BOB ABERNETHY: Our Perspectives this week are on the shattering crisis of faith the Holocaust caused and still causes for many of us, especially for many Jews. How could God have permitted such an atrocity to people who believed they had a unique covenant with him? We talked about the changes the Holocaust forced in their concept of God, with theologians Rabbi Irving Yitzh Greenberg of New York and Michael Berenbaum of Los Angeles; also with Florence Singer of Potomac, Maryland, a Holocaust survivor.FLORENCE SINGER (Holocaust Survivor): Where are you, God? Basically, that was the question, where are you? If you exist, where are you? Why are you allowing this?
Dr. MICHAEL BERENBAUM (President & CEO, Shoah Foundation): Traditional Jewish theology has always maintained that there's a relationship between one's behavior and one's fate in the world. The problem when you apply the traditional lessons of prophetic Judaism and of Jewish theology to the Holocaust is you have to speak about what are the sins that would lead to the Holocaust? The moment you enter that world, you enter into a world of obscenity.
Rabbi IRVING YITZH GREENBERG (President, Jewish Life Network): I don't believe that any sin could justify the kind of pain and suffering that was inflicted upon Jews. At some point after -- I would constantly torment myself -- Where was God? Where was God? The answer was obvious -- Where was God? Where would God be, but suffering with God's people? So God was in the concentration camps, God was in the gas chamber being gassed, God was being burned alive at Auschwitz. So I asked the wrong question. The question was not Where was God? That was to me evident; the real question was, Why hadn't God stopped it? And there it seems to me, the answer was, as a believer, at least I came to believe that God was asking me to stop it, that in some sense, the divine message was that the human partner was supposed to stop this.
Dr. BERENBAUM: I think that any view of history has to maintain that God allowed humanity and freedom to shape history. What that means in terms of where God is, I'm not sure. What it means in terms of what our responsibility is, I am sure -- which is that we are the actors in history.Rabbi GREENBERG: We have to come to grips with -- we always thought that this partnership was guaranteed, that God was going to step in and save us from our worst sins, our worst errors, that there was a guaranteed happy ending -- and God was almost our ace in the hole, so to speak, against our worst mistakes. I now have come to believe that God truly believes in freedom, and has given us that freedom.
Dr. BERENBAUM: So, if you ask me if I believe in God, that answer is, I wrestle with God. I confront God. I fight God. I shout at God. I scream at God. I live in tension with God. But do I have the naive belief in God? No. I can't have a naive belief in God. And God can't be naively good either. If we had a naive conception of God, then God was awful, because the God who intervenes in history would've been present.
Rabbi GREENBERG: The fairy tale, the God of the white beard in heaven, all's well with the world, the one who does it all for us, I think is no longer credible, no longer possible. But a mature understanding of a God who loves us and our freedom, who has called us to responsibility, who is with us at every moment, I think such a God, if anything, is more present and maybe more close for maybe having suffered together and having shared our pain infinitely; if anything, is more beloved and maybe more inspiring to follow.
Ms. SINGER: There has to be someone up there, out of sight of the world. There has to be a higher being who oversees and, for whatever reason, is balancing and is preserving us. I don't know.
