To the Shoah Survivors
Jewish Messiah
God is Old and Deaf and Goes on Holidays.
This website is addressed to Shoah survivors. I worked with survivors for five years as an aged care worker and spent hundreds of hours talking to them about their lives during and since the war. There was a common thread in our conversations. The survivors couldn’t understand why God had allowed the Holocaust to happen. Some said He was old. Some said He was deaf. Others said He went on holidays. For your loved ones and community to be persecuted and killed by an evil regime is one thing. But to feel abandoned by the One who made you would make life pointless and futile. For many of my clients who did have a strong faith, even their relationships with God were mixed with doubt, ambivalence, and sadness. Because of my position as a worker for a home care agency, I wasn’t allowed to say much, but throughout those five years, I almost burst with a longing to respond and often went home in tears. This website is dedicated to those survivors that I wasn’t allowed to share my beliefs with because of professional ethics and to all Shoah survivors who wonder why it happened.
The Devil and His Followers.
The Tanakh has a lot to say about evil: evil people, and the evil one himself, Satan or Lucifer. A psalm of Asaph reads
“They have none of humanity’s trouble, nor are they plagued like others. Therefore, they put on pride as a necklace, and violence wraps around them like a garment. Their eyes bulge out from fatness. The imaginations of their hearts run wild. They scoff and wickedly plan evil.” Psalm 73:5-8.
An apt description of the Nazis. Evil people take on the nature of the evil one. The prophet Isaiah said of Satan,
“How you have fallen from heaven, O brighstar, son of the dawn. How you are cut down to the earth, you who made the nations prostrate! You said in your heart: ‘I will ascend to heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, ….. I will make myself like Elyon.’ Yet you will be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest parts of the Pit.” (Isaiah 14: 12-15).
So, Satan was originally from heaven, but he was cast to earth for wanting to make himself God. His destiny is the Pit. Ezekiel the prophet, said of Satan that he was full of wisdom and perfect in beauty, perfect in his ways, and placed on the holy mountain of God until unrighteousness was found in him. (see Ezekiel 28:12-15) Satan is very real and at large on planet Earth and he hates all that God loves, especially you, God’s chosen.