Not “Any Tom,Dick,and Harry”

Selected Writings on the Holocaust

Heschel and Buber addressed the philosophical questions of divine providence and theodicy raised by the Holocaust in a number of their works. The following is a brief overview of these discussions, consisting of a précis of four treatments by each of them. In Heschel’s first important work in the English language, Man is Not Alone (Heschel, 1951), the chapter “The Hiding of God” addresses God’s relationship to the Holocaust. It begins with a question: “For us, contemporaries and survivors of history’s most terrible horrors, it is impossible to meditate about the compassion of God without asking: Where is God?” (Heschel, 1951: 151). Heschel’s answer is explicit. The Holocaust does not pose a problem for God, since it essentially concerns human actions and human responsibility. It is they who have turned from and thus silenced God, rather than God himself being silent. Heschel uses biblical and liturgical references to impress this point. He both legitimates expressions of anguish and reaffirms ultimate faith in God, by ending this section with the whole 26 verses of Psalm 44, which concludes, “For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly cleaveth unto the earth. Arise for our help, and redeem us for Thy mercies sake” (Heschel, 1951: 157).

God in Search of Man (Heschel, 1955), the second of Heschel’s signature philosophical works, refers to the Holocaust in a late chapter, “The Problem of Evil.” He writes: “This essential predicament of man [our disturbing familiarity with human evil] has assumed a peculiar urgency in our time, living as we do in a civilization where factories were established in order to exterminate millions of men, women, and children” (Heschel, 1955: 369). Heschel’s response is that through the commandments (mitzvoth) we can begin to redeem the world, which also awaits God’s messianic redemption.

Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations (Heschel, 2007) was originally published in Hebrew in three volumes as Torah Min ha-Shamayim in 1962. ⁴ In the first volume Heschel includes a discussion of the competing views concerning God’s relationship to evil and suffering offered by the two preeminent second-century authorities, Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva. He uses Akiva, who was martyred by the Romans during the Bar Kokhba revolt, to put forward his own position, with an eye on the Holocaust. ⁵ According to Heschel’s portrayal, Ishmael had a consistent rationalistic outlook on the relationship to God, which still recognized the limitations of human reason. He sees suffering as punishment for human sin, and protests to God when this equation does not seem to be in evidence. Akiva has a more intimate understanding of the relationship to God. Not only does God suffer along with humans, but in some cases the suffering of innocents can be seen as a paradoxical gift, that is, as a means to deepen their intimate love of God. Accordingly, Heschel writes,

the greatness of afflictions [suffering] is not only because they cleanse a person’s sins, but because within them there is human participation in the afflictions of heaven. No one truly understands the meaning of love, nor does one even know whether he is in love, except through affliction. (Heschel, 2007: 135)

A Passion for Truth is somewhat analogous to Heschel’s two-volume Yiddish work, Kotsk: The Struggle for Truth of 1973. As in earlier books, a particular chapter, “The Kotzker and Job,” addresses poignant questions about evil and suffering, with some reference to the Holocaust. This background is made unmistakable by the statement: “Life in our time has been a nightmare for many of us, tranquility an interlude, happiness a fake. Who could breathe at a time when man has engaged in murdering the holy witness to God six million times?” (Heschel, 1974: 300–301). A key section in this chapter offers a story to encapsulate the challenges that the Holocaust poses to the life of faith. “Barrels Full of Holes” relates a story from the midrashic literature told by the Kotzker to some of his followers. In it a king hired laborers to fill barrels that were punctured with holes. One of the workers complained about the futility of this exercise, in seeing the water just trickle out. However, a wise worker replied, “Surely I am to be paid for every barrel! I shall fill them; for this clearly means that my obedience is important to the king” (Heschel, 1974: 286).

The level of intensity, actually what many characterize as its anguish, of this chapter is unmatched even in an authorship known for its passion. Heschel intersperses challenges with responses in a continuing spiral of emotion. The key question is about the apparent meaninglessness or even absurdity of human existence. He struggles with myriad answers, many of which he has offered before: the task is to obey God; there is meaning beyond absurdity; it is humans who are responsible for injustice; perhaps what is intended is that the barrels be repaired; there will ultimately be compensation for the toil; to stand before the grandeur of the universe and declare it all absurd is “idiotic”; our defining task is to search for truth; we can still carry out some meaningful pursuits; God shares in our suffering; and faith is “compassion for God.” It is in this context that Heschel makes reference to Buber’s criticism of the biblical story about God punishing Saul for not killing the Amalekite king. Heschel’s indictment is clear: What right does Buber have to limit God to his own understanding of justice? However, it is not evident that Heschel is satisfied with any of the answers. In an earlier section he uses the Kotzker to once again raise his own query, one that haunts the text, regarding: “the thought that ultimately God Himself was responsible for the inherent falsehood of human existence” (Heschel, 1974: 233). ⁶

The sites that mark Buber’s most significant reflections on the Holocaust are more diverse than the references in book chapters we noted in the Heschel oeuvre. The essay “Dialogue between Heaven and Earth” (Buber, 1967b: 214–225) was first given as a French lecture in 1950. The background motif of the essay is performed by its title, that the teaching of the Bible is that “our life is a dialogue between the above and the below” (Buber, 1967b: 215). However, according to Buber, the Bible also knows of times when God’s providence seems to have disappeared. He supports this statement with a quotation from the Prophet Isaiah (8:17), who speaks of a time when God “hideth His face from the house of Jacob” (Buber, 1967b: 222). Building upon this, Buber refers again to Isaiah, who describes such times as “barbarous,” and to Job (30:21), who even speaks of the “cruel God.” Of course, God’s response to Job is well known; no apology or explanation is forthcoming for this righteous man’s suffering. Rather, God only appears and is heard once more. In one of the most startling and powerful statements in Buber’s huge literature, he concludes that what is left in such times, our time, is to struggle for justice, contest God’s silence, and await His enigmatic presence.

No, rather even now we contend, we too, with God, even with Him, the Lord of Being, whom we once, we here, chose for our Lord. We do not put up with earthly being; we struggle for its redemption, and struggling we appeal to the help of our Lord, who is again and still a hiding one. In such a state we await His voice, whether it comes out of the storm or out of a stillness that follows it. Though His coming appearance resemble no earlier one, we shall recognize again our cruel and merciful Lord. (Buber, 1967b: 225)

The next document is a letter Buber wrote in 1950 to an acquaintance, Ernsz Szilagyi (Buber, 2003: 172–173). The letter supplements the advice of the above essay, about living in a time of God’s absence. Buber poses three choices in this situation: to just withdraw from the world (perhaps having in mind his early work on world-renouncers in Buddhism and Hinduism), to admit that the world has no meaning, or to accept in faith that God is just. Answering his own question, “How is Jewish life after Auschwitz possible?” he writes:

How is a Jewish life after Auschwitz possible? Today I no longer know exactly what Jewish life is, and I am not sure it will be known to me in the future. But I know what it means to cling to Him. The ones who continue to cling to Him are pointing toward what could justly be called in the future Jewish life. (Buber, 2003: 173)

“God and the Spirit of Man” (Buber, 1952: 123–129) was a lecture of 1951 delivered in the United States and later published as a chapter in the book Eclipse of God. While the Holocaust does not enter as a subject, the text adds an important strand to the wider fabric of Buber’s reflections on what has happened to the relationship to God. He carefully describes the ways that philosophers and religious persons have succeeded in the effort to silence God. The former have made God a mere object of reflection. The latter have sought to manipulate him according to their wishes and designs. In all, the damage done to the relationship to God is caused by the apotheosis of the human subject, the “I.” In his words,

In our age the I–It [the self-absorbed and objectifying] relation, gigantically swollen, has usurped, practically uncontested, the mastery and the rule. The I of this relation, an I that possesses all, makes all, succeeds with all, this I that is unable to say Thou, unable to meet a being essentially, is the lord of the hour. (Buber, 1952: 129)

Lastly, as part of a group of treatments of a number of important contemporary philosophers, a series titled “The Library of Living Philosophers,” a volume dedicated to Buber was completed in 1963. It included essays by recognized scholars as well as providing the opportunity for Buber’s response. The section “Replies to My Critics” (Buber, 1967c: 689–744) includes a few pages where Buber refers to his Eclipse of God. Once again, the Holocaust is not mentioned, but the issue of God’s silence is paramount. He begins by reiterating the thesis of that book, quoting lines about how the “I–It relation, gigantically swollen … steps in between and shuts off from us the light of heaven” (Buber, 1967c: 715–716). Buber adds that the Bible knows of the other side of this eclipse, “the divine side,” which it metaphorically calls “the hiding of God, the veiling of the divine countenance.” He continues:

These last years in a great searching and questioning, seized ever anew by the shudder of the now, I have arrived no further than that I now distinguish a revelation through the hiding of the face, a speaking through the silence. The eclipse of God can be seen with one’s eyes, it will be seen. (Buber, 1967c: 716)

Some Issues Raised in the Secondary Literature

There is an extensive literature on the philosophical investigations of the Holocaust by Heschel and Buber. However, the body of commentary is bereft of discussions of the two philosophers together, which is surprising in light of some deep similarities in their life-experiences and fundamental religious views. ⁷ Three overlapping issues from the individual treatments will be pursued: the claim that each philosopher basically ignored the challenges posed by the Holocaust; the question whether there was any development in their thinking; the criticism that their examinations were not consistent and systematic.

Until recently both Heschel and Buber were criticized for not seriously addressing the philosophical issues raised by the Holocaust. Thus, a significant twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, wrote: “Jewish thinkers of unquestionable Jewish authenticity such as Martin Buber and Abraham J. Heschel said little about the Holocaust—and that little with great reticence” (Fackenheim, 1982: 194). In harmony with this view is Morris Faierstein’s statement: “The impression that one might gain from recent studies of the late Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel and his writings is that the Holocaust was not central to his theological thought” (Faierstein, 1999: 255), ⁸ and also David Glantz’s view that “It is surprising to realize how disrespectful is Buber of this subject [the Holocaust]” (in Forman-Barzilai, 2003: 175).

However, in light of the extensive periods and intensive intellectual probing covered by the preceding brief review of selected responses by Heschel and Buber, it is difficult to agree with this criticism of their lack of attention to the Holocaust. Both figures have forcefully spoken of being obsessed with the horrifying events. In an interview Heschel confided: “Auschwitz and Hiroshima never leave my mind. Nothing can be the same after that” (in Kaplan, 1996: 117). Buber once disclosed to his life-long friend and biographer, Maurice Friedman, that beginning in 1945 and 1946, when he became aware of the full extent of the atrocity, and continuing “[f]or the rest of his life … not an hour passed in which he did not think of the Holocaust” (Friedman, 1988: 306).

More recently, a number of fine essays and larger works have documented each thinker’s confrontation with the Holocaust. Critics such as Morris Faierstein, Edward Kaplan and Robert Eisen have pointed to Heschel’s often overlooked Yiddish works as additional evidence of his continual wrestling with that horror. Jerry Lawritson and David Forman-Barzilai have chronicled the different positions that Buber assumed in the struggle to salvage his notion of dialogue given his awareness of God’s silence. Lawritson concluded: “The conception of the eclipse of God … occupied Buber from 1939 until his death in 1965” (Lawritson, 1996: 301).

A second issue arising from the critical literature concerns the question whether there was any clear development in their responses to the Holocaust. Steven Katz, in his “Abraham Heschel and Hasidism,” definitely finds that A Passion for Truth constitutes a dramatic departure for Heschel. He writes:

Heschel, to whose earlier works one could rightly apply the description of an earlier Jewish sage [Spinoza]—“the God-intoxicated philosopher”—now seems aware of quite another, altogether more absurd, dimension of human existence … This latter reflection [“that ultimately God Himself was responsible for the inherent falsehood of human existence”] would be daring for any Jewish thinker, for Heschel it is revolutionary. (Katz, 1980: 97)

Katz’s view of the revolutionary nature of Heschel’s last book is, to me, unassailable. While Heschel had offered a number of different answers to the questions posed by the Holocaust—the responsibility of humans, the power still to accomplish good in the world, that there was “meaning beyond absurdity,” that God shares in human suffering—there was no noticeable progression. With A Passion for Truth, even though all of these answers appear once again, they are not forwarded with the usual assuredness. Heschel for the last time weighed the challenges, and while he still saw faith as overcoming if not conquering these, his voice certainly wavered.

With Buber, the secondary literature is not able to clearly identify either progression or a final turning point in his reflections on the Holocaust. At times the critics seem to hint at some development, but this may just be the outcome of an attempt to summarize Buber’s positions. For example, Jerry Lawritson’s “Martin Buber and the Shoah” (Lawritson, 1996) suggests that there are three aspects in Buber’s treatment of the “eclipse of God.” There is first the “ontological” dimension, which includes both the apotheosis of the human subject and that God is hiding His face. God’s silence, including some possible speaking through the silence, is regarded by the author as a second aspect. The third is identified as “staying with God” (Lawritson, 1996: 305). Forman-Barzilai summarizes Buber’s efforts to understand the Holocaust in terms of the eclipse of God, God’s hidden face, and the notion of speaking through the silence. He does hint at some development when he writes that “we observe signs that Buber abandoned the bold and secure foundational statements about God that had previously dwelled at the core of his philosophical system” (Forman-Barzilai, 2003: 172).

I agree with the comments of the two critics, and others, that there is no clear progression in Buber’s treatment of the Holocaust. The “Dialogue between Heaven and Earth,” originally delivered in 1950, already includes most of the major elements in Buber’s repertoire: history appearing empty of God; God hiding Himself; humans being left with contending with God and waiting for a future manifestation of “our cruel and merciful Lord” (Buber, 1967b: 225). Buber’s feature of God’s “eclipse” is added soon after. His “Replies” does introduce the note of “a revelation through the hiding of the face” (Buber, 1967c: 716), but what that means is left completely open.

Lastly, in the literature on Heschel and Buber, comments are often made about the lack of consistent, systematic, and convincing answers in their treatments of the Holocaust. This is the case, even with very sympathetic critics. In terms of Heschel, for example, in the course of his article, Katz questions the “philosophical coerciveness” and “logic” of some of his arguments and assertions, and hints at the need for more critical, detailed scrutiny overall (Katz, 1980: 100, 102, 104). In reviewing Buber’s “Dialogue between Heaven and Earth,” Fackenheim writes that “This answer [that we contend with God and await His voice], arresting and thought-provoking in many ways, is, in one sense, no answer at all” (Fackenheim, 1982: 197). Forman-Barzilai is at one point more severe with Buber, stating that in “the philosophical and theoretical realm … Buber seems to move uneasily from one idea to another and his message seems hesitant, inconsistent, and often self-contradictory” (Forman-Barzilai, 2003: 158).

Yet, the same critics, and others, recognize that the Holocaust elicits no simple answer and that the struggles of these two philosophers evidence sincere religious responses. Katz follows his philosophical suspicion of one of Heschel’s statements with the comment that it needs to be taken as a “confession of faith,” and that “what is particularly impressive about it … is its total commitment. It is a religious position unalloyed by compromise” (Katz, 1980: 100). Edward Kaplan continues in this appreciative vein:

Heschel refuses to systematize the unspeakable—whether it be the divine Presence, God’s silence at our agony or massive evil. As is faith itself, trust in God is not static, like a formulated creed, but an unending challenge, a way of thinking about nothing less than redemption. (Kaplan, 1996: 130)

While Fackenheim found great lapses in Buber’s answers to the Holocaust, he saw that it was not because Buber ignored its tests, writing: “Buber’s thought was, despite all, shaken by the Holocaust, and this not at its political periphery but rather at what may be called its religious center” (Fackenheim, 1982: 196). Forman-Barzilai coins the term “agonism,” as in “agonism in faith … means that the very notion of faith itself is being lived in agony over the very visible and undoubtedly perplexing ways of God” (Forman-Barzilai, 2003: 171). He appreciated Buber’s efforts in refusing “to give up his faith or admit defeat, to admit that whatever he lived and believed, wrote and fought for, was proven wrong by Hitler’s satanic deeds” (Forman-Barzilai, 2003: 172).

How does one reconcile this mixture of critical and laudatory statements in the secondary literature? The critics, as their philosophical subjects themselves, are mired in that situation of tension between an expectation or at least desire for an answer, for at least rational consistency, and the acknowledgement that reason and logic are overwhelmed by the extent and horror of this event. Kaplan clearly agrees with Heschel when writing, as we just saw: “Heschel refuses to systematize the unspeakable” (Kaplan, 1996: 130), and later adds: “Even faith cannot untie the Gordian knot” (Kaplan, 1996: 131). For Forman-Barzilai the notion of “agonism in faith” precisely characterizes not only Buber’s response to the Holocaust, but “a new stage in human religiosity … in the face of God’s mysterious (read: unknown) ways” (Forman-Barzilai, 2003: 171).

Heschel and Buber are adamant that there is neither answer to nor comfort for the suffering in the Holocaust. Even in the wake of celebrating the reuniting of the city of Jerusalem in 1967, Heschel exclaimed: “And yet, there is no answer to Auschwitz” even if “Israel enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical despair” (Heschel, 1969: 115). Buber also does not see an answer forthcoming, either from humans or from God. He turns to Job’s story, with the counsel not to expect “God to make a confession” or “explain his secrets” (Buber, 2003: 173).

Of course, there have been attempts to formulate a solution to the philosophical questions following in the wake of the Holocaust. Aviezer Ravitzky chronicles a number of sectarian Jewish rabbis who proffer a clear answer. They see the Holocaust as just punishment for the “apostasy” of Zionism. Thus, the Satmarer Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum held that, “in our generation one need not look far for the sin responsible for our calamity … The heretics [read, Zionists] have made all kinds of efforts … to seize sovereignty and freedom by themselves, before the appointed [messianic] time” (Ravitzky, 1991: 49). Equally unequivocal, if very different, answers have been offered by such classic Holocaust thinkers as Richard Rubenstein and Eliezer Berkovits. For the former, “God really died at Auschwitz” (Rubenstein, 1966: 224), and the latter saw its “unimaginable cruelty and unbridled inhumanity” as a consequence of God creating humans with free will (Berkovits, 1977: 89).

The position that rejects the possibility of definitive resolutions has many proponents, with Heschel and Buber as early adherents. This is the message one hears from such prominent thinkers as Elie Wiesel and Emil Fackenheim. Wiesel insisted that the Holocaust could not be adequately described, not to mention understood. Thus we find that even the survivors “could never express in words, coherent, intelligible words, our experience of madness on an absolute scale” (Wiesel, 1979: 201). To arrive at an answer, or a meaning, in the actions of humans or God is to suggest the Holocaust can be demarcated, then classified, penetrated and ultimately understood. However, for Wiesel these efforts cannot be successful: “In truth, Auschwitz signifies … the defeat of the intellect that wants to find a Meaning—with a capital M—in history” (Wiesel, 2000: 71).

Fackenheim concurred with Wiesel on this and many other occasions. He rejected the possibility of any conclusive meaning or answer to the “trauma of Auschwitz” (Morgan, ed., 1987: 168). ⁹ Every attempt could at most result in fragmentary answers, or better midrashim, that is, stories. Fully in accord with this insight is the fact that Fackenheim offered two stories, that a “commanding Voice of Auschwitz” could be heard following the event, and that God’s partial Tikkun or redemption was evidenced in the heroic efforts of men and women at that time to resist the Nazis by affirming their own humanity (Morgan, ed., 1987: 168, 187–188). Thus, eschewing a single comprehensive answer, Fackenheim still insisted on the need for authentic responses, and a guiding criterion of these was Jewish survival. In a statement fully representative in its evocative quality, he wrote: “For a Jew after Auschwitz, only one thing is certain: he may not side with the murderers and do what they have left undone” (Morgan, ed., 1987: 179).

Comparing their Responses

So, then, what distance actually separates the positions of Heschel and Buber? The perusal of the secondary literature has already noted one significant feature they had in common, that there was no closure to their wrestling with the Holocaust. There are other, more specific overlaps discernible. One was the necessity for political action in the support of human rights and dignity. Their common theoretical considerations included: the ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust rested with humans; ours is a time of God’s withdrawal or hiding His face; God and ultimate meaning are correlates for faith; speaking of God as Person has metaphoric value; faith requires a trust that does not limit God to human desires or measures of justice; the event of the Holocaust deeply impacts on all reflections on theodicy. Of course, the comparison of any two thinkers’ similarities will always show differences within them, but it is the shared that is the focus at this point.

Both Heschel and Buber were well known for social activism, which was an extension of their overall philosophies as well as part of their responses to the Holocaust. Heschel was a strident advocate concerning the civil rights of African-Americans, with the protest movement against the Vietnam War, and for the emigration of Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union. He regarded this work as authentically Jewish, in support of the dignity of life and against its satanic denial, exemplified by the Holocaust. Heschel considered prejudice, whether racial or religious, as being of one cloth, writing: “Racial or religious bigotry must be recognized for what it is: satanism, blasphemy” (Heschel, 1972: 86).

For Buber, the cause of reconciliation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and later in the State of Israel, was his most vital specifically political concern. He was instrumental in the formation of two organizations to bring understanding between Jews and Arabs and to advance his position of binationalism, Brit Shalom (the covenant of peace) in 1925 and Ihud or unity in 1942. Although his attention to this issue—“the Arab Question”—antedates the Holocaust, Buber recognized the influence of Nazism in the chauvinism of the quest for power for its own sake that he saw being advocated by some radical supporters of a Jewish national homeland (Mendes-Flohr, ed., 1983: 291–292). ¹⁰ In another essay the link was put more starkly, that such limitless national egoism leads to acting in “the land of Israel like Hitler” (cited in Forman-Barzilai, 2003: 159).

Heschel and Buber shared the view that the Holocaust was first and foremost a question of human responsibility. In Man is Not Alone, Heschel insisted that it was folly to shift “the responsibility for man’s plight from man to God, in accusing the Invisible though the iniquity is ours” (Heschel, 1951: 151). Humans have defied and betrayed God, which has led to his departure, or as Heschel expressed it, “He was expelled. God is in exile” (Heschel, 1951: 153). This theme is not lost in Heschel’s later works, so that even in the anguishing A Passion for Truth, the main message is about recognizing and combating human falsehood and self-deception. In this connection Heschel said that the Holocaust “had its origin in a lie … Decimate the Jews and all problems would be solved” (Heschel, 1974: 321).

Buber expressed a similar accusation about human responsibility, in the language of “the mastery and the rule” of the “I–It relation, gigantically swollen” (Buber, 1952: 129). Here human self-interest and aggrandizement have obscured the ever-continuing voice of God. This notion of “the eclipse of God,” fully detailed in the book of that name in 1952, is reiterated over a decade later, as we have seen, in Buber’s “Replies to My Critics” (Buber, 1967c: 715). The essay “Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace” (Buber, 1999: 195–202) shows another dimension of Buber’s understanding of the human guilt for the Holocaust. In it he spoke of a coming “final battle of homo humanus against homo contrahumanus” (Buber, 1999: 196). Homo humanus stands for those who believe in the possibilities of genuine dialogue, and speak directly with the intention of affirming and confirming the other. Opposed to them are those in league with the antihuman, who seek to exacerbate and profit from human divisions. Buber held that some persons in the camp of homo contrahumanus, who “have so radically removed themselves from the human sphere, so transposed themselves into the sphere of monstrous inhumanity” (Buber, 1999: 195), were precisely the leaders and perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Following the common indictment of human responsibility, Heschel and Buber do speak of God’s absence during that time and following. One way of portraying this absence is through the metaphor of God hiding. They share more than just this metaphor, but also the idea that God’s hiding is at least partially a reaction to humans’ turning from God. The most relevant piece in Heschel’s work is, obviously, his chapter “The Hiding God” (Heschel, 1951: 151–157). It is here that he begins by criticizing those who see the Holocaust as a fundamentally theological problem, yet he does examine the splintered relationship to God. Taking his lead from a number of sources in the biblical text, Heschel contends that God was forced into exile because of human wickedness, malice, and cruelty. He argues that God is not by nature hidden, but that He has been forced into exile by human actions. Referring to the prophet Isaiah, he writes:

It is not God who is obscure. It is man who conceals Him. His hiding from us is not in His essence: “Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior!” (Isaiah 45:15). A hiding God, not a hidden God. He is waiting to be disclosed, to be admitted into our lives. (Heschel, 1951: 153–154)

We have already noted Buber’s discussion of God hiding, in “The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth” (Buber, 1967b: 214–225). He wrote of times when this dialogue is interrupted, referring to Isaiah 8:17, which describes a situation where God “hideth His face from the house of Jacob” (Buber, 1967b: 222), and seems totally absent from human affairs. At least in this context, Buber does not speak of human evil as the cause of hiding, referring, for example, to the slavery in Egypt, and to a story from Psalm 82, about a time when God’s angels misruled the earth (Buber, 1967b: 223). The letter to Ernsz Szilagyi adds to this that, “He will not stop being the hidden God [the last words in Hebrew], when He reveals Himself anew” (Buber, 2003: 173), in the sense that God will not apologize or provide answers for his inaction. Finally, there is also Buber’s reference to “a revelation through the hiding of the face, speaking through the silence” (Buber, 1967c: 716).

One of the types of inconsistencies noted in the critical literature arises in the course of Buber’s reflections on the hiding God. In “Dialogue between Heaven and Earth,” Buber distinguishes God’s continual revelation in nature from that plane of history where “revelation is essentially not a continuous process, but breaks in again and again upon the course of events” (Buber, 1967b: 221–222). Yet, in “Replies” he affirms: “I cannot conceive of any interruption of the divine revelation,” and he does not seem to refer to the dimension of nature for he adds that still there is “a condition that works on us as a silence of God” (Buber, 1967c: 716). I cannot find a way to reconcile the two statements concerning whether revelation is continuous or discontinuous in history, and both are actually in harmony with other views he espoused.

In response to God’s hiding or silence, both philosophers speak of a faith or trust in God that may have to transcend our reason or understanding. In Heavenly Torah, Heschel uses the example of Rabbi Akiva to argue that where human suffering is clearly not the result of sin, God’s justice can still be upheld, because it may serve the cause of purging the righteous person of some minor imperfection, or bring about a deeper intimacy with God. Heschel’s A Passion for Truth echoes with a particular definition of faith: “Faith comes about in a collision of an unending passion for Truth and the failure to attain it by one’s own means” (Heschel, 1974: 302). ¹¹ The title of one section, “Meaning Beyond Absurdity,” underscores his belief that “the ultimate meaning of God’s ways is not invalidated because of man’s incapacity to comprehend it” (Heschel, 1974: 293).

Buber speaks of a waiting for God’s reappearance based upon the faith in God’s justice, even though this may exceed human understanding or desire. In very personal terms he writes: “My faith in you is not dependent on your doing what I see as just but in the fact that all your deeds are the just, more so, the absolute justice” (Buber, 2003: 172–173). This is true, even when God’s creation appears “frightening” and his acts “barbarous.” Limiting faith to one’s own image of the divine is for Buber nothing less than idolatry: “If someone accepts him otherwise [than as He is], he accepts a statue, an idol crafted by his own hand, a ‘good’ one that is easy to love” (Buber, 2003: 173).

A few further common features will conclude this examination of similarities in the responses of Heschel and Buber to the Holocaust. The first is that the metaphor of God as Person stands at the foundation of their various considerations. For Heschel, beyond the pronouns—exclusively male, used by both thinkers—God seeks human partners, commands and addresses them, is sometimes silent, shares human suffering, and even needs human comfort. The last is poignantly expressed: “When man is in distress, there is a cry of anguish in Heaven. God needs not only sympathy and comfort but partners, silent warriors” (Heschel, 1974: 300).

Buber’s notion of God as Person, resonates throughout his I and Thou (Buber, 1970), as well as his deliberations on the Holocaust. In the former he speaks of God as “Absolute Person,” who “enters into a direct relationship to us human beings through creative, revelatory, and redemptive acts, and thus makes it possible for us to enter into a direct relationship to him” (Buber, 1970: 181). In relation to the Holocaust, this direct relationship to “Him” opens the way for Buber’s discussion of trust, of waiting for an appearance, and especially, His silence: “The other, the divine side, is called in the holy books of Israel the hiding of God, the veiling of the divine countenance. Nothing more than such an anthropomorphic image seems to be granted us” (Buber, 1967c: 716). For both philosophers, drawing upon human relations to address the challenges of the Holocaust, enables their responses to have the range, vitality, depth and tone of sincerity that they have.

Additionally, Heschel and Buber argue that our very existence as humans requires a clinging to God, even following the Holocaust, because without God there is no authentic human existence. Heschel expresses this insight succinctly, in terms of meaning: “Expectation of meaning is an a priori condition of our existence”; and follows this with the postulate or “premise,” that “God and meaning, as we understand them, are one” (Heschel, 1974: 290). Buber provides a more extended discussion, in a similar but different key, focusing on trust rather than meaning. This is presented in two of his essays in A Believing Humanism. He holds that only through true speech between persons can homo humanus, humans in their fullest sense, come into existence. What true speech requires is trust in the other; even the stranger or enemy can be trusted when one addresses them with sincerity and respect. However, trust in the other is itself ultimately grounded in faith or trust in life, or Being, or, as Buber prefers, God. He writes:

Here humanity and faith … they penetrate each other, they work together, indeed, they are so centrally related to each other that we may say our faith has our humanity as its foundation and our humanity has our faith as its foundation. …

It is simply trust that is increasingly lost to men in our time. And the crisis of speech is bound up with the loss of trust in the closest possible fashion, for I can only speak to someone in the true sense of the term if I expect him to accept my word as genuine … This lack of trust in Being [or God], this incapacity for unreserved intercourse with the other, points to an innermost sickness of the sense of existence. (Buber, 1999: 117, 201)

Finally, at least implicit in the discussions of Heschel and Buber is the dawning awareness that the Holocaust must have a central place in all Jewish reflections on human evil and God’s justice, on the sufferings of the righteous and the innocent in history. As the first prominent Jewish philosophers to wrestle with the implications of this terror, they laid the groundwork for the role that the Holocaust would come to hold not only in relation to the issue of theodicy, but also for modern Jewish philosophical understandings of Jewish identity, the covenant with God, and the significance of the State of Israel. As demonstrated in their readings of Isaiah and Job, and in Heschel’s examinations of Rabbis Ishmael and Akiva, the Besht and the Kotzker, the Holocaust’s impact often extends even to contemporary reception of Judaism’s classic sources.

Obviously, there are also important differences between the positions of Heschel and Buber, elements that are distinctive to each philosopher. With Heschel, this includes his discussions of divine pathos, that the major task remains to obey, and the promise of a messianic redemption. The first two of these features in Heschel’s response to the Holocaust are already adumbrated in the early exchange with Buber in the third decade of the twentieth century. As indicated earlier, Heschel’s portrait of the biblical Prophets highlighted their access to God’s inner life, which reveals God’s passionate concern for and sharing of human emotions from love to anguish. ¹² Heschel has written that “He is both transcendent beyond human understanding, and full of love, compassion, grief or anger” (cited in Chester, 2005: 143). Among numerous examples of what the notion of divine pathos provides, is the story that Heschel tells at the end of that crucial section, “The Kotzker and Job” (Heschel, 1974: 263–303), of his final book. In a meeting between two Jews in a train, one person justified his action of saying his morning prayers, despite the Holocaust, with the line “It suddenly dawned upon me to think how lonely God must be; look with whom He is left. I felt sorry for Him” (Heschel, 1974: 303). Here God is affected by human actions, in that He feels lonely, and humans can share and even comfort God through their prayers. These elements of intense intimacy between the divine and human partners—often classically portrayed in terms of a bridegroom and bride—not surprisingly resound with Heschel’s background and participation in Hasidism. Buber’s distance from this portrayal by Heschel of the accessibility to God’s inner life, can be gauged from some lines in “Dialogue between Heaven and Earth.” In what can be used as a direct rejoinder by Buber, he writes: “it [the Bible] does not deal with the essence of God but with His manifestation to mankind. The reality of which it treats is that of the human world” (Buber, 1967b: 220).

A Passion for Truth also provides fine examples for other distinctive features. The story of “Barrels Full of Holes” (Heschel, 1974: 285–289) reiterates the refrain that one has a duty to obey the King, that is, to follow God’s commands. Heschel writes, “The supreme category accessible to man, then, is that of command. And the supreme response of which man is capable is obedience” (Heschel, 1974: 289). This is an allusion to the continuing significance of Jewish law, which is a perennial theme in Heschel’s treatment of Judaism. On the other hand, Buber, who was not a practicing Jew, never saw Jewish law as a vital dimension of modern Jewish life. It was for him a human made and even fossilized feature of traditional Judaism that was no longer viable as a bridge to God. For example, Halakhah was a contentious issue that arose in a famous exchange between Buber and his friend Franz Rosenzweig. In a letter of 1924 to Rosenzweig, he wrote: “I told you that for me, though man is a law-receiver, God is not a law-giver, and therefore the Law [Halakhah] has no universal validity for me” (in Glatzer, ed., 1955: 115).

Heschel’s references to God’s heavenly reward and to messianic redemption, in his repertoire of considerations concerning God, the Holocaust, and theodicy, are also absent from Buber’s work. In the story of the barrels, the wise laborer says: “Surely I am to be paid for every barrel!” (Heschel, 1974: 286). This may allude to rewards in this life, to the doctrine of reward and punishment in the life to come, as well as to the final redemption in the messianic end of times. In terms of the latter, Heschel writes: “Our present order is but tentative; at the end of days, in the messianic era, there will be an end to mendacity and violence, as also to death” (Heschel, 1974: 299). Additionally, in Heavenly Torah (Heschel, 2007), through an analysis of the views of Rabbi Akiva, Heschel answers the question of why the just suffer. He holds that such “afflictions” deepen the contact with God, and that the suffering of innocents purges them of the little evil they have committed in order to hasten their entry into heaven (Heschel, 2007: 135). None of these ideas were serviceable to Buber, who was reluctant to go beyond his statement that, whether in reference to the Bible, to religion in general or to Judaism in particular, “The reality of which it treats is that of the human world” (Buber, 1967b: 220).

Buber’s distinctive response draws its resources from his dialogical philosophy. This philosophy, beginning with the poetic vision originally laid out in I and Thou, almost sings of that encounter between humans and the “eternal Thou.” Buber portrays a relationship of mutuality and reciprocity, in which each participant stands in their fullness, and whose central element is language (Buber, 1970: 57). This encounter is also the source of that cacophony of metaphors Buber uses to address the breakdown of the “dialogue between heaven and earth” (Buber, 1967b: 214) at the time of and following the Holocaust: speech, eclipse, hiding, silence, waiting, and speaking through the silence.

In relation to Heschel’s deliberations, three of these distinctive metaphors stand out. Buber’s well-known terminology of the “eclipse of God” allows him to maintain his theme of God’s eternal speech, and yet still note its frightening interruption, because human “selfhood that has become omnipotent … steps in between and shuts off from us the light of heaven” (Buber, 1952: 129). Humans are left, first of all, with a difficult if not terrible waiting, in response to which he lamented: “The estrangement has become too cruel, the hiddenness too deep” (Buber, 1967b: 224). It may be that the situation of Buber’s waiting for a renewal of the dialogue with heaven is more extreme than we find in Heschel. This is because Buber does not have the comfort of offering either heavenly reward or messianic redemption. As a consequence of the experience of God, in these last years, as “frightening” and of his acts as “barbarous” (Buber, 2003: 173), the future is not unambiguous, even when the waiting is over. Buber leaves us with the haunting description: “Though His coming appearance resemble no earlier one, we shall recognize again our cruel and merciful Lord” (my emphasis; Buber, 1967b: 225).

Still, Buber struggles to offer some hope even today, in his last lines, of “a revelation through the hiding of the face, a speaking through the silence” (Buber, 1967c: 716). What type of gift is this? It is perhaps suggesting that if dialogue is a dance, then silence can be seen as one of its steps and not its end; or, following through with his metaphors, if in conversation speech at one point comes to a halt—silence breaks into the conversation, and that silence itself can communicate, can have many meanings.

Finally, Buber’s response to the Holocaust also differs from Heschel’s in that he can describe the very specific ways that the breakdown in the divine–human dialogue affects interhuman relations, that is, what the impact of God’s hiding and silence are for the “word” given and received between persons. The parallel between the divine–human and interhuman relationships is well expressed in Buber’s “Afterword” (Buber, 1970: 171–182) to I and Thou. He declares: “the central significance of the close association of the relation to God with the relation to one’s fellow-men … is my most essential concern” (Buber, 1970: 171). In A Believing Humanism, as we saw, Buber tied the lack of trust in God to the cessation of trust and genuine speech between persons: “This lack of trust in Being, this incapacity for unreserved intercourse with the other, points to an innermost sickness of the sense of existence” (Buber, 1999: 201).

Not “Any Tom, Dick, and Harry”

We are now in the position to return to Heschel’s statement about Buber’s position and to offer an assessment. Heschel wrote:

Martin Buber’s declaration “Nothing can make me believe in a God who punishes Saul because he did not murder his enemy” must be contrasted with the Kotzker’s statement “A God whom any Tom, Dick, and Harry could comprehend, I would not believe in.” (Heschel, 1974: 292–293)

Heschel’s reference appears to be to one of Buber’s reports, titled “Samuel and Agog,” of a meeting, in his “Autobiographical Fragments” (Buber, 1967a: 31–33). Buber speaks of a discussion with an acquaintance on a train, which at one point turned to a biblical story in I Samuel 15. Here God has Samuel tell Israel’s first king, Saul, that he will be stripped of the leadership position, because he failed to obey the command of God and spared the life of the Amalekite commander, Agog. Buber tells his partner that “I have never been able to believe that this is a message of God. I do not believe it” (Buber, 1967a: 31), and later comments in the report that “Nothing can make me believe in a God who punishes Saul because he has not murdered his enemy. And yet even today I still cannot read the passage that tells this otherwise than with fear and trembling” (Buber, 1967a: 33).

Heschel’s criticism is that Buber is wrong to insist that God be limited to human judgments, in this case that of Buber, of what is desirable or what constitutes justice. ¹³ Doing this reduces the transcendent God to just an extension of the human. ¹⁴ Heschel’s focus on Buber’s reaction to this biblical episode is appropriate, because it is both a good reflection of Buber’s understanding of the divine–human relation, and it shows a revealing difference in their positions. Buber could not accept that God would command the death of a person, and then punish Saul’s noncompliance. It would undermine his commitment to dialogue, to the centrality of the I–Thou relationship in the redemption of human and all of life. ¹⁵ This was a line Buber could not cross, even as he counseled an awaiting for the Presence of that “cruel and merciful Lord.”

However, a final assessment of Heschel’s critique must take more into account than this initial consideration. Is Buber guilty of reducing God to a human image? As we have seen, Buber argued directly against such a position, writing at times in the first person:

“You [God] are the truth.” … I accepted you the way you are and you cannot make me doubt it. All I want is that you will be what you are and that you are what you are. My faith in you is not dependent on your doing what I see as just but in the fact that all your deeds are the just, more so, the absolute justice. …

If someone accepts him otherwise [than as He is], he accepts a statue, an idol crafted by his own hand, a “good” one that is easy to love. (Buber, 2003: 172–173)

This was also his lesson in reference to the book of Job, which ends not with some explanation of God’s justice, but just with His appearance (Buber, 1967b: 224). ¹⁶

In turning back to Buber’s report of the conversation with an acquaintance, it is interesting to see that the reference to Saul may not be the central lesson or the reason he included it in the “Autobiographical Fragments.” He explains his rejection of the biblical story, with the statement that “Samuel has misunderstood God” (Buber, 1967a: 32). He also follows it with a reflection about translation. Buber writes, and the report itself ends with:

And yet even today I still cannot read the passage that tells this otherwise than with fear and trembling. But not it alone. Always when I have to translate or to interpret a biblical text, I do so with fear and trembling, in an inescapable tension between the word of God and the words of man. (Buber, 1967a: 33)

Yet, the main message of Buber’s story seems to be something different than the statement about not believing God would punish Saul, or even his comments on interpreting the word of God and biblical translation. The story is about this meeting with his acquaintance, who is, significantly, “an observant Jew” (Buber, 1967a: 32). When Buber expressed his judgment about the Samuel story, the dialogue partner originally seemed angry and almost threatening in his reply: “You do not believe it?” However, later, after pondering further, his face was “transformed” and Buber writes: “It [his countenance] lightened, cleared, was now turned toward me bright and clear. ‘Well,’ said the man with a positively gentle tender clarity, ‘I think so too.’” Buber adds, and I believe these are the main points of the story:

There is in the end nothing astonishing in the fact that an observant Jew of this nature, when he has to choose between God and the Bible, chooses God: the God in whom he believes; Him in whom he can believe. And yet, it seemed to me at that time significant and still seems so to me today. (Buber, 1967a: 32)

Thus, Buber includes this report of a meeting in his “Autobiographical Fragments,” ¹⁸ because it provides two lessons that are especially important to him. The first is about the transformative possibilities of true speech, even in the original context of a rather heated disagreement. The second is that Buber always saw a tension between institutional religion with its static texts and doctrines, and living faith. As Buber understood it, his partner, when directly faced with this choice, made a decision based on his own experience, his own faith. From all we have seen in Heschel, although he might not frame the conflict in the same way, he would certainly take the side of living experience and faith. ¹⁹

Heschel’s critique of Buber is thus both correct and incorrect, revealing some important differences in their positions, as well as obscuring even more fundamental similarities. In the final analysis, Buber’s subtle but intense struggle with the Holocaust does not reflect the deliberations of the proverbial “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” but of a living person of faith. Buber’s position, as is that of Heschel, is of an honest person who recognizes that in the face of a generation’s and a people’s deepest challenge, faith is a gift that does not ease but intensifies one’s anguishing battle for meaning. As a true challenge, the confrontation with the philosophic implications of the Holocaust was transformative. It brought both philosophers to positions that conflicted with their deeply held philosophies of “God in search of man,” and of “the dialogue between heaven and earth.” In this vein, their responses are reminiscent of Emmanuel Levinas’ portrayal of the post-Holocaust situation of protest against and intimacy with God, beneath this our often “empty sky” (Levinas, 1990: 143). ²⁰ Their costly won insights point to the true purpose and test of the best in modern Jewish philosophy, of what Hilary Putnam expressed as “Jewish philosophy as a guide to life” (Putnam, 2008).