Today is
Yom haShoah in Israel (Holocaust Memorial Day). Every year we 'Do not forget' and we honor those who were murdered simply for being Jewish. The question is always asked, 'Where was God?' or 'Why did He allow this to happen?' Today we read this article by
Jan Willem van der Hoeven~ an avid Christian Zionist who had dedicated his life to supporting Israel and the Jewish people. We found his treatise to be extremely insightful and so we share it here.
Why the Holocaust?
Again and again, I hear people who are questioned
about the holocaust say that there is no explanation for this terrible
tragedy, which befell the Jewish people at the end of nearly 2000 years
dispersion. How could God have allowed it? What was the reason and how
can one still believe in a God Who apparently allowed such a disaster
of such magnitude including the massacre of 1 ½ million children to take
place in "christianised Europe."
First of all, let me
hereby state that the Holocaust was prophesied about in the scriptures.
That a terrible, terrible disaster would happen to the Jewish people
just before they would return to their own land.
In Ezekiel we read the following verses:
The
hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the
Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of
bones.
Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold,
there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry.
Then
He said to me, "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.
They indeed say, 'Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves
are cut off!'
Therefore prophesy and say to them, 'Thus says the
Lord God: "Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to
come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.
Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O My people, and brought you up from your graves.
I
will put My Spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in
your own land. Then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and
performed it," says the Lord. (37:1,2,11-14)
And in Jeremiah 30:5-7,10,11
For thus says the Lord:
'We have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace.
Ask
now, and see, whether a man is ever in labour with child? So why do I
see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in labour, and
all faces turned pale?
Alas! For that day is great, so that none is like it; and it is the time of Jacob's trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.
Therefore
do not fear, O My servant Jacob,' says the Lord, nor be dismayed, 'O
Israel; for behold, I will save you from afar, and your seed from the
land of their captivity. Jacob shall return, have rest and be quiet,
and no one shall make him afraid.
For I am with you,' says the Lord,
'to say you; though I make a full end of all nations where I have
scattered you, yet I will not make a complete end of you. But I will
correct you in justice, and will not let you go altogether unpunished.'
And in Zechariah 1:14-16
So
the angel who spoke with me said to me, "Proclaim, saying, 'Thus says
the Lord of hosts: "I am zealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with great
zeal.
I am exceedingly angry with the nations at ease; for I was a little angry, and they helped - but with evil intent."
Therefore,
thus says the Lord: "I am returning to Jerusalem with mercy; My house
shall be built in it," says the Lord of hosts, "And a surveyor's line
shall be stretched out over Jerusalem."'
The very long road of
suffering which began with the destruction visited on Jerusalem and
Israel by Titus in 70AD, costing at least 600,000 lives, and ending with
the slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazi's with much suffering,
persecution and massacres in between these two horrible and climatic
events. This has been the sad history of the Jewish people from the
days of their dispersion from their land in 70 AD until their return
during this last century.
In the biblical sense for the Jewish
people to be outside of their God-given land was already seen as a
punishment. The Bible calls it captivity or imprisonment. In God's
eyes the worst form of punishment was to bar them from their own land
and to have his own holy Temple destroyed by uncircumcised gentiles. It
surely was the worst form of punishment, which happened twice to the
Jewish people - first during the time of Nebuchadnezzar and then later
the second time under Titus.
Both Jeremiah, the warning weeping
prophet, and later Jesus, who also wept over Jerusalem, foretold in
detail of these terrible occurrences: the destruction of Jerusalem and
the Temple, and the dispersion of the Jewish people. But sadly, they
were not listened to.
God, Himself, had warned His people
right at the beginning through His servant Moses when He had held out
the terrible, terrible consequences of not observing to all the words of
His law when He said in Deuteronomy 28:58-67:
If you do not
carefully observe all the words of this law that are written in this
book, that you may fear this glorious and awesome name, THE LORD YOUR
GOD,
Then the Lord will bring upon you and your descendants
extraordinary plagues - great and prolonged plagues - and serious and
prolonged sicknesses.
Moreover He will bring back on you all the diseases of Egypt, of which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you.
Also
every sickness and every plague, which is not written in the book of
this law, will the Lord bring upon you until you are destroyed.
You
shall be left few in number, whereas you were as the stars of heaven in
multitude, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.
And
it shall be, that just as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good and
multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you and
bring you to nothing; and you shall be plucked from off the land which
you go to possess.
Then the Lord will scatter you among all people,
from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other
gods, which neither you nor your fathers have know - wood and stone.
And
among those nations you shall find no rest, nor shall the sole of your
foot have a resting place; but there the Lord will give you a trembling
heart, failing eyes, and anguish of soul.
Your life shall hang in doubt before you; you shall fear day and night, and have no assurance of life.
In
the morning you shall say, 'Oh, that it were evening!' And at evening
you shall say, 'Oh, that it were morning!' because of the fear which
terrifies your heart, and because of the sight which your eyes see.
Does
this all mean that therefore all the anti-Semites and all those who
have perpetrated these terrible things against God's people are to be
excused? NO! And as God announces through the verses already quoted
(Jeremiah 30:10,11 and Zechariah 1:14-16), He is furious with the
nations and those who have perpetrated these things against His people
and He will surely punish them even as He said, "make a full end of
them." As He warns through Isaiah:
For the nation and kingdom which will not serve you shall perish and those nations shall be utterly destroyed. (60:12)
Not
withstanding the safest place for the Jewish people is Israel. The
proof of God's returning favour towards them is He opening the doors of
opportunity for them to return home to the land of their fathers.
It
is there in a unique sense where God has promised to protect them, not
outside this land under the continual threat of the wolves among the
Gentiles, as indeed they have experienced throughout their long Diaspora
- from the Crusaders to the Spanish inquisition, from the pogroms to
the Gates of Auschwitz and Birkenau.
One of the most gratifying
compliments I received was from a Jewish agnostic who heard me speaking
to a mixed audience of Jews and Christians in Budapest. He said: 'I
want you to know that with your one speech you have answered all the
questions I had.' That evening I tried to explain, as I have since on
other occasions, that it was not God who was to blame during the days of
the holocaust but man. Firstly, of course the perpetrators and
bystanders who did nothing to help the Jews or prevent the misery laid
upon, but secondly the Jews for not responding to the warnings of God
through the Zionists who warned the Jews in Europe to flee to safety and
end the Diaspora, otherwise as Jabotinsky said, "the Diaspora would one
day liquidate them."
Max Nordau said: "One third of you shall
perish, one third shall be assimilated and one third shall be saved by
returning to Zion." But the majority of European Jewry did not believe
all these people and Zionists. Theodore Herzl, himself, writes in his
diary, 'I have the right to become the world's greatest anti-Semite!"
So did the Jews in Europe fight him and resist him for wanting to help
them escape or immigrate to Palestine when it still was possible.
God
touched the heart of Arthur Balfour also using his dedicated and
believing aunt to open up Palestine for the Jews to return there. But
all this was to no avail for the majority of Jews living in Europe at
the time. Jabotinsky, after having travelled and preached all over
Europe warning the Jews to leave, died as a pauper in New York -
unheeded by most of his fellow Jews. Yet the Jewish people often dare
to question where was our God when we perished under the Nazi heel in
Europe? A God, who like a concerned and caring father, first touched
the hearts of the fiery Zionists, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Nordau and others
to warn them and added to these men His Christian men and women who
helped them in this endeavour. God then touched the hearts and minds of
the British leaders to open up the land of Israel for Jewish
emigration. He is still questioned when He could have left them without
warning, without a way of escape to face the holocaust that He at least
saw coming in all its fury. As he speaks through Zechariah 1:15, "I am
exceedingly angry with the nations at ease; for I was a little angry
and they helped - but with evil intent." Yes, God was angry with His
people and that is why He threw them out of their land. 'Captivity' or
'prison term' is what the Bible calls this punishment. He said they
would become a proverb, find no rest for the sole of their feet,
languish away, "would heap disasters upon them" (Deuteronomy 32:23) but
in the end He would gather them again from all the countries of their
dispersion and end their long centuries of captivity and lead them back
to their land.
He made full provision in His kindness and mercy
to see them return to that land BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST STRUCK. The land
of Palestine during those awful years of the Holocaust and World War II
was the safest place for them. The Nazi's came as far as the Balkans
and Greece and as far as Alamein near Sinai, but God never allowed them
to touch or enter into His land. If they had listened to the warnings
and asked God to help them when He opened the doors of Palestine to go -
they would all have been safe. It was not God that was to blame that
six million Jews perished. He did not only not want it - He even
provided a way of escape but they did not want to leave the 'fleshpots'
of Europe!
It was as Jews have sometimes had the honesty to
remark - the Holocaust saved them from completely forgetting that they
were not like the others - however much they wanted to assimilate - they
were Jews. A Jew once said to me, "The Holocaust made me a Zionist."
So God in His wisdom and mercy - however cruel and dreadful this
experience was, however much the nations who did it and allowed it to
happen to His people will as yet bear the punishment for it -
nevertheless used it to get His people home! It was a Jewish friend
who, as a French Jew had survived Auschwitz being beaten nearly every
day, had completely lost any faith in His God through the many
unbearable cruelties he had seen and watched. The day came that he was
in a believer's house, alone, and had an amazing vision of an encounter
with the Lord. He said first, "I do not want to talk to you. You let
six million of my people die - there is nothing to talk about!" He
said, though he spoke these such Jewish words, the Lord kept looking at
him with such unbelievable love and tenderness that he felt his icy
heart, after all the years of closure, melt that he was able to finally
ask this questions to the Lord: "Why did you allow it to happen? Why?"
The Lord answered him by saying that if it had not been for the
holocaust this sick and often anti-Semitic world would never have
accepted His plan of the revival and restoration of the Jewish people on
their land. I had never heard this answer before. But when I began to
think about it I knew it was true. If it had not been for the
Holocaust, the United Nations would never have reached a majority to
agree with the rebirth of the young State of Israel. It was in view of
and under the influence of the dreadful Holocaust that even this evil
world, the domain of the Evil One and Prince of this world - even this
evil world under the impression of the horrendous Holocaust was willing
to give the Jewish people a few hours of mercy before it returned back
again to its old and evil anti-Semitic ways.
As I found written on a note left by an Israeli who visited the place where they gassed the Jews in Auschwitz:
It's here in this dark and dreary place, Where the light went out.
I press my ear into the ground, I still can hear them shout.
It's Chayle from Warsaw, Ellie from Berlin,
Arik from Budapest, Where do I begin?
We have come back so we can keep that memory alive.
We are a living monument to how we have survived.
Through we are living with the pain of many millions gone,
We are living, and we shall keep marching on.
For a time, they pitied us. They let us have our land.
But soon their pity turned to hate as we rose up again.
There are those who tried to say the whole thing is just a lie.
But we are here to show the world that we will never die.
There
is one important distinction to be made however in relation to the
sufferings of the Jewish people. According to the scriptures there is no
promised protection for the Jewish people for their time among the
Gentiles - the opposite is true. Once they are cast out of their land
they would again and again become the objects of disaster and
persecution. It is only when they finally are allowed to come back into
their land that things will change drastically - as we have seen so far
with Israel. They would win every war, whereas during their time in the
Diaspora it was pretty easy for the anti-Semitic Gentiles to attack and
harass them. Now that they are back they have won every war and will
according to the prophets win every future war. (They will win the Gog
and Magog war and even the Armageddon war).
As it is clearly prophesied by Jeremiah30: 10&11:
Therefore,
do not fear, O My servant Jacob, says the Lord, nor be dismayed, O
Israel; for behold, I will save you from afar, and your seed from the
land of their captivity. Jacob shall return, have rest and be quiet,
and no one shall make him afraid.
For I am with you, says the Lord,
to save you; though I make a full end of all nations where I have
scattered you, yet I will not make a complete end o you. But I will
correct you in justice, and will not let you go altogether unpunished.
The
following are passages of a letter I once wrote about this subject to
Mr. Eli Wiesel, the famous Holocaust Survivor from Auschwitz, who for
many became the voice of the Holocaust:
Sometimes I have been
asked over the many years that I have lived in Jerusalem, "where was God
when the Holocaust occurred?" It is a terrible question and may be as
you said, more terrible to try to answer. But then by not answering it,
the One who pays the bill is God. The very One I am meant to love with
all my heart, is left in the unholy position of being accused of
failing to live up to be the One He claimed to be, a merciful Father.
So not to answer is making Him pay. He will be doubted. He will be
accused. He who suffered more with and for His people during all these
years, more than can even be imagined or expressed. Does He need to be
punished? You expressed it so beautifully in your speech when you said
that in the beginning it was not man questioning God but God putting Hs
question to man, "Where are you?" I loved this point you made, I
dislike man's arrogance always giving himself the right to question God,
without being willing to be exposed to God questioning Him.
The
book of Job is one of the most poignant examples of this. First there
are the cheap, religious, neatly-cut answers by his friends, which do
not satisfy either Job or God, so that in the end Job has to pray for
his religious self-assured friends. Then comes Job's near-rebellious
questioning of God right through the book, and finally God answers Job,
as you said in your speech, by questioning Job. It is only then that
the righteous Job, a tsadik (a righteous one), says, "I abhor myself and
repent in dust and ashes."
It is a pity how we who claim to
believe the Book of Books, often conveniently interpret that book to fit
our own outlook and philosophy. God saw the monstrous power of
prejudice and anti-Semitism coming up like a loud in the hearts and
minds of many Europeans in the beginning of this century. And in His
love and mercy for His people, began to work for His people in preparing
them a way of escape, which was Israel. He touched the heart of
Theodore Herzl, who wrote, "We Jews have not yet sufficiently been
trampled upon to believe that our only hope is to return to Zion."
Jabotinsky said to thousands upon thousand, "liquidate the Diaspora or
the Diaspora will liquidate you." However His people, that God through
all these men wanted to save, did not want to leave the fleshpots of
Europe in accord with God's own promise: "And I will gather you from the
nations where you have scattered and bring you back to the land of your
fathers." He had even made it politically possible, not only by
sending the Zionists but also by putting it in the heart of Balfour to
officially open up the land of Palestine for Jewish immigration.
However
Jabotinsky died as a pauper in New York, Theodore Herzl felt so
rejected that he wrote in his diary, "I have the right to become the
world's greatest anti-Semite," and he died an early death.
The
people that had laughed about these messengers of God's love, pleading
with them to go up to Zion, died in the Holocaust. Your God, who warned
your people of the invasion of Nebuchadnezzar through Jeremiah; of the
Roman Holocaust by Titus through Jesus; and of the horrible, horrible
liquidation by Hitler through the fiery Zionists, and opened the door of
escape through Balfour, is nevertheless still questioned!
I
remember how Mr. Begin spoke some years ago at the Western Wall, the
same evening that you spoke for the 5,000 Holocaust survivors and asked
them this question, "My people, where was our God when six million of
our people were brutally murdered?" I still remember his answer, he
said, "If it had not been for the mercy of the Lord that left us a
remnant to see this day of our redemption, we would have all been like
Sodom and Gomorrah, and let us not forget that our generation that saw
the darkest page in our history also saw the brightest page, the return
to Eretz Israel and Jerusalem. It is this generation that saw a
returned Jerusalem."
Dear Mr. Wiesel, I am a Gentile who
believes with all my heart in what you Jews have taught about our God. I
believe it is you and your people that He wants to bring home to
Israel, to bring then this world home to Himself, when He will be King
over all the world in Jerusalem. I live and pray earnestly for this
day. I believe that in the end the quickest way to be involved with the
redemption of this world is not by trying to be wiser than God, but by
praying for the peace of Jerusalem. It is only from this city that one
day all killing and injustice among the nations will stop.
This
world is not helped just by fighting for all the rights of men. It will
only become a peaceful paradise of justice under the rightful reign of
the Lord and that through His people in Jerusalem. After all the
suffering you have gone through you still prefer New York to Jerusalem.
I wonder why, as a Gentile who lives with burning faith in your city's
and people's destiny in Jerusalem.
What will bring the Jews
home, to become then channels of blessing to the world? New outbursts
of anti-Semitism? If you were in God's place - all loving and caring -
wanting to bring the Jews of America and other nations home to heal this
sad, torn world, how would you go about it?
You have a golden
mouth, the hand of God is upon you. How would you go about convincing
you Jewish people to come home? Will you be successful after all the
sufferings they experienced in their history, after all the promises of
God to bring them back to the land of their fathers, after all the
centuries of praying at Seder night, "LaShana haba'a b'Yerushalayim?"
With all these biblical incentives in your hand, with your enormous
gifts, would you as God's instrument be successful in bringing them to
understand that this world will never become again the place it was
created to be - without the Jews coming up to Jerusalem to present
themselves as a nation to God for Him to heal the world through.
Do we force anti-Semitism, as horrible as it is, upon us as the only way through which God is able to convince us? I hope not.
Jan Willem van der Hoeven, Director
International Christian Zionist Center
