that ignominious death is simply a punishment for past sins. Try telling that to the children stepping down from the cattle cars and into the gas chambers.6 These classic excuses have been rendered moot and not just moot but offensive. So offensive, in fact, that Levi says that even God Godself would “spit” at Kuhn’s prayer. There is no inherent good in suffering, nothing redemptive, no meaningful content. One can make meaning after the fact (e.g., “I am stronger for it”), and that is good, but there is no excuse for arbitrary suffering before or as it happens. The philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Levinas described the Holocaust, in which he lost most of his family, as “pain in its undiluted malignity, suffering for nothing.”7
4. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. (New York: Collier Books, 1961). 130.
5. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 103.
6. Cf. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven J. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
7. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998)
Arthur Cohen wrote that in the Holocaust “martyrs are all saints, Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Karl Gerstein or six million Jews, but the slayers were all baptized”2 This seeming absurdity shifts the Holocaust from the realm of more typical violence, which can at least theoretically be justified by some sort of causal logic (you hurt me, so I hurt you), into the realm of nonsense. The Holocaust was an event during which the baptized, i.e., the saved by God, murdered those chosen by God3. Here is but one absurdity enacted in the camps though a crucial one. It vividly demonstrates the inadequacy of a monotheistic theodicy writ large.
Theodicy attempts to find theological answers to the questions posed by human suffering. Therefore, in some sense the ultimate project of theodicy is to justify suffering. We want God to be good, and we want God to be powerful. But suffering, especially the suffering of the blameless, requires us, voluntarily or not, to question God’s goodness and power. Since the Shoah, theologians (especially Jewish ones) have been forced to ask how one can even attempt to justify God’s goodness and power after the Holocaust.
I will closely read a passage from Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz that describes a victim of the Nazis praying in Auschwitz. In doing so, I will think about what prayer to God can look like after the Holocaust. I reject theodicy, attempts to explain suffering, but I also reject atheism as an equally unsatisfying answer. Suffering and God must both be taken seriously. Auschwitz was a meaningless event, a nonsense event. But what does that mean? And what does that teach us about suffering in general and our relationship to God when suffering? Knowing what we know, we must talk to patients and congregants who themselves are suffering deeply without explaining it away or rejecting prayer as a resource.
Midway through his book Survival in Auschwitz, Levi describes witnessing a man in his bunk thanking God that he had not been selected to go to the gas chambers the next day. The man, Kuhn, prays next to other men who have been selected. Levi asks a series of questions:
Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.4
These are theodicean questions. The first question, the one about whether Kuhn realizes that he is next, is especially interesting. Whether Kuhn will be next is not a matter of opinion. The overwhelming majority of Jews deported to Auschwitz were murdered. Levi says many times that he himself survived by luck alone. The question is therefore not about prayer when faced with the possibility of extreme suffering and brutal murder but rather prayer when faced with the certainty of suffering and brutal murder.
The second set of questions, those about Kuhn’s understanding, is a more subjective response. Here Levi proposes that “nothing at all in the power of man” can create any sort of redemption in the face of selection. He places prayer in the category of actions humans can take to respond to suffering. In doing so, he implicitly suggests that it is possible for prayer to have power and for God to respond to prayer. However, selection is too powerful, and mitigation, redemption, or reversal of the event is impossible. The event itself contains its own beginning and end: the basic reality of selection—not who was chosen to die—remains the problem. According to Levi, the fact that such a thing has happened forecloses the possibility of creating meaning, hence his anger at Kuhn’s incomprehension.
There is another reason for Levi’s anger at Kuhn: Kuhn is no more worthy or unworthy of salvation than any other man in the barracks. When Kuhn prayed in thanks for his salvation, it was a callous act: the twenty-year-old in the bunk next to him had been chosen for no reason at all. In the same way, Kuhn escaped for no reason at all. Life and death become completely meaningless categories because the cause for life and the cause for death are the same. All is arbitrary. Not only did life and death have the same senseless cause, but in Auschwitz Levi did not experience life and death as distinct. He describes the group of prisoners selected to take a chemistry test as “us who are no longer alive […] gone half-crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing.”5 They expected death, but they remained alive, expected life, but received death. For Levi and many others in his situation, these categories felt interchangeable. If death is arbitrary, then so too is salvation from death.
Jews live now in a world in which this selection has happened again and again. Now, there can be no justification, no saying that everything happens for a reason, that everything is a part of God’s plan, that ignominious death is simply a punishment for past sins. Try telling that to the children stepping down from the cattle cars and into the gas chambers.6 These classic excuses have been rendered moot and not just moot but offensive. So offensive, in fact, that Levi says that even God Godself would “spit” at Kuhn’s prayer. There is no inherent good in suffering, nothing redemptive, no meaningful content. One can make meaning after the fact (e.g., “I am stronger for it”), and that is good, but there is no excuse for arbitrary suffering before or as it happens. The philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Levinas described the Holocaust, in which he lost most of his family, as “pain in its undiluted malignity, suffering for nothing.”7