Ever since the Holocaust came to an end eighty years ago, we have known that it was perpetrated by human beings infused with hatred or a callous, insidious indifference. Its victims, both the dead and those who emerged from the inferno, were betrayed and abandoned by most of the world. These realities have been acknowledged in academic studies, works of fiction, and motion pictures, as well as in the annual formal observances across the globe on January 27th, the day the Red Army liberated the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The absence of the Divine on what one survivor famously called the “Planet Auschwitz,” however — and the related theological significance and implications of this cataclysmic event — are studiously ignored in our theological interactions with God. Aside from Yom HaShoah, the day set aside on the Jewish calendar for commemorating the genocide of European Jewry, or perhaps the Martyrology on Yom Kippur, the mass murder of six million Jewish women, men, children, and infants is not featured even obliquely in our formal religious services.
Abraham Joshua Heschel credited the Kotzker Rebbe with the notion that the “true worship of God … was not in finding the Truth but, rather, in an honest search for it.” If so, are we not forced to ask ourselves how we are able to continue to pray to God after Auschwitz as if Auschwitz never happened?
Jewish religious services — whether Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, or Jewish Renewal — are replete with biblical psalms that extol God’s lovingkindness, that tell us over and over that Adonai is and always has been compassionate and merciful, our rock, our fortress, our redeemer, our shield against evil and evildoers. As we read them, we are meant to be comforted by them, to feel close to God. But, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, we do not read them on our own. Hovering over us are ghosts who force us to reconsider any notions of consolation, God’s protection, or a Divine embrace. Thus, in my new book, Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025), these ghosts, the ghosts of Auschwitz and of all the Nazi camps, ghettos, and other sites of devastation, remind God — and remind us — that “they were Your witnesses/Adonai/deserving of Your lovingkindness/Your mercy/Your love/but You/did not shine Your countenance on them/were not their salvation” (“Burning Psalm” 119).
I wrote Burning Psalms not just to allow the ghosts of the Holocaust to enter Jewish liturgy, but also to bring these ghosts into our consciousness, and the consciousness of future generations, by enabling them at long last to show their countenance to, and have their voices heard by, Adonai.
“no hallelujahs from me/after auschwitz,” declaims the narrator of “Burning Psalm 106.” “I cannot give thanks to You/Adonai/for goodness You withheld/at majdanek/for lovingkindness You did not show/at ponary/for mighty deeds You did not perform/at babi yar”
Burning Psalms consists of 150 psalms responding to, reacting to, or inspired by the 150 biblical psalms, but is written from a post-Holocaust perspective. My fervent, if presumptuous, hope is that one or more of them might eventually find themselves included in our synagogues’ daily, Shabbat, Days of Awe, and festival services, alongside or juxtaposed against the biblical psalms, as a reminder that God did not perform miracles during the Holocaust.
I wrote Burning Psalms not just to allow the ghosts of the Holocaust to enter Jewish liturgy, but also to bring these ghosts into our consciousness, and the consciousness of future generations, by enabling them at long last to show their countenance to, and have their voices heard by, Adonai.
“why do I care/that You/once split the sea/made the water stand/drew water from a rock,” asks “Burning Psalm 78” of Adonai, “if You/did not take my grandparents/did not take my brother/out of the birkenau death chamber?”
My father was once asked if he still believed in God after surviving Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and several other Nazi German camps. “I do not hold the Rebboine shel-oilem, the Master of the Universe, responsible for the Holocaust,” he replied, “but I won’t give Him any medals for it, either.”
Many if not most of us are familiar with Psalm 23, “a psalm of David,” which is often intoned at funerals:
Adonai is my shepherd … He makes me lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me… You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies: You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over.… I will dwell in the house of the Adonai forever.
In contrast, “Burning Psalm 23” is rooted not in a sense of comfort and serenity but in anguish and torment:
a psalm to the emptiness
no shepherd
only foes
no festive table
only bitter soup
moldy bread
no green pastures
no still waters
only blood-drenched
rat-infested
mud
he is always hungry
she is always cold
their heads anointed
by blows
shadows walking
through the valley of death
Adonai’s fog-wrapped house
forever
Burning Psalms was written by a Jew born in 1948 in the displaced persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany, who believes — or wants to believe — in God, but who struggles to reconcile the palpable absence of God during the Holocaust with the essence of God, of Adonai, as portrayed in the biblical psalms.
In writing Burning Psalms, I have dared to imagine myself in the mindset of my brother in a Birkenau gas chamber on the night of August 3rd to 4th, 1943. I have dared to imagine myself in the mindset of my parents as they realized that their entire families had been murdered. I have dared to imagine myself in the mindset of the victims of the Holocaust as they were confronted with and overwhelmed by the horrors of the Holocaust and still sought to address Adonai, to question Adonai, mi’ma’amakim, from the depths.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School, and General Counsel Emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. He is the author of Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (2021).
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