My Search for God and Judaism

Today, I walked by the New Synagogue in Dresden, Germany. The modernist cement architecture appears to be a dramatic break with Dresden’s Baroque architecture. The synagogue was built on the grounds of the Semper Synagogue, which the Nazis destroyed during a pogrom known as Kristallnacht, in 1938, just prior to the outbreak of World War II. The wall surrounding the New Synagogue incorporates fragments from the Semper Synagogue. The New Synagogue is located on the boundary of the downtown heart of Dresden. This downtown area was destroyed in the World War II firebombing of the city in 1945, but it has since been rebuilt to replicate the glory of its Baroque past.

New Synagogue, Dresden, Germany (Mishkabear)

The New Synagogue is a fitting metaphor for Judaism, a religion firmly based in its ancient traditions and rituals but a religion that ever evolves to meet the requirements of the present. Judaism is deeply rooted in a reverence for its history, while, at the same time, it responds to the difficult questions that its history presents, particularly questions about God.

Learning About the Holocaust

As I was growing up, my father spoke often of his interest in World War II. My father’s interest in the war also extended to the Holocaust. Though my family is not Jewish, my father had a profound respect for the suffering that the Jews have endured throughout history and particularly in the Holocaust. My father spoke of the deep questions of life and its meaning in the context of the Holocaust.

One of the central points in Karen Armstrong’s book A History of God is that people’s conceptions of God change as time goes by. She writes about how for many people in the modern world, however, God is dead, to borrow Nietzsche’s words. That is to say our idea of God has not evolved as quickly as our history has. Our view of God has not adapted to keep pace with the complex questions that the modern world has presented.

My Idea of God When I Was Child

I remember very distinctly a conversation that I had with my grandmother when I was about six or seven years old. My grandmother was driving, and I was riding in the passenger seat. I turned to her and asked bluntly if she believed in God. She said that of course she did and wondered why I would ask. I told her that I didn’t believe in God because there was no evidence that he existed.

As a child, the idea of God was very unsatisfying to me. God did not seem present in or relevant to my life. It was difficult for me to believe that God had created people only to sit in judgment of his creation, doling out punishments for bad behavior and rewards for good behavior. Didn’t he already know what we would do since he had created us? If he wished us to be different, wouldn’t he just have created us differently? If there were a God, I questioned why God had created such cruel people and a difficult world. These types of questions are still fundamental to my search for God.

The Holocaust and God

The Holocaust has come to represent the totality of the questions I have about God, which are the foundation of my spirituality and my struggle towards belief. My interest in the Holocaust also evolved into an interest in the history of the Jews and their beliefs, particularly how they reconcile their faith with the reality of the Holocaust. I read the history of the Jews, and I touch the holy parts of the human struggle for dignity and meaning and truth—the search for God. Judaism resonates for me because it does not deny the difficult obstacles to faith presented by history.

After the Holocaust, Jews have sought to reconcile humanity’s blatant demonstration of its capacity for evil with God’s silence in response to such evil. One of the basic tenets of Judaism is the affirmation of the world God created. After the Holocaust, Jews began to question God and his creation: Where was God during the Holocaust? Why would God allow this grand atrocity? Was the idea of a Biblical God of history, a God who intervened in history to help the Jews, no longer relevant?

Holocaust Memorial, Miami, Florida (mahler711)

The traditional Jewish belief is that there is one God and that the Jews are his chosen people. God singled out the Jewish people and asked them to accept him, Yahweh, as their one and only God and to assume the great yoke of responsibility that he assigned to them. God made a covenant with Abraham, promising to make his descendants into a great nation, to bless people who blessed them and to curse people who cursed them. God also promised the Jews the land of Israel.

Jewish Response to the Holocaust

The Jewish response to the Holocaust has both affirmed and denied this tenant of chosenness. Either God chose, or at least allowed, the Jews to endure the great suffering of the Holocaust, or there is no God and hence no God to single out the Jews. If there is a God, what is the nature of God who would allow his chosen people to suffer this horror?

I’ve struggled with the question of whether there is a purpose of which humankind is a part of or whether life is just the groping of a callous evolutionary process.  Despite the ultimate answer to this, I believe that it is up to us to create meaning out of suffering, some purpose out of confusion, and to swing the tables in favor of a just universe, a decent God. Perhaps the world is purposely flawed, as part of a grand design to push us to struggle, seek, and stretch beyond our limited perceptions and actions. It ultimately matters not whether God designed the world this way or whether the world is just randomly and purposelessly this way; it is inherently flawed, and I believe that we must do what we can to repair it.

The World Is Good

Judaism posits that God created a world that is good. Creation is good, and life is worthwhile. Nevertheless, Judaism affirms life at the same time that it seeks to improve it. There is a concept in Judaism called tikkunolam—an impetus to repair the world. Judaism recognizes the world’s brokenness and seeks to make it better and thus make life better. It is Jews’ sacred calling to repair the world to a more holy state by seeking to correct suffering and injustice. Throughout their history, Jews have looked deep within and beyond their difficult circumstances, which have involved centuries of persecution and expulsion from various lands, to discover what lessons their struggles have to teach them.

Jews have lived in the Diaspora for many centuries. This is one of the reasons that there is no central governing authority in Judaism. The Torah is the foundation of the religion, and various rabbis have interpreted the Torah over the centuries, which has evolved a religion that values intellectual inquiry. Belief in God is not even a prerequisite to be an observant Jew.  There is a story that I heard a while ago on the Speaking of Faith radio program about a rabbi who approached a rabbinical student studying the Torah in a coffee shop. The rabbi asked the student if he believed in God. The student answered, “Of course.” The rabbi responded, “Well, I don’t, so let’s debate.”

Judaism is action centered rather than dogma centered. Though there are no particular beliefs all Jews must subscribe to, Judaism centers around the hallowing of life through rituals. Jewish rituals include the celebration of various rites of passage, holidays, prayers, blessings, observation of the Sabbath, and the keeping of the law of kashrut (kosher). There is disagreement among the various denominations of Judaism, from Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, to Reconstructionist, about which of the rituals are applicable to Jews’ lives today and to what extent these rituals should be practiced.

Torah scroll (FourTwentyTwo)

An Outsider to All Religions

I had an epiphany of sorts as I was driving home from attending my first synagogue service a couple of years ago. I was enamored with the beauty of, and spirit of reverence in, the synagogue. I was caught up in wishing that the Torah were actually the word of God and that the Jews had it “right.” But then it occurred to me that this was a hollow way of thinking about religion; it did not matter if the objective truth of the religion were verifiable—because really what religion could pass that test?—but only that the subjective experience of the religion provided comfort and solace to and elevated the lives of the believers.

After this experience of the synagogue, I did some research on the requirements for conversion to Judaism. Judaism appeals to me because of its non-dogmatic approach, its reverence for questioning, its grappling with the profound difficulties of living, and its foundation in ancient wisdom. Judaism does not seek converts, which is likely a consequence of the Jews’ own difficult history of being continually persecuted and outcast from societies. There is also the question of what makes one a Jew—that is, is being Jewish a matter or belief or race? Finding a rabbi who is willing to mentor one through the long conversion process is also difficult.

This process of conversion to Judaism is starkly contrasted with the conversion process to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints faith of my extended family members. I was raised in a non-religious home, but I was baptized into the LDS faith. My extended family is Mormon and my husband is Mormon, so I am versed in many of the beliefs and the culture. Also, to the extent that a person’s religion is based on culture, I suppose I am in part LDS. Converting to Mormonism is fairly easy because Mormons believe that in order to participate in the full glory of the afterlife, a person must convert to the LDS faith. Mormons believe God wants them to convert as many people to the faith as possible.

The difficulty I have had with the LDS tradition is its exclusive claims to truth and literal interpretation of scriptures. At the same time that I worked as an intern at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum several years ago, I was exploring Mormonism more fully. Knowing that I was working at the museum, the Mormon missionaries I had been talking with told me that they looked forward to the day when the Jews would receive the fullness of the Gospel. I stopped my earnest investigation of Mormonism at that point.

I feel like an outsider to all religions, and I’ve come to terms with that. I see my journey as a personal one to experience the mystery of God on my own. I think everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is on this same journey, whether their journey is taken within a religious tradition or not. I see my path as that of a dabbler in various religions, gleaning what I can from their ancient wells of truth. I believe that there are prophets in many religions. Whereas traditional Jews and Mormons interpret revelation as coming directly from God to the prophets, I believe all people can tap into the universal wisdom that we carry inside of us. I don’t believe that God made truth exclusive, and I am suspect of such claims.

A Struggle with the Unknowingness

I cannot say anything definitely about God, except for this: I believe that if there is a God, he made the central point of human life a struggle with the unknowingness and instilled within us a desire to find meaning despite and because of this. It is our lot to not know; to claim that we do know requires a leap that shuts us down to the questions, which I believe are central to an authentic spirituality.

The questions that the Holocaust poses are unanswerable, especially those about God. Perhaps the Holocaust ultimately has nothing to teach us because it is that horrific. Karen Armstrong refers to a story about Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp, when a group of Jews put God on trial and found him guilty. Even though they had found God guilty of allowing the heinous and unimaginable that human beings are capable of, the Jews still went on with their religious practices after the verdict (Armstrong 376). In the most insane and horrendous of circumstances, the religious tradition can carry one through even when God does not. In the end, it is of minor consequence that reality is not as beautiful and just as the vision.

Does the Holocaust Have Anything to Teach?

A few years ago, I spent two days at Auschwitz in Poland. The largest part of the camp known as Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, is where the Nazis perfected mass extermination, the gassing of thousands of people per day.  The immensity of Birkenau is utterly astonishing and frightening. Row after row of horse stables once covered a few square kilometers and could hold tens of thousands of prisoners. After arriving in train cars at Birkenau, prisoners underwent quick selection by a doctor. If the doctor pointed to the left, that meant death in the gas chambers; to the right, hard labor that would most likely result in death from exhaustion, malnutrition, or disease. Women with children, weak people, and elderly people were immediately selected to be murdered. The Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners given the job of disposing of the bodies of people who were murdered, collected the bodies from the gas chambers and burned them in crematorium ovens that ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Tour groups only briefly cover the entrance to the Birkenau camp, where the selection area was. The scale of Birkenau makes it impossible for tour groups to take the hours necessary to see all of this section of the camp. For this reason, I went back a second day to see the rest of Birkenau. This second day is when the vastness of this place consumed me. Birkenau was a carefully constructed, highly efficient, high-capacity factory of death. At the back of the camp, there are ruins of several gas chambers that the Nazis blew up in an attempt to hide their crimes.  There are ponds where some of the ashes of the more than a million Jews and others murdered here were dumped.

I stopped in a grove of trees where prisoners selected to die in the gas chambers waited. At this point, they did not know their fate. An enlarged black-and-white photo at this location shows mothers holding babies and small children clutching the legs of their mothers. The same birch trees in the photo towered over me, filling me with the stories of those who had not survived to bear witness. The trees stood silent yet observant, as if proxies for some towering universal consciousness. This glimmer of that ultimate mystery that can be felt but not fully articulated is as close as I can come to God.

Auschwitz-Birkenau near Krakow, Poland (phes999)

Return to the Jewish Homeland

After the Holocaust, the issue of Israel became the central arena in which many Jews worked out their evolving ideas about God. For many Jews, the idea of a personal, literal God of the prophets who protected the Jewish people was irrelevant. It was harder for many to believe in this God of history who had saved the Jews from the bondage of the Egyptian king only to abandon the entire population to the abyss of evil in our own times. The Holocaust had made it blaringly apparent that life in the Diaspora was not safe. The entire Jewish population was in jeopardy. Jews with a secular focus and Jews with a religious focus fought to give all Jews the opportunity to return to their ancient homeland. Secular Zionists felt that God had abandoned them. They believed that now the time was ripe for Jews to take care of themselves, and the only way to do that was to fight to gain a state where Jews could live together and protect themselves. Many religious Zionists believed that it was time for Jews to return to the Promised Land to fulfill Biblical prophecies, the promises made by God to the Jews. Most Zionists were atheists. However, both atheistic and religious Zionists would not wait on God any longer. In this sense, Jews became their own Messiah.

Eilat Mountains, Israel (Avi Morag photography)

One of the few things that I believe with certainty is that we must work out our own destiny, our own salvation. I believe that history teaches us that people have freewill and that we are ultimately responsible for how we exercise our freewill. I question whether God exists as an objective reality, and if he does, what role, if any, he plays in human affairs. After the Holocaust, for many Jews, God was an antiquated concept. God has also died for many other people living in the modern world, especially those with an understanding of the history of the past 100 or so years. I believe that our time calls for a reinterpretation of the great traditions of the past. Like the New Synagogue built on the ruins of the Semper Synagogue, we must construct a vision and meaning for ourselves on the foundation provided by the lessons of history and the wisdom of the great religious traditions. Indeed, the great wonder and depth that the Torah stories evoke are not dead; the mystery that the stories suggest is still as grand as it ever was.

In the Torah story, God spares Abraham from having to slay his beloved son Isaac. We may be suspect of a God who would put one through this wrenching test of obedience, but God at the last possible moment showed that he was more merciful than humanity when it reached the extremities of its power. The Holocaust showed us on a monumental scale the fanatical evil that people are capable of, and it is our responsibility to heed the warning and never forget. In the end, perhaps we have been misplacing our questions outside of ourselves, on God, when we ourselves have been and continue to be the ultimate mystery—man’s capacity for hate, horror, indifference, and love. That mystery prods me along my journey to learn more about the most creative idea people have ever conceived of—that of God.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

     New York: The Random House Publishing Group, 1993.

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