Belief in God Today

"The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors By Reeve Robert Brenne reveals the victims' frank and thought-provoking answers to searching questions about their experiences: Was the Holocaust God's will? Was there any meaning or purpose in the Holocaust? Was Israel worth the price six million had to pay? Did the experience in the death camps bring about an avowal of faith? A denial of God? A reaffirmation of religious belief? Did the Holocaust change beliefs about the coming of the Messiah, the Torah, the Jews as the chosen people, and the nature of God? Drawing on the responses of seven hundred survivors, Reeve Robert Brenner reveals the changes, rejections, reaffirmations, doubts, and despairs that have so profoundly affected the faith, practices, ideas, and attitudes of survivors, and, by extension, the entire Jewish people. Many survivors carried their deepest secrets and innermost beliefs silently, from internment to interment. But Brenner's quest provided the impetus for many survivors to end their silence about the past and come forth with their feelings."

This is the chapter entitled Belief in God Today

During the following 25 years spent in the land of Israel the slight transition toward the profession of belief in an impersonal God became, if not a growing surge, then certainly a moderate trend at the expense of the category of non-believers. The percentage of believers in a personal God rose slightly during this period or, perhaps more correctly, reclaimed some of its earlier pre-Holocaust adherents. Significantly, Holocaust survivors living in the land of Israel for more than a quarter of a century discontinued, by 12 percent, from the high of 43 percent recorded for the time of the Holocaust, their profession of non belief in God. Only 31% of all Holocaust survivors currently claim to be nonbelievers.

What do these survivors profess today, now that they disclaim atheism or agnosticism? Nearly one in every four Holocaust survivors (24% - a rise from 14% during the Holocaust and from 16% immediately after the Holocaust) today claims to believe in an impersonal God - a Force or Power in the universe (a koach elyon). 

One survivor spoke for many others in offering the following reasons for his belief in an impersonal God:

I've thought about it a great deal. And I've reached these conclusions: There were two strong beliefs held by many of us after the Holocaust. These two beliefs were especially held by the intelligent and educated ones among us whom one talked to and with whom one discussed such matters. It seemed there weren't too many of us at the time at all interested in such intellectual "games" or discussions. But for a few of us discussions and thinking of this sort did go on to a great extent during those years.

To many of us it seemed clear there was no God as we had previously understood Him to be. Or, put differently, if there was a God at all we had never properly understood Him or what He really is.

So we spoke of a limited God, an imperfect God, a not-all-powerful God or even a devil as God. Most of us rejected these concepts for one reason or another. Or at the very least we modified these kinds of God concepts quite unsystematically. Or if we accepted them we did so only partially. These are not impersonal God ideas of course, but rather than say we believe with certainty in God who participates beneficially in the affairs of man, a personal God, which we can't accept, we can at least, with less hypocrisy and greater ease of mind, subscribe to the an idea of a more distant God like Nature, a koach elyon. 

And so over the years this is what some of us came around to. For many it must have been a sudden thing. For many like myself was rather a slow, long-drawn-out decision - like a process - how to believe, in what to believe. And it's not over yet.

The second thing is that you must remember that we are Jews. And we care about being Jews. And Jews believe in God - of some form or another. So if not the full, complete God or Father we'd like to have fulfilling our fantasies, one we can talk to and pray to, we can still be a far lesser hypocrite when we join other Jews in worship at the synagogue of we can at least claim a "sophisticated" God is our God, an impersonal God.