“How can we let Adon­ai in when unre­solved anger pre­vents us from let­ting Adon­ai in?”

This ques­tion, posed by Men­achem Z. Rosen­saft in the intro­duc­tion to his sear­ing col­lec­tion Burn­ing Psalms: Con­fronting Adon­ai after Auschwitz, is, for many Jews, the spir­i­tu­al chal­lenge of their lifetimes. 

The chal­lenge cer­tain­ly weighs heavy for Rosen­saft, the child of sur­vivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, whose five-and-a-half-year-old broth­er was mur­dered in a Birke­nau gas cham­ber. While many find com­fort in tra­di­tion­al psalms, prayers that repeat­ed­ly praise God’s com­pas­sion and extol His promise to pro­tect the right­eous and pun­ish evil, the litur­gy does not tell the com­plete sto­ry. For those who per­ished in the Holo­caust, Rosen­saft writes, ​“no such divine assis­tance was forth­com­ing,” and in Burn­ing Psalms, he calls God to account for His absence at a time His chil­dren need­ed Him most.

Rosen­saft responds to each of the tra­di­tion­al 150 psalms with a poem of his own. His burn­ing psalms are cer­tain­ly pow­er­ful as stand­alones, but when con­sid­ered along­side the tra­di­tion­al psalms that informed them, they invite the read­er to eaves­drop on an inti­mate con­ver­sa­tion between the two texts. Rosen­saft lifts images from the orig­i­nal litur­gy and exam­ines them from the lens and expe­ri­ence of the Holocaust’s vic­tims — and of a poet who hears the vic­tims’ ghosts. It is not Rosen­saft who turns the images on their heads. It was God. Rosen­saft is only doc­u­ment­ing — in strong, stun­ning lan­guage that lands on a reader’s heart, gut, soul.

Even those who have not encoun­tered many orig­i­nal psalms will be famil­iar with num­ber 23 and its famous begin­ning: ​“The Lord is my shep­herd; I shall not want.” While the canon­i­cal text speaks of a God who ​“anoints my head with oil” and who is present and com­fort­ing ​“even as I walk in the val­ley of the shad­ow of death,” Rosensaft’s burn­ing response replaces pas­toral images with the bleak real­i­ty of the Holo­caust: ​“no shep­herd / only foes … only bit­ter soup / moldy bread … their heads anoint­ed / by blows /​shadows walk­ing / through the val­ley of death …”

Rosen­saft is metic­u­lous. Noth­ing in the orig­i­nal text slips past his atten­tive eye — or escapes his coun­ter­ing, ques­tion­ing pen. ​“Burn­ing Psalms 59,” for exam­ple, direct­ly refutes claims made in the orig­i­nals and fol­lows the cor­rec­tive with per­haps the most crit­i­cal ques­tion of all: ​“You did not strength­en us against them / You were not my fortress / in my hour of despair … how can we sing of Your lov­ingkind­ness / how can we praise Your might?” Rosen­saft does not dis­pute God’s exis­tence — or His pow­er. On the con­trary, much of the strength in these burn­ing respons­es rests in the belief that God could have stopped the mur­ders, should have ​“split the seas,” as He did for His chil­dren leav­ing Egypt. Instead, these poems assert, He hid His face. 

The col­lec­tion reads like one con­tin­u­ous, des­per­ate cry. It can also feel relent­less. That may be the point. The num­bers, the dev­as­ta­tion, the deaths are beyond human com­pre­hen­sion, more than we can car­ry. Still, we must try. ​“Burn­ing Psalm 150” ends the col­lec­tion with the sin­gle-word line ​“why?” After Octo­ber 7 (the events of which Rosen­saft address­es in ​“Sim­chat Torah Requiem,” appear­ing at the end of the book), that haunt­ing ​“why?” — and these poems — burn more deeply. While there is no answer, it is this very ques­tion­ing that mat­ters. Jews must keep engag­ing with God, even if that means demand­ing account­abil­i­ty for His inac­tion. And Jews will con­tin­ue to hear the ghosts, part­ly because of Rosen­saft, who so mas­ter­ful­ly brings their voic­es to the page.