JERUSALEM (RNS) — Like many religious Israeli Jews, Rabbi Reb Mimi Feigelson has been wrestling with her presumptions about God and suffering since Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian terrorists infiltrated Israel and massacred more Jews in a single day than any time since the Holocaust.
“I’ve been struggling theologically from the first moment,” said Feigelson, a spiritual mentor and senior lecturer in Hassidic thought and death studies at the Schechter Institutes in Jerusalem. “I think the most immediate way to look at it is, how can I live with God after what happened? But without God, I can’t live with what happened.”
Feigelson said Hamas’ cruelty during the yearlong war, which began on the ordinarily joyous holiday of Simchat Torah, has shaken her belief that Jews would never again experience such brutality and inhumanity.
“I always imagined God sitting shiva for the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust and getting up from shiva,” the period of Jewish mourning “when the last survivor left this world. Yet the morning after Simchat Torah — I say Simchat Torah and not Oct. 7 because it keeps God in the equation — I said, God, in my lifetime, you are not going to get up from sitting shiva.”
In a world “that is bleeding, where God’s children a …