Answer

Maybe so, and still it’s hard for me to accept that the Holy One, blessed be He, allows a Holocaust and does not intervene just so that the world can progress. Let Him postpone that progress for six years.
True, one could make the same claim according to my own view as well: that the Holy One, blessed be He, created a world with laws and left it alone. And still, my feeling is that a strategic decision to leave is different from a God who is involved and gives room for progress. If He is still here — then let Him intervene. If He is not — then fine.
———————————————————————————————————————-
Questioner:
I think that one of the strongest engines of progress is דווקא the hard events in history (such as the Holocaust, wars, natural disasters, pandemics, etc.). Without such events, we would conduct ourselves much more placidly. If we knew that there is always someone who will save the situation at the last moment, then there would be no reason to make an effort to avoid deteriorating to that “last moment” in the first place (see, for example, the effort to prevent the spread of pandemics like AIDS, the effort to prevent global warming, the effort to prevent the recurrence of a second Holocaust, the effort to avoid deteriorating into nuclear war, the effort to preserve world peace, the effort to develop medicines, and so on). It’s a bit similar to the idea that you have to let a child fall so he’ll learn to walk.
———————————————————————————————————————-
Rabbi:
Well, that’s already a question of dosage. There are exceptional situations in which I would not let my child fail just so he would learn. True, this is also a bit difficult according to my own approach, as I wrote.
Besides, if it was the Nazis who caused the suffering, then why say that it was “created” by the Holy One, blessed be He? It is the work of human hands. At most, He does not save, but it is not that He created the suffering. But one should distinguish between suffering caused by human beings and natural suffering.