Our Struggle with God’s Goodness

It is time to stop justifying God. Morally, His ways are sometimes inexcusable. Allowing a Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed in the cruelest ways imaginable, causing unbearable pain to innocent children, is morally intolerable. Creating earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other “natural” disasters is insufferable. Any attempt to justify these deeds of God is to profane His holy name.

God is too great to be justified. In fact, any attempt to do so undermines His very being. It is trying to bring God into the limited dimension of human comprehension, which invalidates His total otherness. It is a hopeless task that would ultimately lead to idol worship, the worst of prohibitions. Idol worship is an endeavor to limit the Infinite to the constraints of the finite.

To believe in God is to believe not only that there is ultimate meaning to our existence but also that this meaning is completely beyond our comprehension. We do not know why God created the universe and man; to know that, we would have to be God. We would have to abandon the human condition and confront a metaphysical reality that our brains are not equipped to absorb. A reality that asks us to do the impossible — to utterly reject our thoughts, go beyond the shore of our reason and enter into the unfeasible situation in which God’s thoughts become ours.

As long as we do not know why God created anything, we cannot deal with the question of why God causes, or even allows, so much pain to exist. Only if we could know why the world was created would it be possible to see if there is a need for pain and if it could therefore be justified.

The very fact that we do not know why God created the world forces us to admit that we cannot know what place morality plays in the divine scheme of things. It may well be that morality is only one of many necessary elements in creation and that it sometimes has to yield to other divine considerations. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard spoke of the “suspension of the ethical” when he discussed the moral problem inherent in God’s asking Avraham to sacrifice his beloved son Yitzhak.

From a moral point of view, it is clear that the creation of the world is unjustifiable as long as even the slightest form of pain accompanies it. The anguished cry of even one baby undermines the very pretext of creation. We cannot infer from that, however, that God does not exist or that He had no right to create the world. It only means that by purely moral standards He had no right to do so.

Any attempt to explain all of God’s deeds in terms of moral standards is doomed to fail. It only leads to apologetics, which ultimately produces no satisfactory explanations. That does not mean that God is not moral, or that He lacks the attributes of goodness, mercy and other lofty qualities. What it does mean is that morality is not the whole story. The need for morality is the necessary result of creation, not the purpose of creation. In fact, moral criteria may be required to temper the severe conditions under which the divine purpose of creation had to be realized. This may also be one of the goals of halachic living. It is God who asks us to live by His Halacha so as to moderate the consequences resulting from His creating the world in a way necessary for it to exist.

Only by acknowledging that human existence is beyond all moral comprehension can we realize how important it is to God that we exist. Not because we know what God’s reasons are, but because we know that it holds ultimate meaning in His eyes.

The Goodness of God; Mankind as His image

If God, by our moral standards, cannot be justified for many of His actions, how are we to revere Him? How can we live a meaningful life when it is entirely impossible for us to know why God created the universe and therefore ourselves? Ultimately, we have no insight into why we were placed in this world and can only wonder why God seems to treat us like a divine experiment. What can be our purpose when we have been denied any information about our existential meaning?

If God is entirely unknowable and the reason for our existence is beyond the grasp of our intellect, should we then conclude that from our perspective our life is indeed meaningless, even though God knows better?

Is pain, then, completely pointless, our suffering of no value, our perseverance to survive against all odds nothing but an emotional need to see purpose in life while there really is none? Is God the only one who knows the story, refusing to give us any insight? And is this the God who is to be emulated?

Moreover, what do we make of the claim that mankind was created in God’s image? If God is the cause of so much evil and pain, does this not pave the road for us to be cruel and evil, as we were created in that very image?

When Jewish tradition claims that God is good, even in the face of all evil, it speaks the truth. But it can only make that claim from within the system of divine purpose. “God is good” does not mean in the moral sense of the word but in the sense that there is ultimate meaning to our existence, known only to God.

With evil abounding throughout the world, it is clear that the “moral good of God,” as we generally understand it, is not the whole story. There must be a reason for all this evil, but it can only be justified in terms of divine meaning, not in moral terms. The unfathomable meaning of all existence becomes clear the moment that evil becomes apparent. It is in the deviation from and violation of God’s own moral standards, as expressed in the Torah and felt in the heart of man, that it becomes clear that the purpose of the creation of the world requires God’s “teleological suspension of the ethical.” The world was not created for the sake of ethics; it was created for the sake of divine meaning. It requires moments and circumstances in which God’s morality must be side-tracked.

To argue that evil needs to exist so that we can grow spiritually has no bearing here. There are forms of evil from which we are not able to grow, such as the heinous crimes perpetrated during the Holocaust. Moreover, we remain with the unanswerable question of why we need to exist so as to be able to grow. True, the Sages stated, “If a man sees that painful sufferings visited him, let him examine his conduct”^[1]; and “The Holy One blessed be He brings suffering upon the righteous in this world so that they may inherit the world to come.”^[2] But this does not shed any light on why evil needs to exist, since it does not answer the question of why we must exist to examine our deeds or why we must suffer to merit a share in the world to come. All these arguments are a posteriori.

This is not to imply that there is no meaning to suffering, or that pain has no function and moral dilemmas no purpose. Throughout history we have seen how much these have contributed to the spiritual and moral greatness of mankind. It is through these challenges that people of moral stature have emerged and inspired millions. It has certainly been meaningful in human terms. But this is so only because there is an a priori reason for mankind to exist that surpasses any reason for him to be moral. The latter can never be seen as our ultimate significance. It is of secondary importance in the overall divine meaning of existence. It is a by-product, albeit a deliberate one that God intended.

In fact, it is in the absence of knowing why God created the world that we are able to find meaning. To be part of God’s world and play a crucial role in it without knowing exactly what role one plays, or why there is even a need for it all is by far the most profound awareness we can ever experience.

What gives life its grandeur is living with the knowledge that one plays a role in some plan that is much greater than one can ever fathom. It is recognizing that the value of human existence is in living with fundamental questions which, like diamonds held up to the light, show the spectrum of colors without ever being able to unite all these colors in a well formulated position. The moment these questions would be answered, the light would dim and the colors refracted in it would lose their splendor.

Every answer is a killer; it destroys the art of searching, the very element that makes life exciting. A world that makes total sense is a world not livable. It is endless human curiosity, which can never be satisfied, that is the drive behind all meaningful life. It is not the knowledge of something that gives us joy. It is the relationship between what is known and what remains an ultimate question — that is what gives us the satisfaction of “being.” Lacking this mystique, one can achieve nothing noble. It is God’s gift to mankind, and for that He is to be revered.

It is this unknowable mystique that mitigates our pain even when tortured. What raises our indignation against suffering is not the torment itself but its senselessness. What makes the anguish of a suffering child intolerable is the inability to raise it to the level of meaning. As such, it is the most disturbing form of “teleological suspension of the ethical.” It is this particular case of a child’s suffering, demonstrating the complete absence of divine justice, that proves morality is not at the core of all creation.

For us to truly live life we must live for the sake of God. Our love for God is tested by the question of whether we seek Him or His gifts of goodness. A God of only mercy is an unjust God. To live for His sake means to feel and sustain the ultimate “wherefore” that cannot be answered. This is what the Kotzker Rebbe meant when he said: God, I do not need to know why I suffer, but I want to know whether I suffer for Your sake. “For Your sake we are killed all the time.”^[3]

It is possible for God to exercise mercy and benevolence only as long as this does not violate His ultimate meaning for this world’s existence. It is seemingly despite this divine purpose that mercy exists, not because of it. In this sense, mercy is a novelty because its existence may run contrary to God’s purpose in creating the world. This may be a disturbing observation — it violates our understanding of who we believe God is and who we want Him to be — but it cannot be circumvented. It reminds us that God is not there for the use or benefit of man. Nor is He within the parameters of our comprehension. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the foundation of rationality but not rationality itself.

It is in the image of this divine mercy that mankind was created in God’s likeness. It is despite God’s ultimate reason for the creation that mankind needs to live in His image. We are asked to undo the amoral effects of God’s ultimate purpose for His creation, since the need for morality is an integral part of God’s being, but is not His totality. God’s demand that we live in His image is in partial contradiction to the fundamental purpose of His creating the world. It is only in its a posteriori intention that this demand can be made. Since we have no part in the reasons for this creation, we cannot play a role in its entire fulfillment; we can only do our part, which is to try to be ultimately good, as God’s likeness. God’s likeness is only His image, not His divine totality.

To live a life of Torah is to live a life of the greatest nobility in the presence of God, fully aware that the purpose of life is to live the ultimate mysterious “why,” while never understanding it. Therein lies its meaning.

Questions to Ponder from the DCA Think Tank

• We are told in the Torah that imitatio dei, the emulation of God, is a value — “You will be holy because I am holy.” (Vayikra 19:2) However, we are careful to imitate only God’s palatable aspects. In our recitation of God’s 13 attributes of mercy, we cut off the last words of the verses to portray God as more merciful than the Torah itself delineates: “The Lord! The Lord! God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in kindness and truth, preserver of kindness for thousands of generations, forgiver of iniquity, willful sin, and error, and who cleanses (but does not cleanse [completely], recalling the iniquity of parents upon children and grandchildren, to the third and fourth generations)” (Shemot 34:6-7).
• When we limit this description of God in our own repetition, is that a form of idol worship? Are we turning God into something more relatable? Or, is it a praiseworthy thing that we do — we use our post-facto human values to paint a better picture of God than the real one, and then base our behavior on the improved portrait. (Can something be good and have an aspect of idol worship at the same time?)
• Is there value in trying to make ourselves believe that God is Good, so that we have something to emulate. Should we be deliberately trying to brainwash ourselves for the good of humanity?
• If so, could teaching people to believe in the positive value of suffering lead to misplaced martyrdom in human relationships? Usually, we consider it pathological to look at our suffering in a relationship and to persuade ourselves that we cannot know its ultimate purpose but that our own assessment is not trustworthy enough to leave the relationship. If we believe that God is powerful, why should we stay in a relationship with a powerful being who hurts us? In the real world, we point at that kind of abusive relationship or regime and condemn it!
• The Talmud speaks of the world to come. But the world to come is not explicitly mentioned in the Torah. Is belief in the world to come necessary? Is it a lovely, post-facto palliative?

Notes

^[1].    Brachot 5a.

^[2].    Kiddushin 40b.

^[3].    Tehillim 44:23.