THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

mother was descended from a rabbinical family. He was a Jewish researcher ofreligion who, like many of his peers, was educated in a Zionist youth movement andwas prepared to emigrate to the Land of Israel.Like my father and many other German Jews, Jonas arrived here in the early1930s. He served several years in the British army and fought in Italy as a combatsoldier in the Jewish brigade. He joined the IDF at the advanced age of forty-fiveand served in the artillery corps. He then turned down a position at the HebrewUniversity, preferring a late academic career in North America. In the spirit of thosedays, he was targeted for academic boycott, and since then very few in Israel haveheard his name. This is how the new Israeli spirit lost one of the unique, importantcontributions of the man who would become one of the most influential intellectualsfor the European environmental movements. His book was published in Hebrew onlyrecently. One of his significant works is his contemplation on the meaning of the post-Shoah God:Only an absolutely incomprehensible God can be described asabsolutely benevolent, genera lly . . . Absolute benevolence,omnipotence and comprehensibility are so related that anycombination of two invalidates the third...If God is said to besomehow and somewhat comprehensible—and we must adhere to this—then his benevolence must coexist with evils, and this can be only ifhe is not omnipotent. Only thus can co-exist his comprehensibility andbenevolence, as well as the existence of evils in the world.With great emotional force, probably caused by his mother’s death in Auschwitz andhis years in the British army fighting the Nazis, he wrote one of the cornerstones ofpost-Shoah theology immediately after the Six-Day War. Jonas did not questionGod’s failure in the Shoah. He accepted it as fact and tried to understand the qualitiesof the God who allowed the Holocaust to take place under his watchful—or closed—eye.Jonas was among the first to read the new map of faith. He understood that it isthe duty of each Jewish believer to abandon his faith in the historical God and adoptnew paradigms. Ephraim Meir, in his book Memory Act, Society Man and GodAfter Auschwitz, explains Jonas.