Loving God after Auschwitz: Reading the Burning Psalms amid the ruins of faith

This challenge is at the heart of Menachem Z. Rosensaft’s Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025). This is not a book that offers easy answers. Instead, it forces us to sit with the unbearable tension between faith and despair, memory and silence, justice and its absence. Rosensaft’s poetic psalms do not attempt to rehabilitate God after catastrophe. They do not seek to mend the irreparable. Rather, they stand as acts of defiance against divine silence and human forgetfulness.

If love for God after Auschwitz is possible, Rosensaft's pslams suggests, it is not a love of naïve devotion. It is the love of Jacob wrestling with the angel, of Job demanding an answer, of the psalmist crying out, how could You / forsake them (22); how then can I put my trust / in You (55); how could You / deprive them of Your justice / how could You allow auschwitz (89) - and receiving no reply. It is a love that does not justify or explain but insists on memory as a form of theological resistance.

Rosensaft structures Burning Psalms in the tradition of the biblical Book of Psalms, yet his collection acts as a radical reinterpretation of this sacred form. The original psalms oscillate between despair and praise, between divine wrath and divine mercy. Rosensaft’s psalms, by contrast, lean almost entirely toward protest. They inhabit the theological landscape of Elie Wiesel’s Night, where God is not merely questioned in despair but put on trial. They resonate with Emil Fackenheim’s 614th commandment, that after Auschwitz, Jews must refuse to grant Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning their faith, their history, and their moral responsibility. Yet, unlike Fackenheim, who insists on faith as a necessary act of defiance, Rosensaft leaves the crisis of belief unresolved. His psalms remain open wounds.

This crisis is powerfully reflected in Burning Psalm 136, where Rosensaft subverts the refrain of the biblical psalm of gratitude and divine mercy. He writes:

These verses encapsulate the central theological dilemma of the Holocaust. If God is love, where was that love when Jewish children starved in the ghettos, when mothers and fathers were torn apart at the gates of Auschwitz, when prayers rose to an empty sky? Loving God after Auschwitz cannot mean ignoring these questions. It must mean facing them without the comfort of easy answers.

The significance of Rosensaft’s approach becomes clearer when we consider the fundamental purpose of the biblical psalms. In Jewish and Christian tradition, these ancient texts serve as expressions of both praise and lament, articulating faith even in suffering. Burning Psalms, however, disrupts this framework. Rosensaft does not seek to affirm faith through suffering but to expose the abyss that suffering creates. His collection is not a theological treatise but a poetic confrontation with a God who, if present, remains unanswered.

This is not just a theological project. It is a deeply personal act. Rosensaft was born in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp in 1948, the son of Auschwitz survivors. He carries the memory of genocide as an inheritance. One of the most haunting presences in Burning Psalms is that of his older brother Benjamin, murdered in Auschwitz at the age of five and a half. Through poetry, Rosensaft does not merely remember Benjamin: five-and-a-half-year-old benjamin (68). He resurrects him, refusing to allow him to be reduced to a statistic in the history of mass extermination.

Yet Burning Psalms is not solely a meditation on the Shoah. Rosensaft expands his vision to the horrors of our time. He recalls the genocide of Bosniaks in Srebrenica in 1995, a moment that shattered the moral credibility of an international community that once declared Never again. He writes of the crimes of October 7, 2023, of the suffering of both Israeli and Palestinian children, of the cyclical nature of human brutality. In doing so, he insists that the ethical imperative of Holocaust remembrance is not merely to recall the past but to confront the failures of the present.

Here, Burning Psalms takes on its most urgent political and philosophical significance. What does it mean to say Never again when genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass violence continue to shape our world? Rosensaft forces us to recognize that memory, if it is to have meaning, must be an active force. If we remember Auschwitz but fail to act against new atrocities, then remembrance itself becomes hollow.

In the end, Burning Psalms poses one of the most difficult theological questions of the post-Holocaust era. Is trust in God possible when all evidence points to abandonment? Philosopher Richard Rubenstein famously argued that after Auschwitz, belief in a providential God is no longer sustainable. Wiesel, in Night, wrote of watching a child slowly die on the gallows and hearing a voice within him say, Where is God? He is there, hanging on the gallows. It is within this theological crisis that Burning Psalms dwells. It does not seek resolution but demands that we remain within the tension.

Can one love God after Auschwitz? Burning Psalms does not offer an answer. It forces us to confront the question. And perhaps, in that confrontation, in the refusal to look away, something akin to faith remains, guided by the lucidity of an author whose verses mediate between heaven and earth, building stairways to the divine, while Rosensaft masterfully expands the horizons of theological reflection.