Dean And The Chosen People Summary

The Holocaust, state-sponsored murder of the Jews in the concentration camps, is one of the darkest events in the human history. Six million people were heartlessly tortured and executed in various places in Germany, France, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, and Austria. It is impossible to deny the evil nature of the Holocaust, and scholars have been trying to investigate the essence of evil in the concentration camps. Richard L. Rubenstein, exploring the nature of the Holocaust from the Judeo-Christian perspective, rejects the idea that God who is worthy of worship would impose such evil punishment upon the Jews, while Primo Levi attributes the evil nature of the Holocaust to lack of structure in the camps and its effect of the moral degradation on its members, and Resnais ascribes the evil of the Holocaust to the ignorance of human nature and absence of moral development of
Rubenstein describes his trip to the Press and Information Office of the German Federal Republic where he conducted a variety of cultural and religious surveys to identify certain trends based on them. Having interviews with different religious leaders, Rubenstein was particularly affected by his conversation about the Holocaust with Henrich Gruber, Dean of the Evangelical Church of East, which denied the evil nature of the Holocaust by ascribing it to God’s will and special role of the Jews in the history and development of religion. After this interview, Rubenstein stated, “If I believed in God as the omnipotent author of the historical drama and Israel as His Chosen People, I had to accept Dean Gruber’s conclusion that it was God’s will that Hitler committed six million Jews to slaughter. I could not possibly believe in such a God nor could I believe in Israel as the chosen people of God after Israel.” Rubenstein believes that God would never commit such crime against the Jews and rejects the Judeo-Christian perspective on