Where Was God?

April 17, 2013.


Whenever a horrifying man-created act occurs, one hears someone ask "Where was God?"  Meaning: if God exists, why did she allow this to happen? Why didn't She stop the perpetrators before they had a chanace to complete their terrible deed?  Why didn't God see to it that there was a warning?  There are many possible versions of the question.  Many.  Often, the question is asked calmly by non-believers, the current devastation yet another proof that God does not exist. Because if a God existed, surely she would intervene in the plans of terrorists--or tragically demented teenagers. But believers, too, grief-stricken for victims they never met, may whisper, "Where was God?"  Their belief in God's existence not shaken, but their "faith" in God's power and love may be.

In the two decades after the Shoah, a bookcase filled with books arguing these points appeared.  I myself was overtaken by the question a week before a Yom HaShoah service at my synagogue, the first I would ever attend. I was new to synagogue life--and, indeed, to practicing Judaism. For four days, I sat on my bed and sought an answer to "Where was God"  during the Jew-killing? When Jews were cremated in the death camps by the efficient Nazi murder-machine, where was God? That particular question pushed at me, pushed inside me, pushed me to the limits of my mind's strength to use reason to come to an answer that didn't immediately shrink to an excuse.

As I sat, I wrote, filling page after page of a yellow pad with phrases, thought, twigs of ideas, solitary stark words. I didn't mean to write something--a piece of writing. But whenever I am faced with a mental or emotional or spiritual hurdle, I know that, if there's any way I can vault over it, my only pole is made of words. Back then, finally, on the fourth day, I leapt at this possibility: that, when Jews were marched into the crematatoria, God went in with them.  And because the God who is central to me cannot die, she had to emerge alive--only to repeat that devastating process of companionship, over and over and over. That possible answer stayed with me, seemed to me a way God might have "lived through" the Holocaust.  And later that day, I pieced together some of the bits I'd written and began to write the meditation which emerged from my odd version of meditating. 

When, a few days later, I read what I'd written at the Yom HaShoah service at my then-synagogue, it caused some angry responses--as though I had said that God died and was resurrected. Many of my fellow members knew that I had, for some years, been a Catholic. Was I not saying--claiming!--that God died in the crematoria and was resurrected? The next morning, I stopped by my synagogue, and found that the quick anger of the night before wasn't over: the rabbi was getting indignant phone calls.  As I sat near her desk, bewildered and saddened by what people heard--but that I had not said--a member I hardly knew poked his head into the rabbi's office. She asked him what he thought my meditation was about. He hesittated only a moment or two, then said : "a singed God." His gift of insight a gift to me and, I hope, the rabbi. 

Day before yesterday in Boston, Where was God? I think she was lying in the street, one of her legs shredded.  Of course I don't know where God was, precisely, and my anthropomorphic image may be very off-putting to some; but if we are made in God's image, does not that mean God also has arms and legs a home-made bomb can wound? Maybe not.

What I am sure of is that God was in Boston Monday, perhaps yet again berating herself for having bestowed free will on her creation. But, then, perhaps, seeing all the people who ran to help the victims, God sighed with relief because they, too, were exercising free will.