BURNING PSALMS

A Jewish author reflects on the Psalms through the lens of the Holocaust.

“Again and again, we are told that Adonai is and always has been merciful and compassionate,” writes Rosensaft in the book’s introduction, adding, “yet, we know that no such divine intervention…that no divine lovingkindness manifested itself at Auschwitz.” In this poetic reconfiguring of the Bible’s Book of Psalms, the author reinterprets the ancient writings (“in what may well be the ultimate manifestation of chutzpah”) in the context of the Holocaust (Rosensaft’s brother was killed in a Birkenau gas chamber in 1943). A legal scholar by trade, the author has published multiple works that combine memoir, poetry, and Holocaust remembrances. In these pages, responding to all 150 Psalms individually, the author balances his mastery of Jewish theology with a raw writing style that is unafraid to question, lash out at, and lament God’s seeming passivity in the face of evil. In his response to Psalm 23, a Biblical passage that has comforted Jewish and Christian believers for millennia, the author describes feelings of “emptiness” where there exists “no shepherd / only foes” as the children of God walk “through the valley of death.” Similarly, in his reimagining of Psalm 101, the author declares to God, “I will not sing to You…while slaughters of the innocent / remain unpunished.” As the son of Holocaust survivors who was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany shortly after the war, Rosensaft writes from a place of deep-seated pain and generational trauma. The work’s final section, “The Relentless Continuum of History,” highlights the perpetuation of antisemitic tropes (such as the notion that Jewish “killers…betrayed Christ”). One concluding poem, “Simhat Torah Requiem,” recalls the horrific events of October 7, 2023, stating that, “the ss have returned / to merge into hamas”; another laments the death of both Palestinian and Jewish children as Adonai and Allah watch in “anguish.”

A haunting reimagining of the Book of Psalms.