Hester Panim - God's hidden face
One of the Traditional approaches to the question of suffering is that God has turned His face away, that He is hidden from human beings. This turning away may be in anger or it may be unexplained - beyond any human knowledge or comprehension. However the result of God's turning His face away is that sometimes catastrophe befalls the Jewish people.
Eliezer Berkovits: The Holocaust and Human Free Will
The hiding of God is present; though man is unaware of him, He is present in his hiddenness. Therefore, God can only hide in this world. But if this world were altogether and radically profane, there would be no place in ot for HIm to hide. He can only hide in history. Since history is man's responsibility... Responsibility requires freedom, but God's convincing presence would undermine the freedom of human decision.
Jonathan Sacks: Evil Free Will and Jewish History
God is powerful not through His interventions in history but through His self restraint...
God reveals His presence in the survival of Israel. Not in His deeds, but in His children. There is no other witness that God is resent in history but the history of the Jewish people.
Richard Rubenstein: The Death of God
1.I believe the greatest single challenge to modern Judaism arises out of the question of God and the death camps. I am amazed at the silence of contemporary Jewish theologians on this most crucial and agonizing of all Jewish issues. How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz? Traditional Jewish theology maintains that God is the ultimate, omnipotent actor i historical drama. It has interpreted every major catastrophe in Jewish history as God's punishment of a sinful Israel. I fail to see how this position can be maintained without regarding Hitler and the SS as instruments of God's will. The agony of European Jewry cannot be likened to the testing of Job. To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, anti-human explosion of all history as a meaningful expression of God's purposes. The idea is simply too obscene for me to accept
2. No man can really say that God is dead. How can we know that? Nevertheless I am compelled to say that we live in the time of the ‘death of God.’ This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God. The death of God is a cultural fact.
3. I believe there is a conception of God… which remains meaningful after the death of God-who-acts-in-history. It is a very old conception of God with deep roots in both Western and Oriental mysticism. According to this conception, God is spoken of as the Holy Nothing. When God is thus designated, he is conceived of as the ground and source of all existence. To speak of God as the Holy Nothingness is not to suggest that he is avoid. On the contrary, he is an indivisible plenum so rich that all existence derives from his very essence. God as Nothing is not absence of being but superfluity of being.
The Suffering of God:
God has been understood by some theologians to be suffering alongside those of His people who suffer. This is also a very ancient idea and can be seen in the rabbis's response to the destruction of the First Temple, where God is understood to have suffered alongside the Israelites and accompanied them into exile.
Colin Eimer: Jewish and Christian Suffering
Is there a sense, then, in which a Jew can talk of the power of suffering love? If we speak of a God who cares, who loves his people, of God as a loving parent, then we have also to speak of God who suffers. In the same breath tha the biblical prophets establish a connection between abandoment of the covenant and consequesnt suffering, they also speak of God's continuing love. The Shekinah, the divine presence, has gone into exile with the people. God will be with them, will not abandon them and will ultimately return them to their land and former glory. To match the tears we weep by the waters of Babylon, God also weeps.
Irving Greenberg: For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New encounter between Judaism and Christianity. P.28
Morally speaking, God could no longer command; but God could lovingly ask for Israel’s partnership. And Jewry has responded and taken up that partnership again….
The fundamental basis of covenant is that out of divine love for humanity, God privileges human dignity and freedom over human obedience. Since the divine goal is to achieve the fullness of human life and capacity, then partnership is essential – because freedom and dignity cannot be bestowed; they must be earned. Therefore, God has self-limited and has invited humans to become partners in the process of perfecting the world. In choosing to redeem reality through the covenental methods, God turns away from three alternative responses to the gap between the ideal and the real world. The Divine denounces coercion of humanity to serve God; nor does God the Lord program human beings to do only the right thing; nor God give up the vision of a perfected world that sustains the full value of human life. The divinely intended outcome of the cosmic process is the creation of a human being with a fulfilled image of God – a creature truly of infinite value, equal, and unique, living in a world that fully sustains these dignities. Whatever the role of command or use of reward and punishment in the interim stages of covenant, the ultimate logic of covenant is a voluntary state.
Emil Fackenheim: The Holocaust and the Commanding Voice
The 614th Commandment
What does the voice of Auschwitz command:
Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler posthumous victories. They are
commanded to survive as Jews lest the Jewish people perish. They
are commanded to remember the victims of Auschwitz lest their
memory perish. They are forbidden to despair of man and his world,
and to escape into either cynicism or otherworldliness, lest they
cooperate in delivering the world over to the forces of Auschwitz. Finally,
they are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish.