This question, which has been asked again and again in the decades since World War II, has always been a huge challenge for ultra-Orthodox thinkers * They saw people losing their faith because of the Holocaust, and feared the drift * Their answers ranged from blaming the sins of the Jewish people, through the "hide the face" theory to To the conclusion that man cannot understand the logic of God's actions * This is how the ultra-Orthodox deal with the great disaster of the Jewish people
Avishai Ben-Haim
It is not clear how, and above all why, but the Holocaust and through the remembrance of the terrible tragedy of the Jewish people became to a considerable extent an arena of intra-Jewish polemics, an arena of quarrels between the ultra-Orthodox and the secular. Every year on Holocaust Day, the ultra-Orthodox are asked to face many questions that provoke discussion and controversy, such as why don't they stand for the siren? (Although at least in public places the vast majority are standing) Why did rabbis order Haredim in the diaspora not to immigrate to Israel? How is it that there were important rebbes who fled and left their followers behind? In response, the ultra-orthodox developed a host of fascinating answers. They were not content with that and raised their own questions, provoking discussion and controversy no less: whose heroism is better? Of the ghetto rebels and partisans or of the ultra-Orthodox in the camps, who struggled to maintain their faith and the laws of their religion under impossible conditions? Did the Zionist leadership prefer not to save Haredim from the Holocaust? And above all: Who is to blame for the Holocaust?
But the question of the questions was and remains: where was God in the Holocaust? Even 59 years later, the search continues for an answer to this inevitable question and its implications: "Righteous and evil to him?" ” and “Why did God do this to the people of Israel? ". Over the years, many ultra-Orthodox thinkers have invested efforts to deal with the Holocaust and provide answers that would explain, if only a little, the ear.
This is not a new theological issue. The days of the "righteous and evil" question are the days of the human race. There is also no novelty in the fact that throughout history the Jewish people have been persecuted and suffered physical discrimination in their struggles against other peoples and other religions, which made it possible, for example, to present the terrible situation of the Jews in exile as evidence of the righteousness of Christianity.
Despite this, the ultra-Orthodox thinkers and leaders were required to embrace their fevered minds and present new answers following the fears and threats of the Holocaust. Perhaps it was due to the fact that the unimaginable power of the disaster in the Holocaust was compounded by the fact that for the first time in Jewish history every Jew was faced with the alternative of a different Jewish identity, a secular-Zionist one, that pushed aside religion and its commandments as well as God.
The ultra-Orthodox thinkers heard the voices of those who formed their secularism around the claim of loss of faith in God following the Holocaust, and of those who formed their Zionism around the claim of divine non-help for the Jews in the Holocaust, and feared the drift. The rabbis were called upon, therefore, to find answers to this question. Although they also raised answers to the many other questions related to the issue of the Holocaust and which were mentioned above, but since the canvas will be shortened to deal with all those complex issues, the following review will deal with a collection of the answers of the ultra-Orthodox to the most problematic question of all: "Where was God in the Holocaust? "
The all-Jewish iniquity
Not surprisingly, the general direction was the search for all-Jewish iniquity that led to God bringing the Holocaust upon the Jews. Among the first to do this was Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman, one of the most prominent ultra-Orthodox thinkers of all generations, who himself perished in the Holocaust. In his essay "Aqbata Damshikha" Rabbi Wasserman analyzed the spiritual situation of the Jews before the Holocaust, when many Jews followed ideologies such as socialism and nationalism, and wrote: "These days the Jews have chosen two foreign jobs for them: socialism and nationalism. The theory of the new nationalism can be defined in a vigorous shorthand: 'We will be like the Gentiles'. All that is required of a Jew is national feeling. He who weighs the shekel and sings the 'Tikvah' is exempt from any mitzvot in the Torah. It is clear that this method is considered foreign worship according to the Torah. A miracle happened, in the heavens these two foreign works were combined into one: National Socialism. They created from them a staff of fury and the threat of the Jews in all corners of the country. The impurities we worshiped are the ones that plague us."
Even the Rabbi of Satmar, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the most eloquent and extreme expositor of the ultra-orthodox opposition to Zionism, did not understand the difficulty of finding those responsible for the Holocaust. The Rebbe of Satmar placed at the center of the year of resistance to Zionism the text "Three Weeks". The oaths appear as part of the explanations in the Gemara to the verse from the "Song of Songs": "I have sworn to you daughters of Jerusalem - if you wake up and if you awaken love until you desire".
The oaths are explained as a prohibition for the people of Israel (the woman) to arouse the redemption (love) before her time comes. The three main oaths mentioned as the ones that God swore Israel not to do are: "that Israel will not go up the wall", "that they will not rebel against the nations of the world" and "that they will not delay the end". The meaning: the oaths prohibit the Jews from excessive political activism and place the state of exile as a situation that the people of Israel cannot and are not allowed to change, certainly not by political means, certainly not by means of force, and even more so not through Zionism.
And so the Rebbe of Satmar wrote: "And here in front of Israel in all generations, when a time of trouble came to Jacob, they inquired and demanded what it is and what it is for? What iniquity caused this to happen? And now in this generation of ours, there is no need to search and ask in the treasures for the iniquity that brought us this trouble, because it is visible and explicit in the words of the Sages, who told us this in the interpretation they taught that by breaking the oaths not to climb the wall and not to push the Kachani loose your flesh like armies And as the field maidens. And in our many iniquities it was. The species and the heretics made all kinds of efforts to break these oaths, to climb the wall and take from themselves government and freedom before the time, which is the push for the end, and they continued (pulled) the majority of the Israelites to this impure idea."
Rabbi Ovadia's theory
The fact that the witnesses of the Holocaust came from Europe and that the members of the Mizrah ethnic group, in the vast majority, were saved from it, suited many ultra-Orthodox thinkers and preachers, who explained that the Sephardi were saved because the weight of the Enlightenment movement and secularism was incomparably lower among them. For example, Rabbi Israel Ya'akov Kanievsky wrote in "The Steifler": "And we see this as the finger of God, because the beginning of the unloading of the yoke, mercifully, in an organized manner, was initiated in Ashkenaz, and from there it spread to the rest of the countries, and measure by measure, because the decree to kill and lose all the Jews, mercifully, came from that country. ". In recent years, the spiritual leader of Shas, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has also provided two answers of his own to explain the occurrence of the Holocaust. In one of them he said that "the six million who were killed in the Holocaust are reincarnations of people who sinned in the previous incarnation". In the second, a few weeks ago, he blamed secularism and assimilation for the Holocaust.
Among other things, Rabbi Ovadia said that the fact that Jews before the Holocaust were "without the Torah, without mitzvot, went and mingled with the Gentiles, learned their language" caused the Holocaust to occur, since by their actions they provoked God's anger. "These actions that they would have done brought about the destruction of God's face, brought about everything that was done to us." He blamed the secular and assimilated Jews who "left the Torah, left the religion", that "righteous" Jews also perished in the Holocaust because of them.
But even if the listeners were convinced of whose fault the Holocaust happened, the question still remains as to how it was made possible by God, who is supposed to be both "all-knowing" and "all-powerful", but also "good". Some have found an answer in the "hide the face" theory, according to which during the Holocaust God deliberately hid himself and his intervention and supervision in the world. This is based on the verses of the divine prophecy from the number of "Deuteronomy" which warn that when the people of Israel will follow a "foreign god" then "my soul will sin against him on that day and I will leave you and hide my face from them. . . And I will hide myself and hide my face on that day.
The last Rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Rabbi of Lubbitch, tried to give a different answer. He stated that God "is exalted and arrogant to the point that no creature is able to understand the logic of his judgments". The Lubavitcher Rebbe compared the human observation of God's actions to a layman's observation of the actions of a surgeon.
"With all the terrible pain in this tragedy, it is clear that 'no evil comes down from above,' and within the evil and the suffering of the troubles lies a spiritual and sublime good, even though no human being can achieve it, it exists in all its force. Thus, there is also the possibility that a physical Holocaust will be a spiritual good, because that the areas of the body and mind are not necessarily parallel", he wrote.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe removed the Holocaust from the realm of human judgment and explained: "On the contrary, there is a possibility that physical damage to the body will be good and spiritual salvation. Imagine a person who stumbles into the hospital and enters an operating room. Before him a horrifying picture emerges: a man with paws is lying on the operating table and around him are about ten masked people, holding knives and preparing to amputate one of his limbs. If this guest's knowledge of medicine, and everything related to this subject, is zero, then this person is certain that he is a witness to a cannibalistic phenomenon, and all this because he does not understand medicine at all and does not know the condition of the patient in the past, present and future.
"Had he known that the same limb that was about to be amputated was functioning beyond repair and endangering the patient's life and that in order to save his life the doctors, led by the professor, must operate and amputate the infected limb - because then he would not have cried out. And as a parable, the parable goes like this: God Almighty, like that professor, dissects, knows what is before him and wants the best of Israel, it is clear that everything he did was done for the good."
Punishment, not revenge
To the obvious follow-up question - why, then, did ultra-orthodox Jews who did not need "surgery" also perish in the Holocaust - Rabbi Malovevich replied on behalf of the Chabad Rebbe who preceded him, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson: "A person who was punished for an act he did, Receives a slap in the cheeks even though the bad deed was done by his own hands. And this is because the punishment does not come as revenge, God forbid, but so that he corrects his actions. Therefore, initially a light punishment is tried, and only if it is not enough the educator is forced to punish severely so that the punishment will bring the trainee to correct his actions. And in order for the punishment to be effective and affect the correction of a person's actions, it is given inside, the core of a person, and so was the people of Israel, apart from being punished with a severe punishment in terms of quantity, the punishment was seven times more severe when it affected the public that was the face of the generation." Many ultra-orthodox rabbis tried to find points of light in the great darkness. One of them, Rabbi Eliezer Shech, who led the Lithuanian public, once told what he considered a bright spot in the Holocaust: "During the Holocaust, I thought, I am happy that I am from the people of the murdered and not from the people of the murderers."
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Spaniards also perished in the Holocaust. All Sephardic Greek Jewry. as well as many Tunisian and Libyan Jews. Anyone who writes here against Ashkenazim is evil and a racist, who tries to use the Holocaust to promote an agenda of hating the other.
And now, to the subject of the Holocaust itself: "Why was there a Holocaust? Instead of the easy explanation, which interpreted the disasters as heavenly punishment, the Lubavitcher Rabbi read it differently. There are things that happen in the world as a result of a divine command that should not be interpreted with the tools of human logic. Even great scholars, even righteous people who are close to God, cannot find any reason in such events.
For example, who can explain why one of the great scholars of the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva, was murdered in such a brutal way by the Romans? Why were the "Ten Royal Deaths" executed with severe torture? When Moshe Rabbino foresaw these things and asked the Holy One, blessed be He, for an answer, he responded with the words: "Shut up, that's what came to mind."
There is no logical explanation for the Holocaust, said the Lubavitcher Rebbe, except for the fact that it was the will of the Holy One, blessed be He. It was a difficult time of divine concealment, of "in a small moment I left you". We should not look for explanations, but simply bleed in front of the unfathomable event, which is beyond the capacity of human understanding.
And through the tears, it is important to remember the bright spot: when Jews are in pain, in a certain sense the Holy One, blessed be He, also experiences pain. He is also crying. As the verse says: "With him I am in trouble." (Beit Chabad website).
No one in his faith will live
Yoel Krois, the leader of the Jews
Everything follows the majority even in the legality of the world, the law is determined according to the majority of the behavior of the molecules and not on those who are Uat Law, the majority came out of the framework of Jews and in such teachings there is no divine providence and therefore the majority was annihilated
Rebbe of Lubbitch, leader of the Jews
Rebbe Melo
Two very simple Jewish answers:
(1) The Tanna Elisha ben Abuya ("another"): There is no God!
(2) Maimonides: You have no way of understanding God's finches. I don't know.
Michael Rothschild:
About 65 million people were killed in World War II. But only the killing of the Jews is called the Holocaust. In major natural disasters, entire cities are sometimes destroyed, there are cases of car accidents or other disasters in which an entire family is wiped out and no one thinks to call it a holocaust. G-d was in the holocaust in the same place he is always - everywhere, no place at all. The holocaust only has meaning if the existence of the Jewish people has meaning, because otherwise it is just a sad but coincidental collection of gruesome deaths in the war like all the other deaths in the years 1939-1945 and in general. And the only meaning for the existence of the Jewish people is Judaism, i.e. the Jewish religion, i.e. belief in G-d and His Torah.
And since he is the cause of the causes and the cause of the causes, the Holocaust also came from him. Why? I am short of explaining what the crime of a child or a woman or a family - a town - a district - a country - a continent - six million. Is it as part of reward and punishment for the people of Israel? Is it so that the remnant of the exodus will arise from the place where it was or is, perhaps as part of the divine planning of the redemption (on a historical level it is clear to any observer that there was no chance that the nations would allow the establishment of the State of Israel without their feelings of guilt from the murder they were complicit in by act or omission). I have no idea, but it is clear to me that everything is part of His blessed plan, and I don't doubt it at all even when I don't understand it and when it hurts me to death. Because he is the absolute best and the best has made his way to the top.
You brought two links that incite religious Jews (Orthodox) with hatred similar to the hatred that led to the holocaust (go away, don't respond, I'm not writing this in anger or to argue but only with pain from my heart to draw attention). If I force you to read Psalms instead of standing at the siren or set aside a day for fasting or Torah study for the upliftment of the souls of the victims, will you do it? (Rhetorical question - don't answer me) In your liberal world, will you receive an instruction that requires you to observe Shabbat in your sole possession and Shabbat is much more sacred to me than the siren is holy to you or even in the collective possession of your friends (and don't tell me that Bar Ilan is closed on Shabbat - anyone who travels to Bar Ilan on Shabbat Consider those who walk when the siren sounds in Dizengoff - this is an act of anger and must be condemned in both cases).
There is no difference between doing on fire and (for example) the journalistic articles about sports shows on Holocaust Day (or differentiating from other days that are sacred to Jews) see for example:
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4952462,00.html
What is most absurd is that the people who ask where God was, fly to Berlin during the Passover holiday, drive in Audis, wear Hugo Boss, say that the Germans today have changed and are a different people and not all of them were Nazis and just soldiers and followed orders and compare them to the 'Israeli occupation' and are angry at all the dark and primitive people who speak for revenge…
Where was God you ask? Why don't you dare face the questions such as where was Ben-Gurion and the Zionist movement? And where were the enlightened ones from the West and your friends from America? And where was the man?
Friend, when will you understand that God is everything, he is us, he is the holocaust, he is time and he is space. He who is time has no time because he is this. And as soon as we understand the unity of our awareness and a small part of awareness sees itself as separate and prays to itself, to the one awareness, doesn't it emanate an egotistical stench?
In this issue we proceed from the assumption that there is a God.
It may be that there is not and was not God.
The Holocaust in question is the last Holocaust for the Jewish people, but it is not the first Holocaust.
The question of 'where is God' has been asked in the past - and as a result all kinds of theories were born that talk about the next world, reincarnations and all kinds of things of this kind (the whole world is a very narrow bridge...).
The answer to the question is simple - there is no God.
I don't think there is a question here of where God was in the Holocaust, but of course God does not force a person to do an act and of course Hitler has a free choice (see Rambam Halchot Tosheba, Sefer Hamada, Mishna Torah) a large number from Europe whose ancestors were the barbarians and unfortunately for every person he has Tendency to be like his ancestors and a large part of Europe they have the cunning of the barbarians since the time of Greek mythology the Jews in general were in exile God will punish his people because some of them are being assimilated it is forbidden to say such a thing we would not have been there and we did not do statistics if the people were mostly secular I think the Nazis would have won Their name has the barbarism of their ancestors, this is their soul. The Jewish people should have ascended to the land of Hasharel because this is the source of energy for mercy at its highest and this is our destiny in this land.
3 million Polish and Lithuanian Jews perished in the Holocaust, most of whom were religious and had yeshiva with tens of thousands of students. What did they sin? And a million and a half children who have not sinned and righteous women.
3 million Polish and Lithuanian Jews perished in the Holocaust, most of whom were religious and had yeshiva with tens of thousands of students. What did they sin? And a million and a half children who have not sinned and righteous women.
My uncle and Shlomi
Do you say that God tortures and kills the children of those who have sinned? Are God's actions immoral?
I would appreciate two short answers. Simple questions - the answers should also be simple.
Why did the Ashkenazim have a holocaust?
If you have noticed, most of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim do not marry the Sephardim, and most of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim do not sell apartments to the Sephardim in the Land of Israel, and most of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim say about the Sephardim that the Sephardim are Gentiles. And there is no wrongdoer, and these are the ones who come against a man's wife, and who whitewashes the face of his friend in many ways, and who calls his friend a bad name.
And what about someone who gives a bad name to a friend who goes down to hell and does not come up, all the more so, who says about an entire community in Israel that they are Gentiles, or that it is forbidden to marry them, or that it is forbidden to sell them an apartment in the Land of Israel, that is much worse than calling a friend a bad name. And this is what many ultra-Orthodox do. Ashkenazim. So, all the Ashkenazim who say this about the Sephardim have no part in the next world, that they go down to hell and never come out of there, no matter who it is. There are two options for the same person to have a part in the next world: one - to repent, and the other - to be killed by He is not a Jew, because he is a Jew. God is as merciful as he is, God wants that in the next world there will also be some of these Ashkenazim, who will probably not return, to this day many Ashkenazim say of the Sephardim that they are gentiles, etc., therefore God decided, blessed be He, to take them to heaven About six million Ashkenazim, by me, to be killed by gentiles, so that they will be among them in the next world, although not all the Ashkenazim said this about the Sephardim, but instead of such great wicked people, good and bad, they die, whoever has it in his hand to protest and does not do so, is caught in the same sin .
Those who want proof that there is hell, can go on days, Sunday to Thursday night to the Mount of Solitude in Jerusalem, and hear what screams there are, standing in the middle of a plot of graves, and hear people screaming and crying.
Shlomi, what is it made of God, concrete?
If you were a little wiser, you would understand that it is because of all the sins the Jews committed before the Holocaust and what God said to Moshe, our rabbi, that if Israel forgets His covenant, He will do such a thing, and all the sins of the Jews before the Holocaust caused the Holocaust
It's like you saying why there are nuclear bombs and a nuclear threat to Israel and where is God, it's because of all our terrible sins that we commit every day and you still have the audacity to say where was God, you should learn some Torah, get educated and then you'll understand where God was, you brat.
And of course you ran away from the subject itself
You already said you are a robot and there is no need for you to repeat it
If you don't believe that is your right (not really but you can think so).
But don't try to come to a person who believes in God and ask him where God was,
Because for us God is the only one who can decide the future of anything He created,
And if he decided that a person will have more rights than computers, or not, we have no choice but to accept.
Sometimes atheism is just as blinding as religion.
My uncle:
There is nothing about the Holocaust that I don't understand.
People who were brainwashed by an ideology that placed certain laws outside the realm of human scrutiny were behaving madly.
I still encounter this today.
It is clear that the dimensions of the Holocaust cannot be compared with the dimensions of the persecutions in other periods and from your words it is also clear that you do not understand this.
Are you willing to explain to me what was the crime of the hundreds of thousands or millions of babies and children who were murdered?
"Even Moses was punished!"???
Allow me to doubt this: in my opinion he did not exist at all and I would not define non-existence as a punishment - certainly not for an act he did when he did not exist.
Have you seen videos demonstrating the results of the "information" received by the ultra-Orthodox about the Holocaust.
Why should I try to see what this "information" consists of after it so clearly failed the result test (which is expressed both in the films and in the fact that you personally do not understand what is special about the Holocaust)?
I did not slander anyone - I showed videos in which the actors are your friends.
The fact that you are trying to teach us to take an example from the computer is nothing but an example of the kind of zombies to which religion degenerates man.
You really act like a robot.
So maybe you can explain to me what is more incomprehensible to you about the Holocaust than all the persecutions that the people of Israel went through and that even Moses was punished for not fully following God's commandments,
And stop slandering the ultra-Orthodox for not remembering the Holocaust, if almost every ultra-Orthodox reading book mentions the Holocaust even if it is unrelated
And by the way, for example, a computer does not get angry if the person who created it kicks it if it does not work as expected of it or when the person gives it immoral instructions in its opinion, it can at most display a message about it (prayer)
My uncle:
If the question is retarded - maybe you have an answer that is not retarded?
Perhaps you can also explain these phenomena:
http://www.mynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4063338,00.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbiaPBdLL4E
As far as I'm concerned, the explanation is clear - they avoid preserving the memory of the Holocaust because they know it might bring people back to their sanity - precisely because the "retarded" question posed by the article will arise in their minds.
This whole question is retarded! It's like asking why a six-month-old child falls and gets hit