It’s so much easier being in each other’s presence than
it was before God, whom I now presumptuously, perhaps unpardonably, presume
was the unpatenting Inventor of what I’m a major fan,
presented by Him to us, helping us be present when He’s absent, using Zoom.
By means of Zoom all human beings are by God enabled
to play on one another the same trick that He on us has played for ages,
pretending to be present while He truly isn’t, His undisabled,
disembodied presence echoed by all humans in their zeitgeist Zoomed menages.
Divine, this rationale I postulate for Zoom, is like the cause
that Weiss-Halivni postulated for the Shoah, claiming that it was the op-
posite of revelation, a disaster in which God withdraws
Himself, revealing absence from this most malicious monstrous malaprop.
David Berger concludes his obituary of Rabbi David Weiss-Halivni in the New York Times, July 7, 2022:
Professor Halvini’s 2007 book argued that the Holocaust revealed that God had decided to let mankind make its own choices without his interference.
Professor Halivni was considered something of a theologian, and in 2007 he published “Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah.” In that book, he added a second revelation to the traditional one at Mount Sinai: the revelation at Auschwitz.
While the revelation at Sinai crowned God’s singular attachment to the Jews, he posited, Auschwitz marked God’s withdrawal from intervening in human affairs. He rejected those who tried to rationalize the Holocaust as punishment for Jews’ sins. God, he said, had already decided to let mankind make its own choices without his interference.
“This is a revelation of the absence of the divine,” he said, “a revelation of the possibility of God’s absence from the world.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
