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By Root 2048 0

ration was the center of our concerns. Would it be a centimeter thicker or thinner? Would they give us margarine or jam? Fear of beatings by the guards was greater than fear of heaven. On that score the enemy triumphed: it was the SS, not God, who governed our world and whose shadow fell upon us. The SS wanted their victims to see them not as superior men but as gods, and they acted like sovereign, omnipotent gods. They had every right; we had none. They knew everything; we knew nothing. They fed us or killed us with the merest gesture, but we had no right even to look at them. He who looks God in the face must die. But the faith that bound me to the God of Israel and of my ancestors remained immune to all that, at least for the moment. It remained nearly intact.

For Primo Levi the problem of faith after Auschwitz was posed in stark terms: Either God is God, and therefore all-powerful and hence guilty of letting the murderers do as they pleased, or His power is limited, in which case he is not God. In other words, if God is God, then He is present everywhere. But if He refuses to show Himself, he becomes immoral and inhuman, the enemy’s ally or accomplice. The philosopher and historian Gerson Cohen would later show me a moving and terrifying passage in one of our books of martyrology. During the Crusades the Jews of Mainz hid in an underground shelter. One night their spiritual leaders, Rabbi Baroukh and his son-in-law Rabbi Yehuda, heard sounds coming from the synagogue above. When they went to investigate, they found the synagogue empty, but heard voices in the darkness. The two sages fell to their knees and cried, “Is it You, Lord, who wish our death? Have You changed sides? Have You decided to anoint the enemy as Your chosen people?” This is a cruel trap. The suffering and death of innocent children inevitably places divine will in question and arouses men to wrath and revolt. But what if that were just what God intended: that men cry out to Him of their pain and disappointment? Might that be the path to a solution? I prefer to suggest that no solution exists.

There is a passage in Night—recounting the hanging of a young Jewish boy—that has given rise to an interpretation bordering on blasphemy. Theorists of the idea that “God is dead” have used my words unfairly as justification of their rejection of faith. But if Nietzsche could cry out to the old man in the forest that God is dead, the Jew in me cannot. I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it. I admit that this is hardly an original position. It is part of Jewish tradition. But in these matters I have never sought originality. On the contrary, I have always aspired to follow in the footsteps of my father and those who went before him. Moreover, the texts cite many occasions when prophets and sages rebelled against the lack of divine interference in human affairs during times of persecution. Abraham and Moses, Jeremiah and Rebbe Levi-Yitzhak of Berdichev teach us that it is permissible for man to accuse God, provided it be done in the name of faith in God. If that hurts, so be it. Sometimes we must accept the pain of faith so as not to lose it. And if that makes the tragedy of the believer more devastating than that of the nonbeliever, so be it. To proclaim one’s faith within the barbed wire of Auschwitz may well represent a double tragedy, of the believer and his Creator alike.

How was it possible, in that cursed place, to praise the Eternal One for His supposed love of His people? How was it possible, without telling lies, to say in Auschwitz, “Ashrainu, ma tov khelkainu”—how happy we are to bear our heritage? How and by what right can we speak of happiness in Auschwitz? As I have said elsewhere, Auschwitz is conceivable neither with God nor without Him. Perhaps I may someday come to understand man’s role in the mystery Auschwitz represents, but never God’s.

Was I later reconciled to Him? Let us say that I was reconciled to