I have spent a majority of my life holding a grudge against God for letting millions of His people be killed for their faith in Him. I have been angry at God because He did nothing. There were no pillars of salt, no floods, and no actions to show any divine intervention at all; all I could see was that people had been killed simply because they were Jewish. I was angry that my people were not only killed but forced to flee to places that weren't much more welcoming than where they came from. I heard stories of Holocaust survivors who still prayed while withering away in concentration camps, and I just couldn't understand why these people who had lost everything would still pray to a God who didn't stop it.

In my mind, God let the Holocaust happen, and that was unforgivable.

So when did my faith begin to return? It didn't happen overnight and it didn't happen because of a burning bush, either. It happened because of a musical; Fiddler on the Roof restored my faith in God. Let me explain: In my senior year of high school I directed my theatre program's big spring musical, which was Fiddler on the Roof. When we started rehearsing I knew that I was going to have to teach the cast about Judaism and the history of the Jewish people so that they could connect to and understand the culture behind the characters they were portraying.

So, I made power points, I talked about my family, I brought in my own family's Sabbath candlesticks to use in the show, and I made sure that everyone knew why certain traditions were traditions. In the process of educating everyone else, I realized that I was educating myself. I was learning more and more about my family's history and culture, but most importantly, I learned more about the God that I had turned my back on.

I spent the duration of the production arguing with myself and wrestling with my culture and my faith because I just couldn't get over the fact that God had allowed the Holocaust to happen. I was taught that God was everywhere and that God was in everything. I couldn't believe in Him because if He was everywhere, and He was in everything, how could such evil in the world exist? I thought about the nature of the Holocaust, and when I had the opportunity to listen to a Holocaust survivor describe how he himself does not blame God for the Holocaust and additionally does not hold an entire group of people accountable for the actions of individuals, it came to me almost like an "aha" moment.

God did not make the Holocaust happen, people did.

The evil done in the Holocaust was not done by God; it was the result of fear and the hatred that that fear produced. However, in a way, God did stop the Holocaust. God was in the soldiers who fought for the freedom of people they had no connection to. God was in the citizens who hid Jews and risked their own lives in the process. God was in the few Nazis who showed kindness and would occasionally turn a blind eye. God was everywhere in the Holocaust; God was everywhere there was hope.

I still believe in a God who let the Holocaust happen because I know that it is not God's duty to clean up our messes as soon as we make them. It is our job to be kind to the people we share the Earth with and it is our job to learn from tragedies like the Holocaust. I still believe in God because God didn't make the Holocaust, but He did show up in the end.