God’s Intervention in History, Part 1
One afternoon I was in downtown Detroit and browsing in the Catholic bookstore that shares a building with the offices of the Roman Catholic archiocese of that fair city. I bought then, and still possess now, a book called God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections, by Emil Fackenheim. Inside it said “First Harper Torchbook edition published 1972″. Assuming it had sat on the bookstore’s shelves for a couple of years, my purchase of this book must have been very early after my return to Christian faith in 1974, but before my embrace of the Catholic faith in 1978. The pages of the book betray now the telltale yellowing of acid paper; ultimately it will crumble to dust. (This is notably unlike the rag paper of the 1789 printing of Mrs. Montague’s Memoirs, a specimen of which I found on the shelves of the Wayne State University library, still circulating in 1968, back when I got my Bachelor’s degree in English from Wayne.)
A poignant incident from God’s Presence in History is actually an excerpt from Night, by Elie Wiesel. In the excerpt, the Nazis in the concentration camp are about to execute three inmates, one of them a young boy.
“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.
At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. . . .
I heard a voice within me answer . . . :
“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging on this gallows. . . .
The same question came to the lips of the disciples who had staked their future on Jesus as triumphant messiah. Seeing him dying on the cross, they may well have asked themselves, “Where is God? Where is He?” What answer did they hear?
The Second Holocaust (with a capital “H”) is the designation I attach to the Nazi persecution and eventual attempted extermination of the Jews during the Nazi years of power, 1933 to 1945. I call it the Second Holocaust because the First Holocaust was another point in history where the question of “Where is God?” could only be answered by “Here He is—He is hanging on this cross.” Place around your neck a pendant with the image of an innocent young boy hanging on a gallows, or place around your neck a a pendant with the image of an innocent 33 year old man hanging on a cross. In both cases, the person of faith embraces the contradiction, the irony, and the anguish of a seemingly “powerless” God, and says “I believe. In spite of this, or even because of this, I believe.”
I emphasize this parallel between the attempted Nazi execution of God’s chosen people and the earlier execution of Jesus of Nazareth because I have only been able to nurture my faith by grappling with these contradictions. They entail not only the Christ who ascended into heaven two thousand years ago, but also his chosen people who live with us to this day. Ask me to sever my destiny from that of the Jews, and you ask me to kill my faith. (to be continued)