THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Divine intervention did not come to Auschwitz, only silence. Onlyhumans, righteous gentiles, made miracles. God did not intervene, notbecause he did not want to intervene, but because he could not . . .God’s relinquishing of his power is what enables humanity to exist inall its forms . . . The advantage of Jonas’ story is that the question“Where was God?” is no longer asked. The issue is displaced to therealms of human responsibility, where man can grow towards God. 5In light of Jonas’s wisdom, which conveys my own feelings so precisely, I cannot butconclude that God, who was so understood and present to my parents, probablywithdrew from the world of my peers. As a result, the constructs of faith mustundergo profound changes, and new definitions of human responsibility are called for.The old model of relations between believer and God is like the relation between awitness and the justice system: as people, we were summoned to testify or sit in ajury that decided that God existed and that we should worship him. Faith ruled fromthe time of the Exodus, proving and preserving history. The quote “The people sawGod and believed in God and in Moses his servant” 6 means that God acts in historyand his deeds and their consequences are seen and felt. Therefore it is evident thatthe eyewitness becomes a believer and a living testimony to God’s existence and hisgreatness.As children we asked, “Can God create a stone that he cannot lift?”—inadvertently questioning one of the fundamentals of faith. I know firsthand, throughaffectionate or bitter ideological confrontations, how difficult it is for believers,whether devout or casual, to accept the reality of a god that is not benevolent, notomnipotent, and not comprehensible. Observing the commandments of such a godmay be futile, if only because he may have planned something else altogether ofwhich we are unaware. The difficulty of connecting the sides of the triangle of faith toan understood form makes it mandatory to build a new bridge between God and manthat will enable us to conduct ourselves in the world according to our understandingof the meaning of creation.Instead of placing the responsibility for Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Dachau on Godand his inaction, we need to take the responsibility into our own human hands, andremove God from the business of everyday life. We have no control or jurisdictionover God, and, as we have learned millions of times, He does not really control what