Religion and Theology

The history of the Jews is marked by suffering. They have experienced a lot of problems, from being removed out of the place they had considered home for very many years, to being persecuted, discarded and loathed. There has been disaster after disaster in the lives of the Jewish people. The holocaust marks the most recent disastrous happening in the series of disasters. Holocaust is used to refer to the killing of about six million Jews by the Nazis. This took place during the Second World War. The killings were carried out on the Jews who were a minority in the belief that they posed a threat to the Germans (Braiterman, 1998). The paper seeks to provide ways through which the holocaust posed a Challenge to the Jewish Faith.

After the holocaust, there were very many unanswered questions that challenged the Jewish faith. There was the question about the whereabouts of their God as to allow such things to happen to them. The holocaust brought doubts on whether or not Christian love existed. This love did not seem to be there otherwise the Nazis would not kill such a number of innocent people. There was also the question of humanity on earth. The Nazis revealed no form of humanity they slaughtered the Jews in the most horrible way. In this case, there were doubts in the faith that the Jews possessed faith that had preached love, mercy, kindness, humanity and many other positive aspects of life (Rubenstein  Roth, 2003).Their reasoning about faith and God was obviously affected by the murders of very many of their own. It became difficult for the Jews to relate love, forgiveness and peaceful existence with the kind of horror they went through. It is a fact that in the face of such a terrible situation, people cannot think of God as being loving, caring and merciful. For the Jews, God did not seem to be conscious of what they were going through. Some of the Jewish scholars have struggled with the conventional belief of God amid problems, but their efforts could not work in such terrible situation. If God was there and allowed such things to happen, then it was apparent to them that there was something wrong with what they believed in. Many explanations have been provided to explain this kind of suffering (Braiterman, 1998).

Any effort to apply the principles of faith in explaining holocaust to the surviving Jews is like transforming the Nazis into Gods allies. There are factions of the Jews who saw the holocaust as a form of punishment to the Jews who had refused to become Zionists and chose to stay in Europe. The faction that had migrated before the holocaust to Palestine had survived. In this case, it was hard to explain how God would be on the same side with Hitler in order to allow him to punish them. People who explain suffering from such a perspective seem to blame the Jewish for causing themselves such pain. Such explanations were more likely to draw the Jews far from God as there was no way of making them to understand how God could punish them by letting the most wicked man kill six million people. There were some other explanations based on their history (Rubenstein  Roth, 2003).

In the Jewish community, faith has always been threatened by the disasters they have experienced in history. Some authors have argued that faith has always oscillated from their God being a merciful one to His being unkind. The many disasters that the Jewish people faced have always made them to have doubts as to whether their God is all merciful or whether He is God who punishes. These kinds of doubts have lived with them for a very long time, but the holocaust became the major cause of their most glaring doubts. In the face of their greatest disaster, it would be very likely for the Jewish people to wonder whether God hated them so much. They are after all the community that is so prone to suffering. It is a fact that the survivors of the holocaust could no longer make sense of their life. This being the case, there was a state of doubt about Gods will in their life. When people cannot make sense of their own lives, it is apparent that they lose faith in everything they believed in. In this case, it was not only that the faith was threatened at the moment, but its continuity also seemed unlikely (Braiterman, 1998).

Preservation and continuity of the Jewish religion was also challenged. In the face of danger, children suffer more than adults. They undergo serious psychological trauma. That is so difficult to get out of. During the holocaust, children and the youth suffered a lot in the hands of the Nazis. It is also known that the only way to ensure continuity is through the young generation. Therefore the faith of the Jews would be passed on from one generation to the other through the young. After suffering so much, it was unlikely that the children and the young people could still believe in a force that seemed so strong, yet allowed them so much suffering. Preservation of the faith was also difficult due to disintegration of the community (Rubenstein  Roth, 2003).
    
The displacement of the Jews from their homes affected their religious functions. After the killings, the survivors became disintegrated and found shelters in displaced persons camps that were operated by the Allied authorities. It was no longer possible to meet in the places they used to meet for prayers and other religious ceremonies. The Jewish communities were devastated by the killings and most of them moved to Israel (Braiterman, 1998).

The field of the effects of the holocaust on the Jewish faith has not been sufficiently explored. Many authors and researchers in theology have come up with a lot of explanations as to how the holocaust and suffering impact on faith. It is evident that the Jewish people have gone through a lot of suffering in life with holocaust being the major one. This was such a devastating event that could happen without causing an effect on their faith. The holocaust challenged the Jewish faith in many ways as already discovered from the research. It left them with a load of doubt about their God, whom they had believed from very many years.