Soloveitchik on Iyyov [SOURCE DUMP]

1. is God's answer to Iyyov? How do you know?
2. Was Iyyov comforted by God's answer? How do you know?

"The justification of the neighbor’s suffering is certainly the source of all immorality."
- Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”

"‘Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God’ (Exodus 3:6). Why was he afraid? Because if he were fully to understand God he would have no choice but to be reconciled to the slavery and oppression of the world. From the vantage point of eternity, he would see that the bad is a necessary stage on the journey to the good. He would understand God but he would cease to be Moses, the fighter against injustice who intervened whenever he saw wrong being done.’ ‘He was afraid’ that seeing heaven would desensitize him to earth, that coming close to infinity would mean losing his humanity."
- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World, 22‐23

"The...Halakhah could not accept the thematic metaphysic which tends to gloss over the absurdity of evil, and it did not engage in the building of a magnificent façade to shut out the ugly sights of an inadequate existence . . .The...Halakhah is an open‐eyed, tough observer of things and events and, instead of engaging in a speculative metaphysic, acknowledged boldly both the reality of evil and its irrationality, its absurdity.
As a case in point, let us examine the topical Halakhah’s attitude toward death . . .It is enough to glance at the laws of mourning in order to convince ourselves that the topical Halakhah saw death as a dreadful fiend with whom no pact may be reached, no reconciliation is possible. In the act of mourning for a deceased member of the household, the whole traumatic horror in the face of an insensate and absurd experience asserts itself. Death appears in all its monstrosity and absurdity, and an encounter with it knocks out the bottom of human existence.
If the topical Halakhah concurred with the thematic in its interpretation of death as deliverance, as a victory over nihility, then why mourn and grieve for the departed? Why rend our garments, sit on the floor, and say “Barukh dayyan emet”? . . .
To sum up, I would say that the halakhic ethic of suffering rests upon three propositions. First, evil does exist, and evil is bad. The world in which we live is not free from deformities and inadequacies . . .In other words the reality of evil is indisputable. Second, one must never acquiesce in evil, make peace with it, or condone its existence. Defiance of and active opposition to evil, employing all means that God put at man’s disposal, is the dominant norm in Halakhah. Scientific intervention on behalf of man in his desperate struggle for control of his environment is fully endorsed and justified . . .The third proposition is faith . . .that at some future date, evil will be overcome, evil will disappear.
In Fate and Destiny (=Kol Dodi Dofek), trans. Lawrence Kaplan, pp. 7‐8: The fundamental question is: What obligation does suffering impose upon man? . . .We do not inquire about the hidden ways of the Almighty, but, rather, about the path wherein man shall walk when suffering strikes. We ask neither about the cause of evil nor about its purpose, but, rather, about how it might be mended and elevated. How shall a person act in a time of trouble?"
- Rav Soloveitchik zt”l “A Halakhic Approach to Suffering,” Out of the Whirlwind, 100‐103

"When I looked upon my grandson, I always tried to think of him as if he were my contemporary. I believed that we would always do things and play together. Sickness initiated me into the secret of non‐being. I suddenly ceased to be immortal. . .
The night preceding my operation . . . The fantastic flights of human foolishness and egocentrism were distant from me that night.
However, this “fall” from the heights of an illusory immortality. . .was the greatest achievement of the long hours of anxiety and uncertainty … I stopped perceiving myself in categories of eternity. When I recite my prayers, I ask God to grant me life in very modest terms . . .
When one’s perspective is shifted from the illusion of eternity to the reality of temporality, one finds peace of mind and relief from other worries . . . We magnify the significance of incidents because we exaggerate our own worth. Man sees himself in the mirror of immortality. Hence his desires, dreams, ambitions and visions assume absolute significance, and any frustrating experience may break man. When one frees himself from this obsession, his perspective becomes coherent and his suffering bearable. He learns to take defeat courageously."
- Rav Soloveitchik zt"l “Out of the Whirlwind”, 131‐132

"The function of suffering is to mend that which is flawed in an individual’s personality. The halakhah teaches us that the sufferer commits a grave sin if he allows his troubles to go to waste and remain without meaning or purpose . . .From out of its midst the sufferer must arise ennobled and refined, clean and pure . . . If a person allows his pains to wander about the vast empty spaces of the cosmos like blind, purposeless forces, then a grave indictment is drawn up against him for having frittered away his suffering."
"The motto of the “I” of destiny [yi‘ud] is, “Against your will you are born and against your will you die, but you live of your own free will.” Man is born like an object, dies like an object, but possesses the ability to live like a subject, like a creator, an innovator, who can impress his own individual seal upon his life and can extricate himself from a mechanical type of existence and enter into a creative, active mode of being. Man’s task in the world, according to Judaism, is to transform fate into destiny; a passive existence into an active existence; an existence of compulsion, perplexity, and muteness into an existence replete with a powerful will, with resourcefulness, daring, and imagination."
- Rav Soloveitchik zt"l Kol Dodi Dofek pp. 6, 8

[Job is a righteous man] "from whom everything is taken: possessions, loved ones, health. It is interesting that his wife proposes that Job "curse God and die"; his friends propose that he is being punished for his sins. Job rejects both propositions. (At the end, God specifically rebukes the friends for their "answer.") The ending of the book, in which Job is restored and has a new wife and children, is of course unacceptable by our principle. Six million murdered Jews have not been and cannot be restored. But Job also offers us a different understanding. His suffering is not justified by God, nor is he consoled by the words about God's majesty and the grandeur of the universe surpassing man's understanding.

Rather, what is meaningful in Job's experience is that in the whirlwind the contact with God is restored. That sense of Presence gives the strength to go on living in the contradiction. The theological implications of Job, then, are the rejection of easy pieties or denials and the dialectical response of looking for, expecting, further revelations of the Presence. This is the primary religious dimension of the rebom State of Israel for all religious people. When suffering had all but overwhelmed Jews and all but blocked out God's Presence, a sign out of the whirlwind gave us the strength to go on, and the right to speak authentically of God's Presence still."
- Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire"

"One important stream of traditional Jewish thought, which views Jewish religiosity primarily in terms of Jews’ adherence tohalakhic norms, offers a different perspective on the Holocaust that turns the problem of theodicy on its head. This approach rejects theodicy entirely, not because it is wrong to question God’s providence, but because it is irrelevant. On this view, being confronted by the epitome of evil does not induce thought, but action; the question is not why or how God could allow such horror and suffering, but what: what conduct does God and His law demand under these circumstances?
...Halakhic man is not unsettled or mystified by his inability to understand how an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow the Holocaust to transpire, and he has no need for theodicy to resolve his confusion; his law directs him how to act and teaches him his purpose and duty in the midst of the tragedy he is witnessing and even excruciatingly experiencing...
His law-centered lens offered the halakhic man what the religious man often vainly seeks in theodicy, a sense of understanding of and control over his life at a time when conditions seem contrived specifically to deny him his self-worth and humaneness."
- Rabbi Dr. Shlomo Pill, "Transcending Theodicy: Approaching the Holocaust Through the Lens of Halakhah"