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I see R’ Avigdor Miller’s son is bringing out his father’s book on The Holocaust.
I also remember reading the following in his book Sing You Righteous (p.201 and similar on p.39) – [my capitalisation]:
“The Jewish imitators of gentile ways attributed the destruction of the Six Million to the ”failure to fight back” or ”the failure to plan ahead”. …That G-d planned the destruction in order to wipe out the sinful tendencies of European Jewry, in accordance with the prophecies of the Scriptures, did not occur to these misinterpreters. That THE WORSE DEFECTION FROM THE TORAH SINCE THE BEGINNING OF OUR NATION’S HISTORY had taken place in Europe, and was therefore visited by the greatest retribution in history, was not mentioned by any of the writers…”
I found these words to be very harsh – I was further surprised that Rabbi Miller thought it was sensible to commit them to posterity in his book (some things are better left unsaid, even if one believes them to be true).
1. Does anyone know if a similar idea is expressed by any other Gedolim?
2. How does this agree to the idea expressed in Eleh Ezkera, recited in the Avoda on Yom Kippur, that Hashem refused to answer the Malochim who questioned ‘Zu Torah Vezu Sechoroh’? Surely this is a very strong rebuttal of the need to provide an explanation of such tragedies?
Rav Shach z”l said something along those lines – punishement for Chillul Shabbat and… etc. It’s been 20+ years, so I don’t recall exactly, but you can google it.
Leyzer
Sometimes the medicine is harsh. We take for granted that Hashem is Rachaman but He is not a vatran and there is a middas Hadin and there comes a time to pay your dues. Think about it. Al pi midas Hadin the second any person does one aveira as small as it may be he should instantly drop dead because Hashem would stop allowing his heart to beat. But this never happens. Nobody likes to think about this but we all should have died the day we turned bar mitzvah and chayyiv in mitzvos. If you keep this in mind you have no questions about when Hashem allows the middas Hadin to do some cleansing. The absolute chutzpah us humans have to go against His will and smack Him in the face and then after doing it to Him a few thousand or million times and He sees that He must punish us instead of accepting the mussar we say how dare He!
Rav Avigdor Miller has said many things that were better left unsaid certainly not put in print for anyone to see.
Lakewood001
First of all Hashem created that baby and gave it life. Why did that baby deserve to be born? It.didnt! Hashem is.the big boss in the sky. He is the Melech meimis and. mechayeh at His will. Your comparing Hashem to a melech basar vdam is really off the mark. I think thats where a lot of peoples questions stem from. First realize Who and What Hashem is and what He is not.and then you will understand many things clearer.
Another point is that you need to understand did Hashem bother creating this world. It wasnt so people could sit at their computers munching on pretzels and spouting kefirah. He created this world for spiritual attainment. Everything is about klal yisroel Torah and Hashem. Let me ask you, why is it different killing a baby or.killing 13 year old for.not keeping Shabbos. The.same way He can say that an adult must die for.being mechallel Shabbos He can say that that adults child has to die. Again He made this world based on His rules and His rules are all spiritual rules.because.He is kulo ruchani.
Leyzer.
I was told this by Rav Shmuel Berenbaum zt”l (who lost virtually his entire family to the Nazi’s).
Part of what he said was “If you learn CHumash you you know we have a Toachachoh, do you have any idea what washappening in Europe?”.
Lakewood001
I don’t know what people would prefer to think, but I do know that G-d did give us the Torah and told us many times what would happen if we did’nt keep it.
WIY: I don’t buy that. Hashem gave us different levels of Aveiros with different Chiyuvim. I never understand why people think that Middas HaDin means even the slightest of slight transgressions is a Chiyuv Misah.
Lakewood
Big difference. A human has no intrinsic right to rule over people. He happens to be king and people must listen to him. If he is cruel and they thus rebel then certainly the king is awar.criminal for.punishing them. However Hashem is the creator and the True king. He is All Good All Kind and All Loving. He created humans. He made them and keeps them going every second by that very fact they are all beholden to.him. If people rebel against such a King do they not.deserve to cease being given the right and undeserved privilige provided (provided by the King) to survive?
Lakewood001 There is a world of difference between figuring out cause and effect on our own and applying the Torah’s warning to a given situation. Rabbi Miller was doing the latter: the tochacha talks about what will happen when we sin, and he was saying that this is what happened. Talk about children suffering is irrelevant, because the tochacha says that exactly that will happen. You can complain about the pasuk, but there is not much to say.
lakewood001,
You do NOT realize you’re speaking about Hashem? Right? because otherwise, I’m not sure how in the world you think you have the chutzpah to write even write about hashem the way you judt did.
Same standards? what? does a human king really know ANYTHING? Hashem KNOWS EVERYTHING! I could continue dismantling every one of your silly sentences, but I won’t, until you recognize who and WHAT you’re speaking about.
WIY,
1.) No, it doesn’t follow that if you create a living feeling being you have the right to kill or torture it just because you gave it life.
2.) What about the innocents. Over a million little children died horrible painful deaths. What about the Tzadikim who didn’t rebel against Hashem? What about those who didn’t know better?
Yitzchokm,
I’m saying if I will believe in a God I have to believe he is Good.
lakewood001, the gemara in some places and the medrashim in many places express that when certain means of reckoning are unleashed, there is no differentiation between tzadik and rasha.
Twisted,
How is that justice? Isn’t god supposed to be completely just, more just then the most just person?
lakewood01- consider your problem from a different angle. Do you have a problem with just God in general? Then, complain about the multiple Tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that can be attributed to Him. The holocaust was a man-made ‘disaster.’ So I ask, do you have a problem with God creating humanity? Do you think it would have been better for God to take away free will from humanity? Or to not create them at all…?
I’m not surprised by Rabbi Miller’s harsh stance. Emotionally, it may be near impossible to take in the responsibility for the holocaust, but perhaps it is time. How else will we learn the lesson of the holocaust? To ignore it, can bring more calamity upon us chas vshalom.
Allow me to intervene:
You are essentially asking the ancient question of “Why do bad things happen to good people?”.
I suggest you read R’ Leib (Lawrence) Keleman’s book Permission to Believe, chapter 6, which discusses precisely this. In short, this is his argument:
In order to examine whether or not bad things happen to good people requires access to two elusive pieces of information.
First of all, who is truly good, and who is truly bad? There are innumerable cases throughout our lives of the supposedly good turning out bad, (think Ponzi schemes, kofrim, the Leiby Kletzky case, Yochanan Kohen Gadol, Zimri), and the bad turning out good (such as Nevuzaradan, Rabbi Akiva). Hitler and Stalin were revered by their people, and yet they were the worst murderers in human history. George Washington And Thomas Jefferson were considered rebellious outlaws in Britain, but were men of vision.
The second piece of information is what is good, and what is bad? Even from a purely materialistic standpoint, it is quite clear that things are not often what they seem. A man who missed his flight may curse his luck…until it crashes into the World Trade Center. Someone who wins the lottery may invest it improperly and land himself in debt. We may pity someone whose job has the fly to remote areas, but they might enjoy the adventure. Someone stuck in an elevator on the 59th floor for 5 hours might relish being able to take their mind off work and meet some new people.
This is all without taking into consideration Olam Haba and the concept of yissurim m’chaprim.
Rephrased, the question is “Why do things that appear to be bad happen to people who appear to be good?”
She’eilas Chacham Chatzi T’shuvah
LAkewood001:
It sounds like you are judging G-d. You are observing His behavior in the world that He created & owns, & you have decided that, according to your understanding, Hashem is wrong. Do you admit that you are one of Hashem’s creations, subject to His sense of right & wrong? Do you think Hashem created you SMARTER than Him? Or at least as smart? Do you feel that Hashem gave you a more perfect idea of justice than He Himself has? Do you, with your finite wisdom and limited focus, think Hashem, with His infinite wisdom & perspective, is making mistakes? When you study the past, or observe the present, & you see something that you don’t agree with, why is your response, “How could Hashem do that”? Why don’t you ask, “How is it that I don’t understand what Hashem is doing”?
Although we do not know Hashem’s ways, you can ask your Rebbi or LOR if you want to get as close as possible.
Having said that, liPilpula biAlma:
I think Ben Levi’s post re: R’ Shmuel Berenbaum is instructive.
There are other factors as well, both spiritual and, lihavdil, material:
1. Rav Elchonon HY”D wrote, before the Holocaust, that Hashem created, midah kiNeged midah, a merger of the two idols served by Jews at the time: Nationalism (i.e. Zionism) and Socialism.
2. Kivan sheNitan rishus…
3. liHavdil, on a material level, there was the very existence of Zionism as well as Zionist treachery that were major factors as well. (This is not a secret, much as the Zionists wish otherwise and blaspheme and besmirch our gedolim in attempting to rewrite history. See R’ Weissmandl, R’ Avigdor Miller and many others, in addition to researched and documented secular sources.)
I think the questions raised here are valid, but this is a poor choice of a place to raise them. You really have no idea of the poster’s breadth of knowledge and background.
You wouldn’t trust a doctor over the internet to diagnose your rash, tumor or whatever – you would want to make sure of their credentials, check their experience, etc.
When it’s this important a subject, I think you need to have confidence that you know who your ‘opinion givers’ are.
Good Luck and a Gut Yahr !
FYI Its not wrong to Judge God
The Piaseczno Rebbe) lived near the exit to the Warsaw Ghetto. he saw the deportations daily to Treblinka (His only son was killed during the bombings of Warsaw) and he began to quesion god for this. he put god on trial and found him guilty.
Lakewood, how did you just come through a Yom Kippur davening with the idea that we can understand the concept of Hashems justice? If we are to take the account of Churban bayis shenei in Masches Gittin as plain meaning, that was on par or greater than churban Europe. Yet we say kinnos for it, and in most of the kinnos, there is Tziduk Hadin. Why can’t we manage the same?
Twisted,
Rabbi Miller isn’t saying that its a mystery. He’s giving a reason and saying that it makes sense.
Lakewood: As I said in the other thread (before you joined), your Kashya is not a Kashya. Let’s boil it down step-by-step.
Given: G-d is All-Powerful, All-Knowing, Benevolent, and Good.
Given: Bad things happen to innocent and/or good people.
Conclusion: One of our two givens must be incorrect. Since we see the bad things that happen, it must be that G-d either doesn’t exist or isn’t one of those things.
The problem is that that presupposes a lack of any eternal incentives. If we trust that said All-Powerful, All-Knowing, Benevolent, and Good G-d is all of these things, then it stands to reason that He has ways to make things up to those who suffer. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I think it’s a big step to say that the state of Europe before the Holocaust is “THE WORST DEFECTION FROM THE TORAH SINCE THE BEGINNING OF OUR NATION’S HISTORY” (capitalization, I assume, Leyzer’s). From a historian’s perspective that’s risky to say as we can’t know everything that happens- we basically see the things that happen most recently and are prone to inflate their importance because that’s what we know most about. I’m not saying that for sure it WASN’T the biggest, just that how do we know?
You know, it’s funny- a lot of these posts (ON THE SAME SIDE!) all contradict each other. On the one hand, there’s the argument that R’ Miller brings up about the Holocaust obviously being a punishment for the Holocaust, because of basic cause and effect. On the other hand, the response to the “good things happening to bad people” question is that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. Personally, to me, these don’t seem to really match up.
Put it this way: the way this thread’s been going, the two CONFLICTING theories of the Holocaust are
R’ Miller: The Holocaust is a direct cause-effect result of aveiros on the part of many Jews, and the many who did NOT do these aveiros were collateral damage.
R’ Kelemen: The Holocaust’s effect on each person was based on their individual “account” with Shamayim.
(Yes, I know that this is overly simplistic, but I’m trying to make the point that logically, you can’t say that the two intersect. The only way they could is if you say that most of the people were punished for assimilation and the others were punished for their own individual aveiros, which would leave out the people who assimilated and survived.)
Basically, my point is that I don’t think we can really rationalize these kinds of things. They seem to be “teiku” at the very least and possibly insoluble by us even after me’ah ve’esrim.
The world would be a lot better place if people did not read R’ Miller’s books, especially teenagers reading any of his “proofs” books.
If Lakewood001 would have simply realised that sinning to an Infinite King is morally different than sinning against a finite one, he wouldn’t have came to the conclusion of his above post, nor would he have written his other ones.
HaKatan, why would you say the Holocaust was because of Zionism? Why not say it was because of chassidus? Look at the decimation of Polish Jewry versus other countries’ populations of Jews.
Bottom line is that we CAN’T assign a reason and if you do it just makes you look foolish.
truthsharer: He is fond of quoting a famous conspiracy theorist and rabid anti-Semite who claims that the Zionists intentionally goaded Hitler into starting the Holocaust so that they could get public support to move to Israel.
The Piaseczno Rebbe) lived near the exit to the Warsaw Ghetto. he saw the deportations daily to Treblinka (His only son was killed during the bombings of Warsaw) and he began to quesion god for this. he put god on trial and found him guilty.
I’m sorry… pet peeve of mine.
The proper capitalization in the quoted paragraph is as follows:
The Piaseczno Rebbe) lived near the exit to the Warsaw Ghetto. He saw the deportations daily to Treblinka (his only son was killed during the bombings of Warsaw) and he began to quesion God for this. He put God on trial and found Him guilty.
The Wolf
Sam2,
1.) That doesn’t answer why the suffering is necessary. I think we can all agree that causing unnecessary suffering is bad.
2.) Rabbi Miller’s answer is that the Jews didn’t follow Hashem so they had it coming. That’s what I have a problem with
WolfishMusings I think your corrections are unwarranted. Someone who views Hashem as an infinite Wisdom indeed would capitalize His Name, but someone who presumes to ‘judge’ him (sort of like a cockaroach trying to figure out what that big human is doing on a computer) would not capitalize His Name.
Sad…
Lakewood, you seem to be having serious problems with your emunah. Are you a practicing religious person? Do you consider yourself religious? Someone talking like that about g-d probably doesn’t have much religion in his life ( mods: I’m not sure how you let such a comment through)
Lakewood: Who says it’s unnecessary? He’s an infinite being, presumably He (by definition, actually) knows what’s necessary and what’s not. Our scope of knowledge is limited. But we do know that He has the capability to even all things out eventually and therefore we can assume He does.
Dealie’s a new Joseph, right?
Zahavasdad
You should copyright that story about the Piacezna Rebbe because its a work of fiction. Never happened. There is a story that elie wiesel tellsover of howhe was present when 3 regular Jews put Hashem on trial. I certainly dont believe they had a.right to do so but I wont judge them. So im pretty sure as things stand it is quite outlandish to think we can judge Hashem. There is a story of the Shpoler Zeide where they put Hashem on trial to bring about a miracle and end a famine. But this is obviously not about judging Hashem but rather a method for great Tzaddikim to precipitate a neis. If the story with the piacezna ever happened you need to provide a source. I asked someone who wrote a few books onthe Holocaust and he neverheard anything of the sort.
Zahavasdad
You should copyright that story about the Piacezna Rebbe because its a work of fiction. Never happened. There is a story that elie wiesel tellsover of howhe was present when 3 regular Jews put Hashem on trial. I certainly dont believe they had a.right to do so but I wont judge them. So im pretty sure as things stand it is quite outlandish to think we can judge Hashem. There is a story of the Shpoler Zeide where they put Hashem on trial to bring about a miracle and end a famine. But this is obviously not about judging Hashem but rather a method for great Tzaddikim to precipitate a neis. If the story with the piacezna ever happened you need to provide a source. I asked someone who wrote a few books onthe Holocaust and he neverheard anything of the sort.
WolfishMusings I think your corrections are unwarranted. Someone who views Hashem as an infinite Wisdom indeed would capitalize His Name, but someone who presumes to ‘judge’ him (sort of like a cockaroach trying to figure out what that big human is doing on a computer) would not capitalize His Name.
Sad…
I disagree with your premise, but even if I agreed with it, I’d still be correct. The author of the paragraph I corrected was not the one who attempted to put God on trial.
The Wolf
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