Diamond, James

Senior Fellow: May–June 2023

Research Project: Divine Providence during the Holocaust: The Religious (Re)Turn from Theodicy to Scepticism

Many who struggled with the philosophical/theological crisis posed by the enormity of the suffering during the Shoah resorted to theodicies that drew on traditional rabbinic models that were formulated in one way or another to preserve God’s justice and goodness at the cost of implicating human beings in their own misfortune. None more profoundly engaged this dilemma both existentially and theologically than the Hasidic master R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943). His sermons, which were delivered in the Warsaw ghetto, are a wholly unique testament to a sustained theological, philosophical, and existential struggle to wrest meaning out of evil that defied reason and undermined faith. The suffering of the Shoah presents not only a factual and empirical novum for Shapira, but also one that is rabbinically unparalleled. What this project will show is that uniquely and haltingly throughout his sermons, R. Shapira returns to a sceptical theology rooted in the book of Job, an entire biblical work that explicitly rejected theodicies that “did not speak the truth about Me as my servant Job did” (Job 42:7) in favour of a scepticism that paradoxically reflects supreme faith and allows for a revelatory transcendent Thou. It will place R. Shapira’s rabbinic confrontation in dialogue with the profound philosophical responses of Emil Fackenheim and Hans Jonas whose comceptions of faith after the Shoah are rooted ultimately in a sceptically induced shattering of theodicy.

James Diamond is the endowed chair of Jewish studies at the University of Waterloo.