A Shattered Jewry and a Silent God
The Shepherd of Israel | June 1939 | Joseph Hoffman Cohn
Our nation bleeds. It bleeds in Germany, it bleeds in Roumania,
it bleeds in Italy, in fact it is hard to find a land under the sun
where Jewish blood does not run like rivers of water. The Jews
of the world are terror-stricken, and run hither and thither, and
do not seem to know what to do. Rabbis keep stuffing them with
false hopes, and they mislead them into blatant demands for
certain “rights” as to Palestine or other places. All these tactics
only make matters worse, and the Jews find themselves sinking
deeper and deeper in the quicksands of world hate.
We are a mystic nation. We have lived only because God has
declared through His infallible fiat that we shall live. He is the God
who flung the sun, the moon, and the stars into their places in
the heavens, and by the very might of His spoken word, His fiat,
these orbs spin and rotate in their circuits without ever a mishap.
His divine fiat has said that Israel shall live forever before Him, and
so we live. But what a living! Dispersions, captivities, pogroms,
slaughterings, drownings, burnings at the stake, pillaging,
robberies, expulsions—what a category of anguish! We cry to God
and we beat our breasts, and we give to the poor, and we recite
the Kol Nidre, and fast in our bodies, yet God is silent!
Listen, dear Jewish friend, there is no hope for us until we
come to that precious fountain from which springs the
cleansing blood that takes from us all sin and gives us eternal
life and peace with God. If only our nation as a whole had
12 | Never Again: A Holocast Remembered