Faith can be deepened, not destroyed, by strife, even when the suffering is unspeakable, says Rupert Shortt.
When the renowned Jewish thinker Jonathan Sacks was asked where God had been at Auschwitz, he effectively reversed the terms of the question by asking, “Where was man?”
God, he said, was there in the words “You shall not murder”. He was there in the words “Do not oppress the stranger”, in the words “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground”. Rabbi Sacks immediately added that the Holocaust was not in and of itself a new challenge to faith. Exactly the same question could have been asked about Cain and Abel, among innumerable other disasters. “Why did God let Cain kill his brother? And the truth is, that is the Jewish equation. We believe that God gave us freedom. It is the most fateful decision he made in the entire universe. Freedom means that if we do well, we are little lower than the angels. But if we do bad, we are lower even than the beasts. That is our world. God teaches what’s good and what’s evil, what we should do and what we should not do. But God does not intervene to force us to do good, or to prevent us from doing evil.”
