Reasoning the Holocaust: On God and Evil in Jewish Thought

Efforts to understand- 'reason'-the Holocaust have ranged from claims of the impossibility of explaining or even describing it (thus as literally unspeakable) to assertions of its historical probability or inevitability, given its place in European or German, and Jewish, history. That issue is the more pressing for Jewish thought in its commitment to the role of God in history; the classic 'problem of evil' finds an omnipotent and beneficent God confronted by atrocity and human suffering, magnified in the Holocaust by the act of genocide. The discussion here, epitomized in the question, 'Where was God in Auschwitz?', considers the varieties of Jewish response to that question-as also they range from confessions of incomprehensibility to claims of justice exacted for human failings, verging finally on the possibility of limitation for even divine powers.

Since 2005, Berel Lang has been Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Letters at Wesleyan University. He was previously Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado and the State University of New York at Albany (and Director of the Center for the Humanities). Dr. Lang received his B.A from Yale University in 1954, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1961.