What is interesting here is that Levi rejects theodicy and prayer but not the concept of God. He understands the absurdity and cruelty of praying in Auschwitz, and God might too. In other words, it is not the idea of prayer or the idea of God that Levi rejects, but rather the type of prayer to God, one which participates in the warped world of theodicy. As we have seen, such is cruelty.
Levi calls on us to reject the paradigm of answers and justifications and, as Jennifer Geddes writes, to embrace the first word of the original title of his book: if.8 As she writes, in Levi’s consistent use of the conditional, he
Is calling us onto a space of ambiguity and uncertainty in which we are called to question […] the nature of evil, the particular nature of the evil of the Holocaust, a space in which we are called to responsibility—the responsibility to think, question, consider, but also a space in which we must forego the pleasures and comforts of certainty and closure.9
When we reconsider the reality of evil, we also are called to think critically about our own responsibility. As a human being who has seen others just like me cause so much suffering, what is the harm that I can do? In what way can I talk to God if God is the creator of evil, and
I am someone who bears the potential to do evil?
Yes, if I were Levi, I would spit at Kuhn. Though if I were Kuhn, I might have prayed too. Prayer is the final resource, one of the only resources possible in extremis, when medicine and human mercy no longer apply. In the Jewish tradition, there are many guides to and restrictions on how and when to pray. This fact means that in any situation, we can never be at a loss for words. The ritual steadies us and assures us that not only is there a time for everything but that we are cared for: someone has already prepared the words and actions we need in order to journey through life.10 That said, even in the most structured of prayers, the Amidah (one of the central prayers of the Jewish tradition, traditionally recited three times a day) there is built-in space for individual prayer that is not pre-written.11 The tradition acknowledges that there are things in each person’s life that can only be expressed in the voice of the person in need.
Like love and grief, there is no end to prayer. We can pray in formulas or spontaneously. One can even pray at the moment of death when one cannot do anything else. As much as the thought repels me, that is why I know that
I could have been the person praying in Auschwitz. What else was there to do but pray? There was no reasonable chance of escape. Death was expected at every moment. As Levi wrote, if they were not actively dying, they were on the list of those still to die. Kuhn was taking the only action available to him.
But what prayer would I pray? When Levinas wrote against theodicy, he asked in essence, “what’s the point?” Is it to convince people that the mechanism still works, that the wicked are punished and the righteous rewarded, despite all the evidence to the contrary?12 To justify suffering, i.e., to justify the gas chambers? To save God’s reputation?
The contortions of an apologetic theodicy only serve to turn our faces away from suffering. Acknowledging that God is not innocent allows us to live in a world replete with very real, overwhelming suffering. God created the world and everything—everything—in it. Once
I spoke with a patient in the hospital where
I was interning who told me: “God does give us more than we can handle.” I took this to be
a refutation-by-experience of the verse from
1 Corinthians (the patient was a practicing Protestant).13 He was surprised when I agreed with him, but the fact that I agreed with him led him to speak more openly about his