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Back to Question of the Week Q: Dear Reb on the Web: In a previous Reb on the Web column you wrote: "If God knows about evil and suffering, and can't do anything about it, then God is not powerful, and who wants to worship such a wimpy God? If God could do something about evil, but doesn't know about it, then how can we have any connection to Judaism at all, which is based on the very idea that God heard our cries in Egypt and took us out of slavery? A God who doesn't know what's going on in Her world is too far away, too distant, to feel much passion for." There is one concept in this whole "discussion" on God's Power and Human Suffering, that is actually not being presented - FREE WILL - the fact that WE, humans have a free will to either do good or do evil. To hurt or to heal. Is this concept of Free Will something that is not present in Judaism? I am asking because in my mind the existence of Free Will would explain many things about why we suffer. Even Natural disasters can, in my opinion, be explained by the concept of Free will. Am I missing something here? Shalom, Bear |
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A: Shalom Bear, thanks for writing. You are correct, on one level, that the idea of free will can explain the theological problem of humans doing evil to each other- i.e., it's HUMANS who do evil to each other, not GOD doing evil to humans. You are also correct in pointing out that free will is an important religious concept- if we were not free to choose between good and evil, we'd basically just be robots, and there would be no need for a Torah to teach us the right way to live. In fact, morality itself would be meaningless in a world where our choices were limited or predetermined. This may be what led Rabbi Akiva to teach that "all is foreseen, yet choice is given [to you]. (Pirkei Avot 3:15) Even if we believe that God knows everything that will happen (which not everybody believes, but many Jews do), free choice has to be real for religion to matter. Yet on another level, free will explains the mechanics but leaves us with the theological question of why a good God would PERMIT such evil to happen- after all, if you saw a murder taking place and did not lift a finger to stop it, even though you had a gun in your hand and could defend the victim easily, wouldn't you also be implicated in the crime? You may think that this analogy doesn't apply to God; but some people think it does, and it bothers them. To put it even more starkly: how can we believe that God took us out of Egypt when God didn't take anybody out of Dachau or Auschwitz? Which is worse: to believe that God couldn't take anybody out of Dachau or to believe that God wouldn't, just to preserve the principle of free will? Finally, even if we separate out the question of free will (human-on- human nastiness) from the question of random suffering (illness, natural disasters, the Backstreet Boys, etc.), we still then need to explain why a good God would send cancer on a little child, or allow a volcano to blow up, or flood the poorest sections of Bangladesh. You could answer that it's simply the way the universe works, and that God has nothing to do with it, but then we're back to our original problem: if God stands by doing nothing while innocent people suffer, isn't God accountable? Thus, an impasse: we want to believe that God is good and powerful and knowledgeable, but if we believe all three things we may be stuck with the theological inevitability of God's responsibility for suffering. This impasse has been addressed in a previous Reb on the Web, but the best we can do is point towards some incomplete answers to the problem. Another master of Pirkei Avot, R. Yannai, said it best: "It is not in our hands to explain the serenity of the wicked or the sufferings of the righteous." (Pirkei Avot 4:15) In other words, all our answers are incomplete on this question. NJL |
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