If the God of Abraham led the Israelites out of Egypt because of harsh treatments, what happened with the Holocaust? Why didn't God do anything to save the Jews from what they were going through? Do you think that a significant amount of Jews who had survived the Holocaust became Atheist because of it?
If there has been one thing I've struggled with in regards to God and the Abrahamic perspective of Him, it is this. Would like to hear some perspectives on it!
This is something that every Jew (if not others also) has to struggle with. In the end, though it is an especially egregious and horrific example, it is no more than another facet of the eternal theodicy question: why does God permit the existence of evil?
In part the tradition answers us by pointing out that God, as we understand Him, is not omnibenevolent, and thus may have had overriding reasons for permitting evil-- even especially egregious evil such as this. But the questions remains: how can this be? Omnibenevolent or not, we do believe that God loves us and cares about us-- all human beings, not just Jews; and we do believe that the covenant of Torah between God and Israel is real and meaningful to both parties.
The real answer is that we have no answer. At least, not a single, widely-accepted answer. Theodicy itself as a particularly problematic question of Jewish theology goes all the way back to the Book of Job, and many both wise and great men have written on it since, with no conclusive agreement or treatment of the problem. Many have tried their hand at post-Holocaust Jewish theology, including some of our greatest thinkers of recent years. And while they have come up with many very compelling thoughts, no single answer seems overwhelmingly satisfactory.
Many individuals have struggled with their belief in God in and after the Holocaust, having faced it themselves, or seen its effects upon parents or grandparents. And few can find it in their hearts to be critical of such struggle: how could it not affect any of us so? And some have found faith even amidst the horror. And some seek to isolate it altogether from theology, treating it as a purely human event without higher theological ramifications.
One might wish to read Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Reb Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (the Piazetzner Rebbe, who wrote Hasidic commentary from the depths of the Warsaw Ghetto), Yitz Greenberg, Eliezer Berkovits, Emil Fackenheim, David Blumenthal, Emmanuel Levinas, Viktor Frankl, and Hannah Arendt, all of whom wrote stunningly on the question, with responses that span a spectrum of reaction from despair to determination to hope to faith.
Theodicy is complex, more than can really be responded to on an internet forum. But the two-second thumbnail sketch of what I personally believe is that God does not intervene in the world in grandiose showy ways. He may have done so a handful of times in our earliest history, to prove Himself, to create a living memory of His self-declaration to us. But first of all, to constantly intervene in human affairs would be to effectively negate human free will. And second of all, to continuously interfere with the way that He set the universe up to function would be to negate its independent existence. So I think that, as we human beings grow and begin to mature as a species, God restricts Himself to subtle actions that do not unduly contravene human free will, or drastically rearrange the nature of Creation. I think the evil done by the Nazis was just that-- evil: malicious acts perpetrated as part of human choices. God did not do this to the Jews, Nazis did. And as for why God permitted a third of the world's Jews to be killed in the Holocaust, perhaps what we ought to be remarking on is the miraculous survival of two-thirds of the Jewish People. After all, the war could easily have gone the other way, and if Hitler had made different choices and been victorious-- even partially victorious-- the damage might have been incalculably worse, not only to the Jews, but to the whole world.
