cellio | God on Trial

There is a legend that, one night in Aushwitz, the prisoners held a court, putting God on trial for allowing the Holocaust to happen. As part of marking Yom HaShoah this past week, my congregation held a viewing of a PBS film, God on Trial, dramatizing this.

It's a powerful film, and at some point I plan to borrow the DVD so I can watch it again. (Viewing conditions weren't great.) It raises many of the usual issues of theodicy, or how God can permit evil in the world, about which I've written some before.

This isn't a review; it's some reactions, not necessarily well-organized.

What are the charges? One character says obviously murder and conspiracy. But in the end, the charge is breach of contract, citing the various passages in torah that promise well-being if we keep the mitzvot and ruin if we don't. Is the covenant with us as individuals or with us as a people? I would like it to be the former; I believe strongly that justice must be individual. (Ok, the torah talks about the sins of the father being visited upon the son too, but that's different from me being punished for some guy down the street who I've got nothing to do with. My father's hypothetical sins can hurt me; that's a little different from saying God will punish me for them.) So I'd like it to be individual, but I don't think that's the torah's view. The torah chronicles a period of nation-building and talks about communal rewards like rain. On the other hand, Yom Kippur is an indiviual day of judgement. On the third hand, that might be more rabbinic than from torah.

If reward and punishment are communal, does that mean that even if the individual victims didn't deserve it, the Jewish people (and others who were targetted, for that matter) as a whole did? Some believe that, but I do not, because I don't think the Shoah was divine punishment (or a divine act at all). Evil deeds are the product of people, not God. Some would hold God accountable; he could have intervened to save us from ourselves but didn't. I think God had to give up some portion of omnipotence in order to allow free will; you can't have both. God didn't want the Shoah; he wept with the world. But God didn't stop it either, and I don't think that makes God evil. The only way to avoid evil is to not permit us to do it, to reduce us from independent, thinking beings to characters in a play. God could have done that, of course, but didn't, and I don't think we get to say that God is at fault when our fellow human beings do evil to us.

So if God is hands-off in the world, what's the point of prayer? I had a new insight during the post-viewing discussion. God does not (today) intervene in the world, stopping natural disasters or keeping planes from crashing or preventing humans from doing evil deeds. But God is available to us in some ways; God doesn't help me with external matters but can very much help me with me. The prayers I pray most strongly are the ones where I ask God to help me be a better person. So yes, God is both hands-off at the macro level and available at the micro level, and that doesn't bother me one bit.

A stray thought: There is a point in the film when a youngish man is talking about how the Nazis murdered his mother and made him bury her. The prosecutor asks if she deserved that, to which he emphatically says no; she was a good person. Someone else then says that when God requires a korban (sacrifice) he requires the best -- the animal without blemish -- and so it is with this woman. This is, I think, the single most offensive idea I heard in this film. How dare someone try to justify a murder by saying, essentially, God wants that.

The film is well-done -- very literate, as one congregant said, but quite accessible to those who don't know the torah well. The main characters had depth to them. The story was compelling. There was a framing story of sorts that I didn't care for at the beginning, but they used it powerfully at the end, so it worked out.

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Not my religion and all, but I have to comment that, in the context of Judaism, it strikes me as very odd to say:

"But God didn't stop it either, and I don't think that makes God evil. The only way to avoid evil is to not permit us to do it, to reduce us from independent, thinking beings to characters in a play."

Did God intervening at the Red Sea reduce Moses, et al., from independent, thinking beings to characters in a play?

It sure seems that way, doesn't it? This strikes me every time I read those passages, starting with the first plague. Moreso than pretty much anywhere else in tanakh, it feels like the people are laregly tools in something bigger -- a fight between our God and the Egyptian gods. This might be part of why the midrash about Nachshon ben Aminadav arose; the story is that the sea did not part until Nachshon strode into the water up to his nostrils. So the people, or at least a person, had to display faith/trust before everyone was redeemed, giving us an important role to play.

Tradition says, by the way, that certain miracles were programmed into the world at the beginning, including the parting of the sea and the appearance of the ram at the binding of Yitzchak. Tradition and I don't always see things exactly the same way.

The concept of God you discuss here is very similar to the one presented in the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. That book actually helped me refine my own concept of what God will and won't do.

Half of my maternal grandfather's many siblings (he was the youngest of 13) died in the Holocaust. Obviously, I'm not religious, but knowing that does affect me and some of my attitudes - for instance, it's why I still identify as culturally Jewish even if I'm not observant, and make sure my kids know something of their background. FWIW, it does not bother me that you view the Holocaust as a co-religionist of those who were persecuted, even if you don't share their ethnicity.

But God is available to us in some ways; God doesn't help me with external matters but can very much help me with me. The prayers I pray most strongly are the ones where I ask God to help me be a better person. So yes, God is both hands-off at the macro level and available at the micro level, and that doesn't bother me one bit.

Oh, this is very interesting.

Judaism isn't just a religion, so even though you aren't religious it's good that you're teaching your kids about their heritage.

It is, by the way, with some trepidation that I write anything at all about the Holocaust. I'm a convert; my family wasn't targetted, and a voice in the back of my head persists in asking "how dare you?". I don't know if I'll ever be able to change that. For better or for worse, I'm trying to tackle broader issues, not just this instance.

(1) IMO trying to understand God / the Holocaust seems is a human issue and not just a Jewish one.

(2) Both of my parents were born in the US, 3 of my grandparents were born here and all 4 were living here before the Holocaust, and 5 of 8 in the generation before were born here and all had come here before the Holocaust. Any relatives of mine who were killed in the Holocaust are distant enough on the family tree that I don't know about them. So, the fact that I can trace my Jewish ancestry back more generations than you can doesn't mean my (known) family was any more targeted than yours. Nor does it mean that you would be in any less danger than I would be if someone decided to target Jews now.

A couple of you might know that, although my family is not Jewish, my mother's side is clearly Melungeon (a term for Appalachian people of mixed ancestry) and the Middle Eastern genes are fairly dominant on that side. They all "look Jewish" up to my generation.

Consequently, my mother's father, who was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 at the age of 34, ended up in one of the Third Reich's slave-labor camps for POW's after he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. We think it was located somewhere in what is now western Poland. It doesn't appear to have been Barga, but the story is similar, as with all the slave-labor camps. Starvation, beatings, cold, umpteen-hours days loading railroad cars, bare-board bunks, stealing food at great risk to help the group survive, brutal punishments, untreated illness, people dropping dead in their tracks. Guards who were inhuman; guards who risked everything to help.

He was one of the ones that survived; he weighed less than 100 pounds when the former prisoners were picked up three days after the camp was disbanded, just about exactly 64 years ago. The survivors were put into a hospital in Belgium for a couple of months and shipped back to the U.S. on an open-deck cargo vessel in the summer of 1945.

Granddad said he wasn't sane when he left Europe, but there was a piano lashed to the deck of the ship, under a covering, and he played it during every waking hour for the two weeks of the passage. When he got home he was sane enough to go on. He became an alcoholic shortly thereafter. The story is similar from that point on to many other post-Holocaust families' stories of going on, except for being ethnic Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, which frankly appears to have made little substantial difference to the consequences. I'm a product of, among many other things, that experience.

The way I figure it, the Holocaust was allowed to happen and I just have to deal with that. We all have to deal with it in our own ways, as many have said here and elsewhere.

This is a free-will system. I believe it to be unique among the multiverses. I find the separation between Creator and Created to be illusion, but a very well-constructed illusion. Creation presents a separation, which from the Whole is not real, but from within the Parts is real as real gets within the Parts. Creator "gets an idea" which means process of creation happens (It got the idea, bam! you got the whole thing), which means there is separation, which among many, myriad other possibles makes possible the existence of a free-will system, which means some Parts are involved with free will. Congratulations, you and however-many other billion fragments, volunteered to find out what happens in a free-will system.

IMO, free will is implemented via ignorance. Do I agree with that? It's the only way I can figure to do it, and it does make possible all manner of further creative activity that simply can't be "predicted ahead of time." The probabilities are out there but by setting aside the all-knowing aspect, within the limited boundaries of the system, the system comes up with stuff that could actually be NEW, not foreseeable. Say, suffering, or classical music, or cave paintings or fireworks or the Popol Vuh or whatever.... I really don't like the suffering part. I'm on record, for this lifetime, as still having issues with it and not being sure the rest is worth it. That matters less than a flyspeck in the overall scheme of things, but it means I'm human.

Ignorance is a means for the Whole to "fool itself" by stumbling around in a very limited, form-based system--a kind of hologram which is projected by means of dimensional levels (I see the Qaballa as probably one of the best attempted human expositions of how that system functions)--and in the process putting on what is "currently" the best show in the whole system of Creation. Where else do you just not know exactly how it's going to turn out?

So the Biblical idea that G-d was lonely makes sense to me. That plus G-d is creative kind of just means the rest of it happens.

--Marion/Marian/Miriam

Thank you for sharing that. I didn't know that about your grandfather. It sounds like that piano was, quite literally, a life-saver for him.

I think you're right that free will requires uncertainty; if you have perfect knowledge about the outcome of each of your possible courses of action, then how could you do anything but take the optimal path? I hadn't previously considered the problems that would cause for panentheism.

God on Trial

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