Sacred Heresy
I had a conversation with a devout Jew in synagogue last month, during one of the dark days of a very dark year. He is a regular at a daily minyan and always has a sefer nearby. He asked in despair: Where are our prayers for the God who does not answer, to the God who does not save as opposed to the God who did not save?
I nodded, but now I have an answer: Menachem Z. Rosensaft’s “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.”
Lawyers are seldom poets, and poets seldom lawyers, but Menachem Rosensaft is both.
The long-time General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress and law professor at Cornell, has written a searing series of poems triggered by and modeled after the 150 Psalms that are at the core of our Biblical canon and at the heart of every siddur. Traditional Psalms are recited to praise God in moments of exaltation and of anguish, in moments of crisis and suffering. They speak to the soul, penetrate to the depth of human experience from ecstatic joy to profound sorrow, from the majesty of nature to an encounter in fear and trembling with the divine.
Rosensaft, the child of two Auschwitz survivors and the brother of five-and-a-half-year-old Benjamin, sent to the gas chambers upon his arrival in Birkenau, was enveloped in the Shoah from his birth in the Displaced Persons Camp at Bergen-Belsen. His very name, Menachem, bespeaks his being: he was his parents consolation. The birth of Jewish children after Auschwitz was the ultimate defiance, the most profound response to death, by recreating life, and the paradigmatic negation of despair for the birth of a child is hope.
His effort is audacious, to write poems that address the absence of God in a tradition that celebrates God’s presence, to shape poems that reflect the fact of God’s hiddenness at Auschwitz – hester panim. The canonical Psalms are directed to the presence of God, often to the saving presence of God – the God who redeemed us from Egypt, the God who has answered our prayers. They speak of reward and punishment and God’s active role in human history.
His effort is audacious, to write poems that address the absence of God in a tradition that celebrates God’s presence, to shape poems that reflect the fact of God’s hiddenness at Auschwitz.
Even for believers it is hard to reflect on such a role for God in the world of Auschwitz. Philosophers and poets have anguished with such issues, believers, nonbelievers, those who lost faith at Auschwitz and even those who found faith have struggled to put into words their experience.
Let’s see how Rosensaft wrestles with God.
He confronts the existential situation of those who went through the Shoah.
Burning Psalm 53
locked in their sanctuary of death
the about-to die said in their hearts
“where is God?”
or
“God has abandoned us”
or
“God is slaughtering us”
or even exclaimed
“there is no God”
but none
in those last moments
thanked God
Rosensaft transforms tradition on its head, Witness his rendition of the next to the last line of Birchat Hamazon, Grace After Meals:
I was young and became old
and I have seen far too many
of your righteous sons and daughters
forsaken by the world,
forsaken by You
and their children begging for bread
starving
There is a legend — undoubtedly true for the pious — that Jews went to their deaths singing Ani Maamin, “I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah and even if he tarries, I shall wait for him every day that he may come.”
Rosensaft presents an alternate Psalm of that last moment:
Burning Psalms 14
for the dead
from the dead
a song for the dead
the pious
deprived of hope
did not say in their hearts
“there is no god”
but knowing
that the end of their captivity
will not be rescue
not from Zion
not from anywhere
asked with their last
zyklon-b breath
“where are You, Adonai?”
Moses in the Torah pleaded with God not to kill the sinful Israelites as it will reflect poorly on the divine reputation. The Burning Psalmist wrote:
when I heard a german scoff
“where is your God”
he was right
You were never here
now all I want to know is
do you know that I am here
that we are here
do you ever look down
even for an instance
and see me
see us
here?
Rosensaft does not blame God for Auschwitz and Treblinka, the Germans and their collaborators are to blame, so too, the indifference of the world, the unbridled use of technology and science to murder.
I do not blame You
Adonai
for auschwitz and treblinka
but after auschwitz and treblinka
I cannot sing Your praises
for wonders
You will not perform.
Unlike the death of God theologians of the 1960s, Rosensaft does not celebrate God’s absence or believe that humanity has come of age. He understands what Nietzsche has said: if God is dead, everything is permissible! Everything, including Auschwitz.
and the beginning of wisdom
is fear
of Your absence
As he goes through the Psalms one by one and writes counter Psalms, burning Psalms one feels the echo of a young Elie Wiesel — wrestling with the burdens of surviving when so many others had been killed, Rosensaft was his teaching assistant more than a half-century ago. Unlike Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Rosensaft does not create a theology of God’s absence, yet like Wiesel and “Yitz” Greenberg, he struggles to reconcile what for some Jews — but certainly not all — is impossible to reconcile, the God who saves in the Bible and recalled again and again in our prayers with the absence of a saving God during the Shoah.
As a coda to Burning Psalms, Rosensaft includes his poetic address at Srebrenica, showing that others too experience that absence.
All Jews are now post-Oct. 7 Jews so Rosensaft also includes the poetry he wrote after Oct. 7, when Jews waited for rescue and it did not come from God or from the IDF. For some it came from brave civilians, and from the police and the IDF, but for thousands, it came too late or not at all.
One must respect Rosensaft’s struggle. He may be a teacher of sacred heresy.