Today I'm posting the first of a five part series on God, Suffering and Evil. As always, I welcome your comments and questions.
As I write these words on a December afternoon in 2014, I am aware that one of my students has committed suicide this morning. This has happened before and it is always very sad. A student overdoses, drinks too much, becomes so overwhelmed with his life, his mind, his memories, his depression, and decides there is no other way out. It is sad indeed. As a religious person who wants to believe that there is a God, I wonder what goes on inside the divine mind when a young man so full of promise kills himself. I know all about the free will defense of God (how God has given people free will and so can no longer interfere in their decisions). But I still cannot help but ask: How can a God, who in any shape, way or form speaks about loving his people, not be moved to act?
Growing up in New York, my parents always encouraged me to be a good Jew and a good American. But they did not tell me how to do that. Today, as a 66 year old man I continue to wrestle with their admonition, particularly when it comes to God. When I was 10 years old, I attended YMHA (Young Mens Hebrew Association) day camp. On the bus ride to the camp in New Jersey we heartily sang the song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” I close my eyes today and I am on the bus, going to camp singing the song. I was Jewish and American and it all held together quite well. But today, that is no longer true.
I understand myself to be a modern Jew. What that means is that I am immersed in both the traditions of modernity and Judaism and trying to figure out what that means. As a modern person, I primarily see and hear myself as an “I” who walks around with my own reason deciding day in and day out what I think is true and right and what is false and wrong. As an American, I believe that I have the right to think as I would like and do what I think is right within the bounds of the law. And as a thinking modern individual, a part of my brain has concluded that God does not seem to be a reality in my life or in the world. I experience daily all sorts of joys and pains, no less, no more than anyone else.
Growing up in New York, my parents always encouraged me to be a good Jew and a good American. But they did not tell me how to do that. Today, as a 66 year old man I continue to wrestle with their admonition, particularly when it comes to God. When I was 10 years old, I attended YMHA (Young Mens Hebrew Association) day camp. On the bus ride to the camp in New Jersey we heartily sang the song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” I close my eyes today and I am on the bus, going to camp singing the song. I was Jewish and American and it all held together quite well. But today, that is no longer true.
I understand myself to be a modern Jew. What that means is that I am immersed in both the traditions of modernity and Judaism and trying to figure out what that means. As a modern person, I primarily see and hear myself as an “I” who walks around with my own reason deciding day in and day out what I think is true and right and what is false and wrong. As an American, I believe that I have the right to think as I would like and do what I think is right within the bounds of the law. And as a thinking modern individual, a part of my brain has concluded that God does not seem to be a reality in my life or in the world. I experience daily all sorts of joys and pains, no less, no more than anyone else.
My parents, both Holocaust survivors, died of pancreatic cancer with all the pain and misery that goes with that. If there is a God at work in my life, it is difficult to discern where and how that God operates. The word coincidence easily trumps or explains away any notions of divine design. in my own life Religious traditions seem to be human creations or constructions that speak more about human hopes and fantasies than any real divine reality. I am encouraged to think this way by my education, my technological and scientific culture, my historical study of events, particularly the Holocaust and my own day to day experience of the world. I am a walking and floating “I” alone in an absurd, random and meaningless world or so it seems.
But, I also understand myself to be a Jew who lives in the modern world. As a boy, for about six years, I attended a Yeshiva (Jewish parochial school) where I was taught God is real and becomes real to us through the Torah. I was also taught that Jews are not merely individuals, but they are part of a community, the Jewish people. When I was 13 years old I became a Bar-Mitzvah, a son of the commandment, a responsible member of the community. I was taught that “we do not know who God is but we do know what God wants.” And God wants us to follow the laws of the Torah. God was pictured to us in Yeshiva as a holy mystery whose name was so mysterious that it could not even be spoken out loud. In fact, my Rabbis called him Ha Shem, the Name. We could not say much about who he was in himself but we could and did study and argue about how to best live out God’s laws. God was beyond human comprehension. God was the mystery of mysteries. God inscrutably worked in human history. The main message was: God is God and you are not! Obey the Torah and you will be doing what God wants you to do.
It was only a matter of time before there was a collision between these two ways of looking at the world. For me the collision came when I first read Elie Wiesel’s book, Night. Here was a religious Jew who captured the spiritual madness or craziness of being modern and religious. Wiesel was a young boy in a Nazi concentration camp who believed that God was the protector of the Jewish people. Soon, he hoped, God would come to vanquish the Nazis. Soon, God would remember his promises to the Jewish people. In a few moments the Jewish children would be set free from the camps. But it was not to be. And Wiesel courageously, I thought, raised his voice with terrible and frightening questions I had not heard in my synagogue or my yeshiva. Wiesel’s questions became my questions. His questions were the right questions. If God was real and had promised to care for the Jewish people, where was he now? Why had he remained silent or absent? What was one to make of the hiddeness of God? My Jewish world was crumbling and I prayed everyday to God with questions. But God remained silent. I became a college teacher of Religion and Jewish studies. I studied and taught my Christian students about the Holocaust. I traveled to Israel, visited and spoke at a conference at Yad Vashem. I read and I read and I struggled with God. And the more I studied, the more the collision between being modern and being Jewish became a terrible tension from which I have not be able to escape to this day. At a certain point I even became a Christian, entered deeply into that faith for a number of years and studied their responses to the problem of evil, but that tradition could not answer my questions nor stop my struggle. The Christian scripture and tradition does recognize that even after Jesus the world remains a dangerous and uncertain place. It asserts that regardless of what suffering, pain or evil we are living through, “nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I understood and tried to believe what they were saying: we are accompanied through our experience, and as Jesus died and was raised so we too would die and be raised. Some even asserted that justice would be taken care of in the afterlife. But it seemed and seems terribly insufficient given all the suffering and evil of this world. And I called to mind the haunting words of Rabbi Irving Greenberg : No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.
But, I also understand myself to be a Jew who lives in the modern world. As a boy, for about six years, I attended a Yeshiva (Jewish parochial school) where I was taught God is real and becomes real to us through the Torah. I was also taught that Jews are not merely individuals, but they are part of a community, the Jewish people. When I was 13 years old I became a Bar-Mitzvah, a son of the commandment, a responsible member of the community. I was taught that “we do not know who God is but we do know what God wants.” And God wants us to follow the laws of the Torah. God was pictured to us in Yeshiva as a holy mystery whose name was so mysterious that it could not even be spoken out loud. In fact, my Rabbis called him Ha Shem, the Name. We could not say much about who he was in himself but we could and did study and argue about how to best live out God’s laws. God was beyond human comprehension. God was the mystery of mysteries. God inscrutably worked in human history. The main message was: God is God and you are not! Obey the Torah and you will be doing what God wants you to do.
It was only a matter of time before there was a collision between these two ways of looking at the world. For me the collision came when I first read Elie Wiesel’s book, Night. Here was a religious Jew who captured the spiritual madness or craziness of being modern and religious. Wiesel was a young boy in a Nazi concentration camp who believed that God was the protector of the Jewish people. Soon, he hoped, God would come to vanquish the Nazis. Soon, God would remember his promises to the Jewish people. In a few moments the Jewish children would be set free from the camps. But it was not to be. And Wiesel courageously, I thought, raised his voice with terrible and frightening questions I had not heard in my synagogue or my yeshiva. Wiesel’s questions became my questions. His questions were the right questions. If God was real and had promised to care for the Jewish people, where was he now? Why had he remained silent or absent? What was one to make of the hiddeness of God? My Jewish world was crumbling and I prayed everyday to God with questions. But God remained silent. I became a college teacher of Religion and Jewish studies. I studied and taught my Christian students about the Holocaust. I traveled to Israel, visited and spoke at a conference at Yad Vashem. I read and I read and I struggled with God. And the more I studied, the more the collision between being modern and being Jewish became a terrible tension from which I have not be able to escape to this day. At a certain point I even became a Christian, entered deeply into that faith for a number of years and studied their responses to the problem of evil, but that tradition could not answer my questions nor stop my struggle. The Christian scripture and tradition does recognize that even after Jesus the world remains a dangerous and uncertain place. It asserts that regardless of what suffering, pain or evil we are living through, “nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I understood and tried to believe what they were saying: we are accompanied through our experience, and as Jesus died and was raised so we too would die and be raised. Some even asserted that justice would be taken care of in the afterlife. But it seemed and seems terribly insufficient given all the suffering and evil of this world. And I called to mind the haunting words of Rabbi Irving Greenberg : No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.
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