<Table Of Contents

On Prayer in Auschwitz

by Talia Goldberg, 2024 Clergy & Religious Leaders Fellow

Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
(T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion” )1

Arthur Cohen wrote that the Holocaust was an event in which “martyrs are all saints, Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Karl Gerstein or six million Jews, but the slayers were all baptized”2 This seeming absurdity shifts the Holocaust from the realm of more typical violence, which can at least theoretically be justified by some sort of causal logic (you hurt me, so I hurt you), into the realm of nonsense beyond meaning. The Holocaust was an event during which the baptized, i.e., the saved-by-God, murdered those chosen by God.3 Here is but one absurdity enacted in the camps, though a crucial one. It vividly and completely demonstrates the inadequacy of a monotheistic theodicy writ large.

Theodicy attempts to find theological answers to the questions asked by human suffering. Therefore, in some sense the ultimate project of theodicy is to justify suffering. We want God to be good, and we want God to be powerful. But suffering, especially the suffering of the blameless, requires us, voluntarily or not, to question God’s goodness and power. Since the Shoah, theologians (especially Jewish ones) have been forced to ask how one can even attempt to justify God’s goodness and power after the Holocaust.

I will closely read a passage from Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz that describes a victim of the Nazis praying in that camp. In doing so, I will think about what prayer to God can look like post-Holocaust. I reject theodicy, attempts to explain suffering, but I also reject atheism as an equally unsatisfying answer. Suffering and God must both be taken seriously. Auschwitz was a meaningless event, a nonsense event. But what does that mean? And what does that teach us about suffering in general and our relationship to God when suffering in particular? Knowing what we know, we must talk to patients and congregants who themselves are suffering deeply without explaining it away or rejecting prayer as a resource in extremis.

Midway through his book Survival in Auschwitz, Levi describes witnessing a man in his bunk pray in thanksgiving to God, offering thanks because he had not been selected to go to the gas chambers the next day. The man, Kuhn, prays next to other men who have been selected. Levi asks a series of questions:

Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.4

These are theodicean questions. The first question, the one about whether Kuhn realizes that he is next, is especially interesting. Whether Kuhn will be next is not a matter of opinion. The overwhelming majority of Jews deported to Auschwitz were murdered. Levi says many times that he himself survived by luck alone. The question is therefore not about prayer when faced with the possibility of extreme suffering and brutal murder but rather prayer when faced with the certainty of suffering and brutal murder.

The second set of questions, those about Kuhn’s understanding, is a more subjective response. Here Levi proposes that “nothing at all in the power of man” can create any sort of redemption from the selection. He places prayer in the category of actions humans can take to respond to suffering. In doing so he implicitly suggests that it is possible for prayer to have power and for God to respond to prayer. However, the event of the selection is too powerful, and mitigation, redemption, or reversal of the event is impossible. The event itself contains its own beginning and end: the basic reality of selection, not who was chosen to die, remains the problem. According to Levi, the fact that such a thing has happened forecloses the possibility of creating meaning, hence his anger at Kuhn’s incomprehension.

There is another reason for Levi’s anger at Kuhn, which is that Kuhn is no more worthy or unworthy of salvation than any other man in the barracks. When Kuhn prayed in thanks for his salvation, it was a callous act: the twenty-year old in the bunk next to him had been chosen for no reason at all. Kuhn equally escaped for no reason at all. Life and death were demonstrated to be completely meaningless categories because the cause for life and the cause for death were the same: arbitrariness. Not only did life and death have the same senseless cause, but in Auschwitz Levi did not experience life and death as distinct phenomena. He describes the group of prisoners selected to take a chemistry test as “us who are no longer alive […] gone half-crazy in the dreary expectation of nothing.”5 They expected death, but they remained alive, expected life but received death. For Levi and potentially those in his situation, these categories felt interchangeable. If death is arbitrary, then so too is salvation from death.

Jews live now in a world in which this selection has happened again and again. Now, there can be no justification, no saying that everything happens for a reason, that everything is a part of God’s plan, that ignominious death is simply a punishment for past sins. Try telling that to the children stepping down from the cattle cars and into the gas chambers.6 These classic excuses have been rendered moot and not just moot but offensive. So offensive, in fact, that Levi says that even God Godself would “spit” at Kuhn’s prayer. There is no inherent good in suffering, nothing redemptive, no meaningful content. One can make meaning after the fact (e.g., “I am stronger for it”), and that is good, but there is no excuse for arbitrary suffering before or as it happens. As the philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Levinas described the Holocaust, to which he lost most of his family: “Pain in its undiluted malignity, suffering for nothing.”7

What is interesting here is that Levi rejects theodicy and prayer but not the concept of God. Levi understands the absurdity and cruelty of praying in Auschwitz, and God might too. In other words, it is not the idea of prayer or the idea of God that Levi rejects but rather the type of prayer to God. This type of prayer participates in the warped world of theodicy. But, as we have seen, such is cruelty.

Levi calls on us to reject the paradigm of answers and justifications and, as Jennifer Geddes notes, embrace the first word of the original title of his book: if.8 As she writes, in Levi’s consistent use of the conditional, he

Is calling us onto a space of ambiguity and uncertainty in which we are called to question […] the nature of evil, the particular nature of the evil of the Holocaust, a space in which we are called to responsibility—the responsibility to think, question, consider, but also a space in which we must forego the pleasures and comforts of certainty and closure.9

When we reconsider the reality of evil we also are called to think critically about our own responsibility. What is the harm that I, as a human being who has seen others just like me cause so much suffering, can do? In what way can I talk to God if God is the creator of evil, and I am someone who bears the potential to do evil?

Yes, if I were Levi, I would spit at Kuhn. Though if I were Kuhn, I might have prayed too. Prayer is the final resource, one of the only resources possible in extremis, when medicine and human mercy no longer apply. In the Jewish tradition, there are many guides to and restrictions on how and when to pray. This fact means that in any situation, we can never be at a loss for words. The ritual steadies us and assures us that not only is there a time for everything but that we are cared for: someone has already prepared the words and actions we need in order to journey through life.10 That being said, even in the most structured of prayers, the Amidah (one of the central prayers of the Jewish tradition, customarily recited three times a day) there is built-in space for individual prayer that is not pre-written.11 The tradition acknowledges that there are things in each person’s life that can only be expressed in the voice of the person in need.

Like love and grief, there is no end to prayer. We can pray in formulas or spontaneously. One can even pray at the moment of death when one cannot do anything else. As much as the thought repels me, that is why I know that I could have been the person praying in Auschwitz. What else was there to do but pray? There was no reasonable chance of escape. Death was expected at every moment. As Levi wrote, if they were not actively dying, they were on the list of those still to die. Kuhn was taking the only action available to him.

But what prayer would I pray? When Levinas wrote against theodicy, he asked in essence, “what’s the point?” Is it to convince people that the mechanism still works, that the wicked are punished and the righteous rewarded, despite all the evidence to the contrary?12 To justify suffering, i.e., to justify the gas chambers? To save God’s reputation?

The contortions of an apologetic theodicy only serve to turn our faces away from suffering. Acknowledging that God is not innocent allows us to live in a world replete with very real, overwhelming, suffering. God created the world and everything—everything—in it. Once I spoke to a patient in the hospital where I was interning who told me: “God does give us more than we can handle.” I took this to be a refutation-by-experience of the verse from 1 Corinthians (the patient was a practicing Protestant).13 He was surprised when I agreed with him, but the fact that I agreed with him led him to speak more openly about his experience of suffering than he had previously. I say this not to compliment myself but to illustrate that (to borrow a phrase from Levinas) acknowledging the uselessness of suffering can do spiritual good. If you are someone who believes that everything is a part of God’s plan, and that God only gives you as much as you can handle, then you risk being plagued by the fear of failing God. But it is not we who have failed God; it is God who has failed us.

Of course, when someone professes their faith and talks about how much God has done for them, I believe them wholeheartedly—who am I to say otherwise? I have seen the light of God’s comfort shine from the faces of the extremely ill and dying, and I know it to be real. And yet even as I believe that God is present for them, I have double vision. When I look out of one eye I see blessings, abundance, and the reassurance that God is with me. I look out of the other eye, and I see bulldozers pushing my people’s emaciated bodies into mass graves at Bergen-Belsen.

I could take away God’s power. Instead of a creator-god, God could be, as God has been represented in the Jewish tradition, a tearful god, weeping beside God’s children instead of intervening in history. If I diminished God’s power, I would take away God’s power to do evil and perhaps reduce the power of evil by saying that evil comes from people alone. But if I did that, I would also be diminishing God’s power in general. I do not want to do that, because I have witnessed and experienced the power of God’s other creation, evil’s twin—love. God created the world and everything in it, and that includes “love, the first value, which is that small amount of humanity by virtue of which alone the creation deserves to continue.”14 The best thing we can do is pray for others rather than ourselves. In this way, we express the strong aspect of the omnipotent God that goes hand-in-hand with the evil that God through God’s inaction, condones in the world. We can weep for others and ourselves, and God can weep with us. We also must take responsibility for the evil we do. And so must God.

When, during the FASPE visit to Auschwitz, we had an opportunity to pray at Birkenau, I turned away from that opportunity in horror. To invoke holiness while standing on grass nourished by the ashes of my people seemed macabre at best. I stand by my horror at prayer in Auschwitz, because I see what Levi saw when he looked at Kuhn. How can we pray? All throughout the fellowship, T.S. Eliot’s poem “Gerontion” ran through my head: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”15 And, how can we not pray? What else could we possibly do, now that we know everything, when fresh terror inspires fear but not surprise? The truth we know now after the Holocaust is that the self and the other, the baptized and the chosen, are all of us capable of inflicting and undergoing horror beyond horror. We can only pray. But when we pray, we cannot make excuses for God. And we can never look a patient in the eye and say that everything happens for a reason, that this too is for the good. The only reasonable statements that God could make to us are the only prayers we can offer: “I love you” and “I’m sorry.”

Talia Goldberg was a 2024 FASPE Clergy & Religious Leaders Fellow. She received her MDiv. from Harvard Divinity School and will be beginning a PhD in theology at Cambridge University this fall.

Notes

  1. T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” https://beta.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47254/gerontion.
  2. Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum as Caesura,” Cross Currents, Winter 1980-81. 440.
  3. Here I speak from different perspectives within Christian and Jewish cultures: the idea that baptism is a salvific act is broadly speaking Christian and the idea of Jewish election by God is derived from Biblical theology and traditional Jewish thought.
  4. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. (New York: Collier Books, 1961). 130.
  5. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. 103.
  6. Cf. Rabbi Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Steven J. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  7. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, European Perspectives (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998).98.
  8. Survival in Auschwitz was originally entitled If This is a Man.
  9. Jennifer L Geddes, “Verbal Images of Evil and (in)Humanity during and after the Holocaust,” Nordisk Judaistik 29, no. 1 (2018), 32.
  10. See the Biblical book of Kohelet.
  11. See the Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 31a:26, and Avodah Zara 8a:2, and the Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayim, 119.
  12. The next question to ask might therefore be: Is olam ha’ba, the messianic age to come (or the equivalent in other traditions) worth the life of your child? Interestingly, when Arthur Cohen addressed this question, he wrote that he would agree with it except for the fact that “history nowhere presents such symmetrical historical options as God or your babe” (Cohen 427). Basically, the obvious answer would be atheism, except that this is a false equivalency. If the Jews had renounced their Judaism in order to save their children, they would have been murdered anyway. It was not an issue of theology. We cannot therefore reject God so easily, but we must continue to rethink the meaning of the reward-punishment mechanism that is so present in Biblical covenantal logic.
  13. Corinthians 10:13.
  14. Emmanuel Levinas, “Prayer Without Demand,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Blackwell Readers (Oxford, UK Cambridge, MA, USA: B. Blackwell, 1989).231.
  15. T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion,” https://beta.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47254/gerontion.