Jeremy Rosen
The Religious Response to the Holocaust: Can There be One?
Summary
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen engages in the difficult conversation of how the religious community, both Jewish and otherwise, can interpret and respond to the Holocaust and why it happened.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Barry, the Popes have done a lot in recent years. Since Pope John the 23rd they have turned around completely. And of all the Christian denominations, they are the ones who have not only apologised and done as much as they can to go out of their way to make up for it. It’s not so easy because remember, they also have to please the other side and bother about other considerations. But they have. The Pope, the last five popes have done a very good job.
Look, I do believe there are so many different options. Whether you believe in God, whether you don’t, what kind of God, a deistic God, a theistic God. And I think in the end what God or whoever wants of us is to be good human beings. So to me, it doesn’t matter what theology you take. I have my theology, doesn’t mean it’s right. I have what works for me I tend in religious matters to take a mystical point of view, not a rational point of view. When I’m doing science, I’m a rationalist. When I’m dealing with theories and philosophy, I’m a rationalist. But when I come to religion, it’s experience, mysticism, or if you like existentialism. It seems that we cannot answer the question why.
Sometimes we’re impatient. You know, I look back on my period as a head master and I think I could have done a lot better. I could have helped people more, which you know, I was caught up with the obligations of the school and running an institution and this, that, and the other and I didn’t have time. And one thing we come up with excuses, but I don’t think that we push God away intentionally. I think most of us simply have never experienced God. We were never taught it, we were never experienced it. And even in people brought up in very religious family sometimes have no experience. I was fortunate, I was brought up in a family where there was an experience and it was a positive one. But so many people don’t know. And that’s interesting to me why? In the religious world, one of the reasons why they say now that you should never punish or make a non-religious person feel unwanted or bad or negative because the Talmud talks about . A child who is brought up in a non-Jewish world and has no knowledge of of Jewish law, anything like that. How can you possibly punish him for something he never knew or her for something he never knew. So you can’t blame people for something they never knew.