Why did G-d let the Holocaust happen and let all of those innocent people die? Where was he for the 5 or 6 million people who died, and why does he let people like hitler torment and oppress us?

While it would be presumptuous to try to answer this question, it is important to note that man-made evil is not, in and of itself, an overwhelming challenge to the idea of G-d's goodness. It is a basic tenet of Judaism that G-d gave man free will, and that as a result human beings can choose to do evil. If G-d stopped people every time they tried to do evil, there would be no more free will, which is the essence of what makes human beings human. Of course, this does not entirely resolve the problem of evil in the world. Why, for example, did G-d create in human beings--or at least in some human beings-- the desire to torture other people? There could have been free will without endowing some people with a propensity for sadism.

The problem of G-d's apparent passivity in the face of many evil acts is exacerbated by Judaism's belief that G-d sometimes does intervene to stop evil. "According to the Torah," one frequently hears post-Holocaust Jews say, "G-d intervened in Egypt and took the Jews out of slavery. Why did He not destroy the death camps?"

The question is poignant, but naive. The account in Exodus makes it clear that G-d did not intervene when Pharaoh enslaved the Jews. Generations suffered under Egyptian cruelty, and untold numbers of male Jewish babies were drowned in the Nile, before G-d sent *Moses to confront Pharaoh. From that perspective, it has been noted, one could say that G-d intervened in the Holocaust as well: Indeed, He stopped it, but only after six million Jews had been murdered. I do not claim that this answer is satisfactory; in all likelihood, there probably is no satisfactory answer.

One of the dangers of theodicy, in fact, is that in its attempts to justify G-d's ways to man, it frequently blames man for his sufferings. For example, one sometimes hears ultra-Orthodox Jews speak of the Holocaust as G-d's punishment for Jewish irreligiosity. Aside from the fact that suffocating a small child in a gas chamber seems an excessive response to the Sabbath violations of that child's parents, such a view makes no sense on other grounds. However irreligious European Jewry was in the 1930s and 1940s, the percentage of Jews in the United States who were religiously nonobservant was much higher. Yet American Jewry was spared the Holocaust and has had a very prosperous history.

Some anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox thinkers explain the Holocaust as G-d's punishment for Jews turning to the secular, Zionist movement. This explanation seems even more far-fetched, since among the few European Jews who escaped the Holocaust were the Zionists who left Europe before 1939 and emigrated to Palestine. Indeed, some religious Zionist thinkers understand the Holocaust as G-d's punishment of those Jews who did not become Zionists and chose instead to stay in Europe. This argument is morally offensive, too. Putting children into gas chambers as punishment for their parents' refusal to respond to Theodor Herzl's challenge seems equally grotesque.

What is offensive about most attempts to explain the Holocaust is that, in one form or another, they convert Hitler into G-d's ally, or at least into His lieutenant. Somehow, Hitler is seen as carrying out G-d's will. Invariably, the people who offer such explanations accuse Jews other than themselves of having provoked G-d's wrath. Such theologians undoubtedly hope that if they can isolate what it is precisely that so angers G-d, then they will be in a better position to pacify Him. Rather than trying to decipher why G-d would have "wanted" six million Jews to be murdered by order of the most wicked human being who ever lived, the proposition that the Holocaust, murders, an many other daily cruelties are the result of human free will seems to make more sense.

There is no comparably easy answer to explain natural suffering. Why are there earthquakes, floods, cancer? Clearly, there is no discernible relationship between human goodness and human suffering. When a truly evil person becomes ill, many people feel a certain satisfaction that someone who has caused so much suffering is now experiencing it. Indeed, if illness or tragedy befell only bad people, we would undoubtedly witness massive movements of repentance. However, suffering seems to be quite evenly distributed among the good and the bad, and remains the single greatest challenge to religious belief.

Without suffering, there would probably be few nonbelievers in the universe. But, if the believer has his troubles with evil, the atheist has more and graver difficulties to contend with. Reality stumps him altogether, leaving him baffled not by one consideration but by many, from the existence of natural law through the instinctual cunning of the insect to the brain of the genius and the heart of the prophet. This then is the intellectual reason for believing in G-d: That, though this belief is not free from difficulties, it stands out, head and shoulders, as the best answer to the riddle of the universe.

Moreover, G-d, by definition, is a higher reality that our mind cannot grasp. If G-d is a given, there are no questions. Just as a computer program is cannot understand the motives of its programmer, it is illogical that creatures should be able to completely understand every decision of their creator and designer.

From Rabbi Joseph Telushkin's book, Jewish Literacy. The last paragraph was added by Mendy Elishevitz based on a letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe

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