If we asked a parent, ‘What meaning did you have when you had your child?’ they might be perplexed. Their family has a simple purpose. It is an expression of their love. It’s the outcome of a loving relationship, the closest bond. This instinct for intimate connection is at the heart and soul of Creation. We are part of a dynamic unity, from the smallest quark to the weather that circles the earth. Love might be a reason and a purpose but we might need a more practical answer.

From his observations on surviving Auschwitz, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankel gives us his answer. He tells us that we find meaning in life in three ways: by creating a work or doing a deed, by encountering someone or even experiencing something, and by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering.

These are the things that contribute to our sense of identity. The Biblical account explains them with analogies, which focus on Israel as a particular example. We cannot steal their identity but the illustrations are meant to have a universal appeal. They teach us about the attitude that triumphs over suffering, that creates good out of evil. These images encourage us to form genuine relationships and explore opportunities. They present us with a challenge, to be proactive, to create our own work, to do our own deed.

Father, Son and Daughter

Biblical analogy uses our closest kinships to explain our bond with God and how we might encounter someone or even experience something. These relationships are father and child, husband and wife.

Throughout the Bible, God refers to Himself as our compassionate Father. This implies a close relationship of dependence, protection and provision. It also infers a genetic connection. Like father like son or daughter. The father will teach his child skills and knowledge and they will learn to be like their father and take on the family business. When the child is in need they automatically turn to their father.

Kiss

As God is our Father, we might ask, ‘Wouldn’t a father run to rescue his child when he is hurt? Wouldn’t he pick his child up, wrap his arms around his child and comfort them with a kiss? Wouldn’t a mother’s kiss, kiss it better?’

This is a small excerpt,

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen…

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Even in these most dehumanizing and degrading conditions, the divine spark within the women internees was still searching for the light of beauty and honour that originates with God. Although we may not be able to fathom who or what or why we are, there is in all of us, at all times, a glimmer of God’s shekinah that witnesses to us that we are far more than animals. In the cosmic scheme of things, we each matter. With every breath we take, we attest that clay can become a living, speaking spirit in God’s own image.

Everyday lips kiss wounds better, express tenderness and love. Lovers kiss. People are revived through mouth to mouth resuscitation. Moses and God communicated mouth to mouth. Adam became human with the press of God’s lips against his own. God breathed His life into Adam’s lungs through their lips.

So, how can God ‘kiss’ the Shoah injury better, heal such a deep laceration in our communal soul? And, if we are the daughter or son, how do we respond? Do we turn to Him and expect Him to act?

Husband and Wife

The description of God as a husband and Israel as His wife is strange but it expresses God’s desire for intimate connection with humanity. It illustrates a synergy that is repeated throughout creation and reveals something about who God is and what He wants. It becomes a powerful metaphor when we consider its implications.

At first, God instituted a covenant with one man, Abraham. His intention was that ‘all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.’ This covenant would find fulfilment in a land that God designated for them. Then as Abraham’s family grew, it became a nation in covenant with God.

There is a significant difference between a covenant and a contract. A contract is a transaction between parties who are pursuing and protecting their own interests. A covenant is two or more people coming together in mutual respect and affection, so that they might accomplish together what they could not alone. A contract only manages competing interests. A covenant transforms and shapes identity.

Marriage is a covenant, not a contract, because two separate characters become one single entity described in Genesis as ‘one flesh’. Throughout the Bible, Israel’s relationship with God is described as a husband and wife, a bride and groom. In Jewish understanding, Moses acted as the matchmaker for this strange union at Sinai where a whole host of people joined Israel to respond to God’s proposal with a unanimous, ‘I do!’ Together, at the mountain, they made their marriage ketubah.

The marriage is not always an easy one because Israel is prone to infidelity. She is quick to worship other gods. Yet, the prophet, Hosea, describes God’s persistent tenderness for Israel. He loves her and wants her back even when she strays. He longs for His Israel-wife and speaks gently to her.

This presents a particular problem. If God has this intimate connection with His people, where was He in the camps? Where was He in the pogroms and crusades and any suffering? Doesn’t He have a legal obligation to act on their behalf? And if He lets them down, how can we trust Him?

So, where was Israel’s God-husband in Auschwitz when she suffered?

I am the creator of this image. So, I stripped my feet bare and pressed them into the charcoal leaving an imprint amongst the cobbled stones. The Maker was barefoot, walking alongside his barefoot bride. Was He the target, and did she suffer with Him?

Hugo Gryn gives his answer to this question in ‘Chasing Shadows’ which is about his experience in Auschwitz. He was less than 15 years old at the time but wrote this memory as a respected rabbi.

Two contradictory emotions governed much of my inner life. That I was innocent and that I was abandoned. They came to a head a few weeks later on Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. A day we had spent in the synagogue as far back as I could remember. We knew the date. On that day in 1944, I was at my place of work. Like many others I fasted and cleared a hiding place for myself amongst stacks of insulation boards. I spent most of the usual working day there, not even emerging for the thin soup given to us at midday. I tried to remember as many prayers as I could and recited them, even singing the Kol Nidre, asking for God’s forgiveness for promises made and not kept. But eventually I dissolved in crying. I must have sobbed for hours. Never before or since have I cried with such intensity and then I seemed to be granted a curious peace. Something of it is still with me. I believe that God was also crying. And I understood a bit of the revelation that is implicit in Auschwitz. It is about man and his idols. God, the God of Abraham, could not abandon me, only I could abandon God.

I would like you to understand that in that builder’s yard on the Day of Atonement, I found God. But not the God I had childishly clung to until those jet streams dissolved over Auschwitz. People sometimes ask me, ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ ‘I believe that God was there Himself – violated and blasphemed. The real question is, ‘Where was man in Auschwitz?’

If we say that the Shoah proves that God has abandoned His covenant, and has torn apart this unity, then we imply that God is a liar and the Biblical analogies are irrelevant. But how is it possible to destroy an eternal covenant that God has made repeatedly, endorsed and many thousands have experienced? One example of this promise from Jeremiah says,

This is what the LORD says, ‘He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and the starts to shine by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar – the LORD Almighty is his name…Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below be searched out will I reject all the descendants of Israel.

The skies remain unmeasurable and the depths of the earth unsearchable. Covenant is like gravity. It holds us together with an unseen, immovable, secure force. It unites us across lands and ages, cultures, languages and politics.

From ‘The Death of God’, Richard Rubenstein asks us,

When I say that we live in a time of the death of God, I mean that the thread uniting God and man, Heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in the cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any powerful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?

Perhaps, in the light of so many personal testimonies to the contrary, perhaps good questions are more personal. Do we want to cut the cord that binds us to God? Do we want to hear or feel God, or experience His ‘powerful power’? Where do we allow God to be in this cosmos of ours?

People adapt to their partner in all marriages. As God limits His power in order to make room for our creativity and free will, so that we can choose good or evil, then maybe, we can also limit our power and make room for Him. Sometimes we fill our cosmos with so much of our own noise that we simply drown Him out.

Witness

Every marriage has witnesses. In the ketubah, the witnesses state. ‘This has taken place in our presence and all is valid and binding.’ We are witness-onlookers to this covenant between heaven and earth but we are also witness – participants. In Isaiah, God calls the people to be His witnesses because they have seen His salvation, redemption and triumph. They have watched Him provide miraculously but they have also experienced His rescue. They have been awestruck by His holiness. Their fear has been turned to confidence because they know that God is with them and they have received His forgiveness. They know Him intimately too, not by the substitute title of LORD, but by His proper name, YHVH (yod-hey-vav-hey), perhaps pronounced Yahweh, meaning, ‘I will be what I will be,’ or ‘My nature will become evident by my actions’.

Our testimony is not just for our own benefit. We can become living examples, reflecting God’s light and an inspiration for others to discover their own way to God.

With the resurgence of humanity’s oldest hatred, we need such witnesses.

These words, ‘Hear, oh Israel, the LORD is one,’ begin the most famous Jewish prayer and are the last to leave lips on the edge of death. Families huddled together, naked and afraid, lifted their voices to God with their last breath in this prayer, giving Him back His spirit in the death chambers. This is called Kiddush ha Shem, Sanctification of the Divine Name. There can be nothing more precious, more holy than this.

Here hands cover, hover over the heaps of the dead, to try to say something about God’s response, as a type of comfort, an overarching Divine Presence.

The question that remains is our response.

Light

If we think about Frankel’s third observation that we give our lives meaning by the attitude we take towards unavoidable suffering, then Isaiah’s analogy of light seems appropriate. In Isaiah’s book, God speaks to Israel, and to us, saying, ‘I will also make you a light of nations, that My salvation may reach the ends of the earth.’ God’s flame of salvation is carried throughout the earth in human vessels. The intention of the covenant is that everyone, everywhere, in all ages will be ‘lit’ from the fire, which comes from God. This flame ignites our ability to act with mercy and humility, turning fear into hope, creating peace where there is conflict, enabling justice to defeat prejudice, turning trouble into opportunity. Salvation’s light reveals the best and most noble qualities in our humanity.

Now, each of us adds our own narrative to salvation’s story. The grand illumination is made of each of our flickering offerings uniting and igniting each other, glowing together into a radiance that can penetrate the darkness of human cruelty and injustice. There may not be one formula that will satisfy everyone’s understanding of the Shoah. Instead, we have countless personal stories that come together to give us hope and tell us that God is with us.

We have seen images of piles of shoes, hair and all sorts of belongings that the Nazis collected and collated with industrial efficiency.

Isaiah describes this,

‘Arise shine for your light has come and the glory of the LORD rises upon you. See darkness covers the earth and deep darkness is over the peoples but the LORD has risen upon you and His Glory appears over you…For the LORD will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory.’

As the Jewish people have no light or glory of their own, we might understand that any attempt at extinguishing, or snuffing them out, is really an attempt to smother any light they might carry as a reminder of God’s presence. It cannot be a coincidence that the Nazis systematically reversed each of the 10 commandments in their obsessive, philosophically driven desire to exterminate all traces of their existence.

Prophetic passages describe such an attack in anthropomorphic terms. They describe a sensitivity on God’s behalf because, ‘whoever touches you touches the pupil of My eye,’ and ‘He watched over him, guarded him as the apple of His eye.’

This imagery indicates an instinctive response. It seems to imply that God takes our suffering personally, that He is impacted by our distress.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg says,

Judaism teaches us that we would think that death would win, but it’s not so. There is this hidden field force, called God, an infinite source of life and goodness that sustains and nurtures and, therefore, the deeper truth…is that life has been growing and has been overcoming death. The Infinite Source of Life, the Infinite Consciousness we call God, shares the pain of the Shoah … and wants life and delights in life.

Work

In Hebrew thought, work, worship and service are linked with one word, avodah. This suggests that we will love our work when it is of service, or when our work is for love, it will be of service.

Isaiah uses poetry and songs to create an image of Israel as God’s servant who has these three attributes. Sadly, this servant will suffer injustice at the hands of other nations. The Kings of those nations will be stunned when they see the final vindication of the Jewish people in the messianic age. They realise, to their horror, that Jewish suffering has been unmerited. Israel was despised and humiliated by them even though he was faithful.

Although Isaiah is clearly writing about Israel as a nation, some think that the suffering servant is a single person who becomes a sacrifice for humanity’s redemption, appeasing supernatural wrath as a type of burnt or sin offering. It has even been suggested that Auschwitz is the Jewish Calvary, the gas chamber is their cross, they are the sacrificial lamb whose vicarious suffering brings atonement to the world. This is not Isaiah’s song. In Isaiah’s world, vicarious punishment is utterly forbidden, as is human sacrifice. And in our world, the Shoah has not achieved the world’s spiritual renewal, nor has it initiated the messianic age.

Isaiah’s servant has a work, an encounter and a hope. He is not a sacrifice. Isaiah insists that Israel should expect vindication and rescue. They can expect life to have its victory over death. Hence, in this picture, Israel is rescued from the rubble by Divine intervention, by the Angel of the Lord.

DNA

There are two female musicians you might meet if you visit Jerusalem. One beautiful young lady wears white, sits in the Jaffa Gate arches and fills the old city entrance with harp music. It is heavenly. She looks angelic. One young lady is dressed with ancient modesty and plays the violin in the commercial part of the city. She looks like she is from the shtetl. Her notes come from the depths of the earth out through her soul, searching for fulfilment. Her body moves as her music takes physical shape. It is heart-rending.

Both are skilled. Both evoke an emotional response from the listener. It is as if one represents the suffering of Jewish history and one represents the Jewish hope in God.

Israel gets its name, and maybe even its character, from Jacob, who wrestled with a celestial being and prevailed. He would not let go until he could admit who he truly was and receive a blessing, even though it meant he would always walk with a limp. This blessing included a name with a promise. Israel, means ‘God shall fight’. The ancient Israelites believed that whenever they took the Ark of the Covenant with them into battle, God would be with them, fighting for them.

In this drawing, these three strands of hope, suffering and covenant twist together forming Israel’s DNA.