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Michael Berenbaum

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.

About the Author
Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, author and Emmy-Award Filmmaker. Former Project Director overseeing the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and former President and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.