The pasuk says, יסר יסרני י-ה ולמות לא נתנני, Hashem chastened me severely but did not deliver me to death.
R' Yehoshua Moshe Aronson writes, “In the dreadful Holocaust we learned a new interpretation: Hashem chastened me severely by not delivering me to death. Death was a good redeemer that delivered us from torments that were severalfold harsher than death. Those privileged to die attained rest.”
R' Alter Yitzchak Isaac Weinberger, the father-in-law of R' Noach Isaac Oelbaum, wrote about the Holocaust, “Our lives became impossible. We were all half-dead, and it seemed that ‘the dead who had died were more fortunate than the living.’ The only thing our minds were capable of was to think about how to get hold of bread to keep ourselves alive. But we couldn’t allow ourselves to fall into despair because anyone who lost faith was lost for good. It says יסר יסרני י-ה ולמות לא נתנני, Hashem chastened me exceedingly, but He did not give me over to death. I now interpreted this to mean that our punishment was that we did not die.”
R' Yehoshua Moshe Aronson wrote philosophical material about suicide during the Holocaust. He wrote it in the camp and later hid it along with his diary. He began it in late 1942, after the major Aktionen, and finished it in August 1943.
In there he writes, “We have to acknowledge that there is a hidden force here beyond our understanding that makes us want to live even a life of such anguish. About such things it has been said, חך אתה חיועל כר, you live whether you want to or not.
Back in the year 5692 (1931/32) I explained the pasuk, פותח את ידך ומשביע לכל חי רצון, You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing as follows: sometimes a person is fed up with life. What force gives him the desire to remain alive, even in a life of anguish and distress that he finds very loathsome, if not a force that is invisible and hidden from our minds, the Divine Will, which is inconceivable to us and beyond our understanding, that seeks to fulfill the purpose of creation? Hashem provides (משביע) every living thing (לכל חי רצון) with the desire to live (רצון). To be alive, even though, if he delves deeply into the question of why he should live, he will not find an adequate answer.’’
