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Jewish World Review June 5, 2006 / 9 Sivan, 5766 The Divine’s ‘silence’ — and the Pope's By Jeff Jacoby
It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to
death as many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them Jews. "In a place like this, words fail," Benedict
said. "In the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to G-d: Why, Lord, did you
remain silent?"
News reports emphasized the pope's question. Every story noted that the man who voiced it was, as he put it, "a son of the
German people." No one missed the intense historical significance of a German pope, on a pilgrimage to Poland, beseeching
G-d for answers at the slaughterhouse where just 60 years ago Germans broke every record for shedding Jewish blood.
And yet some commentators accused Benedict of skirting the issue of anti-Semitism. The national director of the
Anti-Defamation League said that the pope had "uttered not one word about anti-Semitism; not one explicit acknowledgment
of Jewish lives vanquished simply because they were Jews." The National Catholic Register likewise reported that he "did not
make any reference to modern anti-Semitism."
In truth, the pope not only acknowledged the reality of Jew-hatred, he explained the pathology that underlies it.
Anti-Semites are driven by hostility not just toward Jews, he said, but toward the message of G-d-based ethics they first
brought to the world.
"Deep down, those vicious criminals" — he was speaking of Hitler and his followers — "by wiping out this people, wanted to
kill the G-d who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that
are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the G-d who spoke to humanity and took us to
himself, then that G-d finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone — to those men, who thought that by force they
had made themselves masters of the world."
The Nazis' ultimate goal, Benedict argued, was to rip out Christian morality by its Jewish roots, replacing it with "a faith of
their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful." Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he
first destroyed Judeo-Christian values. In the Thousand-Year Reich, G-d and his moral code would be wiped out. Man,
unencumbered by conscience, would reign in his place. It is the oldest of temptations, and Auschwitz is what it leads to.
"Where was G-d in those days?" asked the pope. How could a just and loving Creator have allowed trainload after
trainload of human beings to be murdered at Auschwitz? But why ask such a question only in Auschwitz? Where, after all, was
G-d in the Gulag? Where was G-d when the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was G-d during the
Armenian holocaust? Where was G-d in Rwanda? Where is G-d in Darfur?
For that matter, where is G-d when even one innocent victim is being murdered or raped or abused?
The answer, though the pope didn't say so clearly, is that a world in which G-d always intervened to prevent cruelty and
violence would be a world without freedom — and life without freedom would be meaningless. G-d endows human beings with
the power to choose between good and evil. Some choose to help their neighbor; others choose to hurt him. There were those
in Nazi Europe who herded Jews into gas chambers. And there were those who risked their lives to hide Jews from the
Gestapo.
The G-d "who spoke on Sinai" was not addressing himself to angels or robots who could do no wrong even if they wanted
to. He was speaking to real people with real choices to make, and real consequences that flow from those choices. Auschwitz
wasn't G-d's fault. He didn't build the place. And only by changing those who did build it from free moral agents into puppets
could he have stopped them from committing their horrific crimes.
It was not G-d who failed during the Holocaust or in the Gulag, or on 9/11, or in Bosnia. It is not G-d who fails when
human beings do barbaric things to other human beings. Auschwitz is not what happens when the G-d who says "Thou shalt
not murder" and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" is silent. It is what happens when men and women refuse to listen.
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Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here. © 2006, Boston Globe |
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