EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice (Hans Jonas)
Explicit
Automatically transcribed from the episode audio. Some words and names may be inaccurate.
Listen to the episodeDownload textDownload captions
Okay, let's unpack this. Today, we are undertaking a deep dive into some truly profound, I think very difficult material. It's a speculative theological framework by the philosopher Hans Jonas, an attempt to reconstruct the very concept of God in the devastating shadow of the Holocaust. It's a heavy topic. And this deep dive into Jonas's work, it's really less about religious doctrine and, you know, more about philosophical necessity. We're exploring what happens when Faith confronts an event, Auschwitz, that just fundamentally shatters the traditional understanding of divine justice and power. Right. And for you, the listener, this is really a crucial shortcut to understanding the intellectual and theological fallout of the 20th century's ultimate horror. It really is.
It's also vital context, I think, to remember just how personal this analysis was for Jonas. This wasn't some abstract academic exercise. Not at all. He delivered this material after receiving an award named for Rabbi Leopold Lucas, who died in Theresienstadt, and his wife was murdered at Auschwitz. And Jonas's own mother suffered the same fate. Absolutely. Yeah. So this paper, The Concept of God After Auschwitz, it's an answer that he feels is owed to shadows. It's a philosophical debt, really, paid to the millions who died questioning a silent God. It's concept reformation driven by trauma. That's the perfect way to put it. And before Jonas can even begin this. this reformulation of God, he has to justify the act of doing so at all. Because, you know, by the mid -20th century, a lot of the intellectual date keepers, people like Kant or the logical positivists, they'd essentially declared the whole conversation about God, about metaphysics, to be philosophically dead. That's right. The cognitive veto, as he calls it. Kant had already said that we can't use theoretical reason to speculate on God. It just falls outside the realm of things we can logically prove or, you know, know. And the logical positivists took it even further. They did. They basically argued that statements about God were just nonsensical, void of conceptual meaning because they weren't verifiable by scientific physical data. So if the modern philosophical mind had basically decreed silence on this topic, why did Jonas refuse to listen? Why not just, you know, concede the point and become an atheist or an agnostic? Well, this is where he makes a brilliant distinction that really opens the door for his whole project.
He grants that the cognitive veto only applies to knowledge. We cannot hope to know God, and we certainly can't prove him empirically. Okay. But, he argues, this does not mean we cannot meditate on God in terms of sense and meaning. Ah, so he's rejecting that idea that only the scientifically knowable is meaningful. Just because I can't put it under a microscope doesn't mean I can't speak about it coherently. Precisely. Working at the concept of God is justified as a task of understanding, not a task of knowledge.
And the rigor for this understanding, it's maintained by the discipline of concept connection, making sure the resulting idea of God is logically coherent and doesn't, you know, contradict itself. But there's a second and I think far more powerful justification you mentioned, which gives this entire project its fire. Yes. And it's the force of a unique and shattering experience. This is the ultimate license when an event is so massive, so profound that it just ruptures all previous metaphysical assumptions. And it makes the traditional concept of God morally and logically untenable.
Well, the philosopher is then ethically compelled to try and make sense of the meaning of existence again. And Auschwitz is that event. It's what breaks the silence that Kant decreed. It's the ultimate rupture. So that brings us directly to the core problem. Suffering is not new. Jewish persecution is a millennia -long story. So the question then becomes, what did Auschwitz add to the human equation that required a complete theological overhaul? Why did all the old answers break down so utterly? Well, for millennia, humanity and Judaism specifically had these frameworks of theodicy. which is the theological endeavor to justify God's goodness in the face of evil.
Jonas points out that two of the primary Jewish frameworks were just entirely shattered by the mechanization of debt that ended in 1945. Okay, let's start with the most ancient one, the prophetic view, this idea of guilt and retribution. Right, this is the covenantal framework. So when disaster struck exile, famine, the destruction of the temple, the explanation was, well, it was clear. Israel had been unfaithful to the covenant. The suffering was a punishment for sin. A direct transaction. A direct transaction. But Jonas observes that this particular explanation had already long ceased to function by the modern era. People just didn't view their suffering that way anymore. OK, so that one was already fading. But the second and arguably far more robust framework was that of witness and martyrdom or Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of God's name. This is what sustained Jewish life through the Crusades, the Inquisition. Pogroms. Yes.
And this emerged very strongly in the Maccabean age. The idea was that the innocent suffered, but, and this is the key, they did so with agency. They were choosing death over apostasy. They maintained their dignity. They affirmed God's oneness with the Shema Israel. And through their sacrifice, they kept alive the hope for a final messianic redemption. Their death had meaning. They were spiritual heroes, saints even. They were giving their lives for their belief. Exactly. And that's the crucial context we need to appreciate. In, say, medieval martyrdom, the victims still had a role in the story. They controlled their confession. They were a witness. But Auschwitz redefined suffering. It redefined death. It did.
Jonas stresses that the factory -like workings of the death machine, it knew nothing of fidelity or infidelity, belief or unbelief, guilt or punishment. Not trial, not witness, not heroism, or even cowardice. The conditions of utter degradation, starvation, torture, they stripped away any possibility of a meaningful, dignified self -sacrifice. The victims were reduced to non -persons before they were even killed. They were murdered not for their faith, which is the definition of martyrdom, but because of a lace fiction. It didn't matter if they were pious, secular, or had even converted to another religion. The dehumanization was absolute.
To be a martyr, you had to have agency. You have to be able to say, I died for X. At Auschwitz, the victims were prevented from fulfilling any spiritual role. They were simply annihilated based on a bureaucratic ledger. And this is what Jonas calls the monstrous inversion. It is. The ancient people of the covenant were chosen not for a trial of faith, but for wholesale mechanized annihilation. This defied all possible endowment with meaning. The fact that God was silent throughout those years, that God let it happen. When the people of the covenant were being killed in a way that stripped their death of all theological meaning, well, it nullified every single traditional framework. And this crisis, it hits Judaism with a unique theological force, doesn't it? More so than other faiths like Christianity. It does.
I mean, to a stern Orthodox Christian view, the world is often seen as inherently flawed, tainted by original sin. Suffering is, in a sense, an expected condition of a fallen world. Sometimes it's even viewed as a necessary path to celestial redemption. But Judaism has always historically prioritized this world. Precisely. To Judaism, God is eminently the Lord of history. He is the divine authority that acts, that intervenes, that creates, delivers justice, and brings redemption within the processes of time. In this world, the covenant promises earthly justice in continuation.
So... If history itself produces a horror that is utterly meaningless, unjustifiable, and just unprecedented, it calls the entire traditional concept of God into question, specifically God's power and his willingness to act within time. The covenantal structure is fundamentally violated. As Jonas put it, the entire concept of the Lord of History, we suspect, will have to go by the board in this quest. The question is no longer how God will justify evil, but what kind of God could possibly be compatible with this experience.
The old categories, they just couldn't assimilate this horror. They were broken. Okay, so since all the old answers failed, Jonas has to create a new concept. And he uses the only tool that seems appropriate for this sphere beyond empirical knowledge. Myth. This isn't a historical narrative, right? It's an imaginative, credible conjecture. Sort of like the great cosmic stories of Plato. And this is where he introduces his central mechanism, God's self -forfeiture. Right. And this is the concept of kenosis, or divine self -emptying. For reasons we can never know, the why of it all remains unknowable. The divine chose to give itself over entirely to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming. And this renunciation was total. This is the crucial difference from, say, ideas of mere divine delegation. It was total. The deity held back nothing of itself.
This means God divested himself of his completed, sovereign being for the sake of an unprejudiced becoming. There was no uncommitted or unimpaired part remained to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the outcome of creation. So the world is genuinely left to its own devices. The laws of nature, the course of history, they brook no interference. This is what makes our being in the world so serious, as Jonas says. It creates a tremendous existential risk for the divine itself. And this is not panotheism, where God and the world are identical, which would mean God can neither lose nor gain. Here, God's goal is to receive his being back from the odyssey of time, a being now weighted with temporal experience, a being that is possibly transfigured or possibly even disfigured by it. The stakes are absolutely immense for the internal. Immense. And this unfolding of divine return happens in stages, right? It sort of mirrors the evolutionary history of the cosmos. Let's trace this cosmic gamble. So for the first immense period, Eons and Eons God's cause is relatively safe. It's in the hands of cosmic chance and probability, you know, the inorganic realm. This phase is characterized as the expectant accompaniment of eternity to the labors of time. Transcendence is just a patient memory, sort of hesitantly emerging. And then comes the first dramatic moment, the first stirring of life. Yes. The advent of life is described as a tremendous quickening of concern in the eternal realm. With life comes feeling, sensing, acting, striving, suffering, mortality. But crucially, this stage is marked by innocence. The creatures are merely fulfilling their inherent potential.
This leads to one of the most, I think, difficult philosophical ideas in Jonas's essay. The concept that suffering and even cruelty in the animal kingdom, surprisingly, enriches the divine essence. Why is God safe in this stage? Because the animal kingdom operates outside the moral axis of good and evil. It's all driven by necessity, appetite, fear, survival. So whatever variety evolution produces, the heightened pitch and passion of predation and pain, it enriches the self -experiencing of the ground of being. God cannot lose here because all these experiences, bright or dark, they just swell the fullness of the symphony.
So if a lion kills a gazelle, that's just necessity, not a moral evil. The pain of the gazelle is a modality of existence. It adds temporal experience to the divine essence which is committed to experiencing everything. Precisely. The mortality and the pain simply deepen the transcendent treasure. The suffering is non -moral, and therefore, it's ultimately a gain for the deity. It supplies the tempered essence from which the Godhead reconstitutes itself. And this continues until creation crosses a critical threshold. The moment innocence ceases, the advent of man. This is where the risk becomes absolute. With man comes knowledge and freedom.
This is the gift that ends innocence, and it's replaced with the charge of responsibility under the disjunction of good and evil. The divine cause, having patiently endured the vast spirals of pre -human life, now passes into man's precarious trust. Which means man's deeds have a direct impact on God's destiny itself, the very complexion of eternal being. I mean, that is an astronomical weight of responsibility. It is terrifying. In this myth, transcendence is awakened to itself and accompanies man's doings with the bated breath of suspense. God hopes and grieves with every human action, but... and this is key, because of that initial total self -forfeiture, he absolutely does not intervene in the dynamics of the worldly scene. The ultimate existential risk is introduced at the human level. Creation is now co -responsible for the fate of the creator. Okay, so that myth of self -forfeiture, it translates into three core theological attributes that really break decisively with millennia of orthodox thought.
The first and most immediate is the suffering God. And this notion is immediately antagonistic to the traditional biblical conception of divine majesty, which was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. Ancient Jewish and Christian theologians, drawing on Plato and Aristotle, they stressed impassibility, the idea that God is unable to suffer or be affected by human affairs. Right. And why was impassibility so crucial to traditional theology? Because the Greeks believed that perfection meant immutability. If you are perfect, You cannot change. So if you can suffer, you can be diminished, which means you are not perfect to begin with.
Thus, a perfect God must be impassable, untouched by the turmoil of the material world. But Jonas' suffering God contradicts this fundamentally. It does. Jonas is careful, though. He distinguishes his concept from the Christian idea of kenosis, which often centers on a singular special act of suffering, the incarnation and crucifixion. For Jonas, if the myth is true, divine suffering isn't a special event. It's continuous. It began from the moment of creation and certainly from the creation of man onward. So God's relationship with the world is suffering. Precisely. And although the Orthodox doctrine tried to stamp it out, you can find biblical precedent for this kind of effect of God. You have God ruling that he created man of Genesis or the prophet Hosea describing God's rejection and grief over his unfaithful wife, Israel. Jonas is simply foregrounding and elevating that emotional vulnerability as a necessary divine attribute. And the second attribute flows directly from this emotional connection, the becoming God. This challenges the entire philosophical superstructure of Western religion, that idea of immutability and transtemporality. Yeah, the Platonic Aristotelian ideal insisted that God possessed a completed, eternal being, identical with itself, existing outside of time. Jonas just counters that if God is in any relation to the world, which is the cardinal assumption of any religious tradition, then he is affected.
And to be affected is to be altered or made different. He's no longer alone. The eternal has temporalized himself. So the mere fact of a continual relationship with a dynamic creation means God experiences something new with every passing moment. He progressively becomes different through the actualizations of the world process. And this refutes a key modern philosophical anxiety. Jonas uses this to address Nietzsche's terrifying concept of the eternal recurrence of the same. Remind us briefly why that idea of eternal recurrence was so central to modern angst. Well, Nietzsche hypothesized that if the universe is finite in matter but infinite in time, then every single combination of particles must eventually recur, which means we will live the exact same lives, the same suffering, the same joys over and over again, infinitely.
It's a vision of total meaninglessness, of an utterly indifferent dead universe trapped in mechanical cycles. And how does the becoming God destroy this fatalistic cycle? Because if eternity is affected by what happens in time, there can never be a recurrence of the same. God will not be the same after the experience of one world process. The divine essence itself carries the memory and the cumulative harvest of time. Every moment of existence, good or evil, alters eternity. Which means the future can never be a simple repetition of the past. That's powerful.
It injects genuine, non -cyclical meaning into every action we take. Okay, so finally we have the caring and endangered God. Right. Caring is familiar, of course. But the danger is the consequence of his self -dissessment. This God cares deeply, but he is not some cosmic sorcerer who can guarantee fulfillment through sheer power. He has made his care dependent on the decisions and actions of his free, self -governing agents. And the fact of massive, irredeemable, evil Auschwitz being the ultimate example proves what, according to Jonas? It proves that God is taking a massive risk. Either the traditional, omnipotent God does not exist, or the God who does exist has given an agency other than himself a power and a right to act on its own. And this, by definition, means God has foregone the guaranteeing of his self -satisfaction by his own power once he created the world. He runs the risk of being disappointed, grieved, or even disfigured by human choices.
And this brings us to what feels like the absolute core of Jonas' argument, the necessity of overthrowing the traditional doctrine of absolute, unlimited divine power. For Jonas, if we want a God that is compatible with the Jewish tradition and the reality of the Holocaust, omnipotence has to be discarded first. Yes. And he attacks this first with a purely philosophical argument. He calls the very concept of omnipotence self -contradictory, self -destructive, indeed senseless. This isn't just a theological quibble. For him, it's an ontological one. It's the famous paradox of power, isn't it? How can power be absolute without destroying the very condition that allows power to exist in the first place? Exactly. Power is inherently relational. If power is absolute, having no limits, it's not limited even by the existence of something else. So to maintain its absoluteness, it must logically annihilate anything outside itself, because any other existence constitutes a limitation.
And if it annihilates everything else? It's left in solitude, with no object to act on. And power without an object to act on is powerless power. It cancels itself out. Absolute power ends up equaling zero. That's a brilliant conceptual move. It's like for power to be power, it has to be divided and relational. I think of it like absolute freedom. Absolute freedom where there are zero constraints is meaningless. Freedom needs walls to push against. It's the same principle. Power requires resistance. If power meets no resistance, it is equal to no power at all. The very existence of creation, even if that creation was granted power by the creator. fundamentally limits the initial agent to grant creation being is to grant it a power of its own therefore power is inherently divided and thus god cannot be omnipotent in the absolute sense so philosophically jonas has already proven omnipotence is illogical but the theological and religious objection the one driven by auschwitz that's the real catalyst and this is where he introduces The powerful trilemma. Right. The trilemma states that three attributes, absolute goodness, absolute power, and intelligibility cannot exist simultaneously.
The conjunction of any two excludes the third, especially when you view them against the backdrop of massive, meaningless evil. So if we look at the Holocaust, the devastation, the fact that an omnipotent God watched six million people, including children, die in gas chambers, we have to confront the logical consequences of that. The trilemma forces an extremely uncomfortable choice. If God is good and all -powerful, then the existence of that evil makes his actions completely unintelligible. We can't grasp his motives or purposes at all. And if he is all -powerful and his actions are intelligible, meaning we understand his will, then the evil he allows suggests he is not good. Right. And if he is good and his actions are intelligible, then he must not be all -powerful because he cannot stop the evil. So which of these attributes must we sacrifice? Jonas argues that goodness and intelligibility are essential, which means power has to give way. Goodness is non -negotiable for religious faith. I mean, if God is not good, then what is the purpose of seeking him? But, and this is crucial for the Jewish tradition, intelligibility is also essential. And why is intelligibility, understanding God's will, so fundamentally necessary for Judaism, even when it seems impossible? Because the entire structure of Judaism rests on the premise of revelation. The Torah, The teachings of the prophets, the covenant itself, all these things imply that God has communicated his will, his intentions, and his demands to us. We're expected to follow his law, which means we must have some degree of understanding of his moral order. A completely hidden God, a deus absconditis, is just antithetical to the Jewish narrative.
Yeah, if God were completely hidden and unintelligible, the entire edifice of law and ethical responsibility would just collapse. Exactly. So to preserve the religious core, The goodness and the knowable, if only partially, nature of God's willpower must be sacrificed. The existence of Auschwitz forces the conclusion that if God is good and his goodness must be compatible with the existence of evil, then he cannot be all -powerful. He has to be limited. Okay, so once we accept that God is limited, we have to define the nature of that limitation. A devout believer might try to salvage omnipotence by saying, well, God still has full power, but he chooses not to use it.
you know, voluntary restraint argument, often for the sake of granting creation genuine autonomy. That's the most palatable middle ground for traditional theology. But Jonas insists this idea of voluntary restraint fails the Auschwitz test completely. And the failure hinges on the sheer magnitude of the evil. Precisely. If God is all -powerful and all -good, he might restrain himself to allow freedom to operate in matters of, say, minor corruption or injustice. But in view of the enormity of what humans inflicted on the innocent at Auschwitz, the industrialized murder of millions, a good God observing his rule of restraint would surely be compelled to break it. The moral imperative to intervene would shatter any prior commitment to non -interference. Right. A truly good father, no matter how committed he is to his child's independence, he intervenes when that child is being slaughtered. And yet no saving miracle occurred. The great silence was absolute throughout those years of horror. And this is the moment where Jonas draws the radical conclusion. Not because he chose not to, but because he could not intervene did he fail to intervene. So Jonas is forced to entertain the concept of a God who has divested himself of any power to interfere with the physical course of things for the duration of the ongoing world process. It's an absolute abandonment of the physical realm to the laws of nature and the freedom of man. God responds to the world only with the mutely insistent appeal.
of his unfulfilled goal, not a mighty hand and outstretched arm. This radical finding, it just inevitably dismantles traditional Jewish orthodoxy, specifically Maimonides' 13 articles of faith. Oh, the implications are staggering. If God cannot physically intervene, we have to eliminate the assertions that God rules the universe through intervention, rewards the good, punishes the wicked, and orchestrates the literal coming of a conquering Messiah. All those expectations are tied to a display of mighty physical power. So what remains that preserves the Jewish essence?
I mean, we can't simply toss everything out. What remains is the spiritual and moral core, the oneness of God and the concepts tied to the spiritual realm. So the call to the souls, the inspiration of the prophets, the eternal truth of the Torah, and the idea of election as a moral imperative, not a guaranteed divine protection. God's impotence refers only to the physical course of things, and this is vital because it avoids the Manichean trap. The idea that evil is caused by a co -equal evil force opposing God. Evil here arises solely from the hearts of men exercising their freedom. And this concept of divine self -restriction, while it's radical for mainstream thought, it does have a profound echo within the mystical tradition of Judaism, doesn't it?
The Kabbalah. Yes, Jonas finds a powerful undercurrent there, particularly in the Lurianic Kabbalah, which acknowledges a divine fate that is bound up with the world's coming to be. The central concept here is Tzimtzum. Contraction or withdrawal. Can you tell us a bit more about how the Kabbalists used this concept? The mystics taught that the ends of the infinite and unknowable God was so vast that to create anything outside of himself, he had to contract, withdraw into himself. This created a kind of metaphorical empty space, the koal outside the infinite. If God hadn't retreated, everything would just be subsumed immediately back into the divine all in all. So creation itself was an act of initial, self -imposed limitation to allow a finite world to exist. That sounds like voluntary restraint. So how does Jonas' idea push Simpsom further? What's the radical step he takes? Well, the Kabbalistic Simpsom is generally understood as a spatial or conceptual withdrawal, often leaving residual divine energy to sustain the world. Jonas' myth takes the contraction to its absolute extreme. The renunciation is total as far as power is concerned. He ceded his power wholly to the finite, delivering his ultimate cause entirely into the hands of the world. Creation, in this view, was the single greatest act of sovereignty with which God consented to be absolute no more. So it transforms Simpson from just a precondition for existence to a complete operational divestment for the duration of time.
Absolutely. The God of Simpson created the space for freedom. The God of Jonas surrendered the ability to override that freedom. Even when its use leads to cosmic devastation. And this non -intervening, divested God, it completely redefines the purpose and responsibility of humanity. If God is silent in the physical realm, he responds not with force, but with the mutely insistent appeal of his unfulfilled goal. He's waiting for the outcome. Which reframes the entire narrative of Auschwitz. If God was silent, then the true miracles that occurred could only have been man -made. Yes, they came forth solely from man.
the deeds of the solitary, mostly unknown just of the nations, those who, at unimaginable risk, chose to help, save, or mitigate suffering. These individuals didn't shrink from utter sacrifice. Their actions were grace in the face of the unspeakable. They showed that even in the deepest spiritual degradation, human freedom can still choose good. And this leads to a new covenantal understanding, doesn't it? The relationship between man and God is basically reversed. Since God gave himself whole to the becoming world and has no more to give, it is now man's turn to give. to God. That's a radical shift from passive submission to active co -creation. Man gives to God by ensuring it does not happen or happen too often and not on his account that it repented the Lord to have made the world. Our ultimate purpose is to prevent God's grief and disappointment. And this resonates so deeply with the ancient Jewish lore of the 36 righteous ones, the Lamb of Avniks. It ties in perfectly. This lore holds that the continued existence of the world depends on the hidden holiness of exactly 36 righteous individuals in every generation. Their superior goodness outweighs countless guilt and redresses the balance.
They are the ultimate agents of the non -intervening God, sustaining the invisible moral realm and securing the possibility of peace through purely human actions. And this brings us to the profound confirmation Jonas found after writing this essay, The Diaries of Eddie Hillesum. This connects the abstract philosophy directly to the witness of the victims. Right. Eddie Hillesum was a young Dutch Jewess who was deported and later perished at Auschwitz. And her final writings provide a shattering independent confirmation of Jonas's theology of divine impotence and human responsibility.
She was writing about this paradox from inside the system that was designed to eliminate God's goodness. And what she wrote is just astonishing. Her writings detail her struggle to maintain the internal spiritual dwelling place of God amidst the degradation of the transit camp. She wrote, I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me, that you cannot help us, that we must help you to help ourselves. That is just an incredible statement. It's a profound reversal of the standard prayer formula.
It is. And she continues, Alas, there does not seem to be much you yourself can do about our circumstances. Neither do I hold you responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help you and defend your dwelling place in us to the last. She concluded that God was present but powerless to intervene externally. Her duty was to protect the internal divine spark from being extinguished by external evil. Wow. That provides the ultimate corrective to that initial despair that Auschwitz allowed no room for martyrdom or dignity. If martyrdom is defined as protecting the spiritual truth, then Hilsum's act of defending God's dwelling place within her is the highest form of self -sacrifice and spiritual defiance. In her assertion that we must help God is the ultimate shift of agency that Jonas's framework demanded. It's a theology that is validated not by scripture, but by history and by moral experience. So we began this deep dive with the question of theodicy and the suffering of the righteous, the question of Job. And Jonas' synthesis delivers an answer, but it's one that is the complete opposite of the answer found in the biblical book of Job.
Absolutely. The book of Job invokes God's unassailable plenitude of power, a power that man cannot question or comprehend. Jonas, however, invokes God's chosen voidance of power, his self -renunciation, as the necessary condition for existence itself. And yet, this vulnerable, dependent God is still worthy of praise. He is. This final synthesis argues that the divine renunciation was made so that we, the mortals, could be. Existence itself is the ultimate gift stemming from this initial total sacrifice. And it demands a life lived in profound gratitude and, more importantly, profound responsibility. The final synthesized answer to Job, then, is that God is not detached, judging from afar. No. The conclusion is that in him, man, God himself suffers. His destiny is bound up with ours. His success depends on our moral fidelity. It leaves us with a truly provocative thought, I think, about the enduring nature of faith, even when it's stripped of all its traditional power structures. Jonas cites the powerful lines from Goethe. All that ever stammers praising the Most High is in circles there assembled far and nigh. And we're left to reflect on whether this concept of a vulnerable, suffering, independent God offers more sense and meaning in the face of history's deepest tragedy, like the Holocaust, than the traditional assertion of unquestionable, unassailable omnipotence.
It's certainly a concept that demands a different kind of life and a much higher level of ethical responsibility from every person who chooses to believe. What kind of world will you help God bring back from the odyssey of time? That's really the question Jonas leaves us with.