Judaism, like Christianity and our Abrahamic cousin, Islam, is grounded in revelatory affirmations of God as the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer of the world. God is revealed not only in the natural order but also through the course of history, most especially in the election and covenantal formation of Jews and Christians, whose destinies are indissolubly bound to God’s ongoing involvement in the world. Since God is understood as the Lord of all history, evil as well as good is classically attributed to the inscrutable will of the Almighty. Disasters have, traditionally, been interpreted as punishment that serve to reorient the wayward, or as the necessary birth pangs of the messianic era.

The logic of this generates a theological challenge: if God is not the Author of the Holocaust, does God at the very least share some of the responsibility for the tragedy, when 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews perished? When the war ended in 1945, so had a whole way of life for European Jews; their numbers were decimated – of the pre-war Jewish populations of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany and Austria, less than 10% survived; 1.1 million, mainly Jews, perished in Auschwitz alone.

How are we to understand God in the context of such a catastrophe? The results of such inquiry can only be tentative and as one Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, stated: “One does not practice Holocaust theology for there cannot be such a discipline. There is only a theology that is threatened by the Holocaust and saves its integrity by self-exposure to it.”

The Holocaust or as many prefer, the Shoah (a biblical word that means destruction or desolation) raises deeply disturbing questions about the moral and spiritual credibility of humanity. As the survivors of the Holocaust grow older and die, the legacy of the Shoah suffers the loss of an exceptionally powerful voice. This afternoon’s commemoration is one response to the ethical demand of remembering this painful chapter in human history. We need to share the burdens of this legacy for our spiritual and moral credibility, which is inseparable from an honest reckoning with this past.

Some years ago, I visited Auschwitz. I wondered whether it was possible to discern God’s relationship to humanity, and humanity’s response.  Among the places I visited was the Centre for Dialogue and Prayer. When I met its director, Father Manfred Deselers, who later became a friend, our conversation began not with prayer or dialogue but with silence and listening. A story is told about Mother Teresa of Calcutta. What did she say to God when she prayed, she was asked. ‘I don’t say anything’, she replied, ‘I just listen.’ ‘And when you listen’, she was asked again, ‘what does God say?’ ‘He doesn’t say anything’, she replied, ‘He just listens.’

When you stand in Auschwitz however different you may be, in our case as a German Catholic priest and a British Jewish theologian, you cannot escape the longing to recognise each other as siblings and that while words of our prayers are different, our tears and our silence are the same.

During the visit, the BBC who were producing a radio documentary, asked to record me saying the Kaddish – the Jewish prayer of mourning – whilst standing in the ruins of a gas chamber. What was left were just blocks of bricks but you could still make out the chimney stack.

I couldn’t do it. Saying Kaddish, with microphones and sound crew seemed shallow and insincere.

I returned to Manfred’s Centre and told him what happened, expecting sympathy for being put into this position. Instead, I received a scolding that I hadn’t experienced for many years. ‘What right do you have, ‘ he exclaimed, ‘not to say Kaddish for the 6 million? Don’t you understand the Kaddish is not about you, it is about those who perished. It is an exaltation of God’s name in the memory of those who were murdered.’

My spiritual pride had been pricked and the next morning, with a not a little humility but also a sense of foreboding, I told the BBC producer that I would chant the Kaddish and so I did.

For many theologians, myself included, the Shoah continues to raise questions about God’s presence or absence, God’s power and freedom. Perhaps we should simply concur with Elie Wiesel: God was present at Auschwitz, hanging on the gallows; or another well-known Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Hugo Gryn. ‘I believe that God was there Himself,’ he said, ‘violated and blasphemed’.

Hugo tells how on the Day of Atonement, he fasted and hid amongst the stacks of insulation boards. He tried to remember the prayers that he had learned as a child and asked God for forgiveness. Eventually, he said, ‘I dissolved in crying. I must have sobbed for hours… Then, I seemed to be granted a curious inner peace… I believe God was also crying… I found God.’ But it was not the God of his childhood, the God who he had expected miraculously to rescue the Jewish People. Hugo found God in the camps, but God was crying.

I think God was silent as well and urge you to listen to God’s silence and in that silence to consider what steps you will take towards making a better future, the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day.

The journey starts by remembering what it is to be human by truly seeing others as humans, like us; to appreciate their history, their community, and their values. When we face their humanity we avoid the trap of demonizing those whom we don’t know.

This means not defining ourselves by ourselves but defining ourselves in the presence of others. In this way we will overcome two perspectives which, in our unsettled society, are becoming increasingly common: one suggests, ‘I know who I am because I am not you’; the second, ‘I know who I am and I don’t need you’.

Looking to a better future means that we need to help one another on a journey whose end is a society which respects the integrity of creation and the diversity of the world God has made.

Plato, of course, says the opposite. That it’s all shadows. It’s all illusion. We say: No! For us, reality is down here. For us, our greatest aspiration is not to escape from this reality of life on earth into some mystical splendour. For us, the greatest achievement is to escape into reality, to actually immerse ourselves in this world with all its infinite difference. To make this world a better place.

For what is real is not the Platonic concept of one leaf – but the 250,000 different kinds of leaf that there actually are. What is real to us is not a theoretical universal language, but the 6,000 different languages that exist.

Let me end by saying this another way. Those of us touched by the angel of interfaith dialogue have learned about the difference between power and influence. Power and influence are often thought of as being the same kind of thing: those who have power have influence and vice versa. In fact, though, they are quite different. If I have total power and then decide to share it with nine others, I now have only one-tenth of the power I had before. But, if I have a certain measure of influence and then share it with nine others, I do not have less. I have more. Instead of one person radiating this influence, there are now ten. Power works by division, influence by multiplication.

Ancient kings had power. They ruled. They made military, economic and political decisions. Those who disobeyed them faced the possibility of death. Prophets, like Isaiah, however had no power whatsoever. They commanded no army; had no way of enforcing their views. But they had massive influence. Today, we barely remember the names of the kings of the Bible. But the words of the prophets, like Isaiah, continue to inspire by their vision and ideals. As Kierkegaard once said: When a king dies, his power ends; when a prophet dies, his influence begins.

Like lighting one candle with another, sharing does not mean we have less; we all have more. The interfaith encounter is like that flame of the candle which lights another candle. The first is not diminished. There is now, simply, more light. 

Wittgenstein, the great Cambridge philosopher, was asked what was the task of philosophy. He answered “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”. The fly, trapped in the bottle, bangs its head against the glass, trying to find a way out. The one thing it fails to do is to look up.

May this Holocaust Memorial day, this 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, prompt us all to look up, discover our shared humanity, and walking together towards a better future by becoming a blessing to one another.

Kein yehi ratzon.  May this be God’s will. Amen.