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Boston Globe, MA
June 4 2006
The silence of God
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | June 4, 2006
``WHERE WAS God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood
in Auschwitz last week. ``Why was he silent? How could he permit this
endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"
It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of
death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as
many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them
Jews. ``In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. ``In the
end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a
heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?"
News reports emphasized the pope's question. Every story noted that
the man who voiced it was, as he put it, ``a son of the German
people." No one missed the intense historical significance of a
German pope, on a pilgrimage to Poland, beseeching God for answers at
the slaughterhouse where just 60 years ago Germans broke every record
for shedding Jewish blood.
And yet some commentators accused Benedict of skirting the issue of
anti-Semitism. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League
said that the pope had ``uttered not one word about anti-Semitism;
not one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply
because they were Jews." The National Catholic Register likewise
reported that he ``did not make any reference to modern
anti-Semitism."
In fact, the pope not only acknowledged the reality of Jew-hatred, he
explained the pathology that underlies it. Anti- Semites are driven
by hostility not just toward Jews, he said, but toward the message of
God-based ethics they first brought to the world.
``Deep down, those vicious criminals" -- he was speaking of Hitler
and his followers -- ``by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the
God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles
to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid.
If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who
spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had
to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who
thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world."
The Nazis' ultimate goal, Benedict argued, was to rip out Christian
morality by its Jewish roots, replacing it with ``a faith of their
own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."
Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first
destroyed Judeo-Christian values. In the Thousand-Year Reich, God and
his moral code would be wiped out. Man, unencumbered by conscience,
would reign in his place. It is the oldest of temptations, and
Auschwitz is what it leads to.
``Where was God in those days?" asked the pope. How could a just and
loving Creator have allowed trainload after trainload of human beings
to be murdered at Auschwitz? But why ask such a question only in
Auschwitz? Where, after all, was God in the Gulag? Where was God when
the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was God
during the Armenian holocaust? Where was God in Rwanda? Where is God
in Darfur?
For that matter, where is God when even one innocent victim is being
murdered or raped or abused?
The answer, though the pope didn't say so clearly, is that a world in
which God always intervened to prevent cruelty and violence would be
a world without freedom -- and life without freedom would be
meaningless. God endows human beings with the power to choose between
good and evil. Some choose to help their neighbor; others choose to
hurt him. There were those in Nazi Europe who herded Jews into gas
chambers. And there were those who risked their lives to hide Jews
from the Gestapo.
The God ``who spoke on Sinai" was not addressing himself to angels or
robots who could do no wrong even if they wanted to. He was speaking
to real people with real choices to make, and real consequences that
flow from those choices. Auschwitz wasn't God's fault. He didn't
build the place. And only by changing those who did build it from
free moral agents into puppets could he have stopped them from
committing their horrific crimes.
It was not God who failed during the Holocaust or in the Gulag, or on
9/11, or in Bosnia. It is not God who fails when human beings do
barbaric things to other human beings. Auschwitz is not what happens
when the God who says ``Thou shalt not murder" and ``Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself" is silent. It is what happens when men and
women refuse to listen.
Benedict XVI's Coat of Arms
June 4 2006
The silence of God
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | June 4, 2006
``WHERE WAS God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood
in Auschwitz last week. ``Why was he silent? How could he permit this
endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"
It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of
death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as
many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them
Jews. ``In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. ``In the
end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a
heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent?"
News reports emphasized the pope's question. Every story noted that
the man who voiced it was, as he put it, ``a son of the German
people." No one missed the intense historical significance of a
German pope, on a pilgrimage to Poland, beseeching God for answers at
the slaughterhouse where just 60 years ago Germans broke every record
for shedding Jewish blood.
And yet some commentators accused Benedict of skirting the issue of
anti-Semitism. The national director of the Anti-Defamation League
said that the pope had ``uttered not one word about anti-Semitism;
not one explicit acknowledgment of Jewish lives vanquished simply
because they were Jews." The National Catholic Register likewise
reported that he ``did not make any reference to modern
anti-Semitism."
In fact, the pope not only acknowledged the reality of Jew-hatred, he
explained the pathology that underlies it. Anti- Semites are driven
by hostility not just toward Jews, he said, but toward the message of
God-based ethics they first brought to the world.
``Deep down, those vicious criminals" -- he was speaking of Hitler
and his followers -- ``by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the
God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles
to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid.
If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who
spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had
to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who
thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world."
The Nazis' ultimate goal, Benedict argued, was to rip out Christian
morality by its Jewish roots, replacing it with ``a faith of their
own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."
Hitler knew that his will to power could triumph only if he first
destroyed Judeo-Christian values. In the Thousand-Year Reich, God and
his moral code would be wiped out. Man, unencumbered by conscience,
would reign in his place. It is the oldest of temptations, and
Auschwitz is what it leads to.
``Where was God in those days?" asked the pope. How could a just and
loving Creator have allowed trainload after trainload of human beings
to be murdered at Auschwitz? But why ask such a question only in
Auschwitz? Where, after all, was God in the Gulag? Where was God when
the Khmer Rouge slaughtered 1.7 million Cambodians? Where was God
during the Armenian holocaust? Where was God in Rwanda? Where is God
in Darfur?
For that matter, where is God when even one innocent victim is being
murdered or raped or abused?
The answer, though the pope didn't say so clearly, is that a world in
which God always intervened to prevent cruelty and violence would be
a world without freedom -- and life without freedom would be
meaningless. God endows human beings with the power to choose between
good and evil. Some choose to help their neighbor; others choose to
hurt him. There were those in Nazi Europe who herded Jews into gas
chambers. And there were those who risked their lives to hide Jews
from the Gestapo.
The God ``who spoke on Sinai" was not addressing himself to angels or
robots who could do no wrong even if they wanted to. He was speaking
to real people with real choices to make, and real consequences that
flow from those choices. Auschwitz wasn't God's fault. He didn't
build the place. And only by changing those who did build it from
free moral agents into puppets could he have stopped them from
committing their horrific crimes.
It was not God who failed during the Holocaust or in the Gulag, or on
9/11, or in Bosnia. It is not God who fails when human beings do
barbaric things to other human beings. Auschwitz is not what happens
when the God who says ``Thou shalt not murder" and ``Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself" is silent. It is what happens when men and
women refuse to listen.
Benedict XVI's Coat of Arms