God on Trial
There is a legend that, one night in Aushwitz, the prisoners held a
court, putting God on trial for allowing the Holocaust to happen. As
part of marking Yom HaShoah this past week, my congregation held a
viewing of a PBS film,
God
on Trial, dramatizing this.
It's a powerful film, and at some point I plan to borrow the DVD so I can watch it again. (Viewing conditions weren't great.) It raises many of the usual issues of theodicy, or how God can permit evil in the world, about which I've written some before.
This isn't a review; it's some reactions, not necessarily well-organized.
What are the charges? One character says obviously murder and conspiracy. But in the end, the charge is breach of contract, citing the various passages in torah that promise well-being if we keep the mitzvot and ruin if we don't. Is the covenant with us as individuals or with us as a people? I would like it to be the former; I believe strongly that justice must be individual. (Ok, the torah talks about the sins of the father being visited upon the son too, but that's different from me being punished for some guy down the street who I've got nothing to do with. My father's hypothetical sins can hurt me; that's a little different from saying God will punish me for them.) So I'd like it to be individual, but I don't think that's the torah's view. The torah chronicles a period of nation-building and talks about communal rewards like rain. On the other hand, Yom Kippur is an indiviual day of judgement. On the third hand, that might be more rabbinic than from torah.
If reward and punishment are communal, does that mean that even if the individual victims didn't deserve it, the Jewish people (and others who were targetted, for that matter) as a whole did? Some believe that, but I do not, because I don't think the Shoah was divine punishment (or a divine act at all). Evil deeds are the product of people, not God. Some would hold God accountable; he could have intervened to save us from ourselves but didn't. I think God had to give up some portion of omnipotence in order to allow free will; you can't have both. God didn't want the Shoah; he wept with the world. But God didn't stop it either, and I don't think that makes God evil. The only way to avoid evil is to not permit us to do it, to reduce us from independent, thinking beings to characters in a play. God could have done that, of course, but didn't, and I don't think we get to say that God is at fault when our fellow human beings do evil to us.
So if God is hands-off in the world, what's the point of prayer? I had a new insight during the post-viewing discussion. God does not (today) intervene in the world, stopping natural disasters or keeping planes from crashing or preventing humans from doing evil deeds. But God is available to us in some ways; God doesn't help me with external matters but can very much help me with me. The prayers I pray most strongly are the ones where I ask God to help me be a better person. So yes, God is both hands-off at the macro level and available at the micro level, and that doesn't bother me one bit.
A stray thought: There is a point in the film when a youngish man is talking about how the Nazis murdered his mother and made him bury her. The prosecutor asks if she deserved that, to which he emphatically says no; she was a good person. Someone else then says that when God requires a korban (sacrifice) he requires the best -- the animal without blemish -- and so it is with this woman. This is, I think, the single most offensive idea I heard in this film. How dare someone try to justify a murder by saying, essentially, God wants that.
The film is well-done -- very literate, as one congregant said, but quite accessible to those who don't know the torah well. The main characters had depth to them. The story was compelling. There was a framing story of sorts that I didn't care for at the beginning, but they used it powerfully at the end, so it worked out.
It is, by the way, with some trepidation that I write anything at all about the Holocaust. I'm a convert; my family wasn't targetted, and a voice in the back of my head persists in asking "how dare you?". I don't know if I'll ever be able to change that. For better or for worse, I'm trying to tackle broader issues, not just this instance.
It's a powerful film, and at some point I plan to borrow the DVD so I can watch it again. (Viewing conditions weren't great.) It raises many of the usual issues of theodicy, or how God can permit evil in the world, about which I've written some before.
This isn't a review; it's some reactions, not necessarily well-organized.
What are the charges? One character says obviously murder and conspiracy. But in the end, the charge is breach of contract, citing the various passages in torah that promise well-being if we keep the mitzvot and ruin if we don't. Is the covenant with us as individuals or with us as a people? I would like it to be the former; I believe strongly that justice must be individual. (Ok, the torah talks about the sins of the father being visited upon the son too, but that's different from me being punished for some guy down the street who I've got nothing to do with. My father's hypothetical sins can hurt me; that's a little different from saying God will punish me for them.) So I'd like it to be individual, but I don't think that's the torah's view. The torah chronicles a period of nation-building and talks about communal rewards like rain. On the other hand, Yom Kippur is an indiviual day of judgement. On the third hand, that might be more rabbinic than from torah.
If reward and punishment are communal, does that mean that even if the individual victims didn't deserve it, the Jewish people (and others who were targetted, for that matter) as a whole did? Some believe that, but I do not, because I don't think the Shoah was divine punishment (or a divine act at all). Evil deeds are the product of people, not God. Some would hold God accountable; he could have intervened to save us from ourselves but didn't. I think God had to give up some portion of omnipotence in order to allow free will; you can't have both. God didn't want the Shoah; he wept with the world. But God didn't stop it either, and I don't think that makes God evil. The only way to avoid evil is to not permit us to do it, to reduce us from independent, thinking beings to characters in a play. God could have done that, of course, but didn't, and I don't think we get to say that God is at fault when our fellow human beings do evil to us.
So if God is hands-off in the world, what's the point of prayer? I had a new insight during the post-viewing discussion. God does not (today) intervene in the world, stopping natural disasters or keeping planes from crashing or preventing humans from doing evil deeds. But God is available to us in some ways; God doesn't help me with external matters but can very much help me with me. The prayers I pray most strongly are the ones where I ask God to help me be a better person. So yes, God is both hands-off at the macro level and available at the micro level, and that doesn't bother me one bit.
A stray thought: There is a point in the film when a youngish man is talking about how the Nazis murdered his mother and made him bury her. The prosecutor asks if she deserved that, to which he emphatically says no; she was a good person. Someone else then says that when God requires a korban (sacrifice) he requires the best -- the animal without blemish -- and so it is with this woman. This is, I think, the single most offensive idea I heard in this film. How dare someone try to justify a murder by saying, essentially, God wants that.
The film is well-done -- very literate, as one congregant said, but quite accessible to those who don't know the torah well. The main characters had depth to them. The story was compelling. There was a framing story of sorts that I didn't care for at the beginning, but they used it powerfully at the end, so it worked out.
It is, by the way, with some trepidation that I write anything at all about the Holocaust. I'm a convert; my family wasn't targetted, and a voice in the back of my head persists in asking "how dare you?". I don't know if I'll ever be able to change that. For better or for worse, I'm trying to tackle broader issues, not just this instance.