Suffering has no answer, only questions. Everything depends – as the neo-Kantians said – on the way you phrase the question. The challenge to God of suffering must be properly wielded. It is an old Jewish tradition that the question must be turned back on ourselves: guilt that is not pathological but induces moral regeneration. But – so much? The Holocaust too? The attitude can be overdone.There is a reverse attitude: the challenge is flung at God, as it were: Abraham, Rabbis on Job say: An insult, a scandal and blasphemy — that was all right for a Moses, or an Abraham or a Berditchever -- or the victims of the Holocaust themselves. But the problem is that all the bystanders, and those who were born after the Holocaust, also ask such questions. There is an element of self-righteousness about the person who, living in an economy of affluence, and never pious, asks, how can I believe in God after Auschwitz?There is something simply phony about the attitude. I remain unimpressed by the obese, cigar-chomping philosopher who excuses all his failings by blaming God for suffering of the Holocaust. Too much of what is written in our contemporary literature, and that passes on the lecture podium is no more than preposterous posturing.What then? They must be both simultaneously. Midrash says: So, one question without the other is invalid• To challenge and blame only man and the victim is insensitive; only God is — arrogant and silly. When we combine both questions, as Moses did, then we are asking the great question from the point of proper balance.

During the Summer of 1987 I should prepare an op-ed piece for The New York Times this coming Thanksgiving. It should be entitled, “Thanksgiving is a Pain.” The theme will be that of course we are deeply grateful to the Almighty for America, but the very gratitude brings with it a feeling of aching guilt, perhaps “survivor’s guilt,” especially for Jews. By some quirk of fate, my grandfathers decided to emigrate to this country when so many of their peers did not. I am therefore grateful – but I am pained by the knowledge that my destiny and the fate of so many of my cousins who perished in the Holocaust was determined by a seemingly innocent and casual decision taken some seventy, eighty, or ninety years ago. Can not this same attitude be replicated for Mexicans? Poles? Chinese? (Blacks?)... So, Thanksgiving is a pain, but a pain that generates even more Thanksgiving.

See my "The Religious Thought of Hasidism", chapters 15 and 17, re: the nature of evil (and exile). Kabbalists were generally dualistic, affirming not only the reality of the good but also that of evil, while Hasidic teachers held to a monistic view, denying the ontological validity of evil and affirming only the good, but in various stages or guises, etc. See the above, chapter 17, selection 5c, from קדושת לוי השלם על איכה, offering the hasidic view. R. Levi Yitzhak points to the famous hymn recited on Tisha B’av, and interperts it to yield the hasidic view. The verse reads, אלי ציון ועריה כמו אשה בציריה—”Wail, O Zion and her cities, as a woman in her birth pangs.” The interpretation: In the course of her delivery, the woman feels great pain, but after the birth of the baby, she is very happy.However, those who are present with her are happy even during her suffering for they know that the pain leads to great joy. So it is with Zion: while her cities are destroyed she feels great grief and pain, but God rejoices because He knows that it will lead to greater happiness; the suffering is only temporary and the ultimate joy will more than compensate for the misery.However, beautiful as the idea and the interpretation are, our generations in this post-Holocaust era find it extremely difficult to derive much consolation from them. For us, evil is hard as nails, and suffering is perhaps more real than joy. The crematoria successfully negated the ontological denial of evil.For us, we point to the rest of the verse mentioined above1: וכבתולה חגורת על בעל נעוריה pw-”and as a maiden girded in sackcloth lamenting for the husband of her youth.” Our historic experience is more this than the first half (according to tne hasidic exegesis)—more like a bride whose love was never consumated because her groom has been killed and she remains a disconsolate widow. There is no compensation , albeit the possibility and even probability remains that she will remarry and find true happines…