Holocaust Theology is the body of theological and philosophical debate about God's role in the universe in the light of the Holocaust of the late 1930s and 1940s. This is primarily found in Judaism. Jews were killed in a higher proportion than any other group; some experts limit the Holocaust's definition to the Jewish victims of the Nazis because the Jews themselves are targeted for the Final Solution. Others include an additional five million non-Jewish victims, bringing the total to about 11 million. A third of the total Jewish population worldwide was killed during the Holocaust. East European Jewish population in particular was hit hard, reduced by ninety percent. While disproportionate numbers of Jewish scholars are killed, more than eighty percent of the world's total, Holocaust perpetrators are not just targeting religious Jews. Most Jews who were killed in Eastern Europe and Western Europe could not see or accept even the level of Jewish basic education.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam traditionally teach that God is omniscient (omniscient), omnipotent (omnipotent), and omnibenevolent (all-good) in nature. However, this view is in stark contrast to injustice and suffering in the world. The monotheists seek to reconcile this view of God with the existence of evil and suffering. Thus, they face what is known as a crime problem.
In all the monotheistic religions, many answers (theories) have been proposed. Given the great depravity seen in the Holocaust, many people have also re-examined the classical view of this. The general question raised in Holocaust theology is "How can people still have faith after the Holocaust?"
Scientific literature, including various anthologies and commentaries, has developed that reflect the Holocaust theology as a religio-cultural phenomenon.
Video Holocaust theology
Respons Yahudi Ortodoks
Haredi dan Hardal
Satmar leader Joel Teitelbaum writes:
Because of our sinfulness, we have suffered greatly, suffering from the wormwood worm, worse than any Israelites have ever known since becoming a nation... In the past, whenever trouble overtook Jacob, the matter was contemplated and the reasons sought - has sin brought the matter about-so that we can atone for wrongs and return to God, may He be blessed.... But in our generation there is no need to seek far away for the sins responsible for our misfortune.... The heretics have made all kinds- sorts of attempts to violate this oath, to forcibly take and to seize sovereignty and freedom by itself, before the appointed time.... [They] have lured the majority of the Jews into a terrible heresy, such men who have never been seen since the world was created.... It is no wonder then that God has attacked in anger.... And there are also pious people who perish in rebellion sinners and destroyers, so great is [divine] wrath.
There is a Messianic Zionist, at the other end of the spectrum, which also sees the Holocaust as a collective punishment for the ongoing Jewish disobedience to the Land of Israel. Mordecai Atiyah is the main supporter of this idea. Zvi Yehuda Kook and his students, for their part, avoided this harsh position, but they also theologically linked the Holocaust with the Jews' recognition of Zion. Kook writes: "When it finally came and Israel failed to recognize it, there was a ruthless divine operation that eliminated [the Jews] from its exile.
Chaim Ozer Grodzinski, in 1939, stated that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was the fault of non-Orthodox Jews (Achiezer, volume III, Vilna 1939). Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler has a similar view.
Many Haredi rabbis today warn that the failure to follow the ultra-Orthodox interpretation of religious law will cause God to send another Holocaust. Elazar Shach, the former Orthodox leader of the Lithuanian yeshiva in Israel, made this claim on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, stating that there will be a new Holocaust for religious abandonment and "desecration" of Shabbat in Israel.
Both Meir Kahane and Avigdor Miller have written extensively to defend God during the Holocaust, while criticizing the abandonment of the Jewish Jewish community against traditional Jewish values.
Chabad
According to Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch, no explanation can be given by human reason which can provide satisfactory theism for Auschwitz, in particular there is no explanation along the lines of divine punishment. In his published discourses, for example, the following criticism of Auschwitz's rational theodism can be found.
In our own time, the destruction of the six million Jews that happened with such a great and terrible cruelty - a great destruction that never existed (and would never happen, may the Most Gracious save us!) Throughout generations - can not be regarded as the problem of penalties for offenses, because even Satan himself can not arrange for the generation of violation calculus that can justify - being banned by Heaven! - The punishment is so severe. There is no rational explanation and no explanation based on the wisdom of the Torah for Destruction, nothing but the knowledge that "thus it appears in my Thoughts [God]!" and "This is my decision." And even then, of course not in the sense of divine desires or the will of God deepest - Heaven forbid! - because, as it is said in the Torah, "When men suffer, what does Shekhinah say? 'My head is too heavy for me,' "[ Sanhedrin 46a [2]. It's just "for the little moments that made me leave you" [Is. 54: 7]). And of course there is no explanation for the penalty for sin. On the contrary, everyone who was killed in Desolation was called kedoshim [saints]... because they were murdered in the sanctification of the Name of God (being a Jew) [...]
The same approach, in which all forms of rational theodicy were rejected categorically, was adopted by Schneerson in his correspondence with Elie Wiesel (R. M. M. Schneerson, Iggyot Hakodesh, 8989, 23: 370-71).
At the same time, Schneerson also suggested on the occasion that the Holocaust could be compared to the operation. Thus the Israeli historian Judah Bauer writes a curse article on this comparison ("God as surgeon," Haaretz , June 1, 2007 [3]). In this article he quotes the following statements attributed to Rabbi Schneerson (in Mada Ve'emuna, Machon Lubavitch, 1980, Kfar Chabad). "It is evident that 'no evil descends from above,' and is buried in torment and suffering is the essence of the noble spiritual goodness.Not all men can see it, but it is so much there.So it is not impossible for the physical destruction of the Holocaust to be useful "The Rebbe is also quoted as saying:" Hitler is a messenger of God in the same sense that Nebuchadnezzar is called the 'servant of God' in the Book of Jeremiah (Chapter 25). "
As Bauer notes in his article, Chaika Grossman, a former member of the Knesset, published an article on Hamishmar on August 22, 1980 citing Schneerson and expressed his deep surprise at his analogue operation. On August 28, 1980, the Rebbe sent a reply to him in his personal stationery where he confirmed the analogue substance - though not the import it withdrew.
Whether analogic quotations, taken out of dubious contexts and authority, show "justification of God's ways to man" remains unclear, in any case, especially given Schneerson's official published works.
What the systematic scientific study of Schneerson's philosophy is that such questions are generally to be understood in their special epistemological character. Analog operations are intended to illustrate the limits of human knowledge about the problem of crime and Auschwitz, not to provide a positive knowledge of the problem. As Rebbe explains in his letter to Grossman, it is because we have no understanding of why the Holocaust should take place which we must believe, as a matter of belief or trust in God, that ultimately benefits the dead as well as Jews and humans in general. The Rebbe does not try to explain what the benefits are. But it was eschatological-messianic. Such a reason for "operation." The nature of benefits can only be revealed in the messianic dimension in which the human intellect has undergone a radical cognitive revolution, a shift in the total epistemic paradigm. Analogs only work if humans are in their current state of mind compared to unintentional people who have never heard of a sudden surgical look, for the first time, surgeons cut off seemingly "healthy" humans.
Somewhat in the spirit of Imanuel Kant's essay in 1791 about theodicy, the only "Holocaust theology" clearly articulated and supported by the Lubavitcher Rebbe was a practice rather than a theoretical, messianic. In the pragmatic-messianic frame of mind that /em> ("faith") shows itself as a transcendental condition of God's questioning and prosecution and angry rebellion against God.
... it is no coincidence that all authentic questioners [like Abraham and Moses] remain with their belief in God. For that it can not be otherwise. Why is that? If only the problem is meant for the truth, and that is the expression and the product of true feelings of justice and honesty, it is logical that such deep feelings can only come from the belief that true justice is justice derived from the super-human source, that is, from something higher than human intelligence and human feelings. [...] after the initial onslaught [at God by the sufferer], he must see that the whole process of raising a problem and wanting to understand with a higher intellect of the intellect is something that can not happen. In addition, he must - after a thorough crackling and sadness - finally comes to a conclusion: Nevertheless I remain confident [ani maamin ]. Otherwise: even more powerful!
Modern Orthodox Jewish Views
Most Modern Orthodox Jews rejected the idea that the Holocaust was God's fault. Modern Orthodox rabbis such as Joseph Soloveitchik, Norman Lamm, Randalf Stolzman, Abraham Besdin, Emanuel Rackman, Eliezer Berkovits, and others have written about this problem; many of their works have been collected in volumes published by the Rabbinical Council of the United States in volumes titled: Theological and Halachic Reflections on the Holocaust.
Maps Holocaust theology
The work of important Jewish theologians
Richard Rubenstein
Richard Rubenstein's original article on the subject, After Auschwitz , states that the only intellectually honest response to the Holocaust is to reject God, and to admit that all existence is ultimately meaningless. There is no divine plan or purpose, no God reveals His will to mankind, and God does not care about the world. Man must affirm and create his own value in life. This view has been rejected by Jews from all religious denominations, but his works were widely read in the Jewish community in the 1970s. Rubenstein has since begun to move away from this view; his works then affirm the form of deism in which one can believe that God may exist as a basis for reality and some also include the Kabbalistic notion of the nature of God.
No one can really say that God is dead. How can we know that? Nevertheless, I am compelled to say that we live in the "death of God". This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God. The death of God is a cultural fact... When I say we live at the death of God, I mean that the thread that unites God and man, heaven and earth, has broken...
Emil Fackenheim
Emil Fackenheim is known for his understanding that people should look carefully at the Holocaust, and find in it a new revelation from God. For Fackenheim, the Holocaust is "the event that creates the age". In contrast to Richard Rubenstein's view, Fackenheim argues that people must continue to affirm their belief in God and God's sustained role in the world. Fackenheim argues that the Holocaust reveals to us a new biblical command: we are forbidden to surrender Hitler, another posthumous victory. He said that refusing God because the Holocaust was like surrendering to Hitler.
Ignaz Maybaum
In the rare view that has not been adopted by a considerable element of the Jewish or Christian community, Ignaz Maybaum has proposed that the Holocaust is the final form of representative redemption. The Jews became the "suffering servants" of Isaiah. The Jews suffered for the sins of the world. In his view: "In Auschwitz the Jews suffered substitutionary redemption for human sin."
Eliezer Berkovits
Eliezer Berkovits argues that human free will depends on God's decision to remain hidden. If God declares himself in history and holds the tyrannical hand, the free will of man will be nonexistent. This is a loosely based view on the kabbalistic concept of nahama d'kissufa (bread of shame) - the idea that greater satisfaction is achieved when a person becomes worthy of a blessing than when given as a reward. Kabbalah teaches that this is one of the reasons God created man by free will and with obligations, and that in order to maintain that free will, God reduces the extent to which he manifests himself in the world (tzzztzum).
Harran Kushner, William Kaufman, and Milton Steinberg David Weiss Halivni
David Weiss Halivni, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, says that attempts to link Shoah and sins are morally embarrassing. He argues that it is unreasonable on Tanakh's strict reading. He claims that it reinforces the alarming tendency among ultra-Orthodox leaders to exploit the argument on behalf of their own authority. In "Prayer in Shoah" he responds to the idea that the Holocaust is a punishment from God:
What happens in Shoah above and beyond measure (l'miskpat): above and beyond suffering, above and beyond any punishment. No offense deserves such punishment... and it can not be attributed to sin. "
Irving Greenberg
Irving Greenberg is a modern Orthodox rabbi who has written extensively on how the Holocaust should influence Jewish theology. Greenberg has an Orthodox understanding of God; he does not believe that God forces people to follow Jewish law; on the contrary he believed that Jewish law was God's will for the Jews, and that Jews should follow the Jewish law as normative.
The termination of Greenberg with Orthodox theology came with his analysis of the implications of the Holocaust. He writes that the worst thing God can do to the Jews for failing to follow the law is the destruction of the Holocaust level, but this has already happened. Greenberg does not claim that God does use the Holocaust to punish the Jews; he just said that if God chose to do it, it was the worst thing that could happen. There is nothing worse that God can do. Therefore, since God can not punish us worse than what actually happened, and since God does not compel the Jews to follow the Jewish law, we can not claim that these laws can apply to us. Therefore, he argues that the covenant between God and the Jews is effectively broken and unworkable.
Greenberg notes that there were some terrible destructions of the Jewish community, each with the effect of alienating the Jews further from God. According to rabbinical literature, after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the mass execution of the Jews of Jerusalem, the Jews did not receive direct prophecy. After the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem and the mass execution of the Jews of Jerusalem, the Jews were no longer able to offer sacrifices in the Temple. How to reach God is over. After the Holocaust, Greenberg concluded that God did not respond to Jewish prayers anymore.
Thus, God unilaterally violated his covenant with the Jews. In this view, God no longer has the moral authority to command people to follow his will. Greenberg does not conclude that Jews and God must separate; on the contrary he argues that we must heal the covenant between the Jews and God, and that the Jews must accept the Jewish law voluntarily.
His views on this subject have made him the subject of much criticism in the Orthodox community.
Elie Wiesel
A Hungarian-born Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust victim, Elie Wiesel is the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on her experience as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Buna, and Buchenwald. Wiesel 1979 played The Trial of God is about the court where God is the defendant, and reportedly based on the events that Wiesel himself witnessed as a teenager at Auschwitz. During the trial, a number of arguments were made, both for and against God's faults. Wiesel's theological attitudes, illustrated through the possibilities of intuitive literature, are the theology of existentialist protest, which neither denies God, nor accepts theodicies. Regarding the theme of the protest in particular, Menachem Mendel Schneerson maintains correspondence with Wiesel, urging him to feel the faith as a transcendental prerequisite for authentic protest. In one of his books, Norman Lamm treats the Wiesel theology novel, The Town Beyond the Wall, to literary, theological, and Jewish commentaries. The protagonist of this novel symbolically proceeds through various theological views, to which the Midrashic Wiesel style literature can explore where theodicy fails. The end sees hope of renewing mystical reconciliation with God.
Post-Holocaust Theology and violence against children
David R. Blumenthal, in his book Facing the Abuse of God (1993), has taken data from the field of child abuse and has proposed "worship God through protest" as the legitimate answer of survivors of both Holocaust and child abuse.
Other authors addressing survivors of the Holocaust and child abuse were John K. Roth, whose essay "A Theodicy of Protest" was included in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy (1982).
The work of important Christian theologians
JÃÆ'¼rgen Moltmann
In the Crucified God JÃÆ'¼rgen Moltmann speaks of how in a theology after Auschwitz, the traditional idea of ​​God needs to be revised:
- Crushed and destroyed, survivors of my generation then return from camp and hospital to lecture hall. A theology that does not speak of God in the eyes of the one left and crucified will have nothing to say to us then.
The traditional idea of ​​an unshakable immovable mover has died in the camps and is no longer sustainable. Moltmann proposed as the crucified Lord who was a suffering and protesting God. That is, God can not be separated from suffering but willing to enter into human suffering with compassion.
- God at Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified Lord - that's the real hope that they both embrace and overcome the world.
This is in contrast to the movement of theism to justify God's actions and the atheist movement to accuse God. Moltmann's trinity theology of the Cross instead says that God is a protesting God who opposes the gods of this world of power and domination by entering into the suffering and human suffering on the cross and on Auschwitz's gallows. Moltmann's theology of the cross was then developed into a theology of liberation from suffering people under Stalinism in Eastern Europe and military dictatorship in South and South Korea.
Pope Benedict XVI
In a lecture given on the occasion of his visit to the Auschwitz massacre camp, Pope Benedict XVI advised reading of Holocaust events motivated by hatred against God Himself. The address begins by acknowledging the improbability of an adequate theological response:
- In places like this, words fail; in the end, there is only a frightening silence - the silence that is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, do you remain silent? How can you tolerate all this? In silence, then, we bow our heads in front of the endless line of those who suffer and are put to death here; but our silence becomes a request for forgiveness and reconciliation, the plea of ​​a living God never lets this happen again.
Nonetheless, he proposes that Nazi actions can be seen as being motivated by God's hatred and a desire to exalt human power, with the Holocaust functioning as a means to wipe out witnesses to God and His Law:
- The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to destroy all the Jews, to undo it from the list of people on earth. Thus the words of Psalm: "We are slain, reckoned as sheep for slaughter" fulfilled in a terrible way. Deep within, these cruel criminals, by annihilating these people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke of Sinai and set forth the principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally in effect. If these people, by their very existence, are witnesses of God speaking to mankind and bringing us to himself, then God must eventually die and the power must belong to man himself - to those people who think that by their power have made themselves rulers of the world. By destroying Israel, by Shoah, they ultimately want to destroy the root word of the Christian faith and replace it with faith for their own discovery: belief in the rule of man, the rule of power.
Most of the address coverage was positive, with praise from Italian and Polish rabbis. Simon Wiesenthal Center called the visit historic, and addresses and prayers "rejection of antisemitism and their rejection... which refers to the Holocaust as a myth".
Criticism
Some Jewish commentators object to what they feel as a desire to Christianize the Holocaust. There is considerable debate as to whether the subject has contributed to the improvement of the Judeo-Christian relationship. And certain commentators also criticize the tendency to make history and dogmatize certain political or secular events such as Shoah, which are not part of traditionally understood theology, with the effect of trying both to discover God's activity in History and to infuse it more broadly. political rhetoric.
See also
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Norman Finkelstein
- Maximilian Kolbe
- Dorothee SÃÆ'¶lle
- Edith Stein
Note
External links
- The Holocaust theology site, "The work of important Jewish theologians"
- Audio: Dr. Walter Ziffer, Holocaust survivor and professor of theology, discusses this article. Walter Ziffer (the last Holocaust victim in Asheville, North Carolina on April 11, 2004) discusses this article.
- The theological view of Lubavitcher Rebbe against the Holocaust, and other Jewish responses
- Theological Thought Center on Holocaust
- Prayer for Captivity in the United States Capitol Rotunda, National Civil Warnings of Holocaust Victim Remembrance Days
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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