ABSTRACT
Although properly hesitant to explain God’s looking away from Auschwitz, a number of Jewish philosophers and theologians have, in effect, justified God’s silence, inaction or absence by weighing the necessity of human moral freedom against the suffering it can cause. If humanity is to be truly human, that is, free, God must be, in some senses, less than God. God must give way to human (normatively masculine) freedom and becoming by withholding his omnipotent power to override human choice.The good would not be the good, and therefore pleasing to God, had it not been willed and chosen. Human morality therefore entails the strong possibility of its failure. Auschwitz is the price of human becoming and, indeed, human morality itself. At the same time, God’s freedom is secured by his being mysteriously unknowable in his ways and, according to some philosophical traditions, a God who is ultimately apathetic or unmoved by the conditions of finitude. All of these operations can be indicated in the trope of divine hiddenness. As we shall see, the most authoritative exponent of the postHolocaust free will defence of God’s holocaustal non-intervention has been Eliezer Berkovits. In Faith After the Holocaust he argues that had God exercised his power in preventing the Holocaust he would have impeded ‘man’s’ becoming: the project to which even divine justice and happiness must be subordinated. God’s love for our freedom effectively exceeds his love for those who suffer its consequences.1
