“Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz”
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, Ben Yehuda Press (2025).
256 pages, $19.95
No place evokes the depth of human evil more than Auschwitz. Theologians – at a safe distance – can investigate the question of God’s presence in the midst of evil. But when evil devastates people of faith, the question of “where were you God?” is immediate, personal and inescapable – and whether we turn away or face that question head-on has tremendous consequences for our relationship with God.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft has every right to ask these questions in his book “Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.” Rosensaft, former general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, is the son of Holocaust death camp survivors. Nazi Germany, unleashing centuries of socially cultivated hatred with technological and administrative efficiency, murdered his family members with 6 million other Jews. Among them were Rosensaft’s grandparents, and his older brother Benjamin, an innocent little boy of 5 years old, gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“Burning Psalms” is a book of modern Psalmic verse – each poem or “Burning Psalm” is a responsive reflection on the Psalms. Rosensaft writes from within his Jewish religious tradition to confront God, “Adonai,” with burning questions: Why did he turn away his face? Why was he silent? Why did he not use his mighty power to save his people – power which we believe he used in ancient times to rescue them?
“Burning Psalms” is a personal, spiritual journey; Rosensaft is literally confronting God about what happened to his own family. And for Catholics, this book provides an opportunity to rediscover, through Jewish eyes, the ancient biblical tradition of remonstrating with God. That is, confronting God honestly with our anger, confusion, frustration and disappointment toward him – and letting him speak for himself, even with painful silence, recognizing this is an important part of being in relationship with God.
Rosensaft at the very beginning of the book gives us the interpretive key for “Burning Psalms.” He quotes Pope Francis’s insight from his Oct. 14, 2020, papal audience – referencing it again in the introduction – that the Psalms are “invocations, often dramatic, that spring from lived experience,” the voices of men and women of prayer whose “suffering is transformed into a question. From suffering to questioning.”
For this reason, you cannot read “Burning Psalms” like you would a theological book, trying to reconcile God with the reality of evil at a safe distance. To read “Burning Psalms,” you have to read it as one would enter into the pain of a friend, accompanying a friend in the journey of his grief – and allowing yourself in the process to enter into your own pain, grief and questions.
With “Burning Psalms” you are descending into a haunted and scarred world of shadow and fire, ashes and smoke. Auschwitz is man’s satanic inversion of the heavenly Jerusalem – and through these poems, we are wandering with Rosensaft in a land of ghosts, searching for both Benjamin and Adonai’s “fog-wrapped house” from “Burning Psalm 23.”
“Burning Psalms” pushes us to confront God by asking “where” he was – and buried in that question is a deeper one: “Why?” But Rosensaft leaves the answer in God’s court – right where Elihu in the book of Job tells us it belongs: God will speak for himself, and we’re all going to see him face to face one day. For us to put words in God’s mouth would turn a personal, authentic dialogue with the living God – which must endure its painful extended silences – into an internal monologue with God as a foil for an imaginary conversation. It makes it difficult to listen for God.
Internalizing this spiritual realization through the “Burning Psalms” about the “why” sharpens our awareness of God’s presence in the midst of evil – particularly in the Coda, the final poetic movement of the book where Rosensaft confronts Srebrenica, other genocides and the dismissal of these crimes that makes human beings after-the-fact accomplices, and the horrors of the death and suffering inflicted upon Israelis and innocent Palestinians alike triggered by Hamas.
We catch glimpses of God surprisingly close – even in the hellscape of Auschwitz – and by the end of the book, we can hear with Rosensaft “Adonai weeping in the wind.” The spiritual journey that “Burning Psalms” takes us on allows us to receive insight Rosensaft reflected upon in a sermon for his synagogue he shared with the pope. Pope Francis, reading this sermon, sent Rosensaft a note thanking him for it, saying he felt it “constitutes the only possible hermeneutic interpretation.” And that is that God is present in those who do good, who do mercy, who keep the “divine spark” of humanity alive in them and others, and refuse to let evil change them into the image of the killers. People who “each time shimmering candles / emerged ghostlike / from the blackness / in the days of evil ... they rescued / redeemed / Adonai’s name.”
It could have felt satisfying for “Burning Psalms” to have concluded here – but for Rosensaft’s poetry, that would have simply provided us an artifice of escape. Instead, Rosensaft embeds this truth within the work, allowing us to recognize that a relationship with God holds both together: glimpsing “divine sparks” of God’s presence even as we continue to remonstrate with him, asking “why” and “until when, Lord?”
Borrowing an insight from Rosensaft’s poetry, if we wish to see the Messiah come, we – Catholics, Jews and Muslims – must fan these “divine sparks” so that the world catches fire, not with hatred and violence, but with goodness and love fit for the Messiah’s coming. This is how we must go on living in a world where Jerusalem and Auschwitz coexist.
