The Question That Has No Answer: Where Was G-d During the Holocaust?

written for Yom HaShoah 5786

My favorite Jewish joke goes like this. A Jewish comedian dies and when he arrives in heaven, G-d asks him to tell a joke. The comedian tells a Holocaust joke. G-d says, “That’s not funny.” And the comedian replies, “I guess you had to be there.”

When I began converting to Judaism in 2023, it took me a minute to get it, and then I said, ohh burn. But that joke does something important. It reminds us that we are a people who argue with G-d and are allowed to be angry with G-d. It also opens the door to one of the hardest questions in Jewish thought. Where was G-d during the Holocaust, and why did G-d allow this to happen to Their chosen people? There is no single answer. There are many, and they often contradict each other. That, too, is very Jewish.

I live at the intersection of faith and doubt, belief and skepticism. Some days I am absolutely convinced G-d exists and is part of the reason I am still here. Other days I look at the state of the world and think G-d might be a beautiful idea rather than a literal being. Either way, Jewish tradition still feels worth holding onto. I did not convert because everything fits neatly into a box. I converted because it does not. Judaism makes room for questions, for disagreement, for wrestling. What drew me most was the resilience of the Jewish people, the way those traditions have survived across thousands of years of exile, oppression, and attempted destruction, and the idea of tikkun olam, the responsibility to help repair the world. That speaks to something deep in me.

Part of why this question hits so hard for me is where I came from. I was raised in fundamentalist Christianity, where I learned early on about a wrathful version of G-d that punished people harshly. Later, as a teenager in the 90s, I encountered the prosperity gospel, which teaches that if bad things happen to you, it must be because you are not faithful enough. In Pagan spaces in the 2000s and 2010s, I often heard a different version of the same idea, that suffering is punishment for something you did in a past life. Different frameworks, same underlying instinct. If something terrible happens, someone must have deserved it.

That instinct is understandable. It makes the world feel more ordered, more controllable. If suffering is punishment, then maybe we can avoid it by being good enough, faithful enough, pure enough. But when you try to apply that logic to the Holocaust, it collapses. Six million Jews, including one and a half million children, were murdered. Entire communities were erased. To say that this was punishment from G-d is not just theologically difficult. It is morally unbearable.

There are Jews who have argued exactly that, often from anti-Zionist Hasidic perspectives, seeing the Holocaust as divine punishment. I cannot go there. Not emotionally, not ethically. If that is who G-d is, then G-d is not someone I could love or trust. On the other end of the spectrum are Jews who say that if G-d exists, He has a great deal to answer for. I find myself closer to that side. There is something honest in the anger. The Hebrew Bible itself is full of people arguing with G-d, demanding justice, asking why the innocent suffer.

At the same time, I do believe in human free will. If G-d exists, I do not think G-d is constantly overriding human choices. G-d does not reach into people’s minds and force them to be good. That would not be free will. And if human beings have real freedom, then they also have the capacity for real evil. The Holocaust was not a random natural disaster. It was the result of human decisions. It was built step by step by people who chose hatred, who chose obedience to cruelty, who chose to look away.

That does not fully answer the question. It still leaves us asking why G-d did not intervene. Why no miracle, no last-minute rescue, no hand reaching down to stop the machinery of death. Some Jewish thinkers have suggested that G-d was hidden during the Holocaust, that this was a time of hester panim, the hiding of the Divine face. Others say that G-d was present in the victims, in their dignity, in their acts of kindness toward one another even in the camps. Some reject the question entirely and say that after Auschwitz, traditional ideas of G-d no longer make sense.

And then there are those who shift the focus. Instead of asking where G-d was, they ask where humanity was. Why did so many people participate or stay silent? Why did so many nations close their doors to refugees? Why is it that genocide has happened more than once, before and after the Holocaust? That question is less abstract, and more uncomfortable. It points back at us humans.

I do not have a clean answer, and I do not think one exists. What I have instead is a way of living with the question. For me, that means refusing to accept explanations that blame the victims. It means allowing space for anger at G-d, or at the idea of G-d, without feeling like that disqualifies me from faith. It means recognizing the role of human free will and human responsibility. And it means holding onto the parts of Judaism that call me toward action.

Tikkun olam matters here. If the world is broken, whether by human hands alone or in a universe where G-d allows too much to go wrong, then the response is the same. We are called to repair what we can. To remember. To bear witness. To stand against hatred when we see it. To protect one another.

The joke at the beginning is funny because it is sharp, and a little bit defiant. It imagines a human being telling G-d that G-d does not get it. There is something deeply Jewish in that. We do not accept easy answers, and we do not give up the right to question, even in the face of the Divine.​

So where was G-d during the Holocaust? I do not know. Why did G-d allow it to happen? I do not know that either. What I do know is that human beings carried it out, and human beings have the responsibility to make sure nothing like it happens again. Whether G-d exists or not, that responsibility is ours.