Faith After the Holocaust

A sword or gun, or fire or water, can affect only the physical body or the soul’s connection to the body, but never the soul itself. If you ask a rational individual, “What is a person’s essence, his body or his soul? With whom are you truly connected? Who is precious to you? Whom do you defend, and whose pain alarms you?”—he will acknowledge that it is the soul.

What does this tell us? The beloved soul with whom one had a connection, who was sent to Auschwitz and there gave his life for being a Jew—the body may have taken, but the soul remains. The soul remains the day after Auschwitz, the year after Auschwitz, the generation after Auschwitz . . . The soul remains whole into eternity.

If a person were to report: “I met someone for a moment, and he was crying. It must be that his entire life was full of incredible, unbearable pain!”—such a person would be called a fool. The fact that you observed one moment out of a person’s 120 years of life does not indicate in any way the story of that person’s entire life, past or future. So too, those who perished in the Holocaust—what we witnessed of their lives was less than a passing moment in 120 years compared to the soul’s eternal reward . . .