I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.
-Elie Wiesel, Night
Today is the day that we remember the millions of people who died at the hands of the Nazis. One day, somewhat ironically placed at the end of May when new life is springing up all around and flowers are in bloom on the trees. We sometimes call it the holocaust, from the Greek word that means "burnt," which I suppose is somewhat appropriate, but many have re-labeled it using the Hebrew word Shoah, which means "catastrophe."
It's worth mentioning that Jews were not the only victims of the catastrophe, but they were focal point of the hate behind Hitler and the Nazis. I think it's also worth mentioning that this sort of thing has happened far too often in the recent history of the world. Stalin, our ally in defeating Hitler, apparently outdid Adolf in both scope and brutality, there have been numerous genocidal events in Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan and Congo, and there is one going on in Syria as we speak.
These are all catastrophes of human evil.
They at least raise the question of whether or not God really knows what He's doing in giving us this sort of freedom. If you have not read Elie Wiesel's book Night, you really should get around to it, but have a good stiff drink handy. Wiesel survived the Shoah as a boy, he watched his parents taken away and killed, he starved in the camps, he lived in the fear that, at any moment, he might arbitrarily be taken away and shot or gassed and burned in the ovens.
There really is no good theological way to talk around the questions that Wiesel raises in his book, they are things you must just simply absorb and endure. He talks of how the Shoah killed God. God hung on the gallows, God went into the ovens, God died in the night.
He's not wrong.
It's a powerful read for Christians, but in an entirely different sense than it is for our Jewish friends.
Christians live through the story of God dying every year. The cross is nothing new to our way of thinking, the brutal act of crucifixion is a part of our faith story, and so is resurrection.
The thing is though, there has been no Easter morning for Jews after the Shoah. There are small redemptive moments, there are powerful remembrances, but there is nothing that opens the tombs of the millions who died.
Which makes it all the more wondrous to me that people like Wiesel and other Shoah survivors have managed to do just that: survive. They have survived physically, spiritually and they have blessed the world with their stories, and they have held on to God, and found that He was not dead after all.
As time does naturally what Hitler tried to do brutally, we need to observe and remember all the more vigilantly, and we need to remember that we, as a species, have not risen above the hate and violence that caused the catastrophe. When the eyewitnesses are no longer around to tell us what happened, we still need to remember.
These are all catastrophes of human evil.
They at least raise the question of whether or not God really knows what He's doing in giving us this sort of freedom. If you have not read Elie Wiesel's book Night, you really should get around to it, but have a good stiff drink handy. Wiesel survived the Shoah as a boy, he watched his parents taken away and killed, he starved in the camps, he lived in the fear that, at any moment, he might arbitrarily be taken away and shot or gassed and burned in the ovens.
There really is no good theological way to talk around the questions that Wiesel raises in his book, they are things you must just simply absorb and endure. He talks of how the Shoah killed God. God hung on the gallows, God went into the ovens, God died in the night.
He's not wrong.
It's a powerful read for Christians, but in an entirely different sense than it is for our Jewish friends.
Christians live through the story of God dying every year. The cross is nothing new to our way of thinking, the brutal act of crucifixion is a part of our faith story, and so is resurrection.
The thing is though, there has been no Easter morning for Jews after the Shoah. There are small redemptive moments, there are powerful remembrances, but there is nothing that opens the tombs of the millions who died.
Which makes it all the more wondrous to me that people like Wiesel and other Shoah survivors have managed to do just that: survive. They have survived physically, spiritually and they have blessed the world with their stories, and they have held on to God, and found that He was not dead after all.
As time does naturally what Hitler tried to do brutally, we need to observe and remember all the more vigilantly, and we need to remember that we, as a species, have not risen above the hate and violence that caused the catastrophe. When the eyewitnesses are no longer around to tell us what happened, we still need to remember.
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