God, Theology, Israel and the Holocaust.

By Brian Freeman

The Holocaust was the most devastating event in the history of mankind. Hitler’s Nazi Germany killed eleven million people during the Holocaust with six million being Jews. Nazi Germany did not take mercy on men, women or children. They murdered all who where Juden. The Holocaust has left the survivors and the world to ask why? The major question that Jews find to ask themselves is why them? In the movie The Quarrel, the plot revolves around two Jewish Holocaust survivors discussing philosophy, reasoning, and their faith in religion after this horrific event. The two main characters are Hersh and Chaim. Hersh was a Jewish rabbi whose faith was strengthened by his ordeal, and Chaim had escaped the Nazis but lost his faith with the death of his family. In the movie we see many of the issues that the Jews and the theological world debate.

One major issue that comes about is who is to blame. In The Quarrel Chaim blames God for the Nazi Holocaust and states “If I knew God I’d put him on trial.” This brings about a major issue of whether one should blame God for the Holocaust and whether God can be evil. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam traditionally have taught that God is all powerful, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. These claims seem to be in jarring contrast with the fact that there is much evil in the world. Mankind constantly commits evil acts of injury to themselves and others. God appears to be incapable of stopping evil or appears to not want to stop evil acts. This brings the next issue of how to reconcile the existence of this view of God with the existence of evil. This is the problem of evil. The issue that is brought to attention is if God is all powerful. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he is good or at least good in the way that humans understand goodness. Humans are imperfect only having limited knowledge and power. God created the earth and gave humans free will. He placed the power of choice so that those who had yielded obedience might possess eternal salvation. What if the Holocaust was apart of God’s divine plan? Hersh suggests that God punished the Jews for not following the law and being sinful. Chaim strongly disagrees with Hersh’s view stating that even Satan himself could not possibly find a sufficient number of sins that would warrant such genocide. One other view point not mentioned in the movie is the Christian view. One can see the holocaust as the breaking of a covenant, or God’s punishment for Jews forsaking Jesus and seeing this as a symbol for Jews to finally convert.

No matter what belief one has, the Holocaust has had a profound effect on the Jewish religion. The Holocaust created a separation among Judaism and a rejection of Jewish tradition. Those who followed the Jewish culture but not the laws began forming entirely new belief systems. This can be seen in The Quarrel as Hersh relates a story about a train trip he once took. A passenger next to him was a Jewish woman and she said to him in a whisper: “I don’t know who you are mister but I just want you to know how embarrassed I get when I see Jews like you dressed from another century. You make the rest of us look ridiculous. If you have to dress like this, the least you can do is stay at home.” When Hersh said that he was Amish and not Jewish, the woman replied, “I have such respect for you people, the way you keep your traditions.” This can be seen as the Jewish women being ashamed of the Jewish traditions. Her reasons for being ashamed may be because Jewish traditions separated themselves from other cultures. Jews refused to assimilate themselves into other cultures which is one of the reasons why they where persecuted. Jews stood conquered and in diasporas by other nations for hundreds of years. The Western world realized the Jewish people needed to be protected and that they needed their own state.

Israel can be seen as Gods reparations to Jews fulfilling the Torah. The Land of Israel was promised to the Jews as their homeland. The state of Israel was a concept central to Judaism for over three thousand years. The Holocaust and the reestablishment of the State of Israel is a case unique in human history. This event had been predicted by the prophets of the Old Testament and it constitutes the most important single event of the end times.