Challenges of War: Making sense of Jewish death and suffering

In an online discussion about the role of God during the terrible events that struck Israel on October 7, 2023 someone posed the question of what kind of God would allow such horrible and terrible events to take place? People who have faith in God are praying and hoping for the best while on the other hand there are those who either do not have faith in God at all-atheists, or have serious questions about God's ways, meaning they are either sceptics or agnostics at best or nihilists at worst.

For the confirmed atheists, sceptics and agnostics, these questions did not begin on October 7, 2023 but rather are part of a worldview that either denies there is a God at all or raises serious questions about God and the way He lets death, suffering and evil exist in this world - and if they could only find the right answer/s to explain these issues they would maybe believe in God after all.

The Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis has been the most famous case in recent history of questioning why God would allow such a monstrous tragedy to befall the Jewish People. But it does not end or begin with the Holocaust and the recent war between the Arabs and Israel that started in all ferociousness on October 7, 2023. It goes far deeper than that and leads to the basic question as to why there is death and suffering in the world in the first place.

People fear death and dying in most of its forms and some people will mourn the loss of the tiniest pet while others become animal rights advocates fighting for the rights of all kinds of species to live in peace in their natural habitats without threat of being hunted and killed.

The Torah and Judaism do not hide from the topic of death and suffering and in fact lay down the source of the problem in the first place. As hard as it is for secular non-religious minds to get their heads around it, the Torah (Bible) in its opening chapters teaches about the source and origins of death and suffering. In the Torah, the first time something is mentioned is its original source.

The first time death is mentioned is when God warns Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

As humanity evolved from the time of Adam and Eve it sank lower and lower and became corrupt and corrupted until God Himself decided to destroy humanity in the times of Noah by bringing the great flood upon the Earth about 4,500 years ago that destroyed all life except for Noah and his immediate family and what was in the ark that God instructed Noah to build. After the great flood God gave Noah and humanity the Seven Noahide Laws one of which states:

The birth of the Children of Israel as a full grown nation in Ancient Egypt over 3,300 years ago is a turning point in the history of the Jewish People and humanity at large. After their miraculous Exodus from slavery in Ancient Egypt the Children of Israel head to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments from God that are the quintessence of the entire Torah.

With regard to our topic, two of the commandments concerning the prohibition of murder and kidnapping (Exodus 20:12) stand out in particular: לֹא תִרְצָח...לֹא תִגְנֹב expressing God's abhorrence for murder and kidnapping and not just "stealing" but "stealing" (i.e. kidnapping) people, something that resonates in the post October 7, 2023 situation that saw the Arabs of Hamas and the Gaza Strip kidnapping nearly 250 Israeli Jews without mercy as well as murdering over 1,200 Jewish Israelis and others as well.

It must be noted that according to the Torah there are two forces, one coming from Abraham's son Ishmael and the other from Isaac's son Esau, who are the deadliest and most dangerous enemies of the Children of Israel and the Jewish People especially in the last two thousand years.

In earlier history it was the Ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and their armies and empires that wreaked havoc and destroyed the Jewish Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, killing many of the inhabitants of Israel and Judah and subjecting the survivors to exile. But what came after those destructive empires was even worse, the armies of Rome (Esau) and then the hordes of the Ishmaelites.

The Roman Empire destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Judea about 2,000 years ago sending the Jews into a 2,000 year long exile. About 1,500 years ago Islam came to the fore as both a religion and as the belief system of the Arab speaking people. Today there are roughly about two billion Christians that follow the Christian religion that originally was spread by the Roman Empire that became the core of the Roman Catholic Church that dominated European countries. There are also about two billion followers of Islam that have grown from the region of Arabia dominated by the Arabs.

According to Jewish belief and thought these two forces and peoples have their roots in the Biblical Ishmael and Esau. They are also the two groups that have relentlessly and mercilessly opposed the Jewish People for the last 2,000 years causing much Jewish bloodshed and suffering. The Torah says that God predicted that Ishmael would be:

There is a customary poem-song that is sung by Jews at the end of the Passover Seder at night that is called Chad Gadya; "one kid (little goat)" that has been interpreted as having symbolic and even near prophetic meaning as its words can be taken as symbolic of larger and greater concepts and metaphors about Jewish suffering at the hands of the gentiles: "According to some modern Jewish commentators, what appears to be a light-hearted song may be symbolic. One interpretation is that Chad Gadya is about the different nations that have conquered the Land of Israel: The kid symbolizes the Jewish people; the cat, Assyria; the dog, Babylon; the stick, Persia; the fire, Macedonia; the water, Roman Empire; the ox, the Saracens; the slaughterer, the Crusaders; the angel of death, the Ottomans. At the end, God returns to send the Jews back to Israel. The recurring refrain of 'two zuzim' is a reference to the two stone tablets given to Moses on Mount Sinai (or refer to Moses and Aaron)." (Wikipedia).