The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (48 page)

Frankl’s main argument is that we have a choice of how we will respond to suffering. We all suffer—not to the same extent, of course—and for most of us nowhere near as much as people suffered in the camps. But we are free to respond to that suffering, to make it an achievement, even to make it ennobling. “We give suffering a meaning by our response.” He disagreed with Freud that the aim of life is pleasure, and with Adler that the aim is power. For Frankl, the main aim of life is the discovery of meaning, and he quoted various polls, in Europe and America, which showed that, at the time, more people were concerned about meaning in their lives than, say, money. He referred to Irvin Yalom’s book
Existential Psychotherapy
(1980), which said that 30 percent of the people who came to him for help were searching for meaning in their lives, and that 90 percent of alcoholics said they found their lives meaningless.

For Frankl, modern life is lived in an existential vacuum, where we have been estranged from our instincts and have lost our traditions; we live within a “tragic triad” of pain, guilt and death. The way out of this triad, he insisted, was “out there” in the world, not within us, and meaning was to be found in one of three ways—by deed, actions in the world; by someone, love; or by turning our inevitable suffering into something ennobling. We must not fear death, but use its inevitability to underscore the transitoriness of the world so that we act now rather than later. He agreed with Carl Rogers that self-actualization was the aim, but that it could be achieved only as a side effect of self-transcendence—surpassing ourselves—in which the conquest of suffering offers the most widely available possibility. We must lead our lives constantly imagining we are on our deathbed looking back, and asking ourselves whether we have lived a life we can be at peace with.

Frankl lived a long life (dying at ninety-two in 1997), and he practiced into old age his twin passions of flying and mountaineering. He liked to
say that whereas Freud, Adler and Jung have given us “depth psychology,” he had given us “height psychology,” “helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence.” He was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. His reply was: “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.”
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Is that a too-easy answer?

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Auschwitz, Apocalypse, Absence

T
he murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War, its systematic and arbitrary nature, was destined to eclipse all other calamities of the twentieth century, including the carnage of the first war, the millions of Russians killed in both wars and Stalin’s purges in between. The Holocaust brought cruelty to a new level. “The great psychological fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the incommunicability of man’s suffering.” This is Lionel Trilling in
The Liberal Imagination
, published in 1950. Better known, perhaps, is Theodor Adorno’s remark, that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But Adorno changed his mind after encountering Paul Célan’s poem “Death Fugue,” and although many people shared Trilling’s bafflement, there were those who sought to confront the horror head-on.

From our point of view, the question that emerges as the most insistent is this: how could people who had perhaps not agreed with Nietzsche before, and continued to believe in God, still carry on believing when evil, cruelty and suffering had reached such epic proportions? How could an omnipotent, benevolent God allow such calamities? Where was God in Auschwitz?

Some statistics first. Before the genocide, most people who would survive the camps had believed in the existence of God; afterward, only 38 percent did. The belief that Jews were a chosen people also suffered: 41 percent held this view before the war, one third afterward. Only 6 percent
of the survivors thought that the creation of Israel, in the wake of the war, had been worth the sacrifice of six million lives.
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In her book
Suffering as Identity
, Esther Benbassa argues that suffering is a part of Jewish identity, that the trials and tribulations undergone by the Jews throughout their history have become part of who they are and that, for many people, for many Jews, the Holocaust fitted into this paradigm. She referred back to the work of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), who argued that “misery and pain are needed in order to awaken the conscience of men and thereby to advance the cause of ethical progress.”

In Nazi Germany that attitude continued, for the ultra-Orthodox produced ready theological responses to anti-Semitism. Ahiezer de Vilna and Elchonon Wasserman, who lived through Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) but died before the death camps, argued that “the whole of history unfolds under God’s aegis,” meaning that even the Nazis were his instruments. De Vilna thought that the Reformed Jews were responsible for what was happening; Wasserman blamed the abandonment of the Torah, assimilation and Zionism, which he regarded as a lack of trust in religion and in God. Both maintained that what was required of the Jews was a turning
to
God, by way of the Torah. “The more the apparent increase in the power of evil and the sterner the chastisement, the closer one was to redemption. Thus Nazis, Zionists, heretics, the assimilated and Reformed Jews were all instruments of the divine plan of salvation.”
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Aharon Rokeach, leader of the Hasidic community in Belz in western Ukraine, whose eldest son was burned alive in a synagogue that the Germans had torched, said: “It is indeed a kindness of the Almighty that I also offered a personal sacrifice.” Suffering, for him, was a form of God’s “hidden grace” that prayer and study of the Torah could “transform into revealed goodness.” Several Hasidic teachers, such as Shem Klingberg when he was in the Plaszow death camp (in a suburb of Kraków), urged the faithful to accept suffering and death “with love, even during the Final Solution.” Even Hasidic rabbis in the Warsaw Ghetto argued that suffering came from God: “It had not been caused by their sins, but was part of his plan for humanity.” Yitshak Weiss, the spiritual head of the Spinka dynasty, in the Maramures region of Romania near the Hungarian border, danced and sang on the train that took him to Auschwitz. “Purify our
hearts,” he prayed, “and we shall serve you in truth.”

Many other examples of this kind of reasoning, having its origin in the Jewish notion of “sanctification of the Name of God,” could be given. Traditionally, in the Talmud, such sanctification can occur only when, by not denying their faith, Jews attain a choice in the manner of their death. This doctrine was amended during the Holocaust. Although Jews scarcely had a choice in their death, Orthodox leaders deemed that they had a choice in the
way
that they died—a choice between death amid degradation and death “with inner peace, nobility of soul, and self-respect.”

To avoid being intimidated into prostitution, which the German military were intent on, ninety-three young women of the Orthodox Bais Yaakov school in Kraków committed suicide by taking poison after reciting one last prayer. Their sacrifice was immortalized by the Hebrew poet Hillel Bavli in a poem that has been incorporated into the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, “in a spirit reminiscent of the medieval custom of liturgizing catastrophes and acts of martyrdom for the instruction of future generations.”
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HITLER, THE NEW NEBUCHADNEZZAR

Ultra-Orthodox arguments went so far as to say that “Hitler was the new Nebuchadnezzar sent by God to chastise his people.” Yoel Teitelbaum cursed the Zionists for behaving in such a way as to precipitate and legitimize the Final Solution—“just punishment for an act of blasphemy, that of initiating a return to Zion on their own and, thereby, acting as substitutes for the awaited Messiah.” Some Hasidic thinkers even saw the mass murder “as ‘the labor pains’ that are to precede the coming of the Messiah.” The movement known as Chabad considered the entire modern age as the dawn of the messianic era, “which could only be preceded by cataclysmic events.”

On this reasoning the genocide was “thought to have saved the people of Israel by amputating one of its gangrenous members . . . the suffering endured by pure, holy beings in this period had been merely temporal. What did it matter when measured against eternal life? . . . To suffer for the love of God—therein lay the significance of being chosen.” Chabad’s
charismatic leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, went furthest, arguing that the genocide had been the work of a “just God” and had been caused by the sins of the Jews, and that God carried out his work “with the help of Hitler, his messenger.”

By no means did everyone accept such reasoning, and in practice there were three alternatives. One had it that God had been
hidden
during the genocide. The second said that God had to be redefined—he was no longer omnipotent or benevolent, or even a “he”; while the third alternative proclaimed that God had been
absent
from Auschwitz and elsewhere “because God was dead.”
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The first argument was put forcibly by the Orthodox rabbi Eliezer Berkovits. His view was that Auschwitz was not unique, because there had been similar disasters in the past that put the Jews’ faith to the test. However, he did not attribute the death camps to Israel’s sins, as did Schneerson and some others. Berkovits accepted that the Final Solution was “an absolute injustice,” but turned to the concept, contained in the Bible, that God had “veiled his face.” On this reasoning, from time to time in history God withdraws, “thereby allowing certain events that he could have prevented to take place.” This withdrawal by God does not mean—or even imply—that he
wanted
these (often terrible) events to occur, but rather it reflects his desire to grant humans greater spiritual freedom.

“Such ‘veiling’ is the price to be paid for the emergence of a moral humanity. . . . It would be impossible to be humane if God were rigorously just.” For Berkovits, the “absence of God” is nothing new—every generation has had its Masada or Auschwitz—suffering is a consequence of free will. As a creator, God is “obliged” to create an imperfect world, while at a personal level “suffering is positive,” it “purifies and deepens the personality.” For Berkovits, the Final Solution was “an attempt to dethrone God,” but the fact that Israel was (re)born on its territory so soon afterward “proves that God is not absent from history.” Many others share Berkovits’s view that Israel, despite its avowedly secular character, is in fact a religious institution: one role of the Jews, and of Jewish suffering, was to lead the Gentiles to God.
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For Irving Greenberg, “all the old truths and certainties, all the old commitments and obligations, have been destroyed by the Holocaust” and any
“simple faith” is now impossible. The Holocaust ended the old era of Jewish covenantal existence and brought in a new one. He terms this “the third great cycle of Jewish history,” after the biblical age and the rabbinic age. In the new dispensation, the Jewish covenant with God is voluntary. On this analysis the building of Israel is not the work of God but of the Jewish people. For Greenberg this meant that God still existed but the understanding of him could no longer owe anything to rabbinic teaching: the people must set the agenda, creating a modern, post-Holocaust religion in which all the old prejudices and oppressions must be dispensed with.

Three theologians—Arthur A. Cohen, Hans Jonas and Melissa Raphael—chose instead to
redefine
God in the wake of the Holocaust. In
The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust
, Cohen argued that traditional notions of a beneficent and providential God could no longer be entertained. For him, God could no longer be understood as a direct causal agent in human affairs. He is a mystery, and it is that mystery which provokes our searching, and that searching which, ultimately, brings about our moral development, because we can no longer ask anything of God.

Hans Jonas, in a work that he admitted was purely speculative, also argued that God can no longer be understood as omnipotent, but rather, that he suffers alongside humankind and “becomes,” just as people do, implying that he needs the actions of people “to perfect the world.” Melissa Raphael suggests that, after the Holocaust, the patriarchal notion of God as almighty and omniscient is simply incompatible with what happened in the death camps, and should be understood rather as “God the mother,” caring, suffering, loving, but not omnipotent. She “secretly sustains the world by her care.”
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A NEW MEANING FOR PRAYER

For many people, it should be said, and as the statistics mentioned at the beginning of this chapter showed, these arguments took some swallowing. That was certainly so for Richard Rubenstein, who in
After Auschwitz
(1966) roundly broke with the classical idea of an omnipotent, benevolent
God, and, echoing Nietzsche, declared that God was dead, that Auschwitz had made any theology espousing Judaism’s traditional providential God “intellectually untenable.” Rubenstein called for traditional theology to be replaced; instead, there should be a positive affirmation of the value of human life “for its own sake, with no theological references. Joy and personal fulfillment have from now on to be sought in this world, rather than in a mystical eschatological future. There is no hope of human salvation for the human race, whose ultimate fate is to return to nothingness.”
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We are finite beings, he insisted, with finite selves. Self-discovery in this world should be our aim. Prayer should no longer be understood as attempts at a dialogue with God but as expressions of our aspirations. If God is to be understood in any way at all it is as a focus, an aide in concentrating “on what is of genuine significance in the business of life.” Rubenstein’s theories upset many in the Jewish community, and he was “exiled.”
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Amos Funkenstein, professor of Jewish studies at the University of California at Berkeley, also criticized the view that the Holocaust was incomprehensible. He thought that historians, psychologists, sociologists and philosophers “ought to make every effort to comprehend the catastrophe and ought to be guided by reasonable expectation that they can comprehend it.” To understand the Holocaust, he insisted, we have to turn “from God to man.”
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Emil Fackenheim, a German refugee who escaped the Nazis and eventually took Canadian nationality, coincided with Rubenstein in his reasoning. In two books,
The Human Condition after Auschwitz
(1971) and
God’s Presence in History
(1970), Fackenheim found the idea of a redemptive God after Auschwitz to be untenable. The imperative now, he said, had to be Jewish
survival
, to remain “alive, resistant and united as a distinct, identifiable people”: “After the death camps, there remains only one supreme value: existence.” In fact, Fackenheim made survival a commandment—the 614th. (Rabbinical Judaism maintains that there are 613 commandments in the Torah.) For him, too, the state of Israel is “a riposte” to Auschwitz, and in that sense redemptive.
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BEING JEWISH WITHOUT GOD: THE RELIGION OF THE HOLO
CAUST

The uniqueness—or otherwise—of the Holocaust has become an important distinguishing factor between religious Jews, especially Orthodox, and secular Jews. For the Orthodox and for practicing Jews, the Final Solution has been incorporated into a long line of Jewish misfortunes and previous ordeals that are part of Jewish history and identity. For many secular Jews, however, who may sympathize with—and approve of—the existence of Israel but have no wish to live there, the Holocaust, Esther Benbassa suggests, has
itself
become the core idea of a new religion, a secular surrogate equivalent but without a God, “a self-sufficient religion with its rites, ceremonies, priests, places of pilgrimage, modern martyrs, rhetoric, and one supreme commandment: the obligation to remember. At the center of this religion stands Auschwitz.”

The adoption of Auschwitz is curious, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of the seventy thousand prisoners there were Russian or Polish prisoners of war, whereas at nearby Birkenau between 1.1 and 1.6 million people were gassed, 90 percent of them Jews. The new religion, Benbassa says, took shape following the Eichmann trial in 1961 and gained strength during the 1967 Six-Day War, when it seemed possible that yet another genocide might occur. “Auschwitz was eventually transformed into a new Sinai: the place where a new Judaism, a Judaism made to order—less constraining, without the onus of Jewish religious practices or Jewish culture—was revealed to man. Jewishness was thus no longer a religious category, properly speaking, but, rather, an ethics adapted to the demands of a modern society in which mixed identities co-exist without discomfiture.” This new Judaism is called the Judaism “of the Holocaust and Redemption,” raising the destruction of the Jews “to the level of an event possessing intense transcendental meaning, while conferring qualities of the same order, redemptive in this case, on the creation of the state of Israel.”