experience of suffering. I say this not to compliment myself but to illustrate that (to borrow an idea from Levinas) acknowledging the uselessness of suffering can do spiritual good. If you are someone who believes that everything is a part of God’s plan, and that God only gives you as much as you can handle, then you risk being plagued by the fear of failing God. But it is not we who have failed God; it is God who has failed us.
Of course, when someone professes their faith and talks about how much God has done for them, I believe them wholeheartedly—who am I to say otherwise? I have seen the light of God’s comfort shine from the faces of the extremely ill and dying, and I know it to be real. And yet even as
I believe that God is present for them, I have double vision. When I look out of one eye
I see blessings, abundance, and the reassurance that God is with me. I look out of the other eye, and I see bulldozers pushing my people’s emaciated bodies into mass graves at Bergen-Belsen.
I could take away God’s power. Instead of
a creator-God, God could be, as God has been represented in the Jewish tradition, a tearful God, weeping beside God’s children instead of intervening in history. If I diminished God’s power, I would take away God’s power to do evil and perhaps reduce the power of evil by saying that evil comes from people alone. But if I did that, I would also be diminishing God’s power in general. I do not want to do that, because I have witnessed and experienced the power of God’s other creation, evil’s twin—love. God created the world and everything in it, and that includes “love, the first value, which is that small amount of humanity by virtue of which alone the creation deserves to continue.”14 The best thing we can do is pray for others rather than ourselves. In this way, we express the strong aspect of the omnipotent God that goes hand-in-hand with the evil that God through God’s inaction, condones in the world. We can weep for others and ourselves, and God can weep with us. We must also take responsibility for the evil we do. And so must God.
When, during the FASPE visit to Auschwitz, we had an opportunity to pray at Birkenau,
I turned away in horror. To invoke holiness while standing on grass nourished by the ashes of my people seemed macabre at best.
I stand by my horror at prayer in Auschwitz, because I see what Levi saw when he looked at Kuhn. How can we pray? All throughout the fellowship, T.S. Eliot’s poem “Gerontion” ran through my head: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”15 And, how can we not pray? What else could we possibly do, now that we know everything, when fresh terror inspires fear but not surprise? The truth we know after the Holocaust is that the self and the other, the baptized and the chosen, are all of us capable of inflicting and undergoing horror beyond horror. We can only pray. But when we pray, we cannot make excuses for God. And we can never look a patient in the eye and say that everything happens for
a reason, that this too is for the good. The only reasonable statements that God can make to us are the only prayers we can offer: “I love you” and “I’m sorry.”
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Talia Goldberg was a 2024 FASPE Clergy & Religious Leaders Fellow. She received her MDiv. from Harvard Divinity School and is currently pursuing a PhD in theology at Cambridge University.
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14. Emmanuel Levinas, “Prayer Without Demand,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Blackwell Readers (Oxford, UK Cambridge, MA, USA: B. Blackwell, 1989). 231.