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Where was God in the Holocaust? Parshat Devarim
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The priest of Auschwitz answers the question "Where was God in the Holocaust?"
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Transcript
Auto-generated transcript. Not time-synced to the video.
in the early hours of July 23rd 1942 the
first train transport of deportees left
Malky near Poland the train was made up
of 60 closed cars packed with Jews from
the warsaw ghetto the car doors were
locked from the outside
and the air apertures were barred with
barbed wire july 23 1942 was the day
that the murders started in Treblinka
july 23rd 1942 was the 9th of earth
tisha bomb the 9th of our has been a day
of tragedy for the Jewish people
ever since the Exodus and the sin of the
spies in the desert in Auschwitz there
was of all things a chapel the chapel
had a priest whose job it was to
minister to the camp staff day after day
after day he watched as train after
train after train disgorged it's
desperate human cargo day after day
after day his eyes lifted to the smoke
wafting from the ovens all that was left
of a million lives a million mommies and
daddies good night kisses a million
broken birthday toys a million pairs of
bewildered frightened eyes staring
lifeless into eternity day after day
after day one day the priests walked
into his chapel and he went up to the
cross he picked up the cross and slowly
with his bare hands tore it piece by
piece he smashed the cross into
nothing's saying over again as he was
doing this this is the people of God
this is the people of God we usually
think of a miracle as a crippled
throwing away his calipers or a blind
boy blind from birth suddenly saying I
can see I
can see but there are other kinds of
miracles Robby Elkin and Ben Zakai lived
at the time of the destruction of the
Second Temple there was an imaginable
hunger in the Land of Israel one day he
came upon a young girl picking out
undigested barley from amongst the dung
of an animal the only food she could
find this girl was the daughter of nag
demon Ben Gurion one of the richest men
in the world rabbi Yochanan started to
cry and he said how happy are you Israel
when you do the will of God no nation
nor tongue can rule over you and when
you forsake God's will you are delivered
into the hands of the lowliest nation
and not even into their hands but into
the hands of their animals why the
Jewish people should be happy that no
nation rules over them is self-evident
but why should we be happy why should we
be happy sifting dung to survive when
natural disaster strikes when there's an
earthquake or a flood or a building
collapses without reason it means that
God is punishing us without revealing
himself he has used the natural world as
his agent means he doesn't want to
direct involvement with he has distanced
himself from us but when something
happens it's so totally unnatural
something miraculous and even though the
punishment is terrible beyond words
nevertheless we recognize that our
punishment is coming directly from a
Shem and not through the hands of an
agent even in that terrible time we know
that we've not been abandoned by our
Father in heaven