This focus reflects the cataclysmic devastation wreaked on the European Jewish population as the primary targets of the Holocaust.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have traditionally taught that God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (all-good) in nature.
A scholarly literature, including a variety of anthologies and commentaries, has developed that reflects upon Holocaust theology as a religio-cultural phenomenon.
[1] Although the risks and obstacles were great, the promise of the covenant, already with the Jewish patriarchs and for the Land of Israel, is held up as eternally sealed in holiness: To the point of destroying them:[2] LeKhaLotam (לכלתם, to destroy them) also implies KhaLah (כלה, desire and yearning); God is saying, "Even though you have sinned, I do not despise you, because you still desire to serve Me" (Likutey Halakhot V).
The Israelites were instructed to kill all those who dwelled in Canaan: "thou shalt save alive nothing that breathes" (Deuteronomy 19:16) otherwise "I shall do to you, as I thought to do to them" (Numbers 33:56).
Amalek and Israel were archenemies, their enmity originating from the Battle of Refidim, where the Amalekites targeted and killed weak Israelites.
The heretics have made all kinds of efforts to violate these oaths, to go up by force and to seize sovereignty and freedom by themselves, before the appointed time.... [They] have lured the majority of the Jewish people into awful heresy, the likes of which have not been seen since the world was created.... And so it is no wonder that the Lord has lashed out in anger.... And there were also righteous people who perished because of the iniquity of the sinners and corrupters, so great was the [divine] wrath.
[10] He caused outrage in the secular Israeli media when he stated that "the Holy One, blessed be He, kept score for hundreds of years until it added up to six million Jews".
[16] There were Messianist Zionists, at the other end of the spectrum, who also saw the Holocaust as a collective punishment for ongoing Jewish unfaithfulness to God.
Zvi Yehuda Kook and his disciples, for their part, avoided this harsh position, but they too theologically related the Holocaust to the Jewish recognition of God's divine wrath upon them.
Kook writes: "When the end comes and Israel fails to recognize it, there comes a cruel divine operation that removes [the Jewish people] from its exile.
[17] In 1980, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch wrote:[18][19][20] "It is clear that 'no evil descends from Above,' and buried within torment and suffering is a core of exalted spiritual good.
In our own times, the destruction of six million Jews that took place with such great and terrible cruelty—a tremendous desolation the likes of which never was (and never will be, may the Merciful One save us!)
There is no rational explanation and no elucidation based on Torah wisdom whatsoever for the Devastation, nothing but the knowledge that "thus it arises in My [God's] Mind!"
On the contrary, all those who were killed in the Desolation are called kedoshim [holy ones] ... because they were killed in sanctification of God's Name (on account of being Jews) […][21]The same approach, in which all forms of rational theodicy are categorically rejected, is adopted by Schneerson in his correspondence with Elie Wiesel (R. M. M. Schneerson, Iggerot Hakodesh, no.
Since so many practices required effort and access to specific items, many were unable to follow Judaic laws and traditions.
[24][25][26] Prof. Richard Rubenstein's original piece on this issue, After Auschwitz, held that the only intellectually honest response to the Holocaust is to reject God, and to recognize that all existence is ultimately meaningless.
If God were to reveal himself in history and hold back the hand of tyrants, man's free will would be rendered non-existent.
This is a view that is loosely based on the kabbalistic concept of nahama d'kissufa (bread of shame) - the idea that greater satisfaction is achieved when one becomes deserving of a blessing rather than when it is given as a gift.
[28] David Weiss Halivni, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, says that the effort to associate the Shoah and sin is morally outrageous.
"[29]A Romanian Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was the author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps.
[32] The novel's protagonists symbolically proceed through a range of theological views, which Wiesel's Midrashic-style literature can explore where theodicy fails.
In the address given on the occasion of his visit to the extermination camp of Auschwitz, Pope Benedict XVI suggested a reading of the events of the Holocaust as motivated by a hatred of God himself.
[36]Nonetheless, he proposes that the actions of the Nazis can be seen as having been motivated by a hatred of God and a desire to exalt human power, with the Holocaust serving as a means by which to erase witness to God and his Law: The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth.