Anger And Fury
The Prophets tell us
Because of all your sins, these things have come upon you!
The Torah and the Prophets speak of calamities that come (or are threatened to come) as divine consequence. Maimonides exhorts us that when tragedy strikes we should search our deeds and repent our failings.
So from this point of view we should seek to understand what were our sins that the Holocaust came upon us.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last rebbe of Chabad writes:The destruction of six million Jews in such a horrific manner that surpassed the cruelty of all previous generations, could not possibly be because of a punishment for sins.
What greater conceit and what greater heartlessness, can there be than to give a 'reason' for the death and torture of millions of innocent men, women and children? Can we presume to assume that an explanation small enough to fit inside the finite bounds of human reason can explain a horror of such magnitude?
Nevertheless, we look and we seek some explanation, not so much to explain the past, but to help guide our future, to help us understand how we have to live. And although our influence on others may not be so significant, what shortcomings others have are also shortcomings in us, each in its own way, at its own level.
The shortcomings suggested by the next table is desecration. Our shortcoming is the small and the large, the conscious and unconscious desecration of what is holy. It is this that we have to work on.
