The Female Face of God

Have been intrigued by a Jewish theologian named Melissa Raphael, whose writing is featured in an essay written by Christopher Pramuk entitled 'Making Sanctuary for the Divine: Exploring Melissa Raphael's Holocaust Theology.'

'Where was God in Auschwitz?' is a hard question for which there is no easy answer. 'If God is all-powerful, why did he allow millions of Jews to die in Nazi concentration camps?'

Ms. Raphael in grappling with the question, takes issue with the popular assumption of the nature of God's Presence in the world.

She writes: "There has been too much asking 'where was God in Auschwitz?' and not enough 'who was God in Auschwitz?"

As Christopher Pramuk writes in his commentary on Melissa Raphael's 'Female Face of God',

"In truth, Raphael maintains, God was not wholly eclipsed in Auschwitz but was truly present in the relational acts of women who turned in compassion and bodily care toward one another, defying the most inhumane and desperate circumstances. 

'With unsparing detail, she unearths the largely ignored stories of women in the camps who maintained the practices of Jewish prayer and ritual purification with whatever resources were available to them - not excluding their own bodily fluids where no water was to be found. 

'Within the barbed-wire enclosure of the camps, one woman's body bent in compassionate presence over another woman's body or the vulnerable body of a child formed an encircling space where the divine Presence could dwell, where God could be bodily reconciled with humanity over against the patriarchal god of raw power, the false and idolatrous god of nation states and National Socialism. 

'Even, if not especially, in Auschwitz, the most basic gestures of compassion constituted a 'redemptive moment of human presence, a staying power against erasure - not only for women in the camps, but through them for God"

In reading Christopher's essay, it brought to mind a poem by rupi kaur

my god
is not waiting inside a church
or sitting above the temple's steps
my god
is the refugee's breath as she's running
is living in the starving child's belly
is the heartbeat of the protest
my god
does not rest between pages
written by holy men
my god
lives between the sweaty thighs
of women's bodies sold for money
was last seen washing the homeless man's feet
my god
is not as unreachable as
they'd like you to think
my god is beating inside us infinitely