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Rabbinic Insights: On Faith
San Diego Jewish Times,
April 21, 2006
By Rabbi Wayne Dosick
The
greatest impediment to faith, to belief in God, is the existence of evil.
We ask: How can
a good and loving God permit such evil and suffering in our world? How can a
just and fair God permit little babies to be burned in Holocaust ovens? And,
more personally, we ask: how can God permit my mother/father/child to die
especially when I prayed so hard? How can
God ignore my pleas and my prayers and take my child from me?
And,
defiantly, we say: If that is how God is, then I cannot and will not pray; I
cannot and will not believe in God.
These
are, of course, the questions of the ages. Libraries are filled with the
responses of the philosophers and the theologians. Here is but one rather
stunning, but, surely, thought-provoking response.
In
a personal postscript to his book, The Meaning of Death in Rabbinic Judaism,
Professor David Kraemer posits why the Holocaust the systematic
murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during in the years 1939-1945 has
had such a profound theological impact on contemporary Judaism and the Jewish
people.
Kraemer
suggests that at every other catastrophic moment in Jewish history, times when
the persecution of the people and the destruction of their institutions and land
was greatest, the Jews of the time were sustained by one or both of two
underlying beliefs.
First,
the Jews believed that their own sins their faithlessness; their separation
from God had led to the punishment of persecution and exile.
In 586 BCE, when the Babylonians plundered the land, destroyed the Holy
Temple, and sent the people into exile, the Jews believed that "the Lord
has afflicted her [Israel] for the multitude of her transgressions." (Lam.
1:5) Still, today, in the liturgy for the three Pilgrimage Festivals, when we
say,
"because of our sins we were exiled from the Land."
However,
Kraemer teaches, "The same theology of punishment and reward provides a
source of comfort and promise; if sin leads to exile, [then]
return to God's ways will lead to restoration. There is a redeemed life
following this one for these Jews, a life of children and grandchildren in the
rebuilt land of their forefathers."
In
short, the Jews of the time had faith in God; faith that brought them back to
God when they were disconnected; faith that God would grant them redemption and
salvation.
Later in Jewish history, at the time of the Greek and the Roman persecution,
leading to the destruction of the Holy Temple in 70 CE and the exile from their
land, the Jews not only had faith in communal salvation, but, now as
introduced in the Rabbinic Period they had faith in personal reward,
personal salvation, in a world to come.
As
Kraemer puts it,
death at the hands of the tyrants is insignificant next
to future life restored by God ... If death is understood as a conscious and
sentient state the next stage in a life-cycle that includes life, death and
renewed life then the ending of this
life cannot be seen as so catastrophic."
Again,
deep faith sustains the Jewish people.
Indeed,
Kraemer says, "One way or another, in case after case [in Jewish
Why was
religious equilibrium not restored after the Holocaust?
Kraemer
makes a powerful and to some, devastating argument.
the
most significant factor which made the Holocaust subjectively unique was the prior
loss of belief
in death-as-life and life after death. Whatever the particularized
responses following earlier catastrophes, one thing remained constant: the
belief that there is life beyond death, that this life is only one stage: for
the performance of the human-divine drama. But modernity engendered an extreme
skepticism in regard to such beliefs. They were too irrational, too primitive.
With no belief structure to make sense of mass death no scheme for
revitalizing the horrors of this life by reference to continuing life modern
Jews could not but respond with utter theological despair... Unless we see death
as the next stage in life, and understand death as a cleansing transition, we
are too distant from traditional Jewish beliefs to make any claim for them.
The
Holocaust did not precipitate a crisis of faith. A prior crisis of faith made
the Holocaust the theological watershed it has become.
Just
in case we, somehow, do not fully understand Professor David Kraemer's thesis,
he makes it abundantly clear in a series of statements:
[The
Holocaust] was the first major tragedy in Jewish history when neither a belief
in divinely supervised reward and punishment nor a belief in life after death
was held by most Jews who experienced or witnessed the tragedy.
"Most
modern Jews could make no sense of the Holocaust in theological terms. They
therefore found themselves frozen without faith-options."
"Without
the life-of-death, they [modern Jews] could not draw on the same sources of
comfort and meaning as their ancestors. They, and we, mostly stuck with death as
final death, remained without genuine ways of making sense of the catastrophe of
our generations."
Thus,
"They
rejected the living, personal God they had already rejected, finding
in the Holocaust, the confirmation of their earlier fears."
Modernity,
surely, has it blessings.
And,
just as surely, modernity has its curses.
Modernity has given us new wisdom, but, too often, it has stifled our spirits.
Modernity has expanded our minds, but, too often, it has battered
our hearts and crushed our souls.
In
our quest for the rational, in our veneration of the intellectual, many of us
have lost a most precious component of our beings: our faith; the faith that
powerfully translates into the surety of our knowing beyond knowing.
That is why the evil we see the world, and the suffering we personally
experience, so utterly devastates us. We have no faith to look beyond the
present moment; we have no notion of God's ultimate plan for us and for our
universe; we have no grasp of the Great Beyond.
In
our bewilderment and pain, we disconnect, we separate, from God and the Divine
Design. It is then, that we feel the greatest angst and existential loneliness,
for there is no greater emptiness than being without faith; there is no greater
loneliness than being without God.
We
are grateful for the knowledge and the learning and the wisdom that the age of
reason has opened to us. But, we are ever-evolving human beings, living with
ever-expanding consciousness, in an extraordinary moment in the history of our
ever-unfolding Universe. We cannot be limited by time, or space, or dimension.
We know that, if we are connected, we must deepen our bond.
We know that, if we have been away, we must return.
We
know, in the image of the ancient psalmist, that "we must keep God directly
before us" each and every moment.
Then,
when we open our eyes, we see from the beginning of time until its end. When we
open our ears, we hear the echoes of eternity resounding throughout the cosmos.
When we open our spirits, we feel the Oneness of every being. When we open our
hearts, we are enveloped in the presence
of God. When we open our souls, we were, we are, and ever will we be.
Death, be not proud.
Death,
have no dominion over us.
In death, we
are simply "not here, present elsewhere."
Death
is returning home.
And
where is home?
"The
immortal spirit lives with God. Death is just a matter of going from one room to
the other."
From
God.
To God.
The
circle is never-ending.
The
circle continues still.
In
death, as in life, we are in the holy firmament, protected and nurtured under
God's sheltering wings.
In
death, as in life, we are bathed in God's holy light, filled with God's
everlasting love.
In
full faith and trust, we say: "Magnified and sanctified be the Name of
God."
Rabbi Wayne Dosick, Ph.D., the spiritual guide of the Elijah
Minyan, an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego and the Director of
the 17: Spiritually Healing Children's Emotional Wounds. He is the
award-winning author of six critically acclaimed books, including Golden
Rules; Living Judaism; and Soul Judaism: Dancing with God into a New Era.