The Possibility and Plausibility of Divine Abusiveness or Sadism as the Premise for a Religious Response to the

Why is there such a marked reluctance to engage seriously with any religious response to the Holocaust framed in terms of divine abusiveness or sadism? Such responses are, more often than not, simply dismissed as neither theologically possible, nor emotionally plausible. This paper considers the motif of divine abusiveness in three contexts, namely debates concerning (1) punishment for sin, (2) the complex of ideas concerning divine providence, covenant and election (with particular attention to the work of Elie Wiesel and David Blumenthal), and (3) Lawrence Langer’s methodological division of responses to the Holocaust as embodiments of either a “rhetoric of ruin ” or a “rhetoric of consolation. ” It concludes by suggesting that, in such a context, the insistence upon exploring the possibility of divine sadism functions as a refusal to search for or accept the consolation offered by more traditional responses