It was about ten years between the end of my therapy and the beginning of my faith. They were ten good years, taken all in all. I had come out of the therapeutic process a changed person, almost a different person. The delusions and tormenting thoughts of the past were gone. Ideas that had once seemed certain to me now looked like simple madness. My personality was so transformed I hardly recognized myself. Even little neurotic tics had somehow evaporated. Before, I had been a fearful flier. Afterward, I enjoyed flying so much I eventually earned a pilot’s license. Before, I had been a nervous public speaker. Afterward, I spoke and performed with ease. I had not worked to fix these glitches particularly. They had just gone away as my fractured psyche was restructured into the man I was meant to be. I can take no credit for any of it really. It was the work of a brilliant doctor, a genius at his trade.
My only role had been to go on the journey. Now that it was over, it was hard to believe it had ever happened. I sometimes likened the experience to hacking my way through an enchanted jungle. I slashed through entangling vines and clustered branches. I battled raging beasts and survived life-threatening dangers. And when at last I broke out into the fair country on the other side, I looked behind me and saw the jungle was gone, nothing but open plains as far as the eye could see, as if none of the obstacles and monsters had ever really been there in the first place.
My world was full now. I did the work I loved. My family prospered. Ellen and I had a second child, a son, Spencer. Like our daughter, Faith, he proved the truth of one of our family slogans: “More love, more life.” He was a cheerful addition to the clan too. Once, when he was about three years old, he sat playing in a sunbeam on the back porch of our weekend house in Connecticut. He looked up into the light and said aloud, “Thank you, sun, for shining on me.” At this point, I felt pretty much the same way.
There was a time when I used to ask myself why it took so long—a full decade—before I faced up to the conclusions of my own reasoning and experience and accepted what should have been so obvious: the presence of God in my life. But I think I know the answer now. In part, it had to do with coming to trust this new mentally healthy self of mine. It took a while before I was fully convinced that my delusions were gone for good, that my outlook was sound and the things I believed about the world around me were true. It took a while, too, before I grew confident in my self-education and felt competent to disagree with the sages of postmodernity.
And there was something else, something more, a final problem I had to resolve in my own mind before I could move forward in my thinking and in my beliefs. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back I see it clearly. Before I could free myself to accept my latent spiritual conclusions, I had to think through the issue of Western anti-Semitism. In the next few years, I would write three novels that helped me find my way.
For me, this problem was personal. Western anti-Semitism created a dilemma in my mind, which was this: Through my years of reading, I had come to believe, as I do still, that the nations of Europe from, say, the Renaissance to the First World War, had produced more of mankind’s greatest artistic achievements than any others. I know this is now an unpopular sentiment. Some people condemn it as triumphalist. Some even call it racist. Some consider it merely impolite. In fact, it sometimes seems to me the entire postmodern assault on the concept of truth has been staged to avoid just this conclusion: some cultures are simply more productive than others and the high culture of Europe has been the most impressive so far. It’s as if, in the aftermath of the racist cataclysm of the Holocaust, Western thinkers have grown so skittish around the idea of racism they will do anything to avoid naming their culture as superior to others, even if it means avoiding the evidence of their own eyes.
I despise racism. It’s in conflict with everything I feel and everything I believe. But for me, the greatness of European culture is neither a racial issue nor a moral one, just an observational truth. As the discoveries and calculus of Newton are more important scientific breakthroughs than anything that came before or since, as the Constitution of the American founders is the most profound piece of distilled political wisdom in all history, it makes simple sense that the artistic culture that underlay those advances, the culture that includes the poetry of Shakespeare and Keats, the music of Bach and Mozart, the painting and sculpture of Michelangelo and Raphael, and the novels of Cervantes, Zola, Tolstoy, and Dickens was somehow better, richer, and deeper than any other culture that has ever existed on earth.
This has nothing to do with whether these people were nice or decent or did good things. It only concerns the objects they made and left behind. I don’t think it’s a matter of mere taste either. No matter what the popular thinking is, I can’t convince myself that the greatness of a work of art lies in the appreciation of the observer. I believe art does something. I believe it records and preserves the inner experience of being human. I believe some art does this better and more honestly and more completely than other art, whether I happen to enjoy it or not. I’d rather read Raymond Chandler than Gustave Flaubert, but Flaubert is greater.
So I thought—and think—that the beauty and truth of man’s inner life—the beauty and truth of the human spirit—were recorded in the artworks of high Europe more consistently than in any others. This, in turn, gave me a deep respect, bordering on awe, for the underlying philosophy that shaped and informed these works: the Christian worldview.
But if Christianity was the spiritual light that shone within the greatest art of Europe, it was also the dark face of its philosophical shadow: Europe’s hatred of the Jews.
I am a Jew. Even now, even in Christ—I would say never more so. I’m proud of this, belligerently proud. Mine is a uniquely great people. We represent about .2 percent of the world. Not 2 percent. Point two. Statistically almost zero. Yet make a list of the most consequential individuals who have ever lived and Jews will be thick among them, from Moses, David, Jesus, and St. Paul to Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. Around one-fifth of all Nobel Prizes have gone to people of Jewish heritage, more if you only count the science prizes. Point 2 percent of the population. About thirteen million souls. There are single cities with more people in them than that.
And these Jews, these thinkers of thoughts, these writers of books, these doctors, inventors, entertainers, tradesmen—these are the single most despised and put upon people on the face of the planet, bar none. In an age where victimhood carries with it a sick sort of glamour, where any number of interest groups demand to be proclaimed the most oppressed—too late! The Jews have won that thorny crown going away. From the Roman destruction of Jerusalem to the ceaseless pogroms and exiles of the European Middle Ages, from the Holocaust to the current attempts to isolate and destroy the state of Israel, the Jews are the perennial victimized Others of the West.
No one today would call Jew-hatred Christian, but as Christianity shaped every good thing about Western culture so it shaped this bad thing as well. “The Jews killed Christ.” This was the central Christian teaching on the subject of my people for centuries. It’s not even an English sentence really. It’s like that Noam Chomsky formulation that makes grammatical sense but is semantically ridiculous: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. It’s like saying The whites held slaves or The blacks rioted in Los Angeles or The Germans killed the Jews. Did some poor shnook who wasn’t there do it? Did the guilt seep into his cells through some racial radiation and then flow down through his DNA into his children yet unborn? It’s a colorless green idea, all right, and it has slept furiously in the mind of man for way too long.
So for me, who loved Western culture so much, who spent his life studying it, and who even worked in it in my small way, the question was this: If Jew hatred was Western Christendom’s shadow self, were the two inseparable? Were the two really one? Was the great art and culture of Europe—the art I felt best led a man to wisdom—so infected with this poison that to feed on the one was to die of the other?
Even when I was a young man, these questions bothered me. Anti-Semitism was there in many of the books I loved so much. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there was the puling character Robert Cohn with his “Jewish superiority” and his “sad Jewish face.” There was Shylock in Shakespeare; Fagin in Dickens; the horrible Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. So many bent, weak, whiny, grasping, dishonest Jewish characters in Western fiction, so many of them identified only as “The Jew.” I understood these works reflected attitudes of their times. Some might even have given fair depictions of true-to-life figures the authors had met. Still, these writers were my culture heroes and, more to the point, this culture was my culture, and for much of its history, my people were its central image of the despicable.
And then, of course, there was the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews by one of its greatest nations. It was as if, as its great culture came to its conclusion, Europe was transformed into its own shadow, spiraling down to die in the darkness at its core.
My father was obsessed with the Holocaust. He was convinced that at any moment it would begin again, right here in America. Any cultural development that worried him seemed to him the prelude to the mass extermination of American Jews. Any politician he disagreed with was a Nazi. Was there an upsurge in conservatism? A call for more law and order? Even a rise in patriotic feeling? As my father saw it, this meant the country was only one step away from rebuilding the death camps at some secret location, no doubt somewhere in the ever-so-threatening midwest.
A lot of Jews of my father’s generation felt something like this for a while after World War II. It was an understandable reaction to the trauma of having lived through the Holocaust era. But as time wore on and other Jews recovered, my father’s fears grew more fixed and pathological. He developed an almost comical knee-jerk reaction to nearly every event in the news. It only took some blowhard getting elected dog catcher, and he’d be at it again: Here it comes. This is it. Hitler’s back. We’re all dead men. In the midst of American peace and plenty, he saw the storm clouds of slaughter forever gathering above us. He even kept a collection of gold bars hidden in one of his bedroom closets in case we needed to bribe the guards at the Canadian border as we escaped from blood-soaked tyranny to freedom like the von Trapp family at the end of The Sound of Music.
From childhood on, I could see that Dad was irrational on this point. Still, his paranoia kept the issue of anti-Semitism always before me. As my love of European culture grew—and as its wisdom drew me subconsciously toward its Christly center—I began to question whether its bigotries were central to its vision. Was the Holocaust inherent in the Sistine Chapel? Was it inevitable from the moment Michelangelo’s Adam extended his hand toward the hand of God?
With the crisis of my madness over, with my work going well and my life going well, I began to study the Holocaust with a rigor and clarity I’d never really had before. For months I read the books, watched the documentaries, and suffered through the resulting nightmares almost every night.
The Holocaust is not the worst thing that ever happened in history. It’s worse even than that. It lives in a darkness beyond history. It’s the Marquis de Sade’s philosophy brought to fruition: hell on earth. The Holocaust is beyond art too. It’s the opposite of art, the opposite of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” the opposite of a world imbued with and understood through the human spirit. Stories of humanity during the event—even true stories like Schindler’s List or The Hiding Place—are so anomalous as to amount to sentimental lies. There was no humanity, and so there can be no true fictions about it, no paintings, no music. I’ve visited those death camps. Art has no power there. Even the birds don’t sing.
It may seem paradoxical, but I began to plan a novel about this very fact—about the fact that the whole Western idea of beauty and art was called into question by the truth of the Holocaust. It was my way of dealing with the issue that was haunting me: whether Western Jew-hatred undermined the whole cultural enterprise of which I, a Jew, was now a small part.
About this time, we left New York City and moved to England. I had never enjoyed New York much. Now that I could afford it, I wanted to get away, put some distance between me and my parents, and see the world. On top of this, I was beginning to find the growing American mania for so-called political correctness oppressive. In Manhattan, at least, PC had begun to curtail and poison nearly every intellectual conversation. You could hardly express an opinion without finding yourself condemned for it, especially if the opinion was obviously true. It was as if people thought reality could be lied into submission. If you would only say the world was what it wasn’t it would magically become what you said it was.
One night, I stunned an entire dinner gathering into embarrassed silence by making the shocking observation that boys and girls are different. This self-evident truth was now a sexist blasphemy. As we walked out of the restaurant, I turned to my wife in sardonic disgust and said, “We’re leaving the country, baby.” Soon afterward, we did.
We found a flat in South Kensington, London. Moving to London seemed the easiest option. I had some friends there, fellow writers and publishers, and I could speak the language more or less. I only intended to stay for a year, put some breathing space between me and America, get some perspective on my homeland. But I fell in love with the place, the city first and then the entire country.
It really was like love, too, the whole experience—it was just like a romance. I couldn’t stay away from London. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Down the hidden cobbled streets and past the stern Victorian piles, along the ancient Thames and out into the brick-and-chimney suburbs and the rolling countryside—I walked and walked everywhere, rapt and fascinated. The sense of deep history seemed to flow up out of the ground into my shoe soles and all through me. It made me feel peaceful somehow just to know so much civilization had been where I was now. I woke up every morning happy, eager to be near it, really just like in a romance. When our year there was over, I found I couldn’t leave. We ended up staying in London for seven years.
But at the same time I was falling in love with both the city and the country, I could not help but notice the anti-Semitism everywhere.
I met in Great Britain some of the kindest, most decent, most civilized, cultured, and witty people I have ever known. But the open racialism of the British startled my innocent American sensibilities. At a literary party I attended about a month after our move, a man buttonholed me and, in all seriousness, began to instruct me in the differences among the peoples of the Isles. The Welsh were cheap, the Scots were stupid, the Irish drunk, and so on. Finally, irritated at his open bigotry, I drawled at him in my best Ugly American fashion, “This country’s the size of Oregon, man, how different can y’all be?” Well, at least it ended the conversation.
To be fair, for the most part, the English hated other races only just a little more than they hated their own. That is, in general their racialism targeted everybody alike, including themselves. Whenever I told one of my British friends how much I loved their country, they invariably responded with a startled, “Why?” I had to explain to them why it was a great place and how they were a great people.
But the British hostility toward the Jews was different. It was special. It had the heat of fever to it. I had lived thirty-five years in America. I had traveled through almost every state, spoken to every class and kind of person, and I had had virtually no experience of true anti-Semitism, none. Now, suddenly, I found myself sitting in London restaurants and clubs and overhearing normal, civilized people ranting out loud about the evildoing of “the Jews.” The Jews caused wars. The Jews ruined economies. The BBC news stories about Israel were so slanted they amounted to hate speech. Even friends—good friends, good people—made remarks that appalled me. “The Jews secretly run this country.” “A Jew can never really be an Englishman.” “Jews cling to eye-for-eye justice instead of Christian mercy.” And so on.
It seemed every other person I met would ask me, “What sort of name is Klavan?” At first, I thought they wanted to know about my family background. I would launch into some cheerful explanation about how my people had come over from eastern Europe and Austria, how some official at Ellis Island had probably changed our name from Klavansky or whatever. But soon I realized what they were really asking me. After a while, whenever someone said, “What sort of name is Klavan?” I would respond quickly, sharply, “I’m a Jew,” and then watch them blush and stutter.
Whenever I heard an anti-Semitic comment, I answered it in my blunt, obstreperous American way. Nonetheless, over the years I started to feel a kind of racial awareness I’d never felt before. For the first time in my life, I felt conspicuous—and conspicuously Jewish—as if I was wearing my heritage on my face. It was the faintest taste—just the faintest—of what it must be like to be black in a majority white country.
So I was not only asking myself questions about my love of Western culture in light of that culture’s core anti-Semitism, I was living those questions out to some degree: loving England, loving Britain, loving Europe—all the while seeing and hearing evidence of its enduring shadow self.
I mentioned earlier how I visited Munich one Christmastime, how I went to the Christmas Market in Marienplatz—Mary’s Square. There was a light snow falling on the square’s massive Christmas tree. There were carolers singing on the balcony of the ornate neo-gothic city hall. There were red-cheeked children ogling the wooden toys and glass ornaments on display everywhere. And there was that smell of baked goods that carried my memories back to Mina’s house and Mina’s Christmas so that I had the visceral sense that I was home.
But earlier that day, Ellen and I had paid a visit to Dachau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp just outside the city, close enough so that every adult Munchner must have known that it was there. Dachau was not a “death camp,” and many of the prisoners tormented and killed in it weren’t Jews. But toward the end of the war the Nazis did install their signature gas chambers in the place, though they were never used. I had seen countless pictures of these murder machines in the books I had been reading, but these were the first I ever saw in reality and up close. The moment I laid eyes on them, I had the strangest experience. I heard a terrible noise nearby me, a strangled sob of grief and anguish. I looked over one shoulder and then the other to see who had cried out. Several seconds passed before I realized the noise had come from my own throat.
I was a man who felt at home in the living Christmas card of Marienplatz. I was also a man whose people had been slaughtered wholesale by this country. Were these two men, both inside me, so alienated from each other that they could never be reconciled?
I began to write the novel I’d been planning back in America, the first of the three novels that helped me through this impasse: Agnes Mallory. It’s about the friendship between a corrupt Jewish politician named Harry Bernard and Agnes, a Jewish sculptress who works in wood. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Agnes is haunted by the fact that she had a half sister who died in the camps before she was born. She can’t reconcile her desire to create something beautiful in the Western tradition with the West’s mass slaughter of her people. She feels that the very concept of Western beauty itself has been called into question.
When Harry’s corruption is exposed in the New York City scandals of the 1980s, he runs away and hides out with Agnes in her secluded Vermont cottage. As his friendship with Agnes becomes a romance, Harry finds himself confronting a mystery. Every day he hears Agnes chiseling away in her studio. Every dawn, she throws a log on the wood-burning stove and goes out for a swim in the nearby river. But the only work of hers he ever sees are the beautiful statues that lie rotting in a ghostly valley of dead elms in the forest around them.
Agnes has discarded the statues there because she feels she cannot sculpt an image that is at once beautiful and at the same time embodies the dreadful truth of her culture, the truth exposed in the death camps of World War II. Ultimately, to his horror, Harry discovers what’s going on. Every day Agnes is re-creating a fabulously beautiful sculpture of her lost half sister—and every dawn she is destroying the sculpture in the wood-burning stove. It is the only way she knows how to capture the essence of the Holocaust in art. The rest of the story spins out from this act of creative purity and madness.
To my great sorrow, I could not find a publisher for this novel in America. It came out in England but only became available in the United States some twenty years later when I cajoled an e-publisher into re-issuing it with a number of my early thrillers. Baffled and frustrated by my inability to sell in my home country what I knew to be a very good piece of work, I showed the Agnes manuscript to a friend of mine. He was a highly perceptive and intelligent writer, widely read, with a PhD from Yale. “Don’t you understand?” he said to me, with some exasperation. “Your thinking is going in completely the opposite direction to the intellectual trends of our times.” I don’t think even he knew how right he was.
Maybe if I could have published the novel at home, I would have felt a sense of closure and let the matter rest. But I don’t think so. Something was going on inside me below the level of consciousness. The epiphanies and revelations of my therapeutic years were continuing to do their work even without my knowledge. I thought I was an agnostic for life. I thought I had accepted what I had come to call “The Burden of Unknowing.” It wasn’t so. I was changing inside. I should have seen it in my next novel, the second of these three, True Crime.
True Crime is a thriller about faith and doubt. It tells how an innocent Christian on Missouri’s death row faces the existential fact of injustice and death while a cynical atheist reporter prays for a miracle as he tries to save him at the last minute. As the hour of execution nears and the prisoner’s faith begins to crumble, a pastor visits him. The pastor tells the prisoner that, whether he lives or dies, his religious vision has to be big enough to include the injustice and suffering of human existence.
“You want to believe in God,” the pastor says, “you’re gonna have to believe in a God of the sad world.” When I reread this passage now, it seems to me my heart was talking to itself, teaching itself again the hard lesson it had learned in a darkened room back in Manhattan: even in the realms of faith and history, maybe especially in the realms of faith and history, sometimes you just have to play in pain.
Still, the matter of my own relationship to faith and history remained unsettled. So when I began to plan my next novel, the final one in this series, I returned to the dilemma that was bothering me. With that, I began the single strangest writing experience of my life and produced my weirdest novel, aptly named The Uncanny.
To this day, I don’t know whether The Uncanny is any good or not. I know some people love it; but more, I suspect, hate it—hate it a lot. “This book stank,” is one of the more concise reviews of it on Amazon.com. I’d like to have the book back to write again from the beginning. I even tried once to refashion the core of the story into a play. In doing so, I felt I came closer to what I would have liked the plot to be. But I’ve never had the play produced, so I don’t know if it would work any better with an audience than the novel did.
What I do know is that writing the book changed me. It was as if, even in the happy years that followed my therapy, there was one more knot inside me that needed to be untied and somehow writing The Uncanny did the job. I don’t believe in writing as a form of self-exploration. I don’t write for myself. I write to tell stories, communicate a vision. The reader is the point of the exercise, not me. But whenever I think of The Uncanny—which is often—whenever I scold myself for writing a book I knew very few people would enjoy, I can’t help but remind myself that this was the book that undid that final knot inside me and freed my mind at last for faith. I chalk it up to an act of God.
The core of the narrative concerns Richard Storm, a shallow but lovable producer of horror films, and a fully assimilated American Jew. (His father, a small-time actor, was originally named Morgenstern, but John Wayne gave him the stage name Storm. When you have been “christened” by John Wayne, you are about as assimilated as you can get!) When Storm discovers he might be dying, he comes to England, searching for the source of his favorite Victorian ghost story. His hope is that he will discover something uncanny on which he can base a faith in the afterlife. Instead, he finds himself tracing the story back through a series of related tales from various time periods. At last, he discovers the story’s origin in a true tale of a twelfth-century anti-Semitic atrocity. It turns out the very wellspring of the culture he loves is imbued with a hatred for his race.
The novel has a strong strain of satire. It is full of parody references to other novels, especially those like Henry James’s The Ambassadors, that deal with the differences between American and European cultures. Its running joke is that the heavy, morbid European sense of the burden of history transforms Storm’s shallow but happy American ignorance into a kind of accidental wisdom. In a nod to Faulkner’s famous dictum, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Storm goofily but rather profoundly asks, “If the past isn’t past, what is?” With that attitude to guide him, even in the light of the European murder of the Jews—even in the face of his own death—Storm retains a childlike American faith in the power of each new soul to start the world again.
The plot of The Uncanny entangles various European legends into one big vast and eternal conspiracy, but somehow, the writing of it untangled me. Every day as I worked, I felt my mood elevated, sometimes almost to the point of mysticism. Sometimes I would leave my office with a powerful sense of the great unity behind and beyond the minute particulars of life. It was as if I was glimpsing again that sea of love I had seen and nearly entered at my daughter’s birth. It reminded me of the sense I’d had then that our mortal lives were just incarnate metaphors, that we are stories being told about the living love that created us and sustains us. It made me wonder if maybe that was true of all history. Maybe all of history’s beauty and bloodshed was a story not about pleasure and pain and power but about humanity’s relationship with an unseen spirit of love. We yearned for that spirit but we feared and hated it, too, because when it shone its terrible light on us, we saw ourselves as we were, broken and shameful, far from what the spirit of love had made us. Maybe all our wars and rapes and oppressions were just our attempts to extinguish that light and silence that story.
The very moment I put the last period on The Uncanny’s last sentence, I knew the work had done something to me. I could sense the change right away, and as the days went by I became certain of it. The proof was this:
There had been one annoying neurotic symptom that had remained with me after my therapy. Every now and then, I would find myself in an internal, imaginary argument with my father. This was not my real father anymore, of course. He and I had come to a distant but peaceable understanding with each other. This was what the psychologists call an introject, the idea of my father that lived in my own mind, and now spoke to me as a part of myself. When these arguments with introject Dad got started in my head, they would become compulsive, addictive. I would get a rich, sickly pleasure out of rehearsing them over and over. By an effort of will, I had trained myself to stop them as soon as they began, but it bothered me that the old man, even in imagination, still had this sort of power over me.
But the moment I finished The Uncanny, the internal arguments stopped, never to return. As the weeks went on, I knew I had become free in a new way, a special and uncommon way. With William Faulkner, I understood that the past is never dead, but like Richard Storm, I had now come to feel—truly feel—that the past was past. If the past isn’t past, what is?
In this new mental freedom, I came to see that the dilemma I had been wrestling with—my love of a culture that had done so much evil and yet produced such lasting beauty—was only my personal portion of the greater human paradox. We are never free of the things that happen. Every evil weaves itself into the fabric of history, never to be undone. Yet at the same time—at the very same time—each of us gets a new soul with which to start the world again.
It would take a few more years, but I would finally come to understand that I had, in effect, reinvented the doctrines of Original Sin and Salvation. This paradox, my paradox, was the riddle solved by the incarnation and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He offered a spiritual path out of the history created by Original Sin and into the newborn self remade in his image. It is the impossible solution to the impossible problem of evil. All reason says it can’t be so. But it’s the truth that sets us free.
I would come to feel that the West’s enduring hatred of the Jews only made sense in light of the truth of both that indelible sin and that miraculous salvation. In the Bible, the Jews are “chosen” in the sense that God selects them as his doorway back into the world after the separation of the Fall. As such, they represent all people everywhere, a microcosm of what we are like in relationship to God. Seen in that context, the statement “the Jews killed Christ,” begins to make sense. It means we all killed Christ, all humanity, to the last woman and man. To limit that killing to the Jews is a simple act of racist denial and willed blindness, an attempt to say, “They did it, Lord, not us; not us.”
The Holocaust was the crucifixion compulsively reenacted on a grand scale: an attempt to kill God’s people in order to extinguish the Light of the World that shows us as we are. Sigmund Freud called this the “return of the repressed,” a concept he discusses, not so oddly enough, in his essay “The Uncanny.” According to this idea, we bury the trauma and guilt of our past—in this case, the murder of God—and then we keep reenacting that trauma helplessly, in this case through the murder of God’s people. The things we can’t face come back and back to us, shaping our actions, getting bigger and bigger, until finally we either face the cause of them or they destroy us. Europe, in the end, was destroyed. It was their great culture that died in those death camps. The Jews—and their God—live on.
There are some people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The very fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any material explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God’s existence. More than that. The Holocaust was an evil that only makes sense if the Bible is true, if there is a God, if the Jews are his people, and if we would rather kill him and them than truly know him, and ourselves.