Reckoning With an Absent God

My father-in-law once told me with the certainty of a survivor that he did not value my work as a rabbi. He was convinced that I would end up victimized by our congregants and that I had set myself up for a life of suffering. There were certainly (short) episodes that confirmed his judgment, but his disapproval eased with the passage of time. My life has been marked by a surfeit of blessings, and he eventually sensed that I was an exception to his rule.

His other judgment was more lasting and consequential. He was never much of a synagogue Jew. The issues that engaged him were Israeli politics, social justice in America, and German-Jewish relations. The liturgy of the Synagogue was remote from his experience, except for his claim that it had failed on the essentials. He once said with great feeling that it left him frozen. In all the talk about praise and gratitude, there was no acknowledgment of suffering and injustice. In the endless stream of requests and petitions, no one recognized that God never responded, at least not in any obvious way.

If the God of Israel had created the world, He also built the electric fence at Auschwitz. Or if not that, He allowed it to be built. Or if not that, He did not exist, and the world was the plaything of monsters and sadists. A liturgy worthy of his respect and devotion would acknowledge all of this and reflect it back to him. It would honor his career as a slave laborer in Poland. Nothing would return him to his murdered family, but an honest reckoning would bring a sliver of consolation.

Daniel Blue never got what he wanted and that weighs on my conscience long after his death. If a liturgy enjoys any relevance at all, it must be rooted in the reality of the world that produces it, engaging with its horrors as well as its joys. I told my father-in-law that he could take some satisfaction. Although he never attended a full service on Yom Kippur, our own congregation has used a pioneer liturgy that situates the Holocaust in the center of the experience. Many congregations have recited a testament—Yosl Rackover’s Appeal to God—to raise legitimate questions about God’s justice and mercy. I myself shaped a liturgy for the High Holidays that does not take the existence of God for granted and wonders aloud about the nature of our covenant.

Because that, I would argue, is the heart of the matter. Are we still bound by the agreements struck by the patriarchs, or have they been incinerated in the fires of rural Poland? Can we legitimately dance before the open Ark of the Covenant, or should we close it in deference to the murdered children of Europe?

I do not know the answer to these questions, but they have a fierce and disruptive effect on my faith. Other good people feel the same. Here is an effort by Menachem Rosensaft to plumb the nature of our experience with God. This is Psalm 23 in his recent version, punctuated and organized exactly as written. It is suffused with honesty, rage, and despair. It is the poem we know, radically transformed for the world that lies in the shadow of Eichman:

a psalm to the emptiness
no shepherd
only foes
no festive table
only bitter soup
moldy bread
no green pastures
no still waters
only blood-drenched
rat-infested
mud
he is always hungry
she is always cold
their heads anointed
by blows
shadows walking
through the valley of death
Adonai’s fog-wrapped house
forever

Would Daniel Blue have recited such a psalm? I’m guessing he would, and so would I. I have recited it many times already. But the real question is whether that’s true for all of us. Can a liturgy do what it has never done before, to address a God who has been profoundly absent? Can it ground a community in an experience of worship? Can it create the healthy dynamics of love and solidarity, even as it shreds the fundamentals of certainty? I have my doubts, but that is for all of us to decide. The alternative is a dishonest prayer life that cannot contain the experience of our people.