Weiss Halivni‘s Post Holocaust Theology Versus Other Contemporary Voices

Rabbi John S. Schechter

No singular or collective expression of understanding, explanation or investigation of the

role of God in the Shoah is authoritative among modern Jews. Without a central
ecclesiastical body or a unified Jewish politic to make binding declarations, no sole
liturgy or account of the Shoah is accepted for public recitation on the days of
remembrance for the Holocaust. With so few witnesses or survivors who have offered in
public their understanding and insights concerning the role of God, a reader or critic of
the direct accounts and recollections of the first hand observers and survivors must
proceed with caution.

In a larger sense, there scarcely exists a religious canon of the response to the record of
Jewish pain and persecution, outside of the accounts of the martyrs in the Yom Kippur
service and the annual recitation of Lamentations. The challenge to speak of God‘s role
in the Holocaust sounds quite different to a post-war generation who live without a sense
of Galut (exile) more than a half century after the collapse of European Jewry. As David
Roskies so adeptly observed in 1987:

― Perhaps this anthology will mark the closing of the European canon. Perhaps it will be
seen as a last ditch effort to inspire a cohesiveness that can never be (and probably never
was) achieved, now that most Jews no longer speak their own languages, are no longer
organized into organic communities and no longer share the same collective myths.‖
(Roskies, The Literature of Destruction, Jewish Responses To Catastrophe, Jewish
Publication Society, 1987. p. 11)

Those obstacles are also confronted by the Masorati movement‘s recent publication of the
six chapters Megillat Shoah, written by Avigdor Shinan with the guidance of academic
consultants. In that attempt to recount the phases of the Holocaust and the experiences of
the victims and survivors, the question of God‘s role is touched upon, but not fully
explicated (as if that could be done). In its conclusion the projected role of the reader as
new witness is expressed as:

"Do not mourn too much, but do not sink into the forgetfulness of apathy. Do not allow
days of darkness to return; weep, but wipe the tears away. Do not absolve and do not
exonerate, do not attempt to understand. Learn to live without an answer. Through our
blood, live!" (Megillat HaShoah: The Shoah Scroll, The Rabbinical Assembly, New
York. 2003)

But, on the simplest level, American Jews need some answers because to engage the key
questions of the Holocaust is to engage the painful questions and doubts that accompany
all knowledge of the inaction of others to prevent or alleviate suffering; the awareness
that innocents bear the burden of so many wars; and that the race between disease and
allocation of resources is ongoing and universal. Merely to possess knowledge of the
facts will not create motivation to act or to express empathy, as Raul Hilberg has

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demonstrated in his Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (Harper Perennial, New York,
1992.) On a local level, if we are going to write or select compelling readings for days of
remembrance of the Holocaust, and if we pray to God on those days, or in our daily lives,
then we must reckon and come to terms with the complicated wish to know if and how
God was involved in the Shoah. And, as a secondary consideration, we should be able to
distinguish if our answers differ from those of the Jews who lived closely after the earlier
episodes of communal murders and pogroms that scar our history.

Thus, David Weiss Halivni‘s new effort, Breaking The Tablets-Jewish Theology After
the Shoah(Rowman and Littlefield, Maryland, 2007, with supplementary essays and
annotation by Peter Ochs) is a sharpened re-visit to an old arena in which we question the
roles of God and man. In our pain over the failure of God (or, perchance, the choice by
God) not to intervene in a tragedy of murder and hatred, the coolness of Weiss Halivni‘s
prose is remarkable. Only once in this slim volume, does he give way to outright regret to
his own confusion in utilizing a language of theology during those years, and he voices
no direct criticism of the attempts by others to find meaning and reconciliation with God
through investigation of the flawed but revered texts of the Talmud and the Midrash.

In point of fact, that is Weiss Halivni‘s strongest suit: If one can analyze the responses to
the Shoah as a series of maculate, and thus error-filled and distorted readings on the
nature of the world, then one can, like Weiss Halivni himself, apply the forceful use of
intellect to restore, by interpretation and definition, the missing or mis-communicated
pieces of the ancient text, so that the world might revert to prior shape and complexity,
and be properly seen.

However, as familiar as that approach is from Weiss Halivni‘s earlier works, his addition
of an explanation that relies on a personal awareness of the nearness of God in some
moments and the estrangement of God from the people of Israel in others draws the
attempt dangerously close to the tantalizing but worrisome belief that one can discern
God’s hand in history. For a generation ardent for some ancient glory, the establishment
of the state of Israel and the re-vivification of Jewish scholarship in the post-war period
serves to bolster the wish fulfillment that God‘s nearness is manifest.

The problem with such a literary approach is the implicit claim that one can arrive, by
study of the text, with an accurate depiction of God‘s nearness. One central theme of
Breaking The Tablets is that to solve the apparent contradictions in the appearance of the
will of God in the Talmud and its associated literature, one has to trace by comparison,
thoughtful analysis and reason the contours and allusions of earlier references to God‘s
magnanimity, compassion, and self-limitation. And if one is dutiful, then the many texts,
stories, and qualms over the enigmatic role of prayer might just yield a handhold on the
steep and difficult rock wall of how to act and how to pray while so many qualms go un-
voiced and un-answered in our time.

Years ago, Emil Fackenheim accurately described this puzzle:

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―The dilemma is as follows. If we hold fast (as we must) to the children, the mothers, the
Muselmanner, to the whole murdered people and its innocence, then we must surely
despair of any Tikkun; but then we neglect or ignore the few and the select--those with
the opportunity to resist, the will and strength to resist, deriving the will and strength we
know not whence- whose tikkun…precedes and makes mandatory our own. And if, (as
also we must) we hold fast to just these select and their tikkun, then our tikkun, made
possible by theirs, neglects and ignores those who performed no heroic or saintly deeds
such as to merit holiness, and yet, murdered as they were in utter innocence, must be
considered holy.‖ [To Mend The World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought,
Indiana University Press, 1994 pp. 99-100]

That concern comes sharply into focus after Weiss Halivni and Och‘s carefully drawn
tapestry of the scientific discipline of scholarship. In the final essay, one suddenly
confronts the fullest result of Weiss Halivni‘s assertion that the effort to arrive at a
corrected and meaningful text is necessary because of the estrangement from God that
resulted early in the Israelite tradition such that they became less knowing of the real
Torah; less able to maintain a stable Talmudic tradition; and, less personally exacting as
they might have been to assure that prayers that were uttered in God‘s presence would be
spoken with the same fervor and precision by later Jews.

As Weiss Halivni writes: ― In short, horrendous Divine abandonment that took place
during the years of the Shoah marked the nadir of a long, gradual process that may have
already begun with the Golden Calf. To paraphrase a Talmudic saying: If the Tablets
were not broken, the Torah would not have been forgotten‖. If they had abandoned God
by worshipping the Golden Calf, God would not have abandoned us in the years to
follow. But he did abandon us, and His absence has affected all parts of Jewish spiritual
life, including the way that we interpret the Torah. God‘s presence among us has given us
license on occasion to deviate from the peshat, or the plain meaning of the text,
corresponding to the strict, intended meaning sought after in recent years by critical or
scientific scholars of the text. When God was among us, the text was subordinated to His
Will, which manifested itself at times in interpretations that deviated form the peshat or
plain sense. But now, we have only the text itself, and we are guided by its plain sense
alone. We who live in the post-Auschwitz era hope and have every reason to believe that
the pendulum has swung back and that God is getting closer to us. Yet, as far as the study
of halakhah is concerned, our task remains the same, to perfect the literal meaning. We
cannot override the text.‖ (Pp. 114-115)

The authority of the text, and its subsequent usages, is a separate issue from the
theological assertion that one can trace the decline of the relationship of God and the
Jews in a Cartesian fashion. Even if one asserts the holiness of the words and
arrangement of the text, there is still, as will be argued at the end of this letter, sufficient
means and room to arrive at fresh and compelling words of dialogue with and about God.
But, to ask the question of ―Why?‖ is to pull out from the core of our consciousness the
projection of what power God has.

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I do not presume to judge this attempt at explanation by Weiss Halivni by utilizing the
harsh scale of the writer and journalist, Alexander Donat (who upon surviving the Shoah
put forward the most stringent and rough test for any writer): ― I will try to penetrate the
question. How could they, the events, been allowed to happen? I want to know why they
happened. Where was God? What is the reason – if one exists- of our inexpressible
suffering? Many years ago, I began quest for an answer, a religious response to the
Shoah. The following is a report from my extended journey…I examined answers with a
text that I thought to be conclusive. How do they look from the top of a smokestack (of a
crematorium)? This test is extreme and harsh but infallible, incorruptible, and lucid.‖ (P.
276: Katz, Biderman, Greenberg, Wrestling With God: Jewish Theological Responses
During And After The Holocaust, Oxford University Press. 2007)

But Donat‘s demand that we not resort to pat answers or declarations bears upon the
tracing of a downward arc from the time of revelation at Sinai and the incident of the
Golden Calf by the Israelites which swiftly followed that moment in that any model or
construction of a paradigm must then be false, even if momentarily helpful.

Donat merely demands that we hesitate before constructing any paradigm even if it seems
momentarily helpful, because of the harm that will eventually result to our psyches and to
our willingness to challenge evil in our time. The attribution of sin to the victim, whether
done by early rabbis who decried the fall of observance from the time of the Golden Calf,
or the modern historians and journalists who sketched the apparent cooperation of Jews
in their own destruction, will not answer the question of God‘s role.

In earlier generations, the payytanim (liturgical poets) and the mystics sought to
articulate a theological response to the uprooting of the Jewish population and the
murders of significant Jewish communities. They were aware that ---taken together-- the
expulsion from Zion, the collapse of the Jewish centers of the Iberian Peninsula and the
end of security for the Jews of Egypt and North Africa signaled the precariousness of the
relationship with God. The pain of that knowledge led some to introspection seeking a
functional explanation for suffering that might contain within it the seeds of redemption.
The teachings of Isaac Luria (which I will summarize briefly below) enabled a
beleaguered Jewry, in Safed and then Constantinople, Salonika and eventually Europe, to
find meaning and inspiration in the small acts of daily life. Each step and ritual became a
means of unifying the broken, disparate elements of God, while enlightening the believer
and healing the cosmic wounds.

That connection is implicit in Weiss Halivni‘s underlying assumption that it is within our
reach to ascertain and depict a perigee and apogee for the nearness of God. That problem
was taken up by Isaac Luria, (1534-1572) whose attempt to trace the paradox of divine
transcendence and immanence resulted in a startling formulation that the Eyn Sof had
―Been turned upon itself‖ (see Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4000 Year Old
Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Alfred Knopf, New York. 1993 p. 267) such
that God had vacated a region within himself for the world to exist. By doing so God
created a place where He was not; a self-imposed exile which left behind a world where
human influence and behavior might displace the teachings and judgment of God, but

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where we could also find guidance, inspiration and transcendence by our search for the
meaning of God‘s remaining words. The powers of evil thus operate mechanistically for
they are the result of the divinely created chaos and waste necessitated by God‘s self-
exile—a dislocation which itself was necessary for human beings to encounter holiness
and choice.

Weiss Halivni alludes three times to that conception of God:

1. ―After the talmudic period there was a shift in the meaning of the verb tkn
(Hebrew). The prevalent sense was not ―to repair that which was already
damaged‖ as in our usage. This stands in contradistinction to the former
tannaitic usage, which was to prevent a future legal difficulty and the social
ills that would most likely ensue. As it was received by the Amoraim, the
expression tikkun olam thus carried an ambiguous set of meanings and could
not be used with any certainty. Perhaps for this reason, the expression fell out
of use until it was revived out of dormancy by Isaac Luria at a much later
date in a period when the world was perceived to be in need of cosmic repair.
My use of the expression tikkun hamikra is most similar to the Lurianic
notion of repairing what was broken in the beginning. In my reading,
Scripture needs restoration because its text has suffered maculation since its
inception.‖ Breaking The Tablets, Weiss Halivni. pp. 58 – 59

2 ―Lurianic kabbalah teaches us that, before the creation of humankind,

God contracted Himself, as it were, in order to leave space for the
creation of an autonomous creature – the human being….Lest the
Divine presence devour the tsimtsum altogether and vitiate free will;
the Holy one periodically regenerates the tsimtsum: restoring it to its
original source and thus enabling free will to function as before. This
occurs very rarely and has no parallel in history. However, when it
does occur, humanity would be brought to the summit of its moral
freedom, to be exercised for good or for evil – from the point at which
there is only a minimal intervention from Above, until the divine has
re-equalized the normal balance between humanity‘s bounded freedom
and the absolute freedom of God. At that point, God would have
restored history to what we understand, according to the Tanakh, to be
its normal place. Since God will continue to intervene in history, we
should expect that it would be necessary, in the course of time, for
tsimtsum to be restored and adjusted once again. Let us hope that the
free will that results from this restoration will be exercised for good
and not as it was exercised in our generation.‖ Weiss Halivni,
Breaking The Tablets, (Emphasis added.) p. 33.

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 3. ―To understand the full meaning of this prayer (referring to the Amidah of
Rosh Hashanah in which it is stated ―Our God and God of our ancestors, reign
over all the world in your full glory…‖) we must first reflect deeply on the
question that grounds all Holocaust theology: Do we attribute the Shoah to
sin? Lest there be any doubt about my own response to this question, I will
state my conclusions at the outset. It is written in the Torah, a second time in
the Prophets, a third time in the Prophets, and a fourth time in the words of
our sages, that the Shoah was not the consequence of sin.” Weiss Halivni,
Breaking The Tablets, p. 17

While that last, emphatic, quotation may surprise us, earlier Jewish generations,
particularly those who had personally experienced being uprooted and persecuted,
created a viable, though troubled, means of depicting, explaining and justifying God‘s
role in the reality of evil.

As Ismar Schorsch observed in a brilliant and early essay, ―The Holocaust and Jewish
Survival‖ (Midstream magazine, January, 1981. pp. 40 – 43):

―The catastrophic expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492 has often been pointed to as an
instructive model for post-Holocaust Jewry. The relative size of the communities, the
traumatic psychic effects, and the length of time required to formulate a viable
theological response all seem comparable. Conspicuously, however, students of the
Holocaust have failed to explore the utility of Lurianic Kabbalah for neutralizing the
theological waste left in the debris of Hitler‘s Europe…‖ (P.41)…the Kabbalists of Safed
reintroduced mythic discourse into Judaism by creating a set of powerful new symbols to
root the disordered reality of history in the very nature of God. The trauma of exile was
built into the every stage of the world‘s unfolding…From the very outset existence itself
is in disarray with sparks of light and fragments of vessels cluttering the cosmos…The
rootlessness of Jewish existence mirrored the basic flaw of the cosmos…the Lurianic
system is marked by a profound sense of the reality of evil, unmatched by other strata of
Jewish thought {for} the completeness of divine perfection must also entail the presence
of evil, which in turn, gives rise to the need for purification…{when viewed this way}
the figure of God …is surprisingly passive. He is either unwilling or unable to prevent the
vessels from being shattered. {But} The exilic existence of the Jew is not a punishment
but a mission to raise the divine light helplessly trapped in the world of darkness. His
{God‘s} instrument is the fulfillment of the Torah, a divine handbook for the restoration
of harmony. The reward for observance is not personal but cosmic. Progress is
cumulative…‖ (Pp 41-42)

Should we acknowledge God‘s distance from the independent acts of mankind to be

merely a construct, similar to an id or an ego, that construct is, nonetheless, both a

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powerful artifact of the reasoning process and a lens for viewing our world. When Weiss
Halivni so describes the eclipse of God as a result of human action (failure to pay close
attention to revelation and to the actions required in reciprocity for the covenant) and the
response of God as a distancing of the divine presence, he brings the reader close to the
common usage of the term ―Hester Panim‖—which, the modern writer, Gershon
Greenberg, hastens to point out is a subjective interpretation. As Greenberg writes in the
recent Wrestling With God, (Oxford Press, New York. 2007)

―… The idea that God‘s face was hidden (Hester Panim) was a subjective perception
only, not an objective reality, God removed himself only after, and to extent that, man
removed himself from God. The punishment of Hester Panim above comes as a means
for one as well as for punishment for our own Hester Panim below.‖ (P. 17)

But should this mere usage of language concern a reader so deeply? Is it of such deep
concern whether the experience of distance from God originates with man; or with God?
I am afraid so, because much of what we stake our actions upon, in a religious sense,
rests upon our idea of God‘s involvement, monitoring and, perhaps, response to our acts.
To the extent that we can, and do, act independently of the divine spirit, we become like
the Creator—bearing responsibility for our creations, and recognizing the limits of our
power. This dual burden is brought to bear on the very question of the knowing God‘s
place in history in a fine and fierce essay by Eliezer Berkovits in his Faith After The
Holocaust (Ktav Publishing, New York. 1973) where he argues contrary to the
discerning position:

―Man can only exist because God renounces the use of his power on him. This, of course,
means that God cannot be present in history through manifest material power. Such
presence would destroy history. History is the arena for human responsibility and its
products. When God intervenes in affairs of men by physical might, as for instance, in the
story of the Exodus, we speak of a miracle. But the miracle is outside of history; in it
history is at a standstill.‖ (p. 109)

By no means does this settle the matter of whether one can invoke a God who is waning
in influence because of distance, for it would lead to the speculation that to show self-
restraint by not conducting a miracle (at Auschwitz) would suggest that God had lost
sight of the purpose of miraculous redemptions. (Cf. Steven T. Katz, Wrestling With
God, Oxford Press, New York, p. 607)

Is it possible to speak of the limitations of God‘s power without suggesting that God has
lost sight (if it is possible to say) of His power? In tracing Abraham Joshua Heschel‘s
thought on this matter, Alexander Even-Chen (―God‘s Omnipotence and Presence‖,
Shofar, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2007) observes that Heschel, in his 1944 address ―The Meaning
Of This War‖ asked the hard questions openly but answered them through creative
metaphor to balance the responsibility of God and humans. Even-Chen‘s example begins
with the question by Heschel:

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―Why dost Thou not halt the trains loaded with Jews being led to slaughter? It is so hard
to rear a child, to nourish, and to educate. Why dost Thou make it so easy to kill?‖

Even-Chen suggests that Heschel‘s answer to that question is a nuanced stance: when
humans refuse to look upon ―Elohim‖ for judgment and so acknowledge His power of
judgment, then ―man‘s disturbance of the balance between ―might‖ (Gevurah) and
―love‖(Chesed) through his transgressions unleashes the Satanic power…the
responsibility for destruction is man‘s undoing.‖

That is not the whole of Heschel‘s reasoning. Even -Chen observes that if one reads
Heschel as demanding that humans see God as being a totality—either present in all
concerns or in none, ―God will return to us when we are willing to let Him in – into our
banks and factories, into our Congress and clubs, into our homes and theaters. For God is
everywhere or nowhere.‖ ( Even-Chen p. 52) While that may seem overwhelming but
still vague, Even-Chen continues by demonstrating that Heschel later refined the doctrine
of absence.

Addressing the Yiddish Scientific Institute in 1945, Heschel described the Jewry
murdered by the Nazis. But rather than beginning with politics, Heschel started with our
(general) relationship with God, starting with the particular example of the Hasidim
whom he loved so deeply:

―People who at midnight lamented the glory of God that is in exile…They (The Hasidim)
knew that the Jews were in exile, that the world was unredeemed.‖ Even-Chen then adds
the insight that ―Heschel no longer demands that God intervene to save his sons, as he did
in his youth. He now comprehends God‘s lack of ability to miraculously change the
world. Heschel does not explain the concept of divine exile, which plays a major role in
his later theological writings, and how it is realized. He does, however, make the
connection between the exile of God and the exile of the people of Israel. He explains
that according to Hasidic thought that the world had not yet reached redemption (Geula).
As Heschel wrote: ‗Inspired by the idea that not only is God necessary to man, but that
man is also necessary, that man‘s actions are vital to all worlds and affect the course of
transcendent events. It became a matter of popular conviction that what takes place
‗above‘ in the upper sphere, depends on man ‗below‘‖. (Even-Chen, p. 53 in Shofar,
quoting Heschel, The Earth is the Lord‘s. p. 71)

While, on a surface level, this line of inquiry might seem parallel to one element of the
Lurianic doctrine by which human actions might relieve God of some responsibility for
the events of that time, there is no temporal consideration for Heschel. The struggle for
the nearness of God is constant, unending and not subject to direct measurement.

But it is necessary to have, to hold and to state a belief in God, if one is to address the
depth of despair that comes with fuller awareness of the Shoah and its long and
troublesome consequences. Despite the beauty of Weiss Halivni‘s prose, greater
difficulties arise when we posit that the Shoah/Holocaust occurred in a time and
temperament when God was not fully present or fully empowered. The risk associated

8
with that proposition is that it allows for chaos and terror to reign without challenge and
without containment.

To rephrase the challenge: if one suggests that these dual horrors did mark that period of
1933-1945 but diminished in the post-war period, then the proposal hardly commends
itself to us as we face new personal and communal challenges. This problem, too, was
taken up by scholars of the Jewish communal response to the Holocaust in its time and
afterwards.

As related in the collection, Wrestling With God ( Katz, Biderman and Greenberg ,
Oxford Press, New York )Yehudah Bauer quotes and then denounces the position taken
by Moshe Unna, in an essay of 1978 entitled ―Who Can Heal You?‖ Bauer‘s position is
clear when it comes to the religious argument: ― I reject any answer, justification, reason,
cause or appeal to a ―Divine way,‖ that explains why the omnipotent God did not prevent
the murder of a million Jewish children not yet responsible for their own actions, even
according to the strictest halakhic (religious-legal) view. Every explanation, reason,
―Divine Way‖, rationalization, and so forth will only justify mass murder, or explain why
God is a full partner in the murder of children. Such morality, which serves as the basis
for a religious demand for human moral behavior, is the morality of Satan.‖

That being the case, Bauer does find humanistic reason for the calling forth of religious
fervor and even of prayer to God, provided that one sees the reason for invoking a God
for ―psychological and utilitarian reasons.‖ (p.295) Bauer offers a grudging but harsh
critique of the secular interpretation of history and nation building with an extended
question in the form of a quotation from Moshe Unna. Bauer quotes: ―There in Unna
questions those with schema saying: ‗It seems to me that the problem Donat presents, if
we try to identify its philosophical core, is as follows, Is there an advantage to a moral
system from which God is banished, and does such a system make it easier to accept the
reality of life after Auschwitz? In other words, does ―anarchy rules‖ help us to restore the
inner balance that was taken from us? Can it save us from despair, from nihilism?‘ (p.
294)

This charge cannot be responded to only by resorting to citation of scholarship and

studious reading, because the premise of our prayers as Jews is that we are subjects to,
and occasionally, partners with God, whose sovereignty gives us hope and a promise that
our cause (if not our words) endures beyond our allotted time.

Viewed from this perspective, Weiss Halivni‘s attraction to the Lurianic model, (despite
its flaws), is understandable, for the possibility of describing a human-and-divine model
might answer without blame who is responsible for each phase of inertia and paralysis. If
we speak of raising the fallen and hidden sparks through our devotion, we could consider
ourselves capable of restoring a measure of what has been lost in the upper realm. And
then, despite our recognition that the inconceivable did occur, by affirming scholarship
and studious prayer, we would diminish the chasm that exists between God and
ourselves. Our first recognition of the problem might become the bridge.

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But I cannot affirm that route so long as we are limited to words portrayed as the
utterances of God, His sages and His prophets. To pray with the traditional words intact,
without challenging their nuances and associations, to portray a false a point of intimacy
of Jews with God. We do not have such closeness that the mere hint of withdrawal or
absence is sufficient to chasten the hearts of the people. We dare not rely upon a new
literalism by which we speak with certainty of God‘s position and ours. Nor do we
employ a secure and stable language, in which we accurately and consistently can
describe our place relative to God. There is no sanctuary left standing in language after
reading the eyewitness accounts and the letters of religious leaders and theologians.

What remains, and must become our nourishment, is poetry.

Susan Gubar in Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Indiana
University Press, Bloomington. 2003) boldly states the stakes of this venture:

―I began this book with a violent chapter title (The Holocaust Is Dying), potentially
disturbing or even repellent because of course events do not die, people do, and because
of course nothing can keep the past from being buried deeper and deeper by the passage
of time. It was a risk taken to illustrate how metaphorical thinking inevitably informs
critical writing. Even though, as decades intervene with their own stupefying disasters in
tow, it may be impossible to keep the Shoah from declining into just one among
numerous horror shows at the cultural multiplex, the particular burden of second
generation artists and scholars consists in taking up the task. To do so, philosophers and
historians, theologians and literary critics of the Shoah inexorably rely on the figurative
devices poets more explicitly employ as they repeat, respond to, recast the earlier
utterances of those harmed by the catastrophe. Overtly literary, flagrantly rhetorical,
poetry makes manifest what may be subsumed, hidden, or effaced in testimonial or
historical forms of presenting the Holocaust.‖ ( pp.262-262) Emphasis added.

I doubt that any single author, theologian or philosopher will adequately supply us with
the words of experience, challenge and cause to enable us to understand God‘s role (or
absence of one) within the Shoah, and still allow us to function in a religious sense. The
broken and inadequate words of the past can only function when we—even in the midst
of personal or communal prayer—rearrange the words and their associations to provide
us with limited metaphors for God, and for our covenant with Him. In this fashion, we act
upon one aspect of what ―Yitz‖ Irving Greenberg called a voluntary covenant with God
who can no longer compel allegiance. (Perspectives: A CLAL Thesis. The Jewish Center
For Learning and Leadership. 1982. P. 38)

Should we be dutiful readers, then the private inquiry into and public sharing of the
surviving texts, stories, and interviews with survivors will enable us to face our qualms
over the enigmatic role of prayer. Piecing together affirmations and prayers made of
direct excerpts, and speaking these with the same seriousness that traditional prayer
demands, might just yield an honest handhold on the steep and difficult rock wall of how
to act and how to pray while so many qualms go un-voiced and un-answered in our time.

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No one has embraced that brokenness of language and of the singular communal compact
with God as well as did David Roskies in his Nightwords: A Midrash On The Holocaust,
written and first performed in 1970 at Havurat Shalom of Boston. Roskies‘ premise was
that love for God, and love for the memory of those murdered might together be utilized
to build a new and wary covenant using the broken words and experiences of the past
covenants. The act of searching the past for usable fragments, and then, creatively
betraying the original purpose of those words would cause the struggle, the battle, the
covenant of God and the Jews to go another round. Roskies described that particular
example as ―innovative practices -- the chanting of an English-language text to the Torah
trop, the inscription of concentration camp numbers, the dumping of our shoes in the
center of the room -- were all of a piece with the radical experimentation of those days.
The midrashic method of mixing and matching prophecy and profanity, elegy and anger,
the sacred and the sacrilegious, Job, Kafka, and Kazantzakis, bespoke our oracle of
Jewish renewal: to reclaim a classical Jewish idiom but to inflect that idiom with our
modern, equivocal, apocalyptic, sensibility.‖ (Undated essay on Internet, www.clal.org)

By wrenching once sacred language from its perch and then refashioning it into new
prayer and new discourse, the quest to give answer to the Holocaust is ruined. But in its
place arises an effort that starts with the recognition of the value of our personal inquiry
and personal morality. As Roskies observed in that essay: ― Rather than allow the
Holocaust to become the crucible of Jewish culture, rather than turn every day in the
calendar into a day of national mourning, it is possible--and preferable--to make Jewish
culture the crucible in which all events, no matter how catastrophic, are reforged.‖

To conclude, while there will be no perfect or generally accepted answers, we never live
outside of the domain of the Holocaust. Our eagerness to craft questions and answers
reflects our fury and our wish to be linked to the redemptive power of God. The new
work of Weiss Halivni prompts a fresh look at approaches to these issues, provided that
we bear in mind the admonition of the poet, Charlotte Delbo, from her work Auschwitz
and After:

Today people know

have known for several years
that this dot on the map
is Auschwitz
This much they know
as for the rest
they think they know.

(Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew, Susan Gubar, Indiana
University Press, 2003.)

*** ―This essay is dedicated to the memory of my student, Jonah Solkoff Eskin, zichrono
l‘vrachah.‖

Rabbi John S. Schechter

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Congregation B‘nai Israel
Basking Ridge, New Jersey
07920

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