Fifty years ago the Jews of Europe were overtaken by a catastrophe few anticipated and the details of which still have the power to leave anyone of normal moral sensibility gasping. As much as any natural disaster, its horrors posed questions about the grounds of faith, amongst them the problem of evil. In due course Jewish theologians tried to answer these questions. On the basis of my own rather limited reading in this area - and of the understanding of an atheist - I summarize some of the main lines of the resulting literature.
It may be divided schematically into three broad approaches, though I make no claim that there is anything authoritative about this classification. (1) Some ventured a straightforward theodicy - justification of the ways of God. (2) Others proposed a theology of the 'death of God'. (3) A number of thinkers, whom I see as intermediate between these two positions, deployed notions of a God that is hidden or mysterious, limited or self-limiting, in a way that also limits His responsibility in history.
(1) There are different versions (Bernard Maza, Ignaz Maybaum) of a theology that vindicates God's ways before humankind: in one God pours out His fury upon the Jewish people who have strayed from their own tradition into secularist, assimilationist ways, in order to bring them back to the Torah; in another, the Holocaust represents a kind of progress through sacrifice, the progress here being that of bringing the Jewish people out of the middle ages (as in Eastern Europe) and the submissive ways of the shtetl into a more emancipated era of equality and justice.
Critics have been rather severe on this approach, in my own view rightly. It endows such terrible suffering with too easy a meaning and justification. Even leaving aside the empirical basis of the above claims - for example, a secularizing trend amongst Jews has continued - how could a just and beneficent God have presided over that? Could He not have found less terrible means for achieving the same purposes?
(2) The second approach is associated mainly with the name of Richard Rubenstein and is founded on these sceptical questions. For Rubenstein the idea of an omnipotent, beneficent God at work in history, as in traditional Jewish theology, can no longer be sustained. It would imply that the most demonic, anti-human explosion was an expression of God's purposes. That a God worthy of human adoration could have been responsible for Auschwitz is obscene. This didn't lead Rubenstein to atheism, strictly speaking, but to a sort of mystical, natural religion. Yet, for him the thread uniting humankind to God was now broken: there is no ulterior meaning or purpose at work in the cosmos and history; we are unaided by any power beyond our own resources. I am not sure if the position we are left with here truly counts as being a religious one or not.
(3) For Hans Jonas also - the thinker I personally find most interesting as a representative of the 'intermediate' approaches - a providential God intervening in history, as in the traditional Jewish conception, had to go. It is replaced by a notion of the Divine as the ground of being, which forfeits its own integrity, gives itself over to chance and the risk of becoming - a kind of self-limitation which opens the way to human freedom, under the responsibility for good and evil. The image of God passes into humanity's trust, 'to be completed... or spoiled' by what humanity does in the world. Jonas's conception implies a suffering and caring God, an endangered God, but not an omnipotent God; for He has divested Himself of the power to intervene. Humankind is now charged with the burden of fulfilling God's purpose - in freedom. This purpose is not, therefore, a pre-given end. It is a chance only, a possibility.
The more open structure here is common to other post-Holocaust Jewish theologians. Eliezer Berkovits has God renouncing His power, shackling His own omnipotence, and adds the idea of His hiddenness. God hides His face from human tribulation, not through indifference, but to create a space for human freedom, which results in evil as well as good. For Arthur Cohen, God becomes utter mystery, unfathomable and terrifying; to which the Holocaust is a kind of counter-mystery also defying explanation - infinity of evil, orgiastic celebration of death. The emphasis in Cohen is darker than in Jonas. In the human is a configuration of evil destructive of the rational optimisms of the nineteenth century. Still, God is 'the mystery of our futurity'. From Elie Wiesel, finally, I'll pick out just this thread: his is a theology of protest, of a defiant dialogue with God, one challenging God's silence in face of such suffering, such enormity; provided that the challenge is for humanity and not against it.
I don't know if I'm well-placed to speak about the relative cogency of these different approaches, being attached to none of them. But I think the criticisms of the first approach are sound. And I cannot really see why 'death of God' theology stops short of atheism. As to the third broad approach - well, sufficient unto the day.