Jewish theologian questioned traditional notions of God

NO JEWISH THEOLOGY WILL POSSESS EVEN A REMOTE DEGREE OF RELEVANCE TO CONTEMPORARY JEWISH LIFE IF IT IGNORES THE QUESTION OF GOD AND THE DEATH CAMPS. — RICHARD RUBENSTEIN

Richard Rubenstein, a Jewish theologian who stared into the abyss of the Holocaust and rejected the idea of an omnipotent, beneficent god, a stark break from traditional Judaism that placed him among the most significant religious thinkers of his time, died May 16 at a hospital in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 97.

The cause was sepsis, said his daughter, Hannah Rubenstein.

For Rubenstein, modern history, if not all of human history, could be divided into two eras: the one that preceded the establishment of Auschwitz — located in occupied Poland, the largest of the Nazi death camps during the Second World War — and the era that followed, when the world was left to reckon with the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. His best-known and most controversial book was titled After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism.

First published in 1966, the volume made Rubenstein perhaps the most prominent Jewish member of a group of contemporary theologians, mainly Protestant, who posited the idea that God was “dead,” or that belief in a deity as God had long been understood was no longer possible.

Ori Z. Soltes, a professor who has taught Rubenstein’s works at Georgetown University in Washington, described him in an interview as “a path breaker” for being “one of the first Jewish theologians to address ... the question of the Holocaust from a theological perspective.”

Rubenstein’s ideas, in some circles, were perceived as heretical. In a second edition of After Auschwitz, published in 1992, Rubenstein, who was an ordained rabbi, wrote that the book had made him “virtually unemployable within the Jewish community.”

But over the decades his writings have retained enduring relevance among students and scholars wrestling with the question of theodicy, or how a god who is good could coexist with a world in which evil often prevails.

In the wake of the Holocaust, many survivors, their descendants and Jews around the world felt forced to reconsider the meaning of their faith. Some survivors hewed even more closely to their religious traditions, regarding every Sabbath as a victory over Hitler. Others, fearing resurgences of anti-semitism, distanced themselves and their children from Judaism. For many, the question of how and whether to honour their faith was never fully settled, a wound left unhealed years after the Allies liberated the camps.

Rubenstein, who was born in the United States to American parents of Eastern European heritage, was not raised in a religious environment. He attended no Hebrew school, his daughter said, and had no bar mitzvah. But from a young age he was a seeker, and he turned to Judaism in his teens, hoping to find answers to the most fundamental questions of life.

He was ordained as a rabbi in 1952, seven years after the end of the war, and embarked on his academic career in 1960, the year before Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler’s Final Solution, was placed on trial in Jerusalem. The Eichmann trial is considered a turning point in collective understanding of the Holocaust, a moment when many people began to more fully reckon with the slaughter of European Jewry.

It was in that context, and amid the broader theological meditations on the “death of God,” that Rubenstein began to question the Jewish notion of a benevolent power, as well as the idea of the Jews as God’s chosen people.

“Although Jewish history is replete with disaster, none has been so radical in its total import as the Holocaust,” Rubenstein wrote in After Auschwitz. “Our images of God, man, and the moral order have been permanently impaired. No Jewish theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death camps. That is the question for Jewish theology in our times.”

He found a fundamental “irreconcilability” in “the claim of God’s perfection with the hideous human evil tolerated by such a God.”

“A God who tolerates the suffering of even one innocent child is either infinitely cruel or hopelessly indifferent,” he wrote. As many as 1.5 million Jewish children perished in the Holocaust, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Critics of Rubenstein observed, among other objections, that if the suffering of one innocent child negated the possibility of an all-powerful, all-merciful God engaged in human affairs, then belief in God should have died long before the 20th century.

Rubenstein “is not always convincing, and traditional Jewish theological positions can surely be defended against his strictures,” Marvin Fox, a scholar of Judaic studies, wrote in Commentary magazine in 1969. But he “is a thinker who is struggling earnestly with the perplexities of our age.”

Richard Lowell Rubenstein was born in New York City on Jan. 8, 1924. His father and grandfather operated a plumbing business that brought the family a degree of affluence until the Depression. Rubenstein’s mother was a homemaker who — in a manner unusual for women of her generation — held a master’s degree in English literature.

When Rubenstein turned 13 — the year young Jewish men traditionally celebrate their bar mitzvah — he purchased four books. They were Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Freud’s Totem and Taboo.

“He was deeply searching for meaning, the philosophical foundation of life, from an early age,” said his son, Jeremy Rubenstein.

Rubenstein experimented with Unitarianism before pursuing formal study of Judaism and lived for a period of his early adult life according to Orthodox practices.

“I was convinced that I was confronted with the necessity to make a spiritual decision: I had either to choose a Godless world, whose quintessential expression was Auschwitz, or obedience to the commandments of the Lord God of Israel,” he wrote in a passage published in Tablet magazine. “Out of fright and despair I chose the Lord God of Israel.”

Rubenstein received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cincinnati in 1946 and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1952, studying under the celebrated theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. He completed graduate studies in theology at Harvard University, where he received a master’s degree in 1955 and a PHD in 1960.

Rubenstein taught for most of his career at Florida State University. From 1995 to 1999, he was president of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, which operated with substantial underwriting from the Professors World Peace Academy, an affiliate of the Unification Church founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. In news accounts, Rubenstein was described as a longtime friend of Moon, a Korean evangelist and a self-professed messiah whom critics have characterized as a cult leader.

Rubenstein’s marriage to Ellen van der Veen ended in divorce. His second wife, Betty Rogers Rubenstein, died in 2013 after nearly five decades of marriage.

Survivors include two children from his first marriage, Hannah Rubenstein of West Simsbury, Conn., and Jeremy Rubenstein of Los Angeles; three stepchildren, John H. Alschuler of New York City and Sag Harbor, N.Y., Jean Reed of Knowlesville, New Brunswick, and Liora Alschuler of East Thetford, Vt.; 10 grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

A son from his first marriage, Nathaniel Rubenstein, died in infancy. Another son from his first marriage, Aaron Rubenstein, died in 2007.

Rubenstein continued his exploration of the Holocaust in writings including The Cunning of History (1975), which author William Styron, the author of novels including Sophie’s Choice, described in an introduction as one of the “few books (that) possess the power to leave the reader with . . . a sense of revelation.”

In the second edition of After Auschwitz, Rubenstein wrote that he had sought to imbue his arguments with a greater “empathy for those who have reaffirmed traditional Jewish faith in the face of the Holocaust.”

Until the end of his life, he belonged to a Conservative synagogue, attending services every Sabbath.

His life “was a search for authenticity,” his son said, “and ultimately he made his peace … by trying to determine how he could reconcile the history of Judaism and the theology of Judaism with the modern world with all of its troubles and evils.”

Rubenstein’s theology, his son remarked, “was his own.”