Jeremy Rosen
Religious Responses to the Shoah
Summary
Jeremy Rosen discusses various perspectives on the Holocaust and the theological questions it raises. He explores the idea of God’s role in the face of human suffering and mentions different religious viewpoints. He expresses his own perspective and emphasizes the importance of focusing on human responsibility and love for one another.
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.
I’ve always believed somebody whose life is not based on logic will not accept logic to countermand can only speak logically to somebody who is logically inclined. I’m all in favour of education. I think it’s important, particularly Holocaust education. But some people just don’t want to hear. They refuse to hear. And unfortunately at this moment, this is the mood of the vast majority of the Western intellectual mind. The left wing simply does not want to hear another point of view. I’m not saying they don’t have some good arguments and we have plenty of bad arguments, but there’s not even attempts at trying to understand the other side. It’s back to the old Marxism capitalism of the culture.
He explained it very simply as saying because the Jews after the Enlightenment started to assimilate, moved away to America, abandoned their roots, abandoned their faith, this was God punishing them. Simple as that.
Well, the answer to that is I know a lot of the Germans, children of survivor, of Nazis, who did change, and made in some cases very important valuable humanitarian contributions. So I think it’s a problem. We are so susceptible, we human beings. I mean, just look at American politics with such children.