November. The Chief Rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations in the U.K., along with the Archbishop of Canterbury, traveled to the Auschwitz-Berkenau death camp in Poland along with 180 students and teachers, as well as representatives of various other faiths.
The trip was a pilgrimage to mark the 20th anniversary of the Holocaust Education Trust, which arranges for school children to make similar visits.
The full story is told by Ruth Gledhill at her Times Online blog here.
Both the rabbi and the archbishop prepared speeches which were given at Auschwitz.
Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks spoke of the horror that was Auschwitz. "For years," he said, "I could not bring myself to visit Auschwitz. There was an evil about it that, even at a distance, chilled my soul."
The rabbi talked of madness, of a civilization and a culture, which "in the heart of enlightened Europe," became a grotesque, twisted caricature of itself.
He spoke of the lingering hate, war, violence and terror that continues to plague our world. He mentioned God only in passing, as an image that "lives in every human being" and must be honored by fighting for "tolerance, respect and human decency."
Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was not so circumspect. The stories told by "our faiths," he said reflect God, and it is these stories "of specific people in actual places" that we learn of God.
Not only so, but the opposite. "...[W]e learn the horror of evil and godlessness also by hearing and telling particular stories."
"Auschwitz," said the Archbishop, "... reduces us to silence." Except it doesn't. For we must speak of it in order to "understand and imagine" ... to "read the signs of the times, the indications that evil is gathering force once again and societies are slipping towards the same collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Shoah possible."
All of the forces of darkness -- "Distorted religion, fear of the stranger, the reduction of humans to functions and numbers ... " that led to Auschwitz "are still at work in our world."
Without intention, perhaps, he defined the root of the problem of contemporary religion: Auschwitz, he said, was "a place where the name of God was profaned because the image of God in human beings was abused and disfigured. For many the name of God has become something that cannot be uttered or taken seriously because of what was done here." [My emphasis]
The Chief Rabbi understood that. The Archbishop, even as he speaks the words, somehow doesn't.
In fact, he says that looking at the horror that was Auschwitz will hopefully help us as we "travel towards the God who binds us together in protest and grief at this profanation -- and the God who even here was discerned in acts of solidarity and love ... And if there were people who spoke and lived for God here, this too is something we and our world need to hear and to learn."
But the Archbishop cannot go where his words lead him. Thus, he concludes that God was somehow present in the very place that cries out his absence! Acts of solidarity and love, such as they were, did not speak of divine concern, but human compassion. The divine was utterly and completely missing!
What Auschwitz teaches is not that God was present and to be discerned in "acts of solidarity and love," but that he was incomprehensibly absent.
Auschwitz teaches us that if God exists, he is as culpable as the Nazis for he, all-powerful and all-knowing, did nothing to stop the murder of 6 million of his "chosen" people, and millions more.
Auschwitz teaches us that, if we speak of God at all, we must wrap his name in question marks and call up a faith that is ultimately incomprehensible.
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