Just finished about my 10th Jodi Picoult novel--in this case, The Storyteller. And although I am not drawn to stories about the Holocaust--they are, frankly, just too painful--I'm glad that I read this one simply because Jodi is such a gifted writer.
The story is dominated by the events crashing in on Minka, who eventually winds up in a Nazi concentration camp. In considering her horrific existence, Minka says "Some of the women prayed. I saw no point in that; since if there was a God, He would not have let this happen." And of course, therein lies a fundamental problem with theism: the idea that God is at once omniscient, all-powerful, and endlessly loving.
When six million people are rounded up, beaten, starved, exterminated, and thrown into mass burial pits, no one can tell me that any sort of decent God would allow something like that to occur. You can try to explain it, you can try to rationalize it, you can try to say that "God works in mysterious ways," but the reality is that either (a) God doesn't exist, or (b) God simply doesn't have all the magical powers with which He is associated. Any other answer just makes no sense. The suffering in the Holocaust (or Darfur, or Bosnia, or Cambodia--take your pick) has been so beyond tragic that any reasonable person ought to see the folly in thinking that God runs the show. If He does, He should be charged with neglect and abuse. A powerful, loving God would simply not tolerate such suffering. Yet there are those, believe it or not, who think that God has a hand in all their little affairs of the day: whether they get to be homecoming queen, whether they get an accounting job, or whether it's going to rain on the day of the family picnic. Hey--if God can take care of these trivial matters, where in the hell was He when Hitler charged into Poland? Or when the gas chambers were turned on at Auschwitz?
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