For Greenberg, in the fight of the Holocaust, the dichotomy of theist and atheist is impossible to maintain. Instead, faith exists in a dialectic, it is a life response of the whole person to the Presence in life and history. Like life, this response ebbs and flows. The difference between the skeptic and the believer is frequency of faith, and not certitude of position. It is not the Holocaust alone that challenges faith.
History is replete with holocausts, communal and personal.
They represent an enduring challenge to God's power. Death may well be an inexplicable part of God's created world, as inexplicable as the other manifestations of anarchy we see about us. But if Jewish eschatology views history as moving from chaos to cosmos, then God's victory over death is part of that broader mythic pattern. On theological grounds, then, Judaism demands the death of death. If God is truly God, if God's will and power are absolute, then God must triumph over death as well.