(יג) רְאֵ֖ה אֶת־מַעֲשֵׂ֣ה הָאֱלֹהִ֑ים כִּ֣י מִ֤י יוּכַל֙ לְתַקֵּ֔ן אֵ֖ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר עִוְּתֽוֹ׃
(יד) בְּי֤וֹם טוֹבָה֙ הֱיֵ֣ה בְט֔וֹב וּבְי֥וֹם רָעָ֖ה רְאֵ֑ה גַּ֣ם אֶת־זֶ֤ה לְעֻמַּת־זֶה֙ עָשָׂ֣ה הָֽאֱלֹהִ֔ים עַל־דִּבְרַ֗ת שֶׁלֹּ֨א יִמְצָ֧א הָֽאָדָ֛ם אַחֲרָ֖יו מְאֽוּמָה׃
(טו) אֶת־הַכֹּ֥ל רָאִ֖יתִי בִּימֵ֣י הֶבְלִ֑י יֵ֤שׁ צַדִּיק֙ אֹבֵ֣ד בְּצִדְק֔וֹ וְיֵ֣שׁ רָשָׁ֔ע מַאֲרִ֖יךְ בְּרָעָתֽוֹ׃
(13) Consider God’s doing! Who can straighten what He has twisted? (14) So in a time of good fortune enjoy the good fortune; and in a time of misfortune, reflect: The one no less than the other was God’s doing; consequently, man may find no fault with Him. (15) In my own brief span of life, I have seen both these things: sometimes a good man perishes in spite of his goodness, and sometimes a wicked one endures in spite of his wickedness.
(א) רְאֵה אֶת מַעֲשֵׂה הָאֱלֹהִים. הֵיאַךְ הוּא מְתֻקָּן, הַכֹּל לְפִי הַפְּעֻלָּה שֶׁל אָדָם: גַּן עֵדֶן לַצַּדִּיקִים, גֵיהִנֹּם לָרְשָׁעִים. רְאֵה לְךָ בְּאֵיזֶה תִדְבָּק:
(ב) כִּי מִי יוּכַל לְתַקֵּן. לְאַחַר מִיתָה אֶת הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר עִוְּתוֹ בְחַיָּיו:
(1) Consider the deeds of God. How everything is prepared according to man’s actions, the Garden of Eden for the righteous and Gehinnom for the wicked. Consider to which you should cling.
(2) For who [else] can straighten. After death that which he made crooked during his life?34Alternatively, only God can straighten what He made crooked on account of the inequity of the generation, e.g., the Gemara in Maseches Rosh Hashanah 17b states, that if little rain had been decreed on account of the inequities of the generation and afterwards the people improved their ways, God will rectify what He made crooked and cause the rain to fall in its proper time and place without the loss of a drop. (Metsudas Dovid)
בימי הבלי. כן יקראו ימי האדם, לפי שאינם נצחיים: יש צדיק. והנה השכלתי אשר יש צדיק נאבד מן העולם כאשר יחטא מעט, שזהו בעבור רב צדקו, כי הקב״ה מדקדק עם הצדיקים כחוט השערה, ואילו לא היה צדיק גמור לא היה נענש על זה: מאריך ברעתו. מאריך ימי טובה, וזהו בעבור רעתו אשר גברה כי אז יאריך ימי טובה להיות מוטרד מעולם הבא:
וּמִפְּנֵי שְׁלשָׁה דְבָרִים אָמַר רַבִּי יֹאשִׁיָּה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מַאֲרִיךְ פָּנִים עִם הָרְשָׁעִים בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה שֶׁמָּא יַעֲשׂוּ תְּשׁוּבָה, אוֹ יַעֲשׂוּ מִצְווֹת שֶׁיְשַׁלֵּם לָהֶם הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא שְׂכָרָן בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, אוֹ שֶׁמָּא יֵצְאוּ מֵהֶן בָּנִים צַדִּיקִים, שֶׁכֵּן מָצִינוּ הֶאֱרִיךְ פָּנִים לְאָחָז, וְיָצָא מִמֶּנּוּ חִזְקִיָּה. עִם אָמוֹן, יָצָא מִמֶּנּוּ יֹאשִׁיָּהוּ. שִׁמְעִי, יָצָא מִמֶּנּוּ מָרְדְּכָי.
Why do bad things happen to good people? If God is so powerful, why doesn’t God prevent misfortune? The question of suffering and evil is unique among theological and philosophical problems because it confronts us almost daily and because Jewish history is replete with individual and communal tragedy. Jewish thinkers have always been bothered by the existence of suffering and evil, but in modern times, as a result of the Holocaust, it has taken on a central role in the thought of almost all contemporary Jewish theologians.
The Problem
For Jews, the problem of suffering is twofold: There is a universal problem and a particular problem. The universal problem is a philosophical one; it is not just a problem for Jews, but for anyone who conceives of God in a certain way. If God knows everything, then God knows about all evil. If God is all-powerful, then God can prevent all evil. If God is perfectly good, then God should prevent all evil. And yet, evil exists. How can this be true?
According to the Torah, the covenant at Sinai, in which the Israelites agreed to abide by the commandments, established that the Jews would be rewarded if they followed God’s ways. And yet, suffering often seems to be meted out randomly. Righteous people suffer, and wicked people prosper. How can this be reconciled with the covenantal relationship between God and the Jews? The problem of justifying God, despite the existence of evil is known as theodicy.
Types of Solutions
There are several types of solutions to the problem of suffering and evil.
- The biblical book of Job suggests that it is fruitless for humans to try and figure out why God causes some righteous people to suffer.
- While this approach may subvert the concept of reward and punishment, many rabbinic figures, as well as medieval philosophers and mystics, retained this concept by turning to eschatology; that is, they believed that reward and punishment is meted out in the afterlife, or — for those medieval mystics who believed in reincarnation — in a future lifetime.
- Other traditional solutions include the idea that suffering is in some way beneficial (and thus isn’t really bad), and the suffering servant model of the biblical prophet Isaiah, which suggests that the Jewish people suffer in order to redeem the wicked of humanity.
- Many post-Holocaust theologians have developed responses to the unique problems raised by the suffering of the Jews during the Shoah. From “God is hiding” to “God is dead,” these thinkers have placed modern analyses of God and evil at the center of their thought.
(טו) רבי ינאי אומר, אין בידינו לא משלות הרשעים ואף לא מיסורי הצדיקים.
(15) Rabbi Yanai says: We don't have the ability to explain the success of the wicked or the suffering of the righteous.
...Birnbaum begins his essay with a review of the traditional theological responses to the problem of evil. He shows respect for the notion that the ways of the infinite God are unknowable to finite man, but ultimately rejects this on the grounds that a "leap of faith" with respect to the problem of God and evil cannot be appropriate for the rational religious perspective embodied in halakhic Judaism. The notion that radical evil is a punishment for man's sins is seen by Birnbaum (quoting Norman Lamm) as "massively irrelevant, impudent, and insensitive," and indeed a form of blasphemy against our Holocaust martyrs. Birnbaum recognizes the verity in the exhausted cry that there is currently no answer to the problem, but he questions whether an intellectual and educated Jew can adhere to a theology that does not provide a solution to a fundamental crisis in religious belief. Birnbaum, himself, seeks to provide such a solution, and he attempts to do so through an integration of several traditional responses which are, in his view, completely inadequate in themselves, but which, when integrated, form the basis of a unified theodicy/theology. These responses include the notion that in certain historical eras God hides His face and temporarily abandons His surveillance of the world (hester panim); that God must withdraw his protection of the world in order to achieve the higher goal of man's freedom; that the world is, indeed, imperfect, and that man as a partner in creation and is provided with the task to mend it; and that the possibility of evil is necessary for man's moral and spiritual development, and, indeed, a necessary condition for the existence of the ultimate Good...
The closer mankind comes to fulfilling his spiritual, intellectual and other potentials, the closer he comes to fulfilling his purpose on earth via his role as a partner with God in creation. In doing so, however, man must maximize his privacy, independence and freedom, and as mankind moves closer to its own self-actualization, God must, of necessity, retreat further and further into "eclipse." Mankind has, over the centuries, indeed ascended greatly in knowledge, implicitly demanding greater and greater freedom. For God to intervene directly in human affairs at this late stage in mankind's development, as he did, for example, for the Jews in Egypt, would reverse the very development of both His and mankind's essence, and in Birnbaum's terms, threaten to "unravel the cosmos."
Birnbaum recognizes that his theodicy may not be of enormous comfort to those who have experienced a loss and are in the throes of their bereavement (and this is not in his view the purpose of theodicy), but he is confident, perhaps even arrogantly so, that his "Unified Formulation" unites the best aspects of traditional Jewish theodicy into a systematic metaphysics which is both intellectually rigorous and theologically acceptable. His theodicy, he tells us, maintains God's omniscience and omnipotence without sacrificing His benevolence, for it is, indeed, out of true benevolence for his creation that God contracts Himself and does not interfere in human affairs.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he able and willing, but ignorant of evil’s existence? Then he is not omniscient.” The Bible does not enunciate the problem of evil with the analytical precision familiar to readers of Hume (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 10), but it does not shrink from seeking to understand and even challenge the ways of God in the face of apparent injustice. Consternation over evil is a familiar theme in Psalms (13:2; 37; 73), in the prophetic books of Jeremiah (12:1–2), Isaiah (62–3), and Habakkuk, in Lamentations, in Ecclesiastes, and of course in the book of Job.
That the prophets frequently raise the problem of evil has important ramifications. First, it is evident that challenging the justice of God’s ways is not blasphemous—if it were, the prophets would not have allowed themselves to engage in it. Abraham even elicits a positive response from God when he argues that to destroy the innocent of Sodom with its wicked, as God seemed ready to do, would be unjust (“Will the judge of all the earth not do justice?”, Genesis 18). Second, despite Isaiah’s famous dictum, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor my ways your ways” (Isaiah 55:8) (which played an important role in Maimonides’ doctrine of attributes, Guide 3.20), the problem of evil is not dismissed with the glib assertion that “good” as applied to God does not mean the History of Jewish philosophy 16 same as “good” when applied to humans. If such a resolution were valid, authoritative figures in the Bible would not persist in raising the question and leaving it unanswered (see Gellman 1977). Finally, the repeated discussions of the problem throughout the Bible invite another insight, namely, that the biblical writers did not consider the problem of evil as an analytic conundrum, to be solved once and for all, but rather as a mystery perennially tugging at the sensitive theological conscience.
(Because the Bible’s “problem of evil” is situated within a set of theological presuppositions and a fund of experience, it diverges from articulations of the problem that are promulgated by philosophers. In philosophy, the question of evil is usually posed as, “why is there evil?” The biblical formulation, however, starts with certain background beliefs: that suffering is usually punishment for sin; that God loves Israel. In the Bible, therefore, the problem’s formulation is usually narrower: Why do the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper? or: How could God allow Israel to suffer and the Temple be destroyed? In short, why do such-and-such evils befall these people or groups? Another difference between biblical and philosophical formulations is that in the philosophical literature evil is often thought to disconfirm the existence of God, while the Bible does not come remotely near considering that position. The biblical writers are instead concerned about the threat that evil poses to belief in God’s goodness or steadfastness.)
One of the deepest of mysteries, troubling Judaism from the dawn of its existence, is the problem of suffering. At a propitious moment of Divine compassion, Moses, the master of all prophets, pleaded before the Lord of All to be enlightened as to the workings of this impenetrable phenomenon.1 I Moses knocked on the gates of heaven and cried out, “Show me now Your ways, that I shall comprehend You, so that I might find grace in Your eyes … instruct me as to Your glory” (Exodus 33:13, Exodus 33:18)...
Why and wherefore are hardships visited on man? Why and wherefore do the righteous suffer and evildoers prosper? From that wondrous morning when Moses, the faithful shepherd, communed with the Creator of the Universe and pleaded for the comprehensive solution to this question of questions, throughout the generations, the prophets and sages of Israel have grappled with this conundrum. Habakkuk demanded satisfaction for this affront to justice; Jeremiah, King David in his Psalms, and Solomon in Ecclesiastes all pondered this problem. The Book of Job is totally dedicated to this ancient riddle that still hovers over our world and demands its own resolution: Why does the Holy One, blessed be He, permit evil to have dominion over His creations...
As stated above, in man’s “Existence of Destiny” arises a new relation to the problem of evil. As long as man vacillates in his fateful existence, his relationship to evil is expressed solely in a philosophical/speculative approach. As a passive creature, it was not within his power to wrestle with evil in order to contain or to exploit it for an exalted purpose. The child of fate is devoid of the ability to determine anything in the realm of his existence. He is nurtured from the outside, and his life bears its imprint. Therefore he relates to evil from an impractical perspective and philosophizes about it from a speculative point of view. He wishes to deny the reality of evil and to create a harmonistic outlook on life. The result of such an experience is bitter disappointment. Evil mocks the prisoner of fate and his fantasy of a reality that is all good and pleasant...
However, in the realm of destiny man recognizes reality as it is, and does not desire to use harmonizing formulas in order to hide and disregard evil. The “Child of Destiny” is very realistic and does not flinch in anticipation of a face-to-face confrontation with evil. His approach is halakhic and moral, and thus devoid of any metaphysical/speculative nuance. When the “Child of Destiny” suffers, he says in his heart, “There is evil, I do not deny it, and I will not conceal it with fruitless casuistry. I am, however, interested in it from a halakhic point of view; and as a person who wants to know what action to take. I ask a single question: What should the sufferer do to live with his suffering?” In this dimension, the emphasis is removed from causal and teleological considerations (which differ only as to direction) and is directed to the realm of action. The problem is now formulated in the language of a simple halakhah and revolves around a quotidian (i.e. daily) task. The question of questions is: What does suffering obligate man to do? This problem was important to Judaism, which placed it at the center of its Weltanschauung. Halakhah is just as interested in this question, as in issues of issur and heter and hiyyuv and p’tur. We do not wonder about the ineffable ways of the Holy One, but instead ponder the paths man must take when evil leaps up at him. We ask not about the reason for evil and its purpose, but rather about its rectification and uplifting. How should a man react in a time of distress? What should a person do so as not to rot in his affliction?
The halakhic answer to this question is very simple. Suffering comes to elevate man, to purify his spirit and sanctify him, to cleanse his mind and purify it from the chaff of superficiality and the dross of crudeness; to sensitize his soul and expand his horizons. In general, the purpose of suffering is to repair the imperfection in man’s persona. The halakhah teaches us that an afflicted person commits a criminal act if he allows his pain to go for naught and to remain without meaning or purpose. Suffering appears in the world in order to contribute something to man, in order to atone for him, in order to redeem him from moral impurity, from crudeness and lowliness of spirit. The sufferer must arise there from, purified, refined, and cleansed. “An hour of distress it is for Jacob, and from it he should be saved” (Jeremiah 30:7). From the midst of suffering itself he will achieve lasting redemption and merit a self-actualization and exaltation that are unequaled in a world devoid of suffering. From negation sprouts affirmation; from antithesis, thesis emerges; and from a denial of existence, a new existence is revealed. The Torah gave witness to man’s mighty spiritual reaction to suffering inflicted upon him when it said, “In your distress when all these horrors shall come upon you …then you shall return to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 4:30). Suffering requires man to repent and return to God.3 Distress is designated to arouse us to repentance, and what is repentance if not the renewal and supreme redemption of man?