עמו אנכי בצרה, פתח דברWith God in Hell, Preface
א׳
1Some time after the publication of my book, Faith After the Holocaust, and after having delivered numerous lectures on that subject, I came to the realization that while I had attempted to show how it was possible to maintain one’s faith in spite of the fact that not all the problems emanating from the Holocaust can be solved, I had overlooked dealing with the key issue, with the question: What is faith? There were some significant references to the question in my writing, but a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the faith of the authentic Jew was lacking. Not only was I remiss in this respect, but other writers were, too. Questions were asked: How is it possible still to believe in divine providence after what happened in the ghettos and the concentration camps? If, indeed, there is a God, how could He have remained silent in view of the Germans’ inhuman bestiality, of a kind previously unknown in the annals of man? These were, of course, valid questions. However, both those who denied the possibility of belief in a providential divine power after what had happened, and those, too, who affirmed it in spite of everything, forgot to deal with the most important aspect of this awesome issue — the essence of faith within the system of Judaism.
ב׳
2This realization came to me as the result of a conversation with someone whom I met on the flight home to Chicago after a scholars’ conference in New York. I found myself sitting beside a gentleman who turned out to be the cultural director of a Jewish secular organization. He was familiar with my previous book on the Holocaust and in the course of our conversation he told me the following episode. On a Holocaust memorial day, his organization’s guest speaker, a rabbi, declared that in view of what happened in the concentration camps and the crematoria, he could no longer believe in God. His confession greatly upset the audience. I told my neighbor that it was not clear to me why the members of his organization should have been so deeply perturbed by the rabbi’s statement. After all, theirs was a secular group. His answer was: “Many of them were concentration camp survivors,” and for him this was a sufficient explanation. He meant to say that these survivors, who might well have lost their faith as a result of their experiences, were angered by this “successful” American rabbi’s facile dismissal of the possibility of faith in God. They must have thought, “This man, who grew up in the most prosperous country on earth, who never went hungry to bed, whose life was, most probably, never seriously threatened, who never spent a day in a ghetto or a concentration camp, who never watched the clouds of smoke over the crematoria, he is lecturing to us about loss of faith! What does he know of the anguish of the believing Jew who loses his faith because he is so overwhelmed by the inhumanity of man that he can no longer believe!”
ג׳
3I began then to understand that we have been talking and writing about faith lightly, without fully appreciating what we were about. Suddenly I saw before me tens of thousands of Jews for whom Judaism was the sustaining well of their entire existence — Jews for whom the loss of faith was, indeed, a greater disaster than the loss of all their wordly possessions. I could not help thinking of the multitude of Jews who, having lost their faith as well as their lives in the gas chambers, pleaded before the heavenly court: “Almighty God! We can forgive You everything that was done to us on Your polluted earth. Only one thing we cannot forgive: that You did not look after our faith in You; that You allowed such trials to be heaped upon our heads to which our faith was unable to stand up!”
ד׳
4That survivors, who had lost their faith, could be deeply hurt by the facile disbelief of one completely alien to their own experience made one doubt that the modern Western Jew knew what he was talking about when he spoke of belief or disbelief. This made it a demanding necessity to attempt to unravel the mystery of faith with the help of numerous testimonies to its continued manifestations, even in the ghettos and the concentration camps. Forever preoccupied with the problem of faith after the Holocaust, many of us often overlook the fact that in the ghettos and concentration camps there were untold numbers of Jews who to the very end lived and died as Jews. We know of many thousands who walked to the mass graves and the gas chambers with the dignity of an all-conquering trust in the God of Israel and in the future of the Jewish people, and with the superior knowledge of the ultimate defeat of the Nazi monster. Only by making the effort of establishing empathetic contact with the authentic Jew of the ghettos and the camps dare we hope to gain some inkling of the mystery of Jewish faith, and a more significant understanding of the nature of Judaism and of the historic destiny of the Jewish people.
ה׳
5Eliezer Berkovits
ו׳
6Jerusalem, July 1978