Negative emotionality and relationships with God among religious Jewish Holocaust survivors

Abstract

For those who believe in God, tragedy and misfortune often raise internal emotional and religious dissonance. Regardless of one's theological stance, emotional reactions to the Holocaust can be expected to elicit negative feelings towards God, resembling the reactions one would experience towards parents or caretakers who perpetrate or facilitate aggression. Coining the term “theistic object relations” to reflect the maturity level of relationship with God, it is posited that it is predicated on a safe and nurturing environment – paralleling the maturational development of healthy interpersonal interactions. In this context, survivors’ reactions are elaborated using the lens of parental abuse and neglect. Individual beliefs about God's role, while affecting the options for cognitive rationalisations among victims, are posited to have only minimal relevance to the expected negative emotionality. Variations in such reactions are explored from a psychoanalytic perspective within the intersectional context of trauma, divine providence, object relations development, and defence mechanism theory. Unresolved questions about the developmental hallmarks of theistic object relations are outlined insofar as they are relevant to our population.

Keywords:

• Holocaust
• God
• emotions

Notes

1 The diversity of interpretation of divine providence in Judaism contrasts with Christianity's consistent allegiance to the strict notion of divine predestination. Moreover, Christianity features the central postulate of Original Sin which is accented in some denominations as Moral Depravity. This usurps any sense of entitlement and sets the default of human experience as misery, barring the undeserved gift of grace: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Negative emotionality towards God in the face of tragedy is therefore less prevalent among religious Christians as a rule.

2 It is telling that the Bible actually includes two respective admonitions against cursing parents (Exodus 21:17) and cursing God (Exodus 22:28).