Dana Voron: During Both the Holocaust and COVID-19 - I Don’t Know Why, But I Know Hashem Was With Us

Where was Hashem during the Holocaust? The same place He is during COVID-19.

When I was 16, our school took a trip to Poland, called 'I Seek My Brothers.' Two religious schools within a large, respectful group of non-religious schools. We traveled by bus from one extermination camp to another, eating sandwiches, listening to explanations about parts of the journey, sometimes like tourists. Confused by the gaps between the life we live and the death outside.

We would arrive at a place so green it was nauseating or at a camp ready to start again with the press of a button. Sometimes the camp turned into a museum, a train track, a mound of ash. An entire people. Smiles, Shabbat shoes, heritage, culture, history, all trampled under the Nazi boot. Occasionally, I would overhear bits of conversations on the bus from my classmates about existential embarrassment, a crisis of faith, and when we exited the bus to meet the other groups, those bits turned into pulsating arteries of anger and complaint, and the question always echoed: "So how do you still believe? Where was your Hashem during the Holocaust?" The question never troubled me. The answer sprang from within me with surprising simplicity. Painful, bleeding, but clear. I don’t know why Hashem caused the Holocaust, I would answer, but I know where He was. He was with us. He and not an angel. He walked hand in hand with the millions who suffocated, burned, and starved. He carried on His wings the millions murdered for His namesake. Sometimes He distracted the guards so a thin child could squeeze under a barbed wire, behind a barrel, under a bush. That was Him. It always was Him. Gracious and compassionate - terrible and awesome. The same one. That’s what I say every day. And in that, I have no doubt.

And today, when the end of the world got a facelift, and the question rises and echoes again? "So? Why you religious people? Where is this Hashem of yours that you still somehow believe in?" and "What does the Creator have to do with it? It’s genetically engineered, it’s the wet market, it’s the Weizmann Institute" so I look up to the sky and smile. I tell Him, you owe me answers, you know, I don’t have the where, just one big why that echoes, and no human explanation of a rabbi or influencer, or even a righteous person will satisfy me. I yearn for a divine explanation. I, the small one, holding onto the turbulent storm of faith, searching for you every day in the prayer book, in the blessing before the meal, I, who say every day "Where is the place of His glory to revere Him?!" truly searching, where are you? I, of all people, have the right to ask where you are. I bow my head and wait for you to come and answer me. Not about the where, I know you’re here. But about my why, of my people, of the millions of souls who wonder, "Why should the nations say, 'Where is their God?' May it be known among the nations before our eyes, the revenge of the blood of Your servants that has been shed" I wait for you to come with an outstretched arm, with signs and wonders, and show us all, through decrees of extermination, the holocausts, the inquisitions, and to differentiate, the coronas,

that there is always a why.

And where is not a question at all.