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.