The Shoah

CHAPTER 36
The Shoah
Steven T.Katz
INTRODUCTION
It is not surprising that no event has impacted on contemporary Jewish thought as has the
Shoah. The majority of original works in the area of Jewish thought in the past quarter
century have grown out of and have been a response to the annihilation of European
Jewry. Since the deaths of Buber in 1966 and of Heschel in 1972, little Jewish
existentialist work (except that of Levinas) has been produced. In Israel, the history of
Jewish philosophy in all its phases has flourished—one thinks here immediately of
Nathan Rotenstreich’s Jewish Thought in Modern Times, published in Hebrew in 1945
and updated in an English version in 1968; of Eli Schweid’s various important studies; of
Fleischer’s analysis on Rosenzweig—and more recently, of Paul Mendes-Flohr’s work
on Buber, and Stephan Moses’ study of Rosenzweig—but one is hard pressed to find a
single, original philosophical work of major standing in the narrow area of Jewish
philosophy. In this context I specifically and explicitly acknowledge Gershom Scholem’s
genius, while denying that he was a philosopher, despite the claims of some of his
admirers. Surprisingly, even Zionism has been nearly wholly absent as a subject of
original philosophical work. Yeshayahu Leibowitz deserves mention here—but only that.
America, too, has produced significant historical studies—I think at once and most
prominently of the scholarship of the late Alexander Altmann on Mendelssohn, and of a
host of able younger scholars, such as Kenneth Seeskin, Norbert Samuelson, Elliot Dorff,
David Novak, David Blumenthal, Robert Gibbs, and Mel Scult, but lasting, fundamental,
conceptual work, with the exception of Michael Wyschograd’s Body of Faith (1983) and
some of Eugene Borowitz’s work on autonomy, such as Renewing the Covenant (1991),
is hard to find.
In contrast, the Holocaust has evoked a large number of interest-ing and provocative
conceptual responses. These range from the radical pagan naturalism of Richard
Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz (1966, new edition 1992), through the dialectical theism of
Emil Fackenheim and Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, to the dipolar theology of Arthur
A.Cohen, and the classical “orthodox” response of Eliezer Berkovits. In addition,
reflection on the Shoah has also generated less systematic, but at times highly
suggestive—and sometimes even true—comment from thinkers as disparate as Rav
Hutner, Jacob Neusner, Rav Soloveitchik, the Lubavitcher Rebbe (R.Schneerson), Ignaz
Maybaum, and Harold Schulweis. (And no event in Jewish history since the Crucifixion
has caused as much Christian theological and philosophical rethinking as Auschwitz.
Here one thinks immediately of, for example, the work of Paul Van Buren, Franklin
Littell, John Pawlikowski, and A.Roy Eckardt, among others.) Which is to say that, in
both quantity and interest, wrestling with, as Arthur Cohen called it, the tremendum has
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been at the very center of contemporary Jewish thought, and I believe this circumstance
will continue into the next century.
It will do so because the Shoah has challenged all inherited truths and widely shared
assumptions. Old truths might still be defensible, but they must be defended anew. And
this applies not only in the narrowly theological domain but also as regards all the
elemental issues that relate to a consideration of modern Jewish thought. For example,
first, the meaning of modernity, and now the meaning of the so-called “postmodern”
explored by such influential thinkers as Derrida, has again to be analyzed in light of what
modernity has wrought in the death camps; second, the entire relationship between Jews
and Judaism and the larger social order has to be re-evaluated after the failure of modern
politics in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s; third, the implications of secularism and
scientific culture, of technology, bureaucracy and ideology, not only for Jews but also for
the future of humankind is open for reconsideration given this culture’s creation of
Auschwitz; fourth, the meaning and character of Zionism and anti-semitism remains an
unsettled issue; and, last but not least, a host of historiographical and historiosophical
issues about the writing and meaning of history, such as the current debates about the
value of historical narrative that stretch from the revisionism of Hayden White to
Lyotard’s Heidegger and the “Jews” all require deep and careful reconsideration.
In sum, the contemporary conversation about the implications of the
Shoah touches almost every essential Jewish philosophical concern while
at the same time far transcending narrowly Jewish concerns and
constituting the very core of any truly serious conversation about the
project of modernity itself.
INTERPRETATION
I would like to illustrate the broad significance of this post-Holocaust debate by taking a
closer, very critical, look at the analysis of three issues—God, history, and Zion—in the
work of three contemporary thinkers: Richard Rubenstein, Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, and
Arthur A. Cohen. I choose both the topics and the thinkers as examples of a larger
problematic, hoping to illuminate the more general topoi of concern through a somewhat
detailed consideration of these specific, very different, subjects and thinkers.
Untypical of Jewish thinkers of the past, post-Holocaust thinkers have had a great deal
to say—however one estimates what has been said—about God and, in turn, about God’s
relation to history and Zion. Consider the following three proposals, beginning with the
work of Richard Rubenstein. Rubenstein has argued that God is dead. The logic that has
led him to this conclusion can be put directly in the following syllogism:
1 God, as he is conceived of in the Jewish tradition, could not have
allowed the Holocaust to happen.
2 The Holocaust did happen. Therefore,
3 God, as he is conceived of in the Jewish tradition, does not exist.
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Yet, interestingly, despite this negative theological conclusion, the “death of God” for
Rubenstein does not destroy Judaism and the Jewish people but rather forces their
reinterpretation in pagan, naturalistic terms. Rubenstein waxes eloquent on the virtues of
this paganism, urging the Jew to return to the harmonious patterns of nature. His
statement of this reconstruction is so extraordinary that I quote it at length:
In the religion of history, only man and God are alive. Nature is dead and
serves only as the material of tool-making man’s obsessive projects.
Nature does not exist to be enjoyed and communed with; it exists to be
changed and subordinated to man’s wants—the fulfillment of which
brings neither happiness nor satisfaction. In the religion of nature, a
historical, cyclical religion, man is once more at home with nature and its
divinities, sharing their life, their limits, and their joys. The devitalization
of nature, no matter how imposing, has its inevitable concomitant the
dehumanization of man with its total loss of eros. Herbert Marcuse states
the issue extremely well when he speaks of the subordination of the logic
of gratification to the logic of domination. Only in man at one with nature
is eros rather than eroticism possible. Historical man knows guilt,
inhibition, acquisition, and synthetic fantasy, but no eros. The return to the
soil of Israel promises a people bereft of art, nature, and expansive
passion, a return to eros and the ethos of eros. In place of the Lord of
history, punishing man for attempting to be what he was created to be, the
divinities of nature will celebrate with mankind their “bacchanalian revel
of spirits in whom no member is drunk.”1
Rubenstein argues that Jews must now reinterpret their traditional, normative categories
in naturalistic rather than linear and historical terms. They must recognize that both
salvation in the here and now, as well as the future and final redemption, will not be, as
traditionally conceived, the conquest of nature by history but rather the reverse. As a
consequence of this inversion of the priority and relation of nature and history, Jews have
to rediscover the sanctity of natural life. They have to learn to enjoy their bodies, rather
than follow the classical, but now recognized as self-destructive, paths of sublimation and
transformation. Above all, they have to reject the futile transcendentalizing (and
historicizing) of these phenomena.
Rubenstein sees in the renewal of Zion and the rebuilding of the land of Israel, with its
return to the soil by the Jew, a harbinger of this movement. This regression to the earth
points toward the Jews’ final escape from the negativity of history to the vitality of selfliberation through the rediscovery of primal being.
Second, let us consider the extreme post-Shoah theological
recommendations of Irving (Yitz) Greenberg. Greenberg has argued the
provocative thesis that the Shoah marks a new era in Jewish history—what
Greenberg labels “the Third Era”—in which the Sinaitic covenant has
been shattered. Therefore, if there is to be any covenantal relationship at
all today, it must assume new and unprecendent forms.2 In this context
Greenberg insists that Israel’s covenant with God always implied further
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human development. The natural outcome of the covenant is full
responsibility. “In retrospect,” he argues, paraphrasing A. Roy Eckardt,
It is now clear that the divine assignment to the Jews was untenable. In the
Covenant, Jews were called to witness to the world for God and for a final
perfection. After the Holocaust, it is obvious that this role opened the
Jews to a total murderous fury from which there was no escape. Yet the
divine could not or would not save them from this fate.
Therefore, morally speaking, God must repent of the
Covenant, i.e., do Teshuvah for having given this chosen
people a task that was unbearably cruel and dangerous
without having provided for their protection. Morally
speaking, then, God can have no claims on the Jews by dint
of the Covenant.3
What this means is that the covenant
can no longer be commanded and subject to a serious external
enforcement. It cannot be commanded because morally speaking—
covenantally speaking—one cannot order another to step forward to die.
One can give an order like this to an enemy, but in a moral relationship, I
cannot demand giving up one’s life. I can ask for it—but I cannot order it.
To put it again in Wiesel’s words: when God gave us a mission, that was
all right. But God failed to tell us that it was a suicide mission.4
Moreover, for a witness of the horrors of the Endlösung, nothing God could threaten for
breach of the covenant would be frightening, thus the covenant can no longer be enforced
by the threat of punishment.5
As a consequence of this complex of considerations, Greenberg asserts that the
covenant is now voluntary! And this “voluntariness” altogether transforms the existing
covenantal order. First, Greenberg tells us, Israel was a junior partner in its relationship
with the Almighty (in the biblical era), then an equal partner (in the rabbinic era), and
now after Auschwitz it becomes “the senior partner in action. In effect, God was saying
to humans: you stop the Holocaust. You bring the redemption. You act to ensure: never
again. I will be with you totally in whatever you do, wherever you go, whatever happens
but you must do it.”6
And to this suggestive theo-historical analysis Greenberg adds his understanding of
the meaning of the creation of the State of Israel, which he describes as: “the Revelation
in the Redemption of Israel.”7 Greenberg is here willing, as a corollary of his basic and
deepest belief that Judaism is a religion of and in history, to posit direct theological
weight to the recreation of a Jewish state. He wisely proposes that “if the experience of
Auschwitz symbolizes that we are cut off from God and hope, and the covenant may be
destroyed, then the experience of Jerusalem symbolizes that God’s promises are faithful
and His people live on.”8
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Our third thinker, Arthur A.Cohen, has offered the still more radical
contention that:
Any constructive theology after the tremendum must be marked by the
following characteristics: first, the God who is affirmed must abide in a
universe whose human history is scarred by genuine evil without making
the evil empty or illusory nor disallowing the real presence of God before,
even if not within, history; second, the relation of God to creation and its
creatures, including, as both now include, demonic structure and
unredeemable events, must be seen, nonetheless, as meaningful and
valuable despite the fact that the justification that God’s presence renders
to the worthwhileness of life and struggle is now intensified and
anguished by the contrast and opposition that evil supplies; third, the
reality of God in his selfhood and person can no longer be isolated, other
than as a strategy of clarification, from God’s real involvement with the
life of creation. Were any of these characteristics to be denied or, worse,
proved untrue and unneeded, as strict and unyielding orthodox theism
appears to require, creation disappears as fact into mere metaphor or, in
the face of an obdurate and ineffaceable reality such as the tremendum.
God ceases to be more than a metaphor for the inexplicable.9
What these three theological requirements entail for Cohen is the bringing together of
two seemingly opposite traditional theological strategies. One of these is what Cohen
labels “the kabbalistic counter history of Judaism”10 by reference to which he intends to
call attention to the kabbalistic doctrine of the Ein Sof and the related doctrine of creation
in which:
God, in the immensity of his being, was trapped by both its absoluteness
and necessity into a constriction of utter passivity which would have
excluded both the means in will and the reality in act of the creation. Only
by the spark of nonbeing (the interior apposition of being, the
contradiction of being, the premise of otherhood, the void that is not
vacuous) was the being of God enlivened and vivified.11
And this cosmogonic speculation has now to be linked to a second cosmological
tradition, that associated with Schelling and Rosenzweig. This Cohen describes as
follows:
“What is necessary in God,” Schelling argues, “is God’s nature,” his
“own-ness.” Love—that antithetic energy of the universe—negates “ownness” for love cannot exist without the other, indeed, according to its
nature as love, it must deny itself that the other might be (contracting
itself that the other might be, setting limits to itself). However, since the
divine nature as esse cannot have personality without the outpouring, the
self-giving of love to define those limits, it must be postulated that within
God are two directions (not principles, as Schelling says): one which is
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necessary selfhood, interiority, self-containment and another, vital,
electric, spontaneous that is divine posse, the abundant and overflowing.
There arises from all this the dialectic of necessity and freedom, the
enmeshment of divine egoity and person, divine self-love and free love,
divine narcissism and the created image, the sufficient nothing of the
world and the creation of being. The human affect is toward the
overflowing, the loving in God; his containment, however, the abyss of
his nature, is as crucial as is his abundance and plenitude. These are the
fundamental antitheses of the divine essence without which the abyss
would be unknown or all else would be regarded as plenitude…the quiet
God is as indispensable as the revealing God, the abyss as much as the
plenitude, the constrained, self-contained, deep divinity as the plenteous
and generous.12
What the synthesis of these kabbalistic and Schellingian vectors entails for Cohen is that,
first, there is an elemental side of God that is necessarily hidden, but still necessary, in
the process of creation and relation; second, conversely, reciprocally, creation, which is
continuous and ongoing, is a necessary outcome of God’s loving nature; third, God’s
nature requires our freedom; and, lastly, we require a “dipolar”13 theological vision which
admits that things and events look different from God’s perspective and to God as he is in
himself than they do from our vantage point and vis-à-vis our relation to the transcendent.
Cohen argues that in the context of the analysis of the Shoah this means that we
require a new understanding of God’s work in the world that insistently differs
elementally from that taught by traditional theism. The understanding of the
traditionalists issues forth in the putatively “unanswerable” question: “How could it be
that God witnessed the holocaust and remained silent?”14 Alternatively, Cohen’s
recommendation would free us of this causal understanding of the need for direct divine
intervention and allow us to see: “that which is taken as God’s speech is really always
man’s hearing, that God is not the strategist of our particularities or of our historical
condition, but rather the mystery of our futurity, always our posse, never our acts.”15
If we can acquire this alternative understanding of what divine action allows—as well
as of what it does not allow—we will “have won a sense of God whom we may love and
honour, but whom we no longer fear and from whom we no longer demand.”16 This
argument, with its redefinition of God and its emphasis on human freedom, emerges as
the centerpiece of Cohen’s revisionist “response” to the tremendum.
Exegesis of Cohen’s position, however, would not be complete without
brief comment on one further aspect of his argument, his critique of
Zionism. Whereas most of the other major thinkers17 who have discussed
the Shoah in theological terms have embraced the recreation of the State
of Israel as a positive event, even while understanding its value in a
variety of ways, for example in terms of Richard Rubenstein’s naturalism
or Yitzchak Greenberg’s incipient messianism, Cohen remains wedded to
a non-Zionist (which must be scrupulously distinguished from an antiZionist) theological outlook. Cohen’s reservation stems from his
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continuing understanding, indebted as it is to Rosenzweig, of the Jewish
people’s “peculiar” role in history, or rather, as Cohen describes it “to the
side of history.”18
It may well be the case that the full entrance of the Jewish people into the
lists of the historical is more threatening even than genocide has been, for
in no way is the Jew allowed any longer to retire to the wings of history,
to repeat his exile amid the nations, to disperse himself once again in
order to survive. One perceives that when history endangers it cannot be
mitigated. This we know certainly from the tremendum, but we know it
no less from the auguries of nationhood, that every structure of history in
which an eternal people takes refuge is ominous.19
CRITIQUE
In response to these intriguing philosophical and theological proposals the following
needs to be said. First, in reply to Rubenstein, I would argue that the “Death of God,”
putatively grounded in the Holocaust experience, is not as easily defended as he believes,
not least because it concerns nothing less than how one views Jewish history, its
continuities and discontinuities, its “causal connectedness” and interdependencies. By
raising the issue of how one evaluates Jewish history and what hermeneutic of historic
meaning one need adopt, I mean to bring into focus the fact—and it is a fact—that radical
theologians see Jewish history too narrowly, that is focused solely in and through the
Holocaust. They take the decisive event of Jewish history to be the death camps. But this
is a distorted image of Jewish experience, for there is a pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust
Jewish reality that must be considered in dealing with the questions raised by the Nazi
epoch. These questions extend beyond 1933–45 and touch the present Jewish situation as
well as the whole of the Jewish past. One cannot make the events of 1933–45 intelligible
in isolation. To think, moreover, that one can excise this block of time from the flow of
Jewish history, and then by concentrating on it extract the “meaning” of all Jewish
existence, is more than uncertain,20 no matter how momentous or demonic this time may
have been.
This recognition of a pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust Israel forces two
considerations upon us. The first is the very survival of the Jewish people despite their
“sojourn among the nations.” As Karl Barth once said, “the best proof of God’s existence
is the continued existence of the Jewish people.” Without entering into a discussion of the
metaphysics of history, let this point just stand for further reflection, that the Jews
survived Hitler and Jewish history did not end at Auschwitz. Second, and equally if not
more directly significant, is the recreation after Auschwitz of a Jewish state.21 This event,
too, is remarkable in the course of Jewish existence. Logic and conceptual adequacy
require that if in our discussion of the relation of God and history we want to give
theological weight to the Holocaust then we must also be willing to attribute theological
significance to the State of Israel. Just what weight one assigns to each of these events,
and then again to events in general, in constructing a theological reading of history is an
extraordinarily complex theoretical issue, about which there is the need for much
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discussion, and which allows for much difference of view. However, it is clear that any
final rendering of the “meaning of Jewish history” that values in its equation only the
negative factors of the Nazi Holocaust is, at best, arbitrary.
History is too variegated to be understood only as good and evil; the alternating
rhythms of actual life reveal the two forces as interlocked and inseparable. For our
present concerns, the hermeneutical value of this recognition is that one comes to see that
Jewish history is neither conclusive proof for the existence of God (because of the
possible counter-evidence of Auschwitz), nor conversely, for the non-existence of God
(because of the possible counter-evidence of the State of Israel as well as the whole threethousand-year historical Jewish experience). Rubenstein’s narrow focus on Auschwitz
reflects an already determined theological choice based on certain normative
presuppositions and a compelling desire to justify, without real warrant, certain
conclusions. It is not a value-free phenomenological description of Jewish history.
Second, with respect to Rubenstein’s use of A.J.Ayer’s positivist principle of
empirical falsification, while this challenge is an important one that is often too lightly
dismissed by theologians, and respecting Rubenstein’s employment of it as an authentic
existential response to an overwhelming reality, it none the less needs to be recognized
that the empirical falsifiability challenge is not definitive one way or the other in
theological matters and therefore cannot provide Rubenstein (or others) with an
unimpeachable criterion for making the negative theological judgments that he seeks to
advance regarding the non-existence of God. The “falsifiability” thesis neither allows one
decisively to affirm nor disaffirm God’s presence in history, for history provides
evidence both for and against the non-existence of God on empirical-verificationist
grounds. Moreover, the very value of the “empirical falsification criteria” rests, on the
one hand, on what one considers to be empirical-verificationist evidence, that is, on what
one counts as empirical or experiential, and on the other, on whether the empiricalverificationist principle is, in itself, philosophically coherent, which it is not. Again, here
too, the State of Israel is a crucial “datum” (and solidly empirical).
Space prevents extended analysis of Rubenstein’s advocacy of pagan naturalism and
his reinterpretation of Zionism in its light, but four theses require comment in the context
of the Holocaust. The first is that Rubenstein misunderstands the innermost character of
Zionism. Certainly the Jew, through this decisive Zionist act, breaks out of the narrow
parameters of his exilic existence and “break[s] with bourgeois existence as the
characteristic form of Jewish social organization,”22 (though to a more limited extent).
But to equate these Zionist realities with the “resurrection of the divinities of Israel’s
earth”23 is sheer mythography.
Second, what is the “cash-value” of this return to nature a la Rubenstein? After one
reads through it all there is no actual program on which to build a life either for the
individual or for the national community. The point seems to be that in some Freudian
sense (as represented in Norman Brown’s writings, for example, which Rubenstein
specifically commends) humans will be “happy” (that is, not neurotic). But there is no
clear sense of what this “happiness” really consists of either in Freud or in Brown—or in
Rubenstein. Does Rubenstein, who, in his long opening essay in After Auschwitz entitled
“Religion and the Origin of the Death Camps,” concentrates on anality as the key to
decoding the Holocaust, really want to suggest that three thousand years of Jewish
history—or even that of 1933–45—can be explained primarily by reference to anal
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satisfaction and that all Israel’s suffering now leads it to the “promised land” of sexual
gratification above all else?
Third, this late in the history of philosophy, it is odd to find someone extolling the
values of nature per se. Nature is morally neutral; it will not provide the basis for any new
comradeship. The return to nature, its deification and worship, is a blind idolatry without
recompense. Out of nature can emerge no overcoming of the contradictoriness of
existence, no lessening of the “absurdity” which surrounds us, rather it portends what it
has always portended: the cruel, amoral, “meaningless” drudgery of natural selection and
survival.
In this connection let me say too that Rubenstein’s forceful naturalistic imagery carries
one along primarily because of its illicit anthropomorphizing and spiritualizing of blind
forces. Only thus is nature equated with spirit, or again with demonic. However, this
anthropomorphizing rests on philosophical improprieties rather than on
phenomenological astuteness. This is not to deny the evocative power of Rubenstein’s
mystification of nature, but rather it is to assert that for all its appeal the mystical
seductiveness attributed to nature is chimerical.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, is an issue already hinted at: was it not precisely a
mystical pagan naturalism that Nazism extolled? Was it not in the name of the pagan
deities of primal origins that Europe was enjoined to shed the yoke of the Jewish God—
“conscience is a Jewish invention,” Himmler reminded the SS—and thereby liberate
itself to do all that had heretofore been “forbidden”? Was it not the rejection of the taboos
of good and evil associated with the God of the covenant, a rejection now made possible
by his “death,” which made real the kingdom of night? Was it not that very romanticism
of blood and land so deeply ingrained in German culture that Hitler appealed to when he
spoke of the extermination of the Jew? Was it not in the name of “self-liberation” and
“self-discovery” that six million Jews, and upwards of thirty million others, died? After
Auschwitz, the very title of Rubenstein’s most well-known work, is it not time to be
afraid of naturalism and paganism and skeptical in the extreme about the purported
health-restoring, life-authenticating, creative, organic, and salvific qualities claimed for
them?
Passing now to Irving Greenberg’s not uninteresting proposals, one must offer at least
the following demurrals. To begin, the structure of Greenberg’s three covenantal eras, his
many assertions about a “saving God,” his talk of revelation and redemption, and his
radical contention that the Almighty is increasingly a “silent partner” in Jewish and world
history, cannot be advanced without pondering the consequences of these ideas for the
“God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
To put it directly, what happens to the God of Judaism in Greenberg’s theology?
Prima facie the God of all the traditional omnipredicates does not fit easily with a “God”
who is a “silent partner.” This may not be a telling criticism, though I think it is, because
Greenberg is free to redefine “God” for the purposes of theological reflection. But,
having redefined “God” however he feels it appropriate, Greenberg must attend to the
myriad metaphysical and theological consequences of such an action. On the one hand,
this means that the ontological entailments of treating God as a “silent partner” have to be
spelled out. On the other hand, the implication of such a metaphysical principle (God as a
“silent partner”) for such traditional and essential Jewish concerns as covenant, reward
and punishment, morality, Torah, mitzvot, redemption, and other eschatological matters,
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have to be attended to. For example, is a God who is a “silent partner” capable of being
the author and guarantor of moral value both in human relations as well as in history and
nature more generally? Or is the axiological role traditionally occupied by God largely
evacuated?24 Likewise, is there a possibility of sin, in a substantive and not merely a
metaphorical sense, in this perspective? Again, is God as a “silent partner” capable of
being the God of salvation both personal and historic? And, lastly, is God as a “silent
partner” the God to whom we pray on Yom Kippur and to whom we confess our sins and
ask forgiveness? If my skepticism regarding the ability of Greenberg’s “God-idea” to
answer these challenges is misplaced, this has to be demonstrated. For it would appear
that while this revised “God-idea” allows him to unfold the logic of the “Third Era” as he
desires, it in turn generates more theological problems than it solves.
These critical considerations in turn bring us to the most dramatic, most consequential,
of Greenberg’s affirmations—his espousal, in our post-Holocaust era, of a “voluntary
covenant.” According to Greenberg, as already explicated above, the Sinaitic covenant
was shattered in the Shoah. As a consequence he pronounces the fateful judgment: the
covenant is now voluntary! Jews have, quite miraculously, chosen after Auschwitz to
continue to live Jewish lives and collectively to build a Jewish state, the ultimate symbol
of Jewish continuity, but these acts are, post-Shoah, the result of the free choice of the
Jewish people.
Logically and theologically the key issue that arises at this central juncture, given
Greenberg’s reconstruction, is this: if there was ever a valid covenant,25 that is, if there is
a God who entered into such a relationship with Israel—then can this covenant be
“shattered” by a Hitler? Or put the other way round, if Hitler can be said to have
“shattered” the covenant, was there ever such a covenant, despite traditional Jewish
pieties, in the first place? The reasons for raising these questions are metaphysical in kind
and are related to the nature of the biblical God and the meaning of his attributes and
activities, including his revelations and promises, which are immune, by definition, from
destruction by the likes of a Hitler. If Hitler could break God’s covenantal promises, God
would not be God and Hitler would indeed be central to Jewish belief.
Finally, passing on to Arthur Cohen’s radical theological suggestions, the following
philosophical consideration needs to be noted. The subtle intention that lies behind
Cohen’s transformative redescription of God is twofold. On the one hand it seeks to
assure the reality of human freedom and hence to facilitate a simultaneous reemployment of a sophisticated version of a “free-will” theodicy. On the other hand, and
reciprocally, it redefines the transcendent nature of God’s being such that he is not
directly responsible for the discrete events of human history and hence cannot be held
responsible for the Shoah or other acts of human evil. This is a very intriguing two-sided
ontological strategy. Our question therefore must be: does Cohen defend it adequately?
Let us begin to explore this question by deciphering Cohen’s second thesis
as to God’s redefined role in history. The clearest statement of Cohen’s
revised God-idea in respect of divine accountability for the Shoah comes
in his discussion of God’s putative silence and what Cohen takes to be the
mistaken tradition-based expectation of miraculous intervention.
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The most penetrating of post-tremendum assaults upon God has been the
attack upon divine silence. Silence is surely in such a usage a metaphor
for inaction: passivity, affectlessness, indeed, at its worst and most
extreme, indifference and ultimate malignity. Only a malign God would
be silent when speech would terrify and stay the fall of the uplifted arm.
And if God spoke once (or many times as scripture avers), why has he not
spoken since? What is it with a God who speaks only to the ears of the
earliest and the oldest and for millennia thereafter keeps silence and
speaks not? In all this there is concealed a variety of assumptions about
the nature and efficacy of divine speech that needs to be examined. The
first is that the divine speech of old is to be construed literally, that is, God
actually spoke in the language of man, adapting speech to the styles of the
The Tremendum, p. 97
Patriarchs and the Prophets, and was heard speaking and was transmitted
as having spoken. God’s speech was accompanied by the racket of the
heavens so that even if the speech was not heard by more than the
prophetic ear, the marks and signals of divine immensity were observed.
As well, there is the interpretive conviction that God’s speech is action,
that God’s words act. Lastly, and most relevantly to the matter before us,
God’s speech enacts and therefore confutes the projects of murderers and
tyrants—he saves Israel, he ransoms Jews, he is forbearing and loving.
God’s speech is thus consequential to the historical cause of justice and
mercy. Evidently, then, divine silence is reproof and punishment, the
reversal of his works of speech, and hence God’s silence is divine
acquiescence in the work of murder and destruction.
Can it not be argued no less persuasively that what is taken as God’s
speech is really always man’s hearing, that God is not the strategist of our
particularities or of our historical condition, but rather the mystery of our
futurity, always our posse, never our acts? If we can begin to see God less
as the interferer whose insertion is welcome (when it accords with our
needs) and more as the immensity whose reality is our prefiguration,
whose speech and silence are metaphors for our language and distortion,
whose plenitude and unfolding are the hope of our futurity, we shall have
won a sense of God whom we may love and honor, but whom we no
longer fear and from whom we no longer demand.
In response to this reconstruction of the God-idea, some critical observations are in order.
First, it need not be belabored that there is truth in the proposition that “what is taken as
God’s speech is really always man’s hearing.”28 But at the same time, it is only a halftruth as stated. For our hearing the word of revelation does not create “God’s speech”—
this would be illusion and self-projection. Certainly we can mishear God, or not hear
what there is to hear at all—but these qualifications do not erase the dialogical nature of
divine speech, that is, the requirement that there be a Speaker as well as a Hearer. And if
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revelation requires this two-sidedness then we have to reject Cohen’s revisionism
because it fails to address the full circumstance of the reality of revelation and God’s role
in it. Alternatively, if Cohen’s description is taken at face value, revelation, in any
meaningful sense, disappears, for what content can we ultimately give to “man’s hearing”
as revelation? Moreover, from a specifically Jewish point of view, anything recognizable
as Torah and mitzvot would be negated altogether.
Second, this transformation of classical theism and its replacement by
theological dipolarity fails to deal, as did Greenberg’s revisionism, with
the problem of divine attributes. Is God still God if he is no longer the
providential agency in history? Is God still God if he lacks the power to
enter history vertically to perform the miraculous? Is such a dipolar
absolute still the God to whom one prays, the God of salvation? Put the
other way round, Cohen’s divinity is certainly not the God of the
covenant,29 nor again the God of Exodus-Sinai, nor yet again the God of
the Prophets and the Churban Bayit Rishon (Destruction of the First
Temple) and the Churban Bayit Sheni (Destruction of the Second
Temple). Now, none of these objections, the failure to account for the very
building blocks of Jewish theology, counts logically against Cohen’s
theism as an independent speculative exercise. However, they do suggest
that Cohen’s God is not the God of the Bible and Jewish tradition and that
if Cohen is right, indeed, particularly if Cohen is right, there is no real
meaning left to Judaism and to the God-idea of Jewish tradition. Cohen’s
deconstruction in this particular area is so radical that it sweeps away the
biblical and rabbinic ground of Jewish faith and allows the biblical and
other classical evidence to count not at all against his own speculative
metaphysical hypotheses.
The dipolar ontological schema is certainly logically neater and sharper than its
“normative” biblical and rabbinic predecessor but one questions whether this precision
has not been purchased at the price of adequacy, that is, an inadequate grappling with the
multiple evidences and variegated problems that need to be addressed in any attempt,
however bold, to fashion a defensible definition and description of God and his relations
to humanity. Logical precision must not be achieved here too easily, nor given too high a
priority, in the sifting and sorting, the phenomenological decipherment and rearranging,
of God’s reality and our own.
Third, is the dipolar, non-interfering God “whom we no longer fear and from whom
we no longer demand” yet worthy of our “love and honor?”30 This God seems closer, say,
to Plato’s Demiurgos or perhaps closer still to the innocuous and irrelevant God of the
Deists. Such a God does not count in how we act, nor in how history devolves or
transpires. After all “God is not,” Cohen asserts, “the strategist of our particularities or of
our historical condition.” But if this is so, if God is indeed so absent from our life and the
historical record, what difference for us between this God and no God at all? Again, is
such a God who remains uninvolved while Auschwitz is generating its corpses any more
History of Jewish philosophy
770
worthy of being called a “God whom we may love,” especially if this is his metaphysical
essence, than the God of tradition?31 A God whom we can see only as the “immensity
whose reality is our prefiguration,” while rhetorically provocative, will not advance the
theological discussion for it provides negations and evasions just where substantive
analysis is required.
Cohen recognizes that his programmatic reconstruction impacts upon the
fundamental question of God’s relation to history. In explicating his
understanding of this vexing relationship he writes:
God and the life of God exist neither in conjunction with nor disjunction
from the historical, but rather in continuous community and nexus. God is
neither a function nor a cause of the historical nor wholly other and
indifferent to the historical.32
If God then is unrelated to the historical in any of these more usual ways, as “neither a
function nor a cause,” how then is he present, that is, not “wholly other and indifferent,”
and what difference does he make in this redefined and not wholly unambiguous role? “I
understand divine life,” Cohen tells us:
to be rather a filament within the historical, but never the filament that we
can identify and ignite according to our requirements, for in this and all
other respects God remains God. As filament, the divine element of the
historical is a precarious conductor always intimately linked to the
historical—its presence securing the implicative and exponential
significance of the historical—and always separate from it, since the
historical is the domain of human freedom.33
But this advocacy of an “implicit” but non-causal nexus is hardly sufficient.
In the final reckoning, this impressionistic articulation of the problem must collapse in
upon itself for at some level of analysis the reciprocal notions of “causality” and
“function” cannot be avoided. One can talk lyrically of God as a “filament” and a
“conductor” in history as if these were not causal or connective concepts but upon deeper
probing it will be revealed that they are. For talk of God as “filament” and “conductor” to
retain its coherence, for it not to evaporate into empty metaphor, we have to know what it
means to refer to God as a “filament,” as a “conductor,” no matter how precarious. To
rescue these instrumental concepts from complete intellectual dissolution we need also to
know something of how God is present in the world in these ways—what evidence we
can point to in defense of these images.34 For example, and deserving of a concrete
answer, is the question: What of God is conducted? His love? Grace? Salvation? And if
so, how? Wherein, against the darkness of the tremendum, do we experience his love, his
grace, his salvation? To anticipate this objection as well as to attempt to deflect it by
arguing that God is a “filament” but “never the filament that we can identify”35 is a
recourse to “mystery”36 in the obfuscatory rather than the explanatory sense. For as
explanation it means simply: “I claim God is somehow present or related to history but
don’t ask me how.” Alternatively, to come at this thesis from the other side, the analogies
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of “filament” and “conductor” are disquieting as analogs of the relation of God and
history because they so strongly suggest passivity and inertness. If they are the proper
analogs for God’s activity or presence in history, all our earlier concrete concerns about
maintaining the integral vitality of Judaism resurface. For the God of creation, covenants,
Sinai, and redemption is altogether different, qualitatively, metaphysically, and morally
other, from a “conductor” or “filament.”
Given the dispassionate, disinterested, amoral nature of Cohen’s deity, it is not
surprising that the conclusion drawn from this descriptive recasting of God’s role in
“community and nexus” is, vis-à-vis the Shoah, finally trivial (in the technical sense).
That the Holocaust makes no difference to God’s relation to himself we can grant in
principle for the purposes of this analysis. And, logically and structurally, that is,
ontologically, we can allow for the purposes of argument Cohen’s conclusion that “the
tremendum does not alter the relation in which God exists to the historical.” But, having
granted both these premises it is necessary to conclude, contra Cohen, that the
tremendum is not, and in principle could not be, a theological problem. It is, on its own
premises, irrelevant to God’s existence, irrelevant to God’s relation to history and, on
these criteria, irrelevant to God’s relation to humankind—whatever humankind’s relation
to God.
The a-Zionism37 which is the complement of this ontology is logically
consistent. If God is not the causal agent of Auschwitz, he is not the causal
agent of the return to the land. Hence Zionism becomes, if not
theologically problematic, then certainly theologically irrelevant. Cohen,
in effect, falls back on a Rosenzweigian-like vocabulary and ideology to
describe and interpret the state of Israel. But this is inadequate because it
clearly does not dare enough, from a Jewish theological perspective,
where the State of Israel is concerned. And this not least because after
Auschwitz, and after more than forty years of the existence of the State of
Israel, one cannot so easily dissociate the nature and face of the Jewish
people from that of the Jewish state in which about thirty per cent of the
Jewish people now live, an ever increasing percentage, and in which more
than forty per cent of Jewish infants worldwide are born. A theology in
which this does not matter, as the Shoah does not matter theologically,
cannot speak meaningfully to the Jewish condition after Auschwitz.38
LARGER CONSIDERATIONS
What is most important about this brief dialogue with Rubenstein, Greenberg, and Cohen
is not, in the present context, the details of their argument and the particulars of my
critique but rather the enormous range of absolutely fundamental questions that their
work, in its alternating diversity, raises for all contemporary reflection. That is, their
imaginative investigations, along with the contributions of other Holocaust thinkers, raise
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772
elemental and inescapable topoi for further exploration. Among these elemental subjects
are:
(1) The status of history in Jewish thought, that is, is Judaism an historical religion?
Can historical events “disconfirm” Judaism’s basic theological affirmations?
(2) How does one weigh, evaluate, good and evil as historical phenomena vis-à-vis
theological judgments?
(3) How does one divide up and evaluate the meaning of Jewish history?
(4) Is Jewish history in any way singular?
(5) Is the Shoah unique? And, if it is, does it matter philosophically and theologically?
(6) What is the status of empirical disconfirmation as a procedure in Jewish thought?
(7) What does it mean to speak of providence, and God’s intervention into human
affairs?
(8) What is “revelation”? What is “covenant”? Here I note that the essential need for
precision in the use of such technical terms is widely ignored by contemporary thinkers,
even though the meaning of such terms is decisive in relation to claims made for the
putative revelatory character of the Shoah and the reborn State of Israel.
(9) What is the relationship between anthropological and theological judgments?
(10) Recognizing the existence of a long tradition of reflection on this matter, what
limits, if any, are we bound by in interpreting God’s attributes?
(11) What traditional and contemporary sources, if any, have an authoritative status in
this discussion? Here, in addition to the proposals advanced by the three thinkers
considered in detail above, think of Emil Fackenheim’s questionable appeal to midrash as
the key mode and resource for responding to Auschwitz.
(12) Then, last but not least, the colloquy in which we are engaged raises a host of
conceptual questions relating to the philosophical and theological meaning of the land of
Israel, Zionism and the State of Israel, and for some, also to matters pertaining to
messianism.
This is to ask, how are we to decide between Rubenstein’s denial of the
existence of God, Greenberg’s reduction of God to a “junior partner,” and
Cohen’s advocacy of a Hartshorneian type of God—not to speak of
Buber’s Eternal Thou who Buber tells us is “eclipsed” by the Shoah, or
Maybaum’s God who uses Hitler as he had used Nebuchadnezzar, or
Berkovits’ God who must be silent in the face of Auschwitz so man can be
free, or the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s God for whom the Holocaust is a tiqqun.
And again, what meaning are we to give to the State of Israel? That of
Rubenstein’s earth-bound paganism, Greenberg’s “revelation of
redemption,” Cohen’s metahistoric neutrality—or, again, Maybaum’s
classical Reform denial of its theological valence, Fackenheim’s linkage
of the state with his “614th Commandment,” Rav Kook the younger’s
intense messianic identification, or the Satmar Rebbe’s rejection of the
state as an illicit and premature pseudo-messianic initiative? Now these
are not easy questions, but they are questions that cannot be avoided by
contemporary Jewish thinkers. That is to say, as a consequence of thinking
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about the kingdom of night we come to realize that we need to consider
with increased methodological and hermeneutical sophistication the
primal conditions, the elemental possibilities, of Jewish thought. Certainly
it is not only the thinking through of the philosophical and theological
implications of the Shoah that raises these foundational questions, but it
has been primarily in connection with the Shoah that these issues have
been raised most forcefully and urgently in our time. This, more than the
substantive positions so far staked out, has been the real contribution of
post-Holocaust thought to contemporary Jewish philosophy.
NOTES
1 Rubenstein 1966, pp. 136–7.
2 Greenburg recognizes that we must even take seriously the
possibility that the covenant is at an end. See Greenberg 1981, p. 23.
3 Ibid. There may be some final difference of meaning between
Eckardt’s and Greenberg’s understanding of this seminal issue.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
6 Ibid., p. 27.
7 Greenberg 1977, p. 32.
8 Ibid.
9 Cohen 1981, p. 86.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., pp. 86f.
12 Ibid., pp. 89f.
13 This is Cohen’s term, ibid., p. 91.
14 Ibid., pp. 95f.
15 Ibid., p. 97.
16 Ibid., p. 101.
17 A notable exception here is Ignaz Maybaum. For more on
Maybaum’s theological position see Maybaum 1965. I have analyzed
and criticized Maybaum’s views in my essays “Jewish Faith After the
Holocaust: Four Approaches,” and “The Crucifixion of the Jews:
Ignaz Maybaum’s Theology of the Holocaust,” both reprinted in Katz
1983, pp. 155–63 and 248–67.
18 Ibid., p. 103. This is Cohen’s phrase.
19 Ibid., p. 101.
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774
20 Those who would deal with the Holocaust need to master not only
Holocaust materials but also the whole of Jewish history.
21 On Rubenstein’s appreciation of the State of Israel see, for
example, his essay on “The Rebirth of the State of Israel in Jewish
Philosophy,” in Rubenstein 1966, pp. 131–42.
22 Ibid., p. 138.
23 Ibid., p. 142.
24 Here a further nuance must be noted. Greenberg insists that
though God is intentionally more self-limited in the “Third Era,” this
should not be misunderstood as positing either God’s absence or
weakness. God is still active, though he is more hidden. In a private
correspondence Greenberg argued that in his view God is still seen as
possessing, at least, the following four classical attributes of
“calling,” “accompanying,” “judging,” and “sustaining” men and
women, as well as the world as a whole. Whether Greenberg has a
right to maintain these attributes for his “God-idea,” given the other
characteristics of his theology, is open to question.
25 An open question on independent philosophical and theological
grounds.
26 Cohen 1981, pp. 96f.
27 Ibid., pp. 96–7.
28 Ibid., p. 97.
29 Note my parallel comments on Greenberg above.
30 Cohen 1981, p. 97.
31 It is worth comparing Cohen’s present description and
understanding of the divine as dipolar with his comments made in
conversation with Mordecai Kaplan over the idea of God in Kaplan’s
reconstruction and printed inM. M.Kaplan and A.A.Cohen, If Not
Now, When? (New York: Schocken, 1973). Also of interest is a
comparison of his present views as to the nature of God with those
voiced in his earlier, The Natural and the Supernatural Jew (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1962).
32 Cohen 1981, p. 97.
33 Ibid., pp. 97–8.
34 Here, that is, we raise issues as to meaning and related, but
separate, questions as to verification, that is, not conflating the two
but asking about both.
35 Cohen 1981, pp. 97f.
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36 See my paper on “The Logic and Language of Mystery,” in
S.Sykes and J. Clayton (eds), Christ, Faith and History (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 239–62, for a fuller criticism
of this common theological gambit.
37 Described in Cohen 1981, pp. 101ff.
38 The single exception to this generalization is to be found in rightwing ultra-Orthodox circles, for example Satmar Chasidism and
among the Naturei Karta of Jerusalem, who can carry on a
meaningful Jewish existence because of their profound commitment
to traditional Torah observance and study. Outside of these very
small, very specially constituted groups, however, my judgment
stands.
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