When God Goes on Leave

In his famous, and incredibly powerful, memoir, The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal recounts his experiences as a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp. In an especially provocative moment early in the text, Wiesenthal writes the following:

"I once read somewhere that it is impossible to break a man's firm belief. If I ever thought that true, life in a concentration camp taught me differently. It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, which repeatedly 'proves' that one is no longer a man. So one begins to doubt, one begins to cease to believe in a world order in which God has a definite place. One really begins to think that God is on leave. Otherwise the present state of things wouldn't be possible. God must be away. And He has no deputy." (p.15)

Even though this entire passage is thick with meaning, it is that last line that is so striking. When God goes on leave, there is no deputy left to handle things. For me, this resonates with the line by Jean-Paul Sartre that when it comes to human existence and human responsibility: "We are alone and without excuse."

To be is to be responsible . . .

. . . for others.

. . . for the world.

Rather than first being free and then able to be responsible, instead first we are responsible and, hence, freely able to live into responsibility or to try to deny it through self-absorption.

Whether or not you are religious, and regardless of whether you think there is a God, the idea of God going on leave is something that should cause us to pause, reflect, and hopefully reorient ourselves in responsible ways.

When God goes on leave, we are all we have.

When God goes on leave, meaning must be made, rather than found.

When God goes on leave, relationships are necessarily human, all too human.

When God goes on leave, we do not become Gods, or deputies, but fragile beings who, according to Wiesenthal, "savor" hunger, anxiety, and even humiliation because it allows for a reminder that the present minute continues and has significance.

If you have not read Wiesenthal's text, I strongly recommend that you do so. But, why am I talking about it here on LinkedIn? Isn't this a bit too heavy for the sort of breezy motivational stuff that folks are supposed to post here? Reflecting on human responsibility, the absence of God, and the horrors of war isn't at all the kind of thing that is usually offered as a good start to our mornings at work.

Maybe.

But, maybe we can step up our game.

When we think about success, it is important to think about how that notion often implicates us so deeply in individualistic concerns and merely instrumental logics of self-improvement.

Think of it this way: Too often success can be the idol we worship such that even if God were on leave, we wouldn't notice.

We have made it all about us.

Don't get me wrong, we should be invested in appropriate self-love as a way of being able to be the sort of person who can live toward others in meaningful ways.

Today, while at work, I think that we should allow the sort of traumatic narrative offered by Wiesenthal to interrupt our own complacency regarding so many aspects of our lives. When we allow ourselves to be interrupted in such ways, we are able to relativize what true success is all about.

Let me ask you a question: Is your success fundamentally about you?

How we answer this question will say a lot about whether we think freedom is a means of evading responsibility, or a means of facilitating it. It will also say a lot about how we understand genuine leadership as about commanding others, or inviting them not to need commanded in order to be virtuous, productive, and relational.

• What if success is the name for properly understanding how to live with and for others?
• What if leadership is the name for properly modeling how to let others be self-determining?
• What if the idea of "God going on leave" is understood as inviting us to realize that we can't mail it in, as it were, when it comes to living and loving well?

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, himself also a Jewish survivor of a prisoner of war camp in WWII, was once asked whether he still believed in the coming of the Messiah in light of all the evil in the world. His response is quite wonderful. He says that in order to be worthy of the coming of the Messiah, we must live as if the Messiah were never going to come.

In other words, waiting for a God to save us sometimes amounts to abdicating the moral responsibilities that we have to others in our shared world.

In other words . . .

• Perhaps we need God to go on leave in order for us to remember that the world depends on us not to let it go to hell.

Whether or not you are religious, realize that your success is implicated in the success of those around you.

Whether or not you believe in God, recognize that leaders must be people who do not discharge their responsibilities onto others, but instead live into it in order to invite others to embrace their own dignity.

Perhaps God has "left no deputy" because the real challenge of human social life is that we have to recognize we are all in the same boat.

In this sense, then, maybe Sartre got it wrong.

We are never truly alone.

Listen to me, you are never truly alone.

You are surrounded by others.

In my religious tradition, we would call this a "cloud of witnesses" that support us and encourage us to good works.

Thankfully, those of you reading this are not facing the sorts of trauma that Levinas and Wiesenthal lived through. But, unless we own the responsibility that the shared human condition inaugurates, we are not doing all we can to avoid such traumas in the future.

Small acts of kindness create binds that resist the fraying of the human community.

Being a leader requires realizing that the workplace is not the totality of human experience, and that being successful is not the ultimate goal of human existence.

When we relativize our work, we can more effectively recognize that it matters precisely because our jobs are not ultimate.

Whether the product of God's creative activity, or the productive of random evolutionary process, (or, as I believe, a bit of both), we are all instances of dignity and we are daily faced with opportunities to live into relationships more effectively.

When Wiesenthal is asked by his friend in the camp "What do you think of that, Simon? . . . God is on leave." Wiesenthal responded: "Let me sleep, . . . tell me when He gets back" (p. 13).

He then notes: "For the first time since we had been living in the stable I heard my friends laughing" (p. 13).

Today it may seem like God is on leave due to struggles you are facing, but notice that when faced with struggles that were much, much (perhaps infinitely) worse that what we have in front of us here and now, Wiesenthal's and his friends reinforced each others humanity (a humanity that their oppressors attempted to strip away via humiliation) through laughter.

What is more human than laughing together after having cried together?

What is more human than attempting to build each other up after having realized how low we can sometimes be?

As I see it, perhaps we are most divine when we are at our most human.

When God is on leave, we can better remember that we are vulnerable, and yet we should also remember that we are surrounded by others to help us when we can no longer lift ourselves.

I admit that this article is a bit heavy, but hopefully lifting a few weights helps us have the strength for today.

Some takeaways:

• Be successful, but don't forget to be kind.
• Be a leader, but don't forget to serve.
• Pray, but don't forget that God may be depending on you to fix the world.
• You have work to do, regardless of what your job is!

So, get up.

Onward with your day.

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