K-067a the Holocaust 1 of 4 — Art Katz

The Holocaust as a Defining Event of Modern Jewish Consciousness

The cool thing is that the couple of times that it has been aired, the consequences have been stunning. I have never seen a greater response or reaction to the spoken word as took place in the first speaking of this message in Kansas City in 1977 at the charismatic convention or conference there where I was one of the low echelon speakers and spoke this on a Saturday morning to an audience of 2 ,000, the Lord having put me on a fast for five days from the time of my arrival in Kansas City to the time of the delivery of this message, that I myself did not know how momentous a thing I had and there was a deadly silence after the message was spoken virtually in a monotone, almost read from an outline that the Lord never allowed me in those five days to develop.

He gave me the message on the first day of my arrival, I arrived with scraps and notes and collections of things that I had been accumulating for many years because the subject of the Holocaust had been central to my whole formation as a modern man, my whole preoccupation with life, with reality, with truth and meaning as an atheist and no accident that the first chapter of the book Ben Israel which is the description of my conversion begins at Dachau, the concentration camp in Germany just outside of Munich which I visited as a GI in Germany in the early 1950s and that experience was so devastating for me that it deepened what I knew was central to the whole issue of the meaning of the human condition.

How can I say that? I sensed that there's something about the magnitude of the Holocaust that has something to do with the whole mystery of human existence, the predicament of life and I just have to trust that these words have some meaning.

The Holocaust and the Meaning of Modern Jewish Existence

In conclusion, my whole life from adolescence on to the time of my conversion was an existential cry for reality and for meaning as a modern Jew growing up in the city of eight million in New York, coming to manhood or early manhood in the World War II time, learning of the statistics of the Holocaust which were an absolute devastation to me and to many modern Jews.

We're now talking about an event that is 50 years old and the Jewish community's greatest fear now that it is slipping away from the consciousness and the memory of mankind and they are furiously seeking to do all in their power to retain the memory of the Holocaust.

Sometime at your leisure today you can look through some materials that have just recently come to me about a Holocaust memorial museum being established at the cost of many millions of dollars in Washington, D .C. where there'll be a permanent exhibit and that exhibits like that are being established elsewhere in the world, even in Tokyo, because interestingly there's been a great spurt of anti-Semitic literature coming out of Japan and so the Jewish community is running scared and the whole issue of Israel and Israel's birth flows directly out of the Holocaust and it's interesting that when the peace conference was first established in Madrid through Baker as Secretary of State that when Shamir gave his first message the first thing of that message was a reference to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is the indigestible lump. It is the most significant factor of modern Jewish life and in fact it ought to be the great factor of modern life period because of the magnitude of what took place.

I'm just going to stop and pray because unless the Lord gives a grace there's no way even to verbally sketch a sense of what that was if you didn't live through that time and it's only come to you now many years after the event as a word or you've caught some glimpse of it or read a little bit or seen something in the movies.

The Holocaust, the Crucifixion, and the Neglect of Divine Meaning

The Holocaust is the single most devastating event of modern times, not just for the Jew but for the whole of the modern world and what we are now reaping in Bosnia, Yugoslavia and in other places where there's ethnic conflict, Cambodia in more recent history, the elimination, the genocidal extermination of millions on the basis of race has its precedent in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a critical turning point in the whole history of mankind and if we don't understand the magnitude of that event so much will be lost to us and the remarkable thing is this, I'll put it this way, the two great events of modern times are the ones that have been most disparaged, most neglected and least instructive for those for whom it was intended.

One is the Holocaust, the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people of Europe and the second like unto it that precedes it and that is connected with it is the crucifixion of Jesus. There have been two great holocausts in modern history, the crucifixion of Jesus, the devastation or the extermination of the son of man and the like event for the Jewish nation itself 50 years ago and I believe that there's a direct link and connection and correspondence between these events and the failure to properly assess and understand their meaning is to the incalculable loss of mankind and to the Jewish nation and to the church.

So I just want to pray, you can look at this at your leisure and realize what this means to the Jewish community, the millions that are being invested in this, the donations. Jewish philanthropy is famous and people have little brass plaques, you know, you go to any synagogue and they'll be on the back wall, brass plaques with the names of the donors who donated the pews and the Torah and the speaking stands and the decoration, the building itself.

Millions of philanthropic contributions have gone into these museums to keep the memory of the holocaust alive but not in the sense that I believe that God intends because the people who have been its victim have least understood its meaning.

The church does not understand it and as I tried to suggest a few times in the course of these weeks, the failure to properly assess the meaning of this devastation in the way that God, I believe, intends for us to see it has the most devastating consequence for the faith.

Where was God when his covenantal people were being systematically annihilated? The failure of God to intervene implies either he had not the power or he had not the ability to know of it. He was not omniscient nor omnipotent and that means that God as we have traditionally, which is to say biblically understood him, is not the God who is God.

Let that sink in. That the greatest victim of an improper understanding of the holocaust is God himself who has been not only shunted to the sidelines but discredited and the faith of many has been devastated both of Jews and of Christians because of their failure to answer the question, where was God?

The Problem of Explaining How Without Answering Why

And I don't know of any event in history that has prompted more writing, more research, more literature. It's voluminous. It would take libraries of libraries to contain the exhaustive works that have sifted through the holocaust, the casualties, the numbers, how they developed the gas, the systematic annihilation, the rise of Nazism, the history of anti-Semitism that had its culmination in it.

So many things that the historians have pondered and weighed but there's no literature at all on the question of why. They can say how, but they can't say why. And we need to know that there's a great difference between those two questions.

You can give an answer to the question how, and the historians have sifted through the bones and have made the most exhaustive studies to show how it was done. And they can even answer why in the sense of the rise of Nazism, Hitler, that madman, his anti-Semitic hatred of that people, going back to being slighted as a young man in his artistic career that was not recognized, and the competition that came from other Jews.

I mean, that does not answer the great question. And on that great question, there's no literature, to my knowledge. And that question is where was God? And raises the question, is there a God? And maybe what the Holocaust reveals is that we have naively and romantically subscribed to traditional notions about God.

But when the rubber hits the road and God should reveal himself as God in power and ability to intervene, he was silent. And it raises the question of either a God who has a moral defect of indifference to suffering, particularly of his own people, or a God who is powerless to affect any change, or simply a God who is not.

So many books have come out by disillusioned writers. Richard Rubinstein wrote a book called After Auschwitz, a rabbi who is now a professor of religion at a university in Florida, and whose whole argument is a return to paganism.

And that we can no longer consider God as we had traditionally understood him since the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the great event. It's the dividing line. It's the caesura. I'm going to talk about that.

There's another book that I'll be bringing in these days by a Jewish philosopher that nothing can be the same afterwards, and everything that had been previously recognized and respected as traditional is dead.

We're on new ground, and there are moral and religious and social implications that will forever change the world. That's how great a single event can be. And a lot of what I'm saying about the Holocaust is equally true about the crucifixion of Jesus.

That is a momentous single event that should have had enormous ramifications for all time and has not, because it has been sentimentalized, or it has been ignored, or has been incorporated into a kind of a liturgy, or a convenient little framework of atonement.

But the magnitude, the power, the devastation, the implications of the crucifixion of Jesus, the Holocaust of the Son of Man, has been lost to us. And equally now, this is being lost. And I'm saying there's a conjunction, and we'll have to search for it and find it.

The Message's Origins and the Kansas City Response

But when the message was spoken, when God put me on that fast on that first day, and I arrived at that hotel in Kansas City as one of the speakers, and I was given a room, there was a desk from one wall to the other.

And I took out my papers, my back of envelopes, my notes, my newspaper clippings and articles that I'd been collecting for years, and strew them out, and it went from one wall to the other wall. And I looked at it, and I despaired that any kind of message could come out of that.

And I just sat down, I rolled up my sleeves, and I never got up for eight hours. And when I finished, I had a few pages of an outline on a yellow legal pad. And I thought, and I had missed lunch, and by supper time I realized I was not to eat at all, and I didn't until after the message was spoken five days later.

And I come back from that charismatic conference, which was for me a drag, and pick up my outline waiting for the Lord to put flesh on its bones, and it never happened. I picked it up, it was dead, I couldn't touch it.

I just put it down again. Every night I would come back and pick it up, thinking that the Lord was now going to amplify and flesh out that skeleton. No, dead. I put it down again, until finally the Saturday came that it was to be delivered.

And I was to share that morning's time with another brother, speaking on the same subject, but from a vastly different perspective. My perspective was the Holocaust as judgment. His perspective was the Holocaust as the failure of Christianity, the victimization of the Jewish people, the need to guard against future anti-Semitism, you know, the conventional way in which that's...

But strangely, his wife had a baby four o 'clock that morning, and he had to fly out. So I was left with the total time all to myself, and took it. And I picked up my yellow pad before 2 ,000 people, and the Lord did not give me any liberty so much as to raise my voice, to add any schmaltz, to raise my hands to make any gesture.

It was the most monotonous, literally something given in monotone, calculated to be dismal. And when I finished, there was a deadly silence, the persuasive evidence of the failure of a message, not only before 2 ,000 people, but 200 Jewish believers who looked to me with a certain kind of respect for my prominence, which I had to eat and suffer.

And while I was in that terrible suspension of the silence, up the central aisle came two men walking toward the platform from which I had just spoken, one of whom I recognized as Ern Baxter's young man, and the other I did not know, and they beckoned me to the apron of the platform, and this brother said, Artie said, this brother is a Jew and a prophet, and he has a word for you from the Lord.

I looked at him and I said, yes. He said something like, the Lord would have me to say to you that you have done in incalculable damage to the body of Christ, that you have missed the mind of the Lord, and that you need instantly to go back to the microphone and recant your message.

How would you like to be greeted with a word like that, after you have unburdened your soul in the first public speaking of a subject that you have been secretly nurturing for many years and fasted five days to present?

Prophetic Rebuke, Spiritual Risk, and Discernment

Maybe we'll talk about this in the last week when we'll be speaking about the prophetic ministry itself. The only thing that saved me from the knife going right up into the heart to the hilt was that I had heard exactly that same statement once before in the first public message of any prominence that I had ever given as a very young believer at a full gospel regional conference before 5 ,000 in Washington, D .C., where the Lord had me to speak on a eunuch for Christ's sake.

The moment that I had finished that in that same stunned silence, and later on we went upstairs in the hotel there in Washington, D .C., with all of the speakers, the suite, and I was treated like a turd.

People just shunned, poor Inga, what she's had to suffer because of her relationship with me. And when that message was finished, two lines of people were waiting to meet me, one to thank me that that word was life, and the other to take my life.

They were burning with anger and indignation for that word that would condemn their sons and so on to being eunuchs, but that was never my intent. It was a powerful word, but it also came in a fast, and shortly thereafter a man came up to the platform.

He said, he's a Jew. He's a prophet, and he had a word for me from the Lord, that I had missed the mind of Christ, that I had done incalculable damage to the body of Christ, and that I needed instantly to go to the microphone and to recant the message.

And in came the sword or the dagger right up to the hilt and turned. Not only that I had at that moment missed the Lord and done incalculable damage, but what about previous moments, and what about all future moments?

If I could miss the Lord at a critical point then, having sought him with prayers and fastings, at what point ever in the future could I be assured that I would not be missing him again? I'm not doing this justice.

Only the word Schmerz, the German word for pain, gets at the anguish of these kinds of questions that are raised in the moment of delivery. It's something like a baptism of fire through which I believe God's messengers have to come who bring the oracles of God.

It's not cheap, and the greatest devastation is the fear that indeed they might be right, and that you did miss the mind of the Lord, and there's no guarantee. I went from there to a virtual exile in the Washington, D .C. days to Denmark where it was a wilderness experience for me.

The same guy, the prophet so-called, sent me long-distance telegrams on Jewish feast days still calling for my repentance and that I should have a retraction printed in the Voice magazine, the full gospel periodical, and phone calls and harassment and atonement with the question that he might be right.

And God was silent until many months after licking my wounds and refusing to accept any speaking invitations, I finally accepted one in Denmark and spoke from Watchman Nee's trilogy on a spiritual man where I accidentally came across a reference to a eunuch for Christ's sake using exactly the same scriptures that I had spoken from those many months before in Washington, D .C. and Watchman Nee saying, if you don't get this word by the Spirit, you'll be profoundly offended.

And then the Lord just lifted the heavy burden I'd been bearing all those many months. So when this guy in 1977 said the same thing, it didn't have quite the power to torment as had been my experience many years before, but the words were identical and maybe I've not heard them for the last time.

And so as I'm looking at this guy who's telling me I need to recant, that silence was broken by a shriek and a howl like nothing I have ever heard. Reggie, you were there, right? Yes. You can talk to Reggie privately.

I've got witnesses. I've got even photographs of people washing one another's feet. Moish Rosen, Jews for Jesus, and Michael, Mike Evans and a number of Jewish believers and celebrities washing one another's feet.

Cries came out. People fell out of their seats with such racking shrieks of repentance like nothing I have ever seen because of the devastating import of that word. And we went on for hours and it was in that, the many hours that followed that it finally culminated with the Jewish believers standing up and asking forgiveness of those in the audience who had European origins for the mischief that we had done in sowing seeds of doubt over the faith by our very unbelieving presence in Europe through the ages and they getting up and asking our forgiveness for what their ancestors had inflicted on our Jewish kin in violence and in murder and mayhem.

It was a remarkable reconciliation of God of a symbolic and significant kind. I came home with that cassette in my hand knowing that God wanted a book from it, 1977. This is 1992 and that book has not yet come.

Fragments have been developed. The Lord has added other papers. But this is a monumental task that no single man can perform. If ever there's a corporate undertaking, this will be it. And when it ever is published and to find the publisher who will publish it will be to find one with a remarkable courage.

It will exceed the backlash that came by this Rashi. What's his name? Who the Muslims vowed to murder Solomon. OK, this will exceed that in the outrage that will come with a thesis that the Holocaust is the statement of the magnitude of Jewish sin, that the magnitude of the suffering is relative to the magnitude of our sin.

And not only will the Jewish community howl, but the liberal church that is identified with them and wants to placate and mollify and find ecumenical relationship with them will also shriek. So I realized why I was in community, that it would take more than one to bring forth such a work, but would take the corporate strength of a community to bear the backlash that would come.

Preparing Students to Face Future Judgment

So all of that by introduction to the importance of this theme. I've got the original tape and a transcript of it. I've got another expression of that same message that came in Germany. When on a New Year's Eve annual conference of the Sisters of Mary Besselier Schlenk, I was invited to speak and the Lord had me to share that same theme with a little different focus and emphasis.

So you're going to hear portions of it and it'll really test us as students and probe it and to see what God is wanting us to understand by this. And if I'm off base, here's a supreme opportunity to obtain correction.

So let's pray. Thank you, Lord, precious God. We stand at a threshold of an enormous kind and we can say, I think without exaggeration, that the three weeks that have preceded this moment in a very great sense are a preparation for it.

In fact, it would not be too much to say that everything that has preceded this moment may well have been a preparation for it. And if you give us the grace, my God, to open this up and to make the implications of it clear, everything that will follow from this moment shall be altered in the light, my God, that will come from this examination of the subject.

And we ask that. Lord, we just know that there has been a grotesque indifference and neglect of an examination of this epical event in the light of Scripture, that man in his own humanity and sociological bent has found explanation that completely omits reference to you as if you were not there and as if you were not God, and not a God who had written and a God who had prophesied such devastations for Israel.

And, Lord, we ask that as you lead us through this material by your spirit, that our own appreciation of you for the God that you in fact are, as the God who judges, as the God who is faithful to his word, as the God who is severe and is also merciful, will break upon our hearts in a depth and magnitude that we have not before understood.

Lord, this requires a grace of all graces, and I ask it of you now. Bless this, Lord. Give us hearing ears. Open our hearts as we attend to the word that is spoken. We thank you and give you the praise.

In Jesus' name. Amen. Fred, could you be so kind as to get a glass of water out of the kitchen? A brother who has designed a book jacket for the new book, The Spirit of Truth, has already designed a book jacket for this book.

Everything is waiting but the book itself. And then the publisher will have the courage to publish it. And we came up with a working subtitle, Thinking the Unthinkable. The Holocaust. Thinking the Unthinkable.

Where was God? And I think I may have already cited, and if you read Reality, it's described in the book, how I had an opportunity at one moment some years ago to speak to Elie Wiesel, E-L-I-E, W-I-E-S-E-L, who has since won the Nobel Prize for Peace and is an outstanding writer, and the supreme authority on the Holocaust as a Jewish writer, and the sole survivor himself of the Holocaust.

His entire family was exterminated, I believe, thank you, at Auschwitz. And he himself miraculously survived and has become the outstanding Jewish spokesman on this subject. And so he gave a talk in New Jersey, where I was then living, and he mentioned in the course of it how a renaissance of interest in the Bible was taking place in his life.

He was meeting with a rabbi twice a week in the study of Old Testament Scripture. And though there was a question and answer period, the Lord did not give me the liberty to ask him this question publicly.

But afterwards, privately, I went up to him and I said to him this, to what degree are you willing to consider that the Holocaust, as well as all Jewish calamity and suffering, is the fulfillment of what has been spoken in Scripture in the concluding chapters of Leviticus and Deuteronomy as judgment for our sin?

And his answer was, after a stunned moment of hearing a question like that, I refuse to consider that. And that's why this is called thinking the unthinkable. It's unthinkable that an unbelievable atrocity and a horror of the kind that the Holocaust was could be from the hand of God.

In modern times, it's unthinkable. But here's what I want to say, saints. It's unthinkable that we should say anything that is from God is unthinkable. Because, you know what? If you can see by the eye of God, that one statement of the most auspicious, prominent, and celebrated spokesman on the Holocaust completely explains the Holocaust.

And I'll give you an A for the day if you could develop that statement. His answer to my question actually explains the Holocaust. How do you say that, Art? Because when man comes to an arrogance of supremacy over God, where he determines what is thinkable and what is not thinkable, though God himself has spoken, that hubris, H-U-B-R-I-S, that human pride, is the whole issue of what God himself is judging.

Religious Orthodoxy, Messianic Expectation, and Divine Judgment

That it could be made after the Holocaust by the man who is supposed to be the spokesman of the Holocaust, who knows better than any other, the human and other costs of the Holocaust, what that devastation had meant, not only in life, but in culture, the entire wreckage of the Jewish religious community.

It's interesting that the greatest number of victims were not secular Jews, but religious Jews. The whole Hasidic Orthodox community of Poland was almost totally decimated. Only a fragment of it has survived, and now has its location principally in England, and to some smaller degree in Israel.

And the great question, the consternation, that if it was God's judgment, why didn't it fall on American Jews? Or Western Jews who are totally secular in their mentality, why were the greatest number of them Orthodox and pious Jews?

How then could that be the statement of God for the sin of Israel? Can you answer that? That may be one way to look at it, which of course Jews would never consider, is that what we have as Jews celebrated as being religious, and the finest expression of Jewish piety, is not the way God views it.

Because it's the same piety that crucified Christ. What is Orthodoxy today, however celebrated, has a direct lineage and connection with that Pharisaical and Rabbinical class that undertook the crucifixion of Christ and have kept Jewish people for centuries from the consideration of that act, and continue to hold the same ground as their fathers.

So even to raise the question that God might not be pleased or endorse Jewish Orthodoxy is another shattering consideration that that community could not imagine. There's so much, guys, forgive me if I gasp and spurt my way through this, because just as I said that, I know what the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement is doing today.

You know what they think? What do they call those vans, anybody know, where they ride through the streets of Brooklyn and New York and they'll pick up a Jew off the street and bring him into their van and get him to wind the phylacteries around his arm and repeat a prayer after them.

And if they can get enough Jews to do that, the Messiah will come. Do you know that? Do you know what a cry, shriek, pound your head or what? The highest, deepest, most respected expression of Jewish religious life is that movement.

The Hasidic Lubavitcher movement that has this notion that if enough Jews will do that, the Messiah comes and the end of the age and the commencement of the Messianic era.

They say when every Jew holds the Shabbat, then the Messiah will return. Right.

And when you say to them, why do you have difficulty in considering that God may have been the author of the devastation of the Holocaust when you acknowledge that he was the author of the destruction of the temple in 70 A .D.?

And you know what the answer is? That God was judging a religious failure to keep the Sabbath and other kinds of ceremonial observances as they would define them. You understand how they're assessing what that judgment was?

It has nothing to do with the crucifixion of Israel's Messiah or the historic apostasy and the turning from the word of God, but a failure to maintain certain external religious practices that God judged by the devastation of the temple and the expulsion of the Jewish people into the diaspora and exile into the nations.

So there really is a failure even to properly interpret and understand previous judgments, let alone this last one. And what is the consequence of the failure to rightly understand judgments that have come?

Inevitable need to have it come again. That's right.

And that's why we need to gear ourselves for a final Holocaust that will take place globally that will eclipse the Holocaust of half a century ago. We're not talking about some light academic thing that we're sifting to get our understanding.

The failure to properly apprehend the meaning of past judgments invites a future and a greater judgment.

Reggie, you had your hand up? I just wanted to ask, what did you say was the thing.

Lubavitcher, L-U-B-O-V-I-T-S-C-H-E-R. That distinguishes that movement from other ultra-Orthodox movements. And it has its Rabbi, Rabbi Schneerson, who is now being increasingly promoted or celebrated and recognized as the Messiah, though he's 90 years old and has had a recent heart attack or some heart failure that has very much crippled his speech, if not rendered him silent, and brought some paralysis.

So it shows a stunted, ridiculous, messianic expectation more on the basis of tradition and human desire than the Word of God, which is altogether relative to the way in which they have also perceived the judgments of God, humanly and traditionally, in the light of the way that they would want it seen that sets their purposes in a better light, rather than in accordance with the Word of God.

A keeping of the Sabbath by a sufficient number of Jews or the winding on of the phylacteries and repeating a prayer after them, doesn't matter whether you believe or not, just a mechanical recitation performed by a certain number of Jews brings the messianic era.

No biblical precedent for that at all, entirely an arbitrary thing, but you cannot believe with what vehemence and passion they pursue that. Would to God that the Evangelical Church would conduct its outreaches with a like amount of intensity and passion as they perform theirs, because they have hundreds of these vans at a cost of how many thousands of dollars each, touring the streets of Brooklyn and other neighborhoods in New York City for this one purpose, to spot Jews on the street and bring them up into the van and to get that recitation from them in the simplistic way in which they view a role that they're playing that actually brings the messianic era.

Do they believe this accounts as much for the judgment of the Holocaust as the Temple in 70 A .D.? No.

We'll talk about that. Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust, I prefer to save that, that will be the final test of whether we have been prepared in the weeks preceding this. It's a paper that I wrote at the seminary, Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust, in which I quote Elie Wiesel and a number of theologians, philosophers and commentators and come to such an astonishing conclusion that the Catholic nun who was the teacher of that class and herself a leading exponent of ecumenical relationship with the Jewish community, if she had a gun, she would have killed me on the spot when I submitted that paper and made an oral report of it.

We were supposed to get the papers back I never got my paper back. It was a horror to her, my thesis, that the Holocaust was a judgment and that what was revealed in examining Jewish evaluations of that Holocaust was more astonishing still of an anti-Christ kind that staggered me when I finally came to see it.

So we are on to something here. There's something here. I cannot tell you the power of what inheres in this. You know, the same thing would be true of our lives personally. If something of a traumatic kind takes place in our life, of a devastation, and we fail properly to understand its meaning as God would intend for us to see it and lightly disguise it or swallow it down or cover it up, it is only a matter of time before the truth of that thing must finally have its expression in a devastation that perhaps was greater than the thing in its inception.

The Crucifixion, Israel's Judgment, and Historical Suffering

How long can the crucifixion of Jesus be concealed? Or ignored? Remember that we talked about how they bribed the Roman gods around the tomb to spread the story that his disciples had stolen his body away.

How absurd is that? That these broken disciples were themselves fearful and hiding behind locked doors can come through a cordon of Roman gods and steal the body away. And they paid them and bribed them to tell that story and then it says, and this story is believed to this day.

Well, we can believe a lie about something but you cannot suppress the truth indefinitely. In fact, if God would give me the grace, I think I can show you a direct linkage between the failure to receive the statement of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus and every subsequent suffering that has come to the Jewish people historically, including the Holocaust.

I'll just give you a quick thumbnail sketch. Remember Jesus wept over Jerusalem? Don't pray for me, pray for yourselves. You missed the day of your visitation. How oft would I have taken you under my wing as a hen does her chicks, but you would not.

Now he said, not one stone shall be left standing upon the other. And indeed, every prophetic word that he spoke about a devastation that would come to Israel, in fact, came. A devastation to the temple to the city, to the nation and an expulsion into the nations where we remained as unbelieving communities of Jews in the midst of Christian cultures of an unregenerate kind that was like an exacerbating sore.

We were like something that could not be during the Easter season. If there's ever a season in which Jews feared through every year of their lives in exile, it was Easter. Because then would come again the statements about the Christ killer.

Not only, and if you were a Christ killer once, what would stop you from being a Christ killer now? And some of the myths that circulated were that Jews were killing Gentile children to take their blood and employ them in the making of Passover matzahs and other kinds of practices which they performed.

Medieval old wives tales for which Jews were victimized. Entire communities were devastated, murdered, looting, pillaged in spurts of violence and incited by talk like this, by an ungainly Jewish community that simply could not be Christianized and whose continuing rejection of Christ invited this kind of retaliation.

Something was set in motion historically by the failure to properly understand the Holocaust of Jesus that finally eventuated in their own. Every instance of inexplicable suffering raises the issue of God.

How much more the calamity of the Holocaust? How could a God who is by definition just and righteous, all-seeing and all-powerful countenance a horror of such magnitude? For many, the concept of the traditional God has suffered irremediable damage, if not total eclipse.

You cannot assess what the Holocaust has meant in terms of conventional religious belief or faith, not only for Jews, but also for Christians. A kind of religious shallow nominalism that has gone on for so long could not survive the impact of the questions raised by the Holocaust, which is good.

It invites the Holocaust. It's something of the statement of why God is not happy with Jewish piety. You have to have a sense of how man has sublimated God to his own ends and purposes and fashioned something less of the faith than God intends and found a way to accommodate the issues of God as a religious thing that is acceptable to a lifestyle that does not threaten the real interests of man.

Nominal religion is a study in itself. It constitutes a virtual rejection of God while ostensibly at the same time seeming to celebrate God. And that is a stink in the face of God that he must judge. So that one of the consequences of a Holocaust is that it cuts right through and devastates the kinds of nominal believism that can suffice and survive in ordinary times, but it cannot stand in the face of calamity.

Secular Religion, Ecumenism, and the Erosion of Christian Orthodoxy

Can you understand why calamity has got to come again? Why Jews will have to be uprooted, their conventional categories devastated, if a remnant of them are to be fitted for their millennial destiny? Faith as we have understood it is no longer viable since the Holocaust and needs to be discarded as extraneous or perhaps there needs to be a substitution.

This guy, Richard Rubinstein, maybe you'll have a chance to look for his book after Auschwitz. He says one can no longer believe in God as he has been traditionally understood before the Holocaust. But he said, I'm not saying that you should forfeit religion.