This book addresses the faith of a member of the ‘Second Generation’—the offspring of the original survivors of the Shoah . It is a re-examination of those categories of faith central to the Jewish Religious Experience in light of the Shoah: God, Covenant, Prayer, Halakhah and Mitzvot, Life-Cycle, Festival Cycle, Israel and Zionism, and Christianity from the perspective of a child of a survivor.
Table of Content
Foreword by
Zev Garber
Foreword by
Alan L. Berger
Introduction: Why? The Genesis of My Own Thinking
1. The Problem with God
2. Covenant: Involuntary? Voluntary? Nonexistent?
3. The Crises of Prayer
4.
Halakhah and
Mitzvot: Law and Commandments—
The Heart of the Matter
5. Rethinking the Jewish Life Cycle: From Birth to Death
6. Rethinking the Jewish Festival Cycle:
The Calendar in Question
7. Israel and Zionism in the
Post-Shoah World
8. Rethinking Christianity: An Outsider’s Perspective
9. Summarizing: Is Such Even Possible?
Appendixes
Appendix I: ‘[If] There Is No ‘Commander’? …
There Are No ‘Commandments’!’
Appendix II: ‘Rethinking Jewish [and Christian?] Faith
in Light of the Holocaust:
The Response of the Child of a Survivor’
Notes and Bibliography
Glossary
About the Author
About the author
Steven L. Jacobs serves as the Rabbi of Temple B’nai Sholom in Huntsville, Alabama and teaches Jewish Studies at Oakwood College and Mississippi State University. He is the author of
Shirot Bialik: A New and Annotated Translation of Chaim Nachman Bialik’s Epic Poems; Not Guilty? Raphael Lemkin’s Thoughts on Nazi Genocide; and the two volume set
Contemporary Jewish and Christian Religious Responses to the Shoah. He serves as an Educational Consultant to the Center on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights in Philadelphia.