Parallel lines
Nicola Grove’s response (Letters, 6 February) to my article ( ‘A human project’, 23 January)expresses sincere compassion for Palestinian suffering. But it misses the purpose of my article, and raises a serious concern about historical and theological clarity.
My article addressed how faith traditions confront the Holocaust as a uniquely-documented example of intimate, human-to-human evil: neighbours murdering neighbours, parents and children betrayed by those around them, and ordinary people participating in systematic extermination. The question I raised was theological: how belief survives, and must change, when confronted with humanity’s capacity for such acts.
Introducing Gaza as a direct parallel to the Holocaust risks obscuring, rather than illuminating, that moral challenge. The Holocaust was an ideologically-driven, continent-wide project to eliminate an entire people. Drawing equivalence between this and a contemporary conflict, however tragic and deadly, flattens crucial historical distinctions and risks turning Holocaust remembrance into a rhetorical device within present-day political debate.
Recognising this distinction does not diminish Palestinian suffering. Compassion is not a finite resource, and moral seriousness requires us to acknowledge all human suffering honestly. But using Holocaust memory primarily to frame modern political conflicts risks instrumentalising Jewish trauma rather than learning from it.
Holocaust remembrance exists precisely because it confronts us with an enduring and unsettling truth: that ordinary, often religious, people can participate in atrocities while maintaining a sense of moral righteousness. If theology or public reflection turns away from that challenge, it risks becoming sentimental rather than truthful.
‘Never again’ demands not comparisons that collapse history, but honest engagement with the human capacity for evil that the Holocaust so starkly revealed.
Ol Rappaport
Good God?
Thank you, Ol Rappaport, for your reflections on the Holocaust. It is difficult to believe in an all-powerful creator God who is good and loves us, when faced with such human evil and suffering.
It is possible to respond by saying that we as mere mortals cannot understand, and there are reasons for these things, but that seems totally unsatisfactory. We can say that the evil is humans’ fault, not God’s; but powerful rulers are meant to prevent crime, not just stand back and blame it on the criminals. Either God is not all-powerful, or he is not good. A good, all-powerful God would not allow the Holocaust.
In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Harold S Kushner tackles the problem not in the context of the Holocaust, but in the context of his young son suffering and eventually dying from a genetic condition. He concludes that God did not have the power to prevent this suffering – he is not all-powerful.
The alternative is to say that God is not good, which would be devastating. Or that God does not exist, and it is for us as humans to create our own morality.
There is another way of seeing God – not as a person, but better described using a metaphor such as that of light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot extinguish it. But neither does the light wipe out the darkness – they co-exist. And faith is to do with choosing the light, and loving and serving the light. We cannot know God through rational thought, but we can experience the spirit.
James Nayler: ‘There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil.’
The Cloud of Unknowing: ‘By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought.’
Elizabeth Coleman
