Holocaust Essay
As the reality of Climate Change dawns we begin to sense its deep influence on the future. “Our decisions affect who those future people will be, and even if there will be any future people at all.”[1] These are deep moral questions: “What makes life worth living? What do we owe to our descendants?”[2] The future remains unwritten, but many believe the earth is destined for many dangerous centuries, if not thousands of years.[3] In this essay an examination of the Holocaust is used as a pre-meditation for even more dangerous future.
IPCC projects that by continuing business as usual a temperature increase of 3.9 to 4.5 degrees C by 2100 is likely. In the last ice age the difference was 5C cooler. The last time earth experienced such temperatures was 50 million years ago, when crocodiles could be found in the arctic. “These facts prompt some scientists to say that the kind of change being projected would bring us essentially to a ‘different planet.’”[4] Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain, commented, “If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving.”[5] Hans Schellnhuber, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who is currently advising the Pope, warned that “if global warming is not brought under control, we may see a collapse of human population.”[6] He suggested that it might descend to a billion people. James Hanson has stated that such a rise would “wreak havoc with civilization.”[7] Despite the latest round of talks in late 2015, aimed at mitigation of these rises, many scientists believe that these temperatures remain a fair prediction. Are such population figures reliable? No one knows. But they could be. Tim Mulgan, speaking about the inhabitants of a future world, says “these imagined future people find themselves living in world in which the earth’s capacity to sustain human life – as well as the lives of other animals and plants – has been severely damaged.”[8]
Imagine, for example, that 6 billion people died. This is a thousand times the number of people who lost their lives in the Holocaust. Let me make a comparison in geometry. Think of a million millimetres – the distance from my home to the shops. Then think of a billion millimetres (a thousand times the amount) – the distance from Sydney to Brisbane. This is unimaginably higher number! Israel W. Charney, speaking on Comparative Genocide, notes “one must be careful that even legitimate consideration of the uniqueness of a given genocide (such as the archetypical event of the Holocaust) not blind us to the enormity of the problem of mass murders of many different peoples, especially towards our collective future on this planet.”[9]
“By the end of the war, Germany and its collaborators had succeeded in destroying approximately two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population (or one-third of the world Jewish population).”[10] A quarter of these were children.[11] Most theologians agree that the Holocaust brings with it a severe challenge to Biblical understanding. Some say “the fires and flames of Auschwitz have the power to burn theological language itself.”[12] Brueggemann, in his Theology of the Old Testament, speaks of “the interpretative disruption of the Holocaust.”[13] He continues, “An Old Testament theology cannot proceed without acknowledgement of the profound and unutterable disruption of the interpretive enterprise that is embodied in the Holocaust.”[14] Emil Fackenheim comments, “The Holocaust constitutes a radical disruption that is without parallel.”[15] He holds that “Jews and Christians are confronted with disjunctive evidence that a massive and unanswerable challenge to claims about Yahweh’s sovereignty and fidelity.”[16] Brueggemann concludes, “Thus it is possible to suggest that the Holocaust is the quintessential and unparalleled occasion of disjunctive evidence against Yahweh, a ‘service irregularity’ of unspeakable magnitude. It is an extreme case – in the history of the Jews, in the history of the world, in the history of Yahweh – of evidence to the contrary, evidence that will not go away.”[17]
Zvi Kolitz, in Yosl Rakover Talks to God, states that “something unique is happening in the world: hastoras ponim – God has hidden His face. God has hidden His face from the world and delivered mankind over to its own savage urges and instincts.”[18] Contrary to the Scripture, that stated that God would be with them through the flames, the God of Isaiah 43 “was – according to many post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers and Christian theologians – silent, indifferent, passive, absent, in exile or dead.”[19] It has become “a negatively sacred event, or ‘radical counter-testimony to both Judaism and Christianity.”[20] “The Shoah has assumed an aura of authority that calls into question the universe which the biblical texts affirm.”[21] Sadly, “The relative silence of Christian churches during the Shoah is a particular problem that Christian theology is only now beginning to address.”[22]
Abraham Joshua Hershel speaks about the pathos of God. “Not all the evils that befell Israel go back to the will of God.”[23] God has responded in Scripture, “For a long time I have kept silent, I have kept still and restrained Myself; Now I will cry out like a woman in travail, I will gasp and pant (Isa. 42.14).”[24] He notes that the traditional book Heikhalot Rabbati portrays God suggesting, “that the destruction of the Second Temple was a mistake.”[25] Hershel held that “G-d needs humankind, sends prophets to seek relationship with human beings, and is profoundly affected with outrage, sorrow, joy, approval, and so forth, by the actions of human beings in the world. The life of holiness sharpens human sensitivity to G-d and prepares humans to undertake the actions necessary to sanctify and perfect the world.”[26]
The famous philosopher and Talmudic scholar, Levinas “holds, like many others, that to explain the Shoah would be to explain it away, to create the illusion that we can rid ourselves of what caused it and therefore cease to lament.”[27] He has greatly learned from this tragedy, and many themes grow out of it in his ethical philosophy. He thinks differently now about the ‘Other.’ “All of my certainties are shaken by the incomprehensibility of the other’s gaze.”[28] “I see his difference and it calls me to infinite responsibility.”[29] This for him is his “ethical moment.”[30] “I glimpse his infinite difference from me, and find, suddenly, that this difference calls into question all of my totalities.”[31] These totalities are our theories, philosophies, ideologies, languages and comparisons. Our thought structures are questioned, and “a realization of obligation comes into play.” “I encounter uniqueness. It inspires awe. I realize that if I am to live in reality instead of in the illusion of totalizing and same-making explanatory rubrics, I must preserve and support the uniqueness.”[32] “I see his difference and it calls me to infinite responsibility.” Moreover, I see through his eyes too – “until I see the eyes of every other the whole world over.”[33] My totalities are ruptured. The Nazis used an ethic of commonality – he is just like me. But this an ethic of difference – he is not like me at all! “Separation, difference: this is what allows there to be goodness in the world. Community, common causes: this leads to utopianism and to injustice.”[34] God enters at this point, in the everyday experience of being open. In obeying the command “Thou shalt not kill,” in responding, hineni, “Here I am,” in serving the widow, orphan and stranger, we find not only “the infinite otherness of the other who is present,” but “the infinite otherness of the absent God.”[35] Levinas avoids “the ideological systems that postulate a grand historical meaning or scheme in history.”[36] These allow us “to ignore the other except as a function of a plan of the whole, to close our eyes to the other’s pain and do nothing when we should be doing everything.”[37] “After the Shoah, Levinas says, we should no longer find the idea tenable in any form.”[38]
Levinas writes, “God manifests Himself not by incarnation but by absence. God manifests Himself not by incarnation but in the Law.”[39] The Rabbi in the story by Zvi Kolitz, facing the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, remains faithful, despite having lost his family, his society, and his culture. He dies, knowing that “to love the Torah more even than God is to gain access to a personal God against whom one can revolt, which is to say for Whom one can die.”[40] Levinas feels we should return to “the old Jewish books…to ethical books, books that speak of an uncomfortable and demanding service of the other…”[41] To him the Bible is in fact an ahistorical text. Jews, throughout the centuries, have escaped “the strangle hold of historical totality,”[42] they, instead, are simply interested in the “ethics of the text.”[43] Our culture “‘relativises and devalues every moment,’ while Israel attaches itself to an ‘always’ – in other words, to a permanence in time, to a time held by moments of holiness”[44] “The God Who veils His face and yet is recognized as being present and inside oneself – is this possible? …I think…that it is a particular manifestation of Judaism.”[45]
“The Nazi extermination of the Jews of the Jews was unique because never before had a state, under the responsible authority of its leader, decided and announced that a specific group of human beings, including the old, the women, the children, and the infants, would be killed to the very last one, and implemented this decision with all the means at its disposal.”[46] Climate change, by way of contrast, is a truly global phenomenon. It is not caused by a single agent, “but by a vast number of individuals and institutions (including economic, social, and political institutions) not unified by a comprehensive structure of agency.”[47] There are problems, however, with this more communal approach. Those “with vested interests in the continuation of the current system – for example, many of those who have substantial political and economic power, or who expect to gain such power, through selling emissions-intensive resources – will resist such action.”[48] Ninety companies are responsible for two-thirds of the world’s carbon emissions, and of their leadership, about two hundred people are most culpable. Some say they should be put on trial.[49] We all in the West (and rising classes in the Third World), however, remain responsible, because of our wealthy, consumerist, lifestyles.[50] Inga Clendinnen, commenting on the Holocaust, thinks there is much to compare with our own culture: “My own convictions is that our sense of Holocaust uniqueness (and we do have that sense) resides in the fact that these ferocious, largely secret killings were perpetrated within ‘twentieth-century Western society’, and that both our sense of portent, and of the peculiar intransigence of these actions before puny human interpretation, finds its ground in the knowledge that they were conceived, executed and endured by people very like ourselves.”[51]
Rodin R Scott, in his book Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth, discusses the nature of evil. The little girl, from The Brothers Karamazov, is mentioned. “Imagine that it is you yourself who are erecting an edifice of human destiny with the aim of making men happy in the end, of giving them peace and contentment at last, but that to do that it is absolutely necessary, and indeed quite inevitable, to torture to death only one tiny creature, the little girl who beats her breast with her little fist, and to found the edifice on her unavenged tears – would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”[52] Barth directs us to the cross; so great is the suffering there, that the sufferings of the world are “echoes or after-pains.”[53] “It was not the torture of a one little child, but the suffering and death of the very Son of God who won for us the hope of the future and in whom we have the final justification for the sufferings of humanity.”[54] Barth realizes the terrible experience of the girl, but senses the “dichotomy between our personal experience and the ontological reality of the Truth of our existence.”[55]
Elie Wiesel, an inmate of Auschwitz, heard the answer given by another prisoner when asked about where is God: “Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here, on this gallows” (after a Jewish boy, because he was young, took an hour die there).[56] Bauckham writes that for Wiesel “God is dead because the holocaust makes theodicy impossible.”[57] For Job all suffering went back to God. Barth comments: in Job we see “a living, active and speaking God uniquely confronting a living man in his unique existence and responsibility… In the speeches of the friends we simply have the repetition of well-worn formulae and sacred clichés. In those of Job we have something original, new knowledge, the truth breaking through in all its virgin freshness.”[58] These two conversations together in “their divine and human freedom enter into the crisis in which God becomes so incomprehensible to Job even though he will not let Him go. It is in the sphere and exercise of his freedom that there takes place what does take place, the severity of God and the misery of Job, the silence of God and the crying of Job, and finally the self-revelation of Yahweh as the divine decision which closes the case, and the knowledge of Job.”[59] Humanity and not God is in “need of justification, and receives its justification only in relationship with this God.”[60] Dostoyevsky later refers to the Grand Inquisitor, who Jesus, after listening to his statements “suddenly approached…and kissed him gently on his bloodless, aged lips. That was all his answer.”[61] Barth holds that “Whatever evil is, God is its Lord.”[62]
Jacob Neusner talks about a vision beyond catastrophe. The Jews, after the defeat in two great wars against the Romans, after the loss of their temple and the whole ancient way of life that went along with it, they considered a new way of seeing. The Mishnah, formulated in the second century BCE, is the result. The Bible often spoke of history; this document is different. “It speaks of what is permanent and enduring: the flow of time through the seasons…the procedures of the cult…the conduct of civil society…the pursuit of agricultural work…the enduring, unchanging invisible phobias of cultic uncleanness and cleanness.”[63] The old laws were now broken, like the New Testament it spoke of a new reality. “Its laws express recurrent patterns, eternal patterns as enduring as the movement of the moon and sun around the earth and as regular as the lapping of the waves on the beach. These are laws of ploughing, planting, harvesting; birth, marriage, procreation, death; home, family, household; work, rest; sunrise, sunset… It speaks of an eternal present – generally using the continuous present tense and describing how things are – to people beyond all touch with their own past, its life and institutions.”[64]
The future is spoken about in terms of the past. “The old order endures, nothing has changed…The truth is the opposite. In the Mishnah everything has changed…even Biblical Hebrew is abandoned. Nothing endures.”[65] It is a “stunningly daring and creative act… They say the old things in a wholly renewed language.”[66] In it, for the first time, they make no linkage to God’s past revelations. They rarely cite Scripture. They never imitate the language of Scripture – this is very unusual. The authors are never identified, and its recipients are not identified. “We join a conversation already long under way about topics we can never grasp.”[67] It speaks of the Temple and its priesthood, when the Temple lay in ruins and Jerusalem was barred for the Jews. It speaks of the atoning rites of the Temple when none could make use of them. It speaks in a fantasy, speaking “of matters not in being when the Mishnah was created because the Mishnah wishes to make its statement on what really matters.”[68] “The document is orderly, repetitious, careful in both language and message. It is small-minded, picayune, obvious, dull, routine – everything its age was not. This is the source of the irony at hand: the Mishnah stands in contrast with the world to which it speaks… The Mishnah’s message is that what little a person is able to do matters in supernatural, cosmic ways.”[69]
The Temple is no more, but the village becomes the mirror of the Temple.[70] By keeping the appointed times – the Sabbaths, festivals, new moons and holy days, by entering into the “cooking and eating, working and resting, sleeping, celebrating and rejoicing” – they echo God’s eternity.[71] “When it speaks of time, it does not mean history at all.”[72] It wants nothing to happen. “The Mishnah recommends as a solution to catastrophic change the construction of a world without end, as though such a thing was possible.”[73] A world “set apart from history, because it spoke of an interim between history and eternity, a time after, an age before.”[74] This is how the writers of the Mishnah recalculated their traumatic experiences. Neusner described as an instance of humanity responding to a “life lacking compass, centre and sense, how people live in a world that has lost its moorings.”[75]
A Great Pestilence, or Great Mortality, arose in 1346. It began in Central Asia, it decimated all the countries from India unto Asia Minor – modern research shows that 25 million people were killed. In 1347 it spread westwards reaching Sicily. In Italy half the population was killed. Then France and Germany were affected, and eastwards towards Hungary. In 1348 the plague reached England, with almost half of London dying, and then on to the next most populous city, Norwich. Three known plagues appeared during these years – one that killed 30 to 75 percent of cases, one that killed 90 to 95 percent, and one that killed almost 100 percent. “The lightening speed of this dreaded disease in its various forms brought severe mental trauma, physical pain, and emotional terror.”[76]
The Italian author, Boccacio described what it was like at the time: “Every place was filled with the dead… Every morning great numbers might be seen brought out in this manner, to be carried on biers, or tables, two or three at a time… What number of both sexes, in the prime and vigour of youth…breakfasted in the morning with their living friends, and supped at night with their departed friends in another world.”[77] At least half the population of Norwich died. Its population didn’t replenish again till the late sixteenth century, never again was it England’s second largest city. Within this city was Julian of Norwich’s family. She was a child then. Such questions – about the reality of evil and the goodness of God – would continue with her throughout her life. There were a number of returns of the Great Pestilence. The fourth one came in 1378, decimating the children. And another one came in 1391. During this time Julian chose to become an anchoress, after her daughter had died. She received a series of visions of Jesus dying on the cross. This is how she describes her final one: “I looked with all my might for the moment of his dying, and thought I would have seen his body completely dead. But I did not see him thus. And just as I was thinking that his life was about to finish and that I must be shown his end, suddenly, while a gazed on the cross, his expression changed to cheerful joy! The change in his blessed countenance changed mine too, and I was as glad and happy as could be.”[78] “Then our Lord put this thought in my mind, ‘What point is there in your pain and grief, now?’”[79] Jesus assured her that he would have suffered even more for her.[80] Writing about her theology, Turner speaks about redemption: “Our redemption is a work of pure delight,”[81] and evil: “But the evil of them can never be erased, never given, except through a love that is infinite.”[82]
Bjorn Krondorfer, speaking about German theology after the Holocaust, notes its lack of vulnerability. He describes a theologian who describes a letter from the Holocuast, but the theologian doesn’t try to find the surviving relatives. “‘But theologians, Carol Christ wrote, ‘fear vulnerability.’”[83] Zygmunt Bauman spoke of the Holocaust as “a picture on the wall,” and compared it to a “window.”[84] Krondorfer holds that victims narratives are important, noting that we can fall “into the trap of lamenting the absence of faith in God rather than mourning the absence of people’ faces.”[85] He goes on to say, “The universalizing tendency of Christian theology is one mechanism that assists in turning a blind eye to one’s own particular historical, cultural and moral situatedness.”[86] Speaking of the Shoah film, James Young, an American cultural analyst, explains “these memories are still part of the survivor’s inner life, still an inner wound; if, in watching these memoires pass from the private to the public sphere, we also feel some of the pain in transition, we may understand something about the consequences of both the experiences and the telling of such experiences. In the testimonial image, we also perceives the traces of the story the survivor is not telling; these traces are in his eyes, his movements, his expressions – all of which becomes part of the overall text of video testimony, suggesting much more than we are hearing or seeing. We grasp here that memory is being transmitted not merely through narrative but by body movements and behaviours as well…we thus find transmitted a universe of non-verbal memory – signs no less than language to be interpreted and decoded.”[87]
What about our responsibilities to a future world? When the victims “are not yet around to defend the discourse, the potential for moral corruption is especially high.” [88] How can we grasp what is not now? How can we sense what they may think and feel? We cannot visit the unborn. What will they eventually say? Listen to Elie Wiesel, speaking at the fiftieth anniversary of liberation of Auschwitz: “God of forgiveness, do not forgive those who created this place. God of mercy, have no mercy on those who killed Jewish children here…God of compassion, have no compassion for those who have none.”[89] The author notes, “These are chilling words.”[90] Nikolous Wachsmann, in a recent history of the German Concentration Camps, speaks about what they did with the remains of the people killed there: “Ash and bone fragments were dumped into rivers and marshes. They were used to grit the roads in winter and to fertilize the surrounding fields, where Himmler’s cherished agricultural experiments were under way. The roots of Germany’s future settlements were supposed to grow from the remains of its slaughtered victims.”[91] Is it now the other way around – our prosperous societies becoming the soil of future famine, starvation and death? George Bush stated at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 that, “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.”[92] Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, noticed this look: a look, shown by a German Chemist who he, as a prisoner, was working with – “The look, Levi remembers, ‘was not one between two men’: rather, it came ‘as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different world.’” Levi “wanted to memorialize the sommersi, the ‘submerged” or the ‘drowned ones’, the multitude of prisoners who could not withstand the assaults on body and spirit.”[93] Whose voice should we listen to today?
Imagination
It’s unimaginable, the sorrow soon.
When numbers grow through millions to beyond
our minds are left behind. It would be wrong
to say we understood. A flower blooms
and we are moved. Our soul is pitched in tune
with other souls, we feel the dissonance
when sorrow sounds in them. But this abundance
overwhelms us. Suffering in bloom –
in orchard after orchard, spilling over
each horizon found until another’s
seen – no soul can contemplate. We must
retreat. But even this is sobering –
imagination, feebly seeing our brothers,
teaches us to not betray their trust.[94]
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[1] Tim Mulgan, “Intergenerational Ethics.” The International Encyclopaedia of Ethics, February 1st, 2013.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee088/abstract
[2] Ibid.
[3] “The average time spent by a molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is in the region of 5-200 years. This estimate is long enough to create a serious lagging effect; nevertheless, it obscures the fact that a significant percentage of carbon dioxide molecules remain in the atmosphere for much longer periods of time, of the order of thousands and tens of thousands of years.” Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (New York: Oxford, 2011), 33
[4] Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, 229.
[5] “Too hot to handle: can we afford a 4-degree rise.” Paddy Manning: Sydney Morning Herald, July 9th, 2011 http://www.smh.com.au/environment/too-hot-to-handle-can-we-afford-a-4degree-rise-20110708-1h7hh#ixzz3ikwfSNoa “Let’s look at a snapshot of a 4°C world. A global mean surface temperature rise of 4°C equates to around 5-6°C warming of global mean land surface temperature. According to the UK’s Hadley Centre (Sanderson, 2011; New, 2011) a 4°C world would likely see the hottest days in China being 6-8°C warmer than the hottest days experienced in recent heat waves that China has struggled to cope with; Central Europe would see heat waves much like the one in 2003, but with 8°C on top of the highest temperatures; during New York’s summer heat waves the warmest days would be around 10-12°C hotter – all as a consequence of an average global warming of around 4°C.As it is, our infrastructures and our way of living are not attuned to these temperatures, with the very real prospect of dire repercussions for many – particularly for vulnerable communities.” Kevin Anderson, Climate change going beyond dangerous – Brutal numbers and tenuous hope (Development Dialogue, September 2012, Climate, Development and Equity), 28.
[6] “German Climatologist Refutes Claims He Promotes Population Control.” Edward Pentin: National Catholic Register, June 6th, 2015 06/19/2015. https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/german-climatologist-refutes-claims-he-promotes-population-control/
[7] Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, 189.
[8] Tim Mulgan, speaking about his book, Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/33196-ethics-for-a-broken-world-imagining-philosophy-after-catastrophe/
“Melting the mountain glaciers and Greenland alone would lead to a sea level rise of around seven meters, and adding the West Antarctic ice sheet would boast the total to twelve meters. Moreover, it is easy to see why such melting could be catastrophic. Even a total rise of two meters ‘would be sufficient to flood large portions of Bangladesh, the Nile Delta, Florida, and many island nations, causing forced migrations of tens of thousands of millions of people.’” Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, 188-9.
[9] Alan S Rosenbaum, Ed, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, COL: WestviewPress, 1996), ix.
[10] Marvin A. Sweeney, Reading the Hebrew Bible After the Shoah, Engaging Holocaust Theology (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2008), 3.
[11] Other tragedies could be examined: the mass killings in the Ukraine in the 1930s, the decimation of indigenous peoples, the Armenian genocide, or the more recent genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda.
Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique?, 4.
[12] Bjorn Krondorfer, “Of Faith and Faces: Biblical Texts, Holocaust Testimony and German ‘After Auschwitz’ Theology” in Tod Linafelt, Strange Fire, Reading the Bible after the Holocaust (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 89.
[13] Walter Brueggemann, The Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997),
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 329.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Brueggemann, The Theology of the Old Testament, 329.
[18] Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God (London: Vintage, 2001), 11.
[19] Krondorfer, “Of Faith and Faces” in Linafelt, Strange Fire, 87.
[20] Bjorn Krondorfer, Of Faith and Faces, 88.
[21] Ibid., 89.
[22] Marvin A. Sweeney, Reading the Hebrew Bible After the Shoah, Engaging Holocaust Theology, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2008, 3-4.
[23] Abraham Joshua Hershel, The Prophets 1, (Peabody, M: Hendrickson, 2007),151.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Sweeney, Reading the Hebrew Bible After the Shoah, 6.
[26] Ibid., 7.
[27] O E Ajzenstat “Beyond Totality: The Shoah and the Biblical Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas” in Linafelt, Strange Fire, 106.
[28] Ibid., 107.
[29] Ibid., 109.
[30] Ibid., 108.
[31] Ibid., 107.
[32] Ibid., 108.
[33] Ajzenstat “Beyond Totality” in Linafelt, Strange Fire, 109.
[34] Ibid., 113.
[35] Ibid., 115.
[36] Ibid., 115.
[37] Ibid., 116.
[38] Ibid., 117.
[39] Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, 85.
[40] Ibid., 87.
[41] Ajzenstat “Beyond Totality” in Linafelt, Strange Fire, 107.
[42] Ibid., 118.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (NewYork: Continuum, 2007), 17.
[45] Emmanuel Levinas, “Loving the Torah More than God” in Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, 83-4.
[46] Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1998), quoting Eberhard Jackel, 14.
[47] Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, 24.
[48] Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, 30.
[49] “Put Oil Firm Chiefs on Trial, says Leading Climate Scientist.” Ed Pilkenton: Guardian, June 23rd, 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange
“Dutch Government ordered to cut carbon emissions in landmark ruling.” Arthur Nelson: Guardian, June 24th, 2015.
A recent report states: “The analysis presented here suggests that the world’s largest investor-owned fossil energy producers bear substantial responsibility for anthropogenic climate change. This is because:
- They have produced a large share of the products responsible for dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system;
- They continued to produce them well after the danger was scientifically established and recognized by international policymakers;
- They have worked systematically to prevent the political action that might have stabilized or reduced GHG emissions, including through unethical practices such as promoting disinformation;
- While ostensibly acknowledging the threat represented by unabated reliance on fossil fuels, they nevertheless continue to engage in business practices that will lead to their expanded production and use for decades to come.” Peter C. Frumhoff, Richard Heede, Naomi Oreskes, The Climate Responsibilities of Industrial Carbon Producers, Climate Change: Springer Netherlands, July 2015. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-015-1472-5
[50] Repeatedly mentioned in Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ On Care of Our Common Home: An Encyclical Letter on Ecology and Climate (Strathfield: St Pauls, 2015).
[51] Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 22.
[52] Quoting Dostoyevsky. R. Scott Rodin, Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 268.
[53] Rodin, Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth, 268.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Ibid., 270.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Rodin, Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth, 274.
[59] Ibid., 274-5, quoting Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, 459-460.
[60] Rodin, Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth, 275.
[61] Ibid., 275-6, quoting Dostoyevsky.
[62] Ibid., 277, quoting Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, 289.
[63] Jacob Neusner, Ancient Israel After Catastrophe, The Religious Worldview of the Mishnah (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1983), 16.
[64] Neusner, Ancient Israel After Catastrophe, 17.
[65] Ibid., 19.
[66] Misnaic Hebrew. Ibid., 32.
[67] Ibid., 2.
[68] Ibid., 21
[69] Neusner, Ancient Israel After Catastrophe, 21-2.
[70] Ibid., 69.
[71] Ibid., 70-1.
[72] Ibid., 71.
[73] Ibid., 78.
[74] Ibid., 79.
[75] Ibid., xi.
[76] Veronica Mary Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, Illuminating the Life and Revelations of Julian of Norwich (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 70.
[77] Rolf, Julian’s Gospel, 70.
[78] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love Translated by Clifton Wolters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), Section 21, 95.
[79] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Section 21, 95.
[80] Ibid., Section 22, 96.
[81] Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011, 213.
[82] Ibid., 215.
[83] Krondorfer, “Of Faith and Faces: Biblical Texts, Holocaust Testimony and German ‘After Auschwitz’ Theology” in Linafelt, Strange Fire, 99.
[84] Ibid.
[85] Krondorfer, “Of Faith and Faces” in Linafelt, Strange Fire, 100.
[86] Ibid., 102.
[87] Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 199.
[88] Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, 46.
[89] Peter Admirand, Amidst Mass Atrocity and the Rubble of Theology, Searching for a Viable Theodicy (Eugene, O: Cascade, 2012), 267.
[90] Ibid.
[91] Nikolaus Wachsmann, K L, A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 315.
[92] Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm, 424.
[93] Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 55.
[94] John Carroll, The World Before Us. Unpublished Poems, 2012.
johncarrollpoems 