Brave New Words: Taking God To Task For The Shoah

A prominent communal leader has written a dark, bitter response to The Book of Psalms in the hope that Holocaust remembrance will become an integral part of Jewish liturgy.

Haunted by the past: The author’s five-year-old brother was killed in a Birkenau gas chamber in 1943.

Since Biblical days, Jews have not only sanctified and exalted God, but at times argued with their Maker. Abraham’s debate over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah proved to be a successful bargaining session, preventing the total destruction of the wicked cities. Moses was able to appease an angry God who was ready to wipe out the Israelites after the Golden Calf fiasco.

Menachem Rosensaft, 76, an attorney, educator and New York-based Jewish communal leader, has gone a step further.

Much further.

His new book, “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz,” may well be “the ultimate manifestation of chutzpah,” he acknowledges – an indictment of God for abandoning the human spirit during the Holocaust. Its publication will be on January 27, to coincide with the date of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Rosensaft’s 150 psalms/poems were composed in response to the same number of writings, traditionally attributed to King David, that make up The Book of Psalms (Tehillim), a major source of prayer and inspiration for Jews over the centuries. “When I started writing Burning Psalms, I had no idea where they would take me,” the author wrote. “They insisted on writing themselves.” He added that for more than 18 months, “they took up residence in my mind and used me, in effect, as a scribe to record confrontations with ghosts – some familiar, some divine, some I had never encountered before.”

“I wrote them as a Jew who believes – or wants to believe – in God but who struggles to reconcile the palpable absence of God with the essence of God, of Adonai, as portrayed in Psalms,” Rosensaft explained in the book’s introduction. He noted that The Book of Psalms describes a God of mercy and compassion who protects us from evil and evildoers. It is intended to bring us comfort. “And yet we know that no such divine intervention … was forthcoming, that no divine loving kindness manifested itself at Auschwitz or Treblinka…

“I have dared to imagine myself in the mindset of my brother in the Birkenau gas chamber on the night of August 3-4, 1943” … and in the mindset of the victims of the Holocaust as they were confronted with its horrors “and still sought to address Adonai, to question mi’ma’amakim, from the depths.”

Rosensaft’s psalms read like one long cry of anger, frustration and abandonment. The images and emotions are raw and vivid – gas chambers, screams, torn rags, stale bread, lice-infested straw. He questions why God was silent but he doesn’t expect any answers – and doesn’t get any. At the heart of every psalm is the endless challenge: where were You?

“I’m quite certain these questions, whether addressed directly or not, were discussed in the barracks of Auschwitz,” Rosensaft told me during one of several conversations in recent days.

The contrasts between King David’s deep expressions of faith in God and Rosensaft’s bitter lamentations are purposefully pointed. For example, the familiar Psalm 23, a wellspring of comfort for centuries, begins, “The Lord is my shepherd/I shall not want,” and continues: “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no harm for you are with me.” Rosensaft’s Burning Psalm 23 is a stark inversion of those images, and of faith itself. “a psalm to the emptiness,” it begins. “no shepherd/only foes/no festive table/only bitter soup…no green pastures/no still waters/only blood-drenched/rat-infested/mud…shadows walking/through the valley of death/Adonai’s fog-wrapped house/forever.”

Read individually, each psalm is a wrenching, powerful and blunt punch to the gut. As one reads on, and the accusations of divine abandonment mount in the midst of a relentless recitation of suffering, one wants to say “enough.” Perhaps that was an intention of the author, to drive the reader to despair.

After searching through Burning Psalms for even a hint of hopefulness, I turned to Rosensaft for help, and he wrote back: “Admittedly, there are few and far between.” But he cited five examples, and the one most “filled with hope, as opposed to hopeful,” he said, was Burning Psalm 131, which was also the shortest:

Burning Psalm 131

my mother

calming the soul

quieting the fears

of a trembling child

at belsen

was a divine spark

that pierced the darkness

Rosensaft’s primary goal, he told me, is for his psalms to be “a catalyst” to help ensure that, as the generation of Holocaust survives nears its end, remembrance of the Shoah will become a permanent part of Jewish prayer and liturgy.

He noted that the Shabbat evening prayer, Yedid Nefesh (Beloved of the Soul), was composed in the 16th century after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. And four centuries later a prayer for The Prayer for the State of Israel, written in 1948 by the new nation’s two chief rabbis, has become part of the Shabbat service in synagogues in Israel and around the world.

“Our liturgy has not been static or frozen in time,” Rosensaft said. “This is the time when we must recalibrate Holocaust remembrance as part of our ritual and liturgy. It’s the one constant we have in Jewish history.”

Reviewers have praised the book for expressing hidden thoughts and feelings.

Speaking Out For Survivors

Deeply aware of Jewish history, Rosensaft was born three years after World War II ended, but in many ways, his life has been shaped, if not haunted, by the Holocaust. His earliest memories are of the Bergen-Belsen DP (displaced persons) Camp in Germany, where he was born and where his parents, concentration camp survivors Josef Rosensaft and his physician wife, Hadassah, played heroic roles in caring for the thousands of broken bodies and souls there living in limbo. Rosensaft grew up hearing stories from an early age about his father’s short-lived escape from the Nazis by jumping off a moving train headed to Auschwitz and about his parents’ post-war efforts. As a young teenager he learned that his mother lost a five-year-old son, Benjamin, from her first marriage, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Both of his parents lost parents, spouses and children as a result of the Shoah before they met and married.

Deeply moved by their experience, Rosensaft has had a long career in speaking out for the survivors, and was founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He has also served as national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance, longtime counsel of the World Jewish Congress, and as a legal historian.

No stranger to controversy, he was one of five American Jews who met in December 1988 with PLO chairman Yasir Arafat in Stockholm, hoping to establish peaceful Israel-Arab relations. He later called out the PLO founder as a fraud. As for concern that some will read his Burning Psalms as blasphemy, Rosensaft points to Jeremiah as “my favorite prophet” who, he told me, “comes close” to crossing the line between criticism of God and profanation. He also cited the revered 18th century chasidic rabbi, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who in his tales chided the Creator at times, though lovingly.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue, where Rosensaft has served as president, told me his congregant “does not hold back” in “lamenting, confronting and protesting a God on whose watch six million souls were taken. As a member of the second generation, he provides a vocabulary of protest against God and brings the questions up to date through the unspeakable horrors of October 7.”

Rosensaft added a Coda to his book after the current war began, and wrote psalms about the day the war began – “the ss have returned/to merge into hamas” – and about the tragedy of children dying in Israel and Gaza – “the messiah will not come/ will not leave/Adonai’s seclusion/until jerusalem’s bearded/rabbis imams priests/teach daily that each/jewish child/palestinian child/palestinian infant/is created with one/only one/always the same/divine spark”.

“If we are to continue to interact with God in dialogue, through our liturgy, we have to do so with the Shoah in mind,” Rosensaft told me. He said he tried to do that “in a way I believe the ghosts of the Shoah and Auschwitz might have addressed God.” And since those who come after us will not have been privileged to hear the voices of the survivors, “we need to put those sentiments into our consciousness.”

This excerpt from the final psalm in the book came closest to offering a measure of comfort for me:

‘Burning Psalms229’

Adonai Wept

Jeremiah, Chapter 31, Resurgent

Now that I have called out to You, Adonai

now that I have heard the wind

whispering through Birkenau trees

Treblinka trees

Belsen trees

I am filled with pain

and my anger risks becoming indifference

but even though nothing has changed

Ephraim remains Adonai’s beloved son

and Adonai is still my Father

even though He has looked away

I still search for Him.

my heart still yearns for Him

and as we approach each other

slowly

hesitantly

as Adonai opens His window

opens His eyes

looks down

and sees His children once again

I hear Adonai weeping in the wind

From Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, Ben Yehuda Press, 2025

© Menachem Z. Rosensaft 2025

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