Higher stubbornness? I’d recast the impulse behind it this way: No, dammit, whatever I decide about the relationship to between God and evil, between God and Jewish suffering, however unsatisfied I might be by other attempts to explain it, however much I might resent God’s apparent silence or absence in the death camps, however much I reject the notion of some ‘larger plan’ in which God required the murder of millions of children to accomplish some inscrutable end, however much I reject all the consolations and rationalizations of theodicy’s attempt to explain Hitler, I refuse to allow Hitler the power, refuse to allow Hitler to be the catalyst, the defining issue over which I will reject the God my ancestors have lived with and died for, for better or worse, for three thousand years. Reject God for any other reason, for nonexistence, for silence, for death, but not for Hitler, don’t give Hitler that power, that posthumous victory.”
quote concerning Fackenheim’s belief in God, by Ron Rosenbaum in Explaining Hitler