God After Auschwitz (Hans Jonas)

·30 min·2 clips

Etty Hillesum writes that people must help God and defend his dwelling place within them.

1. Dratsi Pod's episode on Hans Jonas treats The Concept of God After Auschwitz as a response to Auschwitz and the Holocaust. 2. Hans Jonas, the philosopher behind the paper, matters because the episode says he writes after an award named for Rabbi Leopold Lucas, whose death in Theresienstadt and whose wife's murder at Auschwitz frame the stakes. 3. The episode asks what kind of God-talk remains possible when Auschwitz has shattered divine justice, divine power, and the old language of theodicy. 4. Jonas answers mid-20th-century thinkers and the logical positivists by accepting a 'cognitive veto' on proof while defending God as a matter of sense and meaning. 5. The hosts say the traditional Jewish explanations of guilt, retribution, and martyrdom no longer fit industrialized killing in 1945. 6. They contrast covenantal punishment with Kiddush Hashem and Maccabean martyrdom, both of which depend on agency, confession, and dignity. 7. Auschwitz becomes a 'monstrous inversion' because victims were sorted by bureaucratic ledger rather than by faith, piety, or apostasy. 8. The episode also says Judaism's this-worldly covenant makes the crisis sharper than a theology that expects suffering in a fallen world. 9. Jonas turns to myth and kenosis, describing divine self-forfeiture as a total renunciation that leaves the cosmos and history to chance and human freedom. 10. He then maps that myth onto inorganic time, the advent of life, animal suffering outside the moral axis, and the arrival of man with responsibility for God's destiny. 11. One of Jonas's hardest claims is that predation and pain in the animal kingdom can enrich divine experience because they are not moral evil. 12. Once man appears, knowledge and freedom end innocence, so every human action alters the divine future. 13. The episode names three divine attributes from this myth: a suffering God, a becoming God, and a caring but endangered God. 14. Jonas rejects impassibility by arguing that if God relates to the world, he is affected and therefore changed by time. 15. He also uses Nietzsche's eternal recurrence to argue that eternity cannot simply repeat the same world once time leaves a real harvest in God. 16. The hosts say omnipotence collapses under Jonas's trilemma, because absolute goodness, absolute power, and intelligibility cannot survive Auschwitz together. 17. The conversation sounds like a two-voice philosophy seminar, with one speaker pushing for definitions and the other testing each claim against the Holocaust. 18. The pacing stays analytical and cumulative, moving from Kant, to Maimonides, to Lurianic Kabbalah, to Etty Hillesum's camp writings. 19. Listeners interested in Jewish theology, Holocaust philosophy, and arguments about divine power will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting light history or entertainment will probably skip it.

As heard by us

Hans Jonas recasts God after Auschwitz in terms of suffering, responsibility, and moral obligation.

Hans Jonas's "God After Auschwitz" engages one of modern theology's hardest questions: what divine justice and power can mean after Auschwitz.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

When Hans Jonas takes on God after Auschwitz, the theology gets expensive fast.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Dratsi Pod