Is there anyone out there ? (part 9)

Submitted by saltysteve on Thu, 05/21/2009 - 18:01

QUESTION : How could God allow the Holocaust?

A very important question, Morry. One that needs to be asked ... and answered.

Where was God between 1933 and 1945 in Germany, in Poland, in Dachau, in Auschwitz?

In the book Faith After the Holocaust, by Eliezer Berkovitz, an Orthodox Jew, we read that there can be no rational explanation for the Holocaust. Jews have to simply keep faith in a God who's activities are hidden from human understanding and can choose to remain silent. He writes 'Perhaps in the awful misery of man will be revealed to us the awesome mystery of God'.

And, ultimately, that is God - a mystery. We can't possibly ever know what is in the mind of God. I find it most difficult to know what is in the mind of my wife, or even in the pea-sized brain of my four year old son!

We do not have the capacity to fully understand God, we can only clutch at the morsels of understanding that he throws at us to help us through the situation in hand. At the end of the day we must just leave it at that and accept the fact in humility and just get on with our lives.

But we can know what is in the mind of man as a whole. It was the evil in the heart of man that engineered and acted out the atrocities of the Holocaust. It was an outcome of man's inhumanity to man, borne out of individual choices for evil rather than good. God allows us to choose between the two, otherwise we'd just be robots, or slaves. If we choose evil, God doesn't interfere with our choice, though, at the end of the day, there will be a final reckoning. Of that you can be absolutely sure of. It may not be in this life but, believe me, it will come.

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