The brutal attacks of October 7, 2023, have once again caused the Jewish people to ask questions raised previously by the horrors of the Holocaust.
Put simply . . . “How could a good God permit this depth of unjust suffering and pain to fall upon His chosen people?”
Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought
Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, in his poem “After Auschwitz,” powerfully captures this sentiment [1]. Amichai called the numbers tattooed on the prisoner’s arms “telephone numbers of God, numbers that do not answer.” His suggestion is clear: God does not answer; therefore, He must not exist.
The Holocaust was a catastrophe of moral evil. On October 7, 2023, the marauding murderers of Hamas—today’s Nazis—attempted to destroy the Jewish people, whose only crime was living in the land promised to them by God and affirmed by a variety of treaties and agreements leading to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Jewish people naturally wondered how this could happen again if a good God exists. Many Jewish people were tempted to reject God altogether because of the evil experienced during the events of October 7. Yet, the denunciation of God also brings with it a renunciation of any eternal evil and good. If this were true, it would mean we would need to accept the idea that we live in a universe with no ultimate reality or justice.
If there is no God who stands as a model and perfection of goodness, then how can we conceive of such lofty ideas as “good” and “evil”? Therefore, if there is no God, no transcendent authority, no ultimate lawgiver, then what basis would we have for declaring the Holocaust—or any act of brutality—truly evil? Without God, all thoughts of ultimate truth, justice, and morality would be reduced to mere opinion!
The Collapse of Human Law
To illustrate this point, consider the historical context of the Holocaust. The Nuremberg Laws, enacted in 1935, defined who a “pure” German was based on arbitrary standards of ancestry. These laws, meticulously documented and brutally enforced, stripped Jewish people of rights, citizenship, and ultimately, humanity. Within the framework of German law at the time, these actions were legal, and Jewish people were treated as inhuman. It was a first step by the Nazis to justify the extermination of all Jewish people, which, if they had won World War II, would have been the eventual outcome.
The Nazis created a spate of immoral and even heinous laws to justify their genocidal actions. In hindsight, the only way we can claim that what the Nazis did was evil is to believe there is a morality beyond the realm of human opinion and to assert that human beings have a deeply embedded sense of right and wrong—a moral compass that transcends cultural boundaries and historical eras—because God created us in His image. The Nazis became a law unto themselves, ignoring the moral heritage of European Judeo-Christian values reinforced by the Reformation.
Morality Defined by the Victors?
In 1945, the Nuremberg Trials addressed this very issue. The Allied prosecutors asserted that the Nazis had committed “crimes against humanity.”
But what gave the international community the basis for charging the Nazi war machine with “crimes against humanity”? The Nuremberg Trials only claimed authority because the Allied forces won World War II. Had the Axis won, the victors would have forced the international community to agree that the Holocaust was justified. The problem with defining “good” through subjective human opinion is that it is arbitrary and shifts with whoever is in power.
The prophet Isaiah’s words and actions speak to us today as we wrestle with the question of evil. Isaiah repeatedly condemned the wealthy and powerful for oppressing the poor, exploiting workers, and corrupting the legal system. Some of his most famous passages include denouncing those who mistreat the poor, calling out judges who take bribes, and criticizing religious people who perform rituals while ignoring the suffering around them.
Isaiah’s prophecies often linked Israel’s spiritual unfaithfulness directly to their failure to protect the weak, making justice not just a noble ideal but a core requirement of faithfulness to Isaiah’s vision of God’s kingdom.
Like Isaiah, the prophet Micah called all humanity to treat one another with dignity and respect. He wrote: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).
The prophets of the Bible reminded us that God cares about character, and those who enact evil against their fellow human beings will suffer the judgment of a righteous and holy God who is the arbiter of eternal good and will judge evil accordingly. The perpetrators of the Holocaust and October 7 will meet a holy and perfect judge in the age to come, where God will mete out justice that goes far beyond whatever judgments He rendered on earth.
The Need for an Objective Good
There is a reason that Israel’s biblical prophets and the New Testament writers recognized that human notions about good or evil always fall short of the standards of heaven. Humanity cannot define goodness; God alone can.
In the Hebrew tradition, God is the ultimate lawgiver and the source of all morality, justice, and goodness. His perfection never changes, nor does His goodness or His very nature. He provides humanity with unchanging standards revealed in the Five Books of Moses. It is through knowing His word that we can better understand both good and evil.
God’s word is an expression of His nature, and living according to biblical standards is how we, as beings created in His image (Genesis 1:27), reflect the nature of the Creator. The Nazis and Hamas are evil, not because they transgressed the majority opinion of the international scene; they are evil because they transgressed the standards of a good and perfect God.
Faith in the Face of “Why?”
We may not completely understand why God allows suffering. But the fact that the Holocaust and October 7 happened and that innocent people, including Gazans mistreated by their evil leaders, suffered unimaginable horrors, does not disprove God’s existence. Instead, by recognizing the existence of a good God, we can define such horrors as evil.
God has a plan to repair what is broken and to heal suffering hearts. Those who embrace the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus), can take comfort in how God sent Him to suffer with us and make us whole. As Isaiah wrote of Him more than 700 years before He came, “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried” (Isaiah 53:4a). In carrying our sorrows, Yeshua does not just transfer misery from one place to the next; He heals us and brings us shalom: “The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5b). Countless Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus can testify to this healing in their lives. The Scriptures beckon us to grab hold of the unshakable foundation of God’s character—described in the Bible as “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth” (Exodus 34:6b). He is good, holy, pure, and faithful. His promises will all come to pass. The shortfall of human values will one day give way to the ultimate justice of our Creator and King, and He will reign supreme. We can know His goodness for all eternity, as the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah defeated evil, and we can enjoy His victory today and forever.
[1] Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open: Poems, trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2006), 47–48.
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