Kaplan absolved God by blaming evil on human agents, on a callous
Western civilization. At the same time, they sought to frame suffering
within the larger context of spiritual catharsis and ethical good. In their
view, Judaism held the same. Modern Jewish thinkers privileged the
moral rigor of the prophets over Job's embittered protest. Striking a “realistic”
position regarding the scope of human evil and suffering, they then
sought to turn them into foundations for good. In contrast, Rubenstein,
Berkovits, and Fackenheim attempted no such alchemy. Post—Holocaust
thinkers, we will see, abandoned even the most modern and (self-) disguised
variants of the theodic “tradition.’ Instead, they reconfigured tradition
by appropriating antitheodic biblical and midrashic fragments and
by pointedly ignoring modern—readings—of—tradition.

Having offered a more nuanced rendering of “tradition’ in the first
part of this book, I devote Chapters 4, 5, and 6 to Rubenstein, Berkovits,
and Fackenheim, respectively. I remain deeply indebted to Steven Katz's
Post—Holocaust Dialogues—undoubtedly the single most important example
of critical scholarship in the field. In this seminal text, Katz applied a
closely reasoned philosophical analysis to the claims posed by post—Holocaust
thinkers. While relying on Katz, my own study includes a “literary”
dimension that he left unexplored. Rhetoric simply inundates the literature.
Under “rhetoric’ I include hyperbolic slogans, polemical overkill,
rhetorical overstatement, and gross overinterpretation expressed with the
intention to shock readers, foment resistance, rally solidarity, and carve
out new theological identities. Rubenstein proclaimed “the death of
God’ and the creation of an “insightful paganism,’ but he himself was
neither a death of God theologian nor a pagan. Berkovits championed
“authentic Judaism’ by reinventing it. Fackenheim's rhetoric about the
614th commandment obscured the fact that he had reduced the content
of revelation to an anxious minimum—while staking a heavy investment
on highly stylized antitheodic figures for whom revelation offers little
hope or consolation.

I ask my readers in advance to note the marked ambivalence with
which I approach the use of rhetoric by these thinkers. I have employed
both a hermeneutic of charity and a hermeneutic of suspicion. On one
hand, I want to show that wild speech begets new religious expression by
opening up uncharted conceptual and hermeneutical territory. As such,
rhetoric proved indispensable to the formation of post—Holocaust Jewish
thought. For example, I explain in Chapter 4 that Rubenstein had no
choice but to adopt “pagan’ rhetoric. His teachers at the Jewish Theological
Seminary (like Heschel, Robert Gordis, Louis Finkelstein) had not
provided him a Jewish vocabulary with which to formulate his own critique
of theodicy. I therefore think it would be uncharitable to fault Rubenstein
for not understanding the tradition as we have come to under-

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