קאווע שטיבל

I was on a television panel with [Richard] Swinburne, and also with our Oxford colleague Professor Peter Atkins. Swinburne at one point attempted to justify the Holocaust on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble. Peter Atkins splendidly growled: ‘May you rot in hell’

Like his philosophical forebears, Sartre too was a rationalist. Unlike them, he thought that the very idea of God was shot through with contradictions. Either a being has consciousness or it does not. If it does, it is pour soi ("for itself"), an activity rather than a thing, a "wind blowing from nowhere toward the world." If it does not have consciousness, it is en soi ("in itself"), an object fixed and complete. God, were such a being to exist, would have to be both pour soi and en soi: both conscious and complete in himself. And that, submitted Sartre, is an impossibility. Still, this God-like combination of fluidity and fixity is one we humans cannot help aspiring to. Our desire to be radically free and yet absolutely secure in our identities is, for Sartre, nothing less than a desire to be God. It is mauvaise foi ("bad faith"), a sort of original sin

Why, though, should someone who did not grow up in one of these traditions believe in such a God, one who cares about our actions and fates? Why not the abstract and aloof God of the eighteenth-century deists, or the impersonal God of Spinoza?

"Well," Swinburne said, "those conceptions fail to take seriously the infinite goodness of the creator. Now, what would a good God do? It's unlikely he'd create a universe and then not take an interest in it. Parents who leave their children to fend for themselves aren't very good parents. You'd expect God to keep a connection with his creation, and if things go wrong, to help people to straighten them out. He will want to interact with his creation, but not be too obvious about it. Like a good parent, he'll be torn between interfering too much and interfering too little. He'll want people to work out their own destiny, to work out what is right and wrong and so on, without his intervening all the time. So he'll keep his distance. But on the other hand, when there has been a lot of sin around, he will want to help people deal with it, especially those who want his help. He’ll hear their prayers and sometimes he'll answer them"

. . .

But would Swinburne go so far as to say that God's existence was a
"brute fact"?

"Yes, I would," he replied. "I would say that. It's not merely that there is no explanation for God's existence. There couldn't be an explanation. One of God's properties is omnipotence. If anything happens to him, its because he allows it to happen. Therefore, if something else brought about God, it could only be because God allowed it to bring about God."

Here was a line of reasoning I certainly hadn't heard before. "So you're not personally puzzled," I said, "about why God exists - or, I don't know, maybe you are puzzled."

Swinburne chuckled -out loud, for once - and said, "I don't think that anyone thought that God was a logically necessary being, not at least until Anselm came along with his ontological proof. And that's halfway through the two millennia of Christianity. Anselm's ontological argument was a bad, unnecessary turn for theology. Even Aquinas didn't really believe in it. So I'm not alone in thinking that God does not exist as a matter of pure logic. But I do think that God is a necessary being in the sense that he does not depend for his existence on anything else. And in that sense he's ontologically ultimate, the ultimate explanation of all other things."

I asked Swinburne to consider, just for the sake of argument, another possibility: that the universe exists as a brute fact, without any God to sustain it. Would the universe itself then be necessary in his sense, since it would not depend on anything else for its existence?

"That's right!" he replied

I must admit," Swinburne said, "that part of me wants to know, wants some guarantee that there couldn't not be a God. But I understand that it's not logically possible to explain everything. You can explain A by B, B by C, and C by D, but in the end all you can do is find the simplest hypothesis that explains as much as possible of reality. That's where explanation has to stop. And that intellectual stopping point, I claim, is God. As to why God exists, I can't answer that question. I can't answer that question."

Could even Swinburne's God, if we were able to ask him, answer it? "I am who am," the voice from the burning bush announced to Moses. But did that voice ever ask, "Whence then am I?" If there were an explanation for God's existence, then God, being omniscient, would know it. But if there really was no explanation - if he is indeed the Supreme Brute Fact - then he would know that too. He would know that his own existence as a contingent being was, in Swinburne's words, "vastly improbable." Would the divine mind be puzzled by its inexplicable triumph over the perfect simplicity of Nothingness?

ההשגחה אינה דבר מוחלט – או שהאדם מושגח או שלא; אלא יש בה מדרגות רבות, לכל אדם כפי דרגתו. האנשים הרחוקים מן הקב"ה, כבר אינם נתונים תחת ההשגחה כלל, אלא הם מסורים למקרי העולם, כבעלי החיים.

בסוף הספר (פרק נא) מחדד הרמב"ם את הדבר יותר: גם החסיד או אפילו הנביא, אינו נמצא במדרגה שווה של השגחה בכל עת, אלא הדבר תלוי במידת דבקותו בה'. בעת שהחסיד אינו שרוי בדבקות אלא עוסק בעניינים אחרים, הרי הוא מושגח במידה פחותה, ואז עלולות לפגוע בו רעות העולם.

קביעה זו, שלפיה בני אדם נפגעים לעתים במקרה ולא רק בהשגחה, סותרת לכאורה את דברי הרמב"ם עצמו (שם, פרק יז), שכל מה שבא על האדם הוא בצדק, על פי הראוי לו:

…ושכל הבא על בני אדם מן הייסורין, או מה שמגיע להם מן הטוב, האדם היחיד או הציבור, הכול מפני שהם ראויים לכך, במשפט הצדק שאין בו עוול כלל… ואנחנו סוברים שכל המצבים האנושיים הללו הם כפי מה שהאדם ראוי לו, וחלילה לא-ל מעוול, ואינו מעניש אדם אלא שחייב עונש…

אך אין זו סתירה בדברי הרמב"ם. אכן כאשר האדם חוטא ומרוחק מן הקב"ה, פוגעים בו מקרי העולם ורעותיו. אך זה עצמו הצדק ומה שראוי לאותו אדם, שהרי במצבו הירוד אין הוא זכאי להשגחה הא-להית, אלא ראוי לו שיהיה חשוף למקרי העולם. {וכך פירש דר. חיים קרייסל.} לא בהכרח כל רעה שתפגע בו נשלחה עליו במכוון מן השמים, אלא ייתכן שזה מחמת הטבע; אך כל מה שיפגע בו פוגע בו בצדק, שכן אילו היה צדיק ושרוי בדבקות מלאה היה ניצל מן הרעה הזו. וכך אומר הרמב"ם באיגרותיו (סוף איגרת יז במהדורת הרב שילת):

…שמעשיו הרעים של זה גרמו לו אלו הרעות, ואילו היו מעשיו שלמים, היו מרחיקים ממנו הפגעים…

אכן החטא הוא הגורם לרעה; אך הקשר בין החטא ובין הרעה אינו בהכרח ישיר, שהרעה נשלחה על האדם כעונש על מעשיו, אלא פעמים רבות הוא עקיף – הרעה באה מחמת טבע העולם, אך היא פגעה באדם זה משום שהוא אינו שלם במעשיו ולא היה זכאי כעת להשגחה מלאה ולהגנה א-להית.

באופן דומה נראה להסביר גם את דברי הרמב"ם בהל' תעניות (א, א-ג):

מצוות עשה מן התורה לזעוק ולהריע בחצוצרות על כל צרה שתבוא על הציבור… ודבר זה מדרכי התשובה הוא, שבזמן שתבוא צרה ויזעקו עליה ויריעו, ידעו הכול שבגלל מעשיהם הרעים הורע להן… אבל אם לא יזעקו ולא יריעו, אלא יאמרו דבר זה ממנהג העולם אירע לנו וצרה זו נקרה נקרית, הרי זו דרך אכזריות, וגורמת להם להידבק במעשיהם הרעים, ותוסיף הצרה צרות אחרות. הוא שכתוב בתורה "והלכתם עמי בקרי, והלכתי עמכם בחמת קרי", כלומר: כשאביא עליכם צרה כדי שתשובו, אם תאמרו שהוא קרי, אוסיף לכם חמת אותו קרי.

בראייה פשוטה, דברים אלה מנוגדים לחלוטין לדברים שהבאנו לעיל – לכאורה הרמב"ם קובע כאן, שבהכרח הצרה מתרחשת כעונש על חטא, ולא במקרה (לכאורה אפשר לחלק, שביחיד יש אירועים המתרחשים במקרה, ואילו בציבור לא. אך כפי שראינו בציטוט דלעיל [במו״נ ח״ג פי״ז], הרמב״ם משווה בין היחיד ובין הציבור. וכך רואים במו״נ ח״ג פנ״א, שגם בציבור ייתכנו מקרים).

אולם לכשנתבונן בלשונו של הרמב"ם, לא נאמר כאן שהצרה לא נגרמה מחמת מנהג העולם והמקרה. הרמב"ם רק כותב, שאם יאמרו "דבר זה ממנהג העולם אירע לנו", הרי זה גורם להם לדבוק במעשיהם הרעים; אבל אינו שולל את עצם האפשרות שאולי באמת הצרה באה מחמת מנהג העולם. דהיינו – כאשר האדם חוטא ואינו מושגח, אכן ייתכן שיפגעו בו צרות מחמת מקרי העולם. אך אל לאדם להסתפק באמירה "זה מנהג העולם", אלא עליו להתבונן בסיבה לדבר: מדוע הוא חשוף למקרי העולם? משום שהוא מרוחק מן הבורא. ולפיכך הלקח מן הצרה הוא שעליו להתקרב לבוראו, וכך ייכנס תחת ההשגחה הא-להית.

ועיין בפירוש הרלב״ג לאיוב, בסיכום לפרקים לג, לד, לז, לט, ו-מא. ובפרק מב עולה מדבריו שרוב בני אדם אינם תחת ההשגחה.

דבר זה נתקשו בו רבים מדוע לא רצה ה' בתשובת אדם הראשון ולא השיב חרב המות אל נדנה. ונ"ל במ"ש באות ג' בשם כתבי האר"י דבחטא האדם הרוח האלקי ישוב אל האלקים וע"י התשובה חוזר עליו. וזה כוונת מאמרם ז"ל בעל תשובה כקטן שנולד דמי ועליו נאמר ועם נברא יהלל י-ה. לפ"ז קודם חטא אדם הראשון היה הרכבתו מאתו ית' והיה יציר כפיו של הקב"ה שנתן לו חלקו וראוי היה שלא יכלה ולהתקיים באיש. אמנם לאחר החטא כשנסתלק חלק האלקי ואחר כך כשחזר בתשובה והחזיר החלק האלקי והרי הוא כאלו עשה את עצמו והיה בבחינת ועם נברא ומעשי אדם לא יוכלו להתקיים באיש רק במין. ומאז עלה מות בחלונינו.

ואם בשאר עבירות היו הורגין שלא כדין לצורך השעה אצ״ל בשפיכות דמים שהחמירו בו חז״ל שכונסין אותו לכיפה כשהורד שלא בעדים כדאיתא בפרק הנשרפין (סנהדרין דף פא:) ואין כן בשאר חייבי מיתות בי״ד ואין צריך להאריך לך בזה שתלמוד ערוך בידך.

מי אני האט געשריבן:דאס איז מלשון הרמב"ם בפ"ד מהל' רוצח ושמירת הנפש הלכה ח-ט נאכדעם וואס ער ברענגט אראפ די צווייטע חלק פונעם משנה וואס זאגט די הכנסה לכיפה לגבי ההורג נפשות אבער וואו דער רוצח איז נישט חייב מיתה ממש וועגן א טעקניקעלעטי בהעדים. אויף דעם זאגט ער אז "ואין עושין דבר זה לשאר מחוייבי מיתות בי"ד וכו'" ע"ש. אבער אין הל' סנהדרין (פח"י ה"ד-ה) וואס איך האב פריער צוגעברענגט, ברענגט דארט צו דער רמב"ם להלכה דעם ערשטן חלק פונעם משנה שם בסנהדרין וואס רעדט זיך לגבי מי שלקה ושנה באיסור כרת או במיתת בי"ד אז מ'איז אים אויך כונס לכיפה ע"ש. די חילוק איז לכאורה לגבי דאס'ן טוהן שוין ביים ערשטן מאל: ביי א רוצח איז עס ביים ערשטן מאל שוין (עכ"פ וואו מ'איז ווי נישט זיכער באשמתו), משא"כ ביי די אנדערע איסורי כרת ומיתות בי"ד איז עס נאר ביים דריטן מאל. (ס'איז טאקע אינטרעסאנט אז דער רמב"ם זאגט ביי רוצח "ההורג נפשות" בלשון רבים, אנדערש ווי לשון המשנה וואו עס איז בלשון יחיד.)

It is not that death deprives us of some particular pleasure, or even of pleasure. What it deprives us of is something more fundamental than pleasure: it deprives us of that thing which we gain access to when, as persisting creatures, we enter into our present mental states… It deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up: not even when the desire for cessation of pain, for extinction, grows stronger

I must confess, painful as the confession may be, that even in the days of my youth's simple faith, I never was made to tremble by descriptions of hellfire, no matter how terrible, for I felt, always, that the idea of nothingness was much more terrifying than Hell. Whoever suffers lives, and whoever lives in suffering still loves and hopes, even though over the portal of his abode is written "Abandon all Hope!" And it is better to live in pain than peacefully cease to be at all. The truth is that I could not believe in this atrocious Hell, an eternity of punishment, nor could I imagine a more authentic Hell than that of nothingness and the prospect of it

There are three laws of thermodynamics: (1) you can’t win, (2) you can’t break even, and (3) you can’t get out of the game

Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves

it is intriguing to observe the evolution from a belief in collective guilt and collective punishment, in the Mosaic Code early in Jewish history, to a rejection of these in favour of a doctrine of individual responsibility in Jeremiah 31, much later. Also, we see how later critics begin to distinguish the legal, moral and ritual elements in the ancient law

There is moral and theological reflection, of course, and the concept of God can be seen as gradually evolving – for example, when God’s holiness becomes less a matter of arbitrary power and increasingly a source and inspiration for justice (notably in Isaiah and Micah), and then for mercy and loving kindness (in prophets such as Hosea)

. . .

It is also interesting to note typical historical processes at work as earlier texts are supplemented by later ones in which exaggeration and hagiography are more and more evident. For example, the books of Chronicles modify passages in the books of Samuel and Kings in order to make Jewish history accord more closely with a claim that sin and punishment are systematically linked

According to the Old Testament, we must serve some time for the sins of our fathers, unto the third and fourth generation. These traditions run deep even for those who might have rejected them, for they have a reasonable core. We all of us benefit from inheritances we did not choose and cannot change. Growing up involves deciding which part of the inheritance you want to claim as your own, and how much you have to pay for the rest of it. This is as true for nations as it is for individuals

Some people will argue that a present-day government cannot apologise for the injustices of the past. An apology, they argue, is valid only if it is made by those who committed the original offence. Guilt for an injustice cannot be passed along from one generation to another. This view is too narrow. Government leaders might not have personal guilt for past national harms, but they are stewards of national values, and as such have a role in repairing historical injustices, and an ability to try to effect reconciliation and remembrance. While average citizens might not bear guilt for historical harms, they are nonetheless affected by its remnants, and they benefit from the social repair

if somebody fears the devil, does he fear an abstract object? — This seems to be psychologically impossible, for an abstract object cannot do any harm to anybody

An anonymous referee suggested to me that fearing the devil might be analogous to fearing a harmless snake that one mistakenly believes to be poisonous: although the devil is in fact abstract (and therefore harmless), those who fear “him” mistakenly believe that “he” is concrete and dangerous. However, I do not believe that this analogy holds. As I see it, those who fear the devil are not intentionally directed at an abstract object that encodes being evil etc. Rather, they are directed at a concrete object that exemplifies being evil. It is not that they mistakenly attribute certain properties to an abstract devil. Rather, they do not have an abstract devil as their intentional object of fear in the first place

think of the story of Job, which has had such a profound effect upon the generations. It conveys something of the meaning of human suffering and of God’s role in it, but here it is far from clear what that meaning is. It will perhaps be the task of theologians forever to ferret it out, and we shall meanwhile see some of it dimly and remain content with what we can sense of it. Meanwhile, no one will be able to say, in a straightforward way, what that meaning is, even to the extent that it is found, for this can be conveyed only by myth

. . .

If, for example, theologians should render different interpretations of the Book of Job, this does not mean that one of them is right and the others wrong, even if those interpretations should be incompatible with each other. A myth, like a poem or a work of art, might embody different truths

God’s answer to a prayer from the Gulag:

No, I will not deliver you. For I resolved not to; and I was right so to resolve, for otherwise your fate would not have been in Stalin’s hands; and then Stalin’s freedom to choose between good and evil would have been less significant. If you had been spared just because Stalin freely relented, that would have been a very good thing. I knew it wouldn’t happen. But it was not for me to prevent it, and I would be preventing it if I stood by ready to release you if Stalin didn’t. So here you stay!

If what I’ve said about the playpen problem is right, this is where free-will theodicy leads. Absurd? Monstrous? - I rather think not, though I’m of two minds about it. It’s uncomfortable, for sure

. . .

Augustine says that ‘as a runaway horse is better than a stone which does not run away because it lacks self-movement and sense perception, so the creature is more excellent which sins by free will than that which does not sin only because it has no free will.’ Maybe free evil-doing is good in its own right, not just the price of trying for freedom without evil. Then God should not withhold freedom just because He knows that it would be misused. That substitutes the worst outcome for the second-best - the stone for the horse

Reply. That value judgement, if credible, would surely smooth the path of free-will theodicy. But to stop to think how an unfree man is better than a stone; and to stop to think of the victims beneath the horse’s hooves. What we have here, I suggest, is a taste of the aesthetic theodicy that we set aside at the beginning: God the fanatical artist

. . .

At this point we may picture God as an unlucky gambler. He confronted a range of options. Some were mediocre: no free creatures, or at least no significant freedom. Others offered Him a gamble on how His creatures would use their freedom. If He gambled, He might lose. Or He might win: His free creatures might freely shun all evil, and that would be very good indeed. Wisely weighing the prospects of winning and losing, He chose to gamble. He lost. Lost rather badly, to judge by the newspapers; but we don’t really know quite how much worse it could have been. Tough luck, God!

In my view, even the most ambitious version [of the Argument from Evil] succeeds conclusively. There is no evasion, unless the standards of success are set unreasonably high. Those who try to escape the conclusion have to insist that no use can be made of disputable premises, however antecedently credible those premises may be. But philosophers can and do dispute anything. Some, for example, are prepared to argue about the law of non-contradiction. The faithful who claim that the strong argument from evil leaves open a bare possibility — the sort of possibility only a philosopher could cherish — gain a victory in name only

. . .

It is hard to distinguish between God and the parent who equips the nursery with sharp objects galore and plenty of matches, fuses, and dynamite

I think universalists have a better reply. The afterlife is a more heterogeneous affair than people have thought. The point of our earthly lives isn’t to divide us into two groups, one to live forever in unimaginable bliss, the other to suffer unimaginable torment. Instead of being tried, we simply discover who we are. Some, perhaps the most fortunate, find out that they are people for whom the adoration of the deity is the highest form of rapture; they are summoned to the presence of God. Others resist the religious message and develop different ideals for their lives. They are assigned to places in the afterlife that realize those ideals for them. Atheist philosophers, perhaps, discover themselves in an eternal seminar of astonishing brilliance. Each of us finds an appropriate niche

(This is the mirror image of the vision of the afterlife offered in a favorite story of the late Sidney Morgenbesser. According to that vision, we find ourselves after death studying Talmud; for some that's heaven, for others hell)

This fantasy allows the sufferings of our mundane lives to be redeemed. Not all of us are destined for salvation, for God’s eternal Sabbath, but everyone will receive a well-adapted reward. God does not treat all of us alike. But there is no divine evil

I am fortunate that I have not experienced a personal tragedy at anywhere near the level of David Vetter or his family. In my religious days, I would have added ‘‘Baruch Hashem’’ to that statement. But it now seems outright silly to praise or bless God for sparing me from such tragedies. I don’t deserve it. And there is no way that the bubble-boy deserved what happened to him. He was born with the condition that robbed him of the simple pleasures of human contact. President Carter once reminded us that life is not fair. We all know that. So why should we believe that this universe was created by a being driven by principles of fairness? And if the universe was created by a sentient being of some sort or other, why does this being deserve our worship, let alone our praise? Free thinkers have been asking these questions for centuries, and I have yet to hear a hint of an acceptable answer

But then came the day that literally changed my life — the day when I first heard the ‘‘argument from evil.’’ The reasoning is easy to state: Suffering exists. If God can do anything, He must not want to prevent suffering; but if He does not want to prevent suffering, He cannot be perfectly good. Therefore, there is no all-powerful, perfectly good Being. The argument has been known for centuries, and many replies have been attempted. For example, many theists point out that a great deal of the suffering in the world is the result of human beings’ exercising their freedom. We must be free, they argue, if we are to be capable of virtuous actions, but free will carries with it, necessarily, the possibility for vicious action as well. Since God cannot intervene to prevent human actions that He knows will cause suffering without compromising the freedom of the actors, He must acquiesce. With respect to the rest of the world’s suffering — that due to droughts and floods and earthquakes and disease — the most popular explanation is that it is simply the necessary consequence of God’s enacting what is, in fact, the best of all possible systems of natural law

I was not satisfied with the proffered explanations of natural evil. I saw no particular reason to believe, other than the mere desire to do so, that an omnipotent God could not devise a better way of organizing the world than the plan currently in evidence. (Voltaire, of course, satirizes the suggestion in the person of the ridiculous Dr. Pangloss.) The free will defense, on the other hand, I found not merely unpersuasive, but morally disturbing. It’s fine and good that God should afford me the opportunity to practice virtue, but why should innocent others be allowed to suffer if I choose to practice vice instead? Also, is there no limit to the amount of suffering that must be permitted under this justification? The U.S. Constitution enshrines freedom as a societal value, but our civic institutions ensure that my freedom is consistent with equal freedom for everyone else. If I perform an act that infringes upon your rights, then I am subject to punishment and to restraint. Why, then, couldn’t God have set things up similarly, with serious criminals being whisked away to Hell before they did too much harm? As things stand, there are apparently no limits on the nature and scope of atrocities that God will allow some human beings to perpetrate against others. Didn’t Hitler show his true colors pretty decisively after — I don’t know — the first million?

ראשית, חוק הסתירה אינו מחייב אותנו לשום דבר. אין איסור לחשוב סתירות. פשוט אי אפשר לעשות זאת (זה ריק מתוכן). לכן ברור שאין כל צורך לדון במקור שנותן לחוק הסתירה תוקף. מעבר לזה, חוק הסתירה גם אינו אובייקט קיים ושוב אין צורך לדון במי שברא אותו (וכנ”ל לגבי הנחת המבוקש של האפלטוניזם).

ניתן אולי לטעון שבניגוד למספר שמונה, חוק הסתירה לכאורה כן טוען משהו, ולכן אולי יכולה לעלות השאלה מה מחייב אותי לקבל את הטענה הזאת. במובן הזה, נראה לכאורה שיש בדוגמה הזאת ממד מסוים של דמיון לשאלה שלנו. אבל בדיון הסברתי שחוק הסתירה לא באמת טוען משהו. זוהי טענה אנליטית ולכן היא ריקה. להיפוכה, כלומר עמדה ששוללת את חוק הסתירה, אין שום היתכנות ושום תוכן. אין מה לדון מה נותן תוקף למשפט שאינו טוען מאומה. להבנתי, חוק הסתירה הוא באותו מעמד לוגי כמו חוק הזהות (שכל דבר זהה לעצמו וכל טענה שקולה לעצמה). לעומת זאת, עקרונות המוסר בהחלט טוענים טענה שרחוקה מלהיות אנליטית. האיסור לרצוח או לגרום סבל או להפלות או להחזיק עבדים, כל אלו הם טענות אתיות בעלות תוכן סינתטי בעליל (כלומר לא טענות אנליטיות). אם כן, כאן בההחלט יש מקום לתהייה מה מעניק להן את תוקפן. בקיצור, אין שום דמיון בין חוק הסתירה לבין שאלתנו לגבי מקור התוקף של עקרונות המוסר.

No very profound knowledge of the Bible is required to see that the abominations ascribed to these people, the altars and massebahs slated for destruction, were once a part of Israelite religion and not perpetrated by some devilish nations. The 'anti-Canaanism' of Hosea and the Dtn-Dtr movement, like the anti-Judaism of the New Testament, denounces an aspect of its own past by seeking to identify and repudiate it as something alien

Aron goes on to speak of God's justice in the words of the Jewish, Old Testament Moses: “Thou punishest the sins of the father on his children and children’s children! Thou rewardest those who are faithful to thy commandments! Thou hearst the cries of the poor and acceptest the offerings of the good!" Moses decisively rejects such reasoning. "Are we able to bring something about that forces thee to an outcome?" No: "Inexorable law of thought compels to fulfillment.'

Whereas Schoenberg's Aron is the biblical Moses, Schoenberg's Moses is a character completely alien to the Bible, one that has its roots in Greek thought, in the religious critique of Xenophanes, the negative theology of the Areopagite, the searching rationality of Maimonides, the heretical theology of the Early Modern period and in Modernist iconoclasm. It is Aron who speaks of love of God, of God's justice, punishment and reward, grace and mercy, of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey; it is Aron who performs the miracles ascribed to Moses or God in the Bible: the staff transformed into a snake, the hand afflicted by leprosy and then restored, the transformation of water into blood, the water struck from the rock, even the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night to guide the people on their way - in Schoenberg's opera, these are all Aron's doing. In the eyes of Schoeberg's Moses, they are false images one and all, flashy showpieces he fall short of the "idea" of true monotheism and thus betray it

מי אני האט געשריבן:דאס גייט צוזאמען מיט וואס דר. קעלנער האלט לפי הרמב״ם.

וע״ע כאן

Kellner’s basic focus in most of his books is how to have an ethical and rational Maimonides, which is part Hermann Cohen’s Maimonides via Steven Schwatzchild (Kellner’s doctorate advisor) and part a spiritualized and carefully selected selection of Maimonides’s ideas that fights the battles against the farshtunken and perverse thinkers that Kellner openly disapproves of their thought including: Ultra-Orthodoxy, Kabbalists, and those who think Jews are superior to gentiles

Rambam certainly thought that non-Jews could achieve a share in the world to come (to the extent that he thought anyone could, a debated subject in academic circles, which we will not address here). Both Abraham and Aristotle were non-Jews. As to Abraham, we assume that no one reading this will deny his place in the world come; as to Aristotle, Rambam wrote to Shmuel ibn Tibbon that Aristotle achieved the highest level of perfection open to human beings just short of prophecy. This is not something Rambam said about Hazal, and if he thought that they could reach a share in the world to come, it would be hard for him to deny such a share to Aristotle

Shem Tov on Guide iii.51 thought that Rambam taught there that non-Jewish physicists were closer to God than non-physicist rabbis. That is likely Rambam’s position (assuming the physicists in question were moral human beings) but it is not, we think, what Rambam was talking about there in iii.51

It is obviously the case that we ask questions of Rambam that he may not have asked himself, and we try to follow the implications of his thought to places he may have had no need or interest in getting to (for example: his “proto-feminism”). We are not living in the twelfth century

Does everything boil down to “mymonides” and “yourmonides?”

Hardly; some interpretations make more sense that others, and some are simply ridiculous (for an example, see the discussion in Hakirah 11). I am quite taken with a method proposed by the philosopher Susan Haack (in the context of an argument against epistemological relativism); I see Maimonides’ writings as a kind of crossword puzzle. At any given point in filling out a crossword puzzle, a number of different solutions might satisfy any given hint. But that does not make all solutions equally reasonable. As Haack notes, “How reasonable a crossword entry is depends on how well it is supported by its clue and any already completed entries; how reasonable these other entries are, independent of the entry in question; and how much of the crossword has been completed.”

Rabbinic texts are filled with theological material as read by Schechter, Heschel, and Idel, and the texts of Tanhuma, Pesikta, and Kallir are filled with theological statements. It seems that you are using a 20th century halakhic definition of the rabbis

Of course there is theological MATERIAL in rabbinic literature ( how could there not be?), but there is no SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY in two sense of the term: (a) an attempt to get clear on the meaning of theological terms (such as “soul”; “free will”; “creation”; “reward and punishment”; “election”) and (b) there is no attempt to put these (largely inchoate) ideas into any relationship with each other, thus allowing for out and out contradictions, which bother no one. In sum, theology is an answer to questions which did not trouble Hazal one bit

. . .

Jews, not thinking that one must be Jewish in order to achieve a share in the world to come, have traditionally paid little attention to the beliefs and practices of others

Kellner, who is upset by the turn among religious Jews towards particularism with its concurrent preaching of irrationality, essentialism, and dogmatism. Hence, as expressed in his preface, his works are an explicit polemic against these positions and the rabbis who hold them, in that, he considers these particularistic thoughts, to capture his rather colloquial style, fakrimt, farfallen, farblonjet, farfoilt, farshlugginner, as well as dangerous

. . .

A good friend of mine likes to say about a prominent Rosh Yeshiva, “he knows so much more than he understands.” Mastering huge swaths of Talmudic literature does not a theologian make. It is also a category mistake to think that one can “pasken” theology as one “paskens” halakhah

As Paul Tillich wrote: “only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers” (The Dynamics of Faith, 94). In a similar vein, Elie Wiesel wrote “every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.” (Night)

מי אני האט געשריבן:ער זאגט אויך אז די געדאנק פון משפט בימים הנוראים איז בעיקר להכניע לבבו ולעשות חשבון הנפש בפרט אין א זמן וואס עס קען זיין ירום לבבו מחמת זמן הקציר. און די משפט פון ״נכתבים ונחתמים״ איז לגבי דעם וואס ווערט ממילא נמשך בדרך כלל בטבע על הצדיקים מחמת ישרם ורשעים מחמת חטאם. (און די עצמו של יוה״כ איז מכפר מיינט אז ער ווערט נאכגעשלעפט בההתעוררות פון וואס רוב טוהן טאקע תשובה באותו היום.)

ומבואר הוא שהתשובה גם כן מזה הכלל, רצוני לומר מן הדעות אשר לא יסודר מציאות אנשי התורה אלא בהאמין אותם, שאי אפשר לשום אדם שלא יחטא ויפשע אם שיסכול בדעת שיבחרהו או מדה והיא בלתי נבחרת באמת או לתגבורת תאוה או כעס. ולו האמין האדם שלא יוכל לתקן זה המעות לעולם היה מתמיד על טעותו ואפשר שהיה מוסיף במריו אחר שלא נשארה לו תחבולה. אך עם אמונת התשובה יתקן וישוב לטוב שבענינים ויותר שלם ממה שהיה קודם שיחטא. ולזה רבו המעשים המקיימים זה הדעת האמיתי המועיל מאד, רצוני לומר הוידויין והקרבנות על השגגות וכן על קצת הזדונות והתעניות. והענין הכולל לתשובה מכל חטא - לסור ממנו. זאת היא תכלית זה הדעת. ואלו כולם תועלתם מבוארת.

With that there emerges a new chronotope, a site with its own, linear temporality in which all causes inexorably give rise to their effects, no good deed is left unrewarded, and no evil deed remains unatoned; a context of meaning that allows even the worst catastrophes to be understood as just punishment and thus safeguards against chaos, senselessness, and despair. This idea of history is unprecedented and first comes into the world with covenant theology. The terrible suffering endured by the people in Egypt had nothing whatsoever to do with any sins they may have committed. This concept of sin first arises within the covenant made on Sinai and within the specific historical form — the framework of linear time — established by that covenant. All the ordeals that the people will have to undergo in the future will be attributable to sin. From now on, suffering is the unavoidable punishment for backsliding from the strict demands of the covenant made on Sinai (The book of Job protests against this — in many respects disastrous — construction of the connection between deeds and their consequences)

The extraordinary prominence accorded the theme of resistance in the biblical texts — not just in the Deuteronomistic history, but already in the Exodus narrative itself — is explicable only from the posttraumatic situation in which those texts came to be written. If the narrative was intended simply as a founding myth for Israel, it would be hard to say why the people whose genesis it relates are made to appear in such a poor light. Why must the Israelites be forced to accept the happy outcome of freedom from Egyptian oppression and partnership with a God who will settle down with them in a fertile land? Why do they not gratefully accept the monotheistic package offered them by their leader? The narrative owes its gloomy tone solely to the fact that it has to cover the downfall of Israel along with its rise. If it wants to salvage the idea of God’s covenant with Israel as his chosen people, the only idea that can alleviate the ongoing ordeal of the present, then it must interpret that ordeal as God’s ongoing judgment for their sins. At least God can then remain in the covenant to castigate and punish — but also stay true to — his wayward people. The idea of God’s righteous anger and judgment is a figure of theodicy. We see now that the distinction between blessing and curse is just as much a part of the covenant as that between friend and enemy

The long shadow cast by the Exodus story should not be passed over in silence. It furnished Christian conquerors, invaders, and colonizers with arguments to legitimate their own mistreatment of indigenous people, while at the same time providing anticlerical proponents of the Enlightenment — and, later, anti-Semites as well — with ammunition for their attacks on the Old Testament. The reactions of Christian apologists to those who denounced their legitimation of violence were often no less dubious than the attacks themselves. The apologists pointed out that God himself gave the orders for destruction, making the Israelites nothing more than the executors of a divine command that brooked no opposition. As such, they could not be held accountable for the acts they committed in God’s name, as if the assumption of a bloodthirsty god were easier to accept than that of a bloodthirsty nation. Other apologists (such as Johann David Michaelis and Johann Gottfried Herder) asserted — notwithstanding scriptural evidence to the contrary — that the Israelites had an older claim to the land, which had been opportunistically settled by the Canaanites while its rightful occupants were held up in Egypt

. . .

nothing is said [in Genesis] about driving these people from their homes and wiping them out. Strict and aggressive exclusivism is reserved for Deuteronomy and also, in a scarcely attenuated form, the pre-Priestly Book of *Exodus. This stance needs to be understood in the context of the ban on foreign gods and idolatry. What we have before us is a purely religious conflict. The monotheism of loyalty to the one YHWH posits an inflexible opposition between itself and the religious customs of its environment. Those customs, however, are not to be identified with the archaic tribal religions of the indigenous Canaanites. Rather, they have three reference points: first, the preexilic religion of the court and the broader populace of Israel itself, denounced as adulterous by prophets like Hosea, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah; second, the rites that the returning exiles found being practiced by those who had stayed behind; and third, the Babylonian religion they encountered in exile, which was to be avoided at all costs lest contact lead to assimilation. Behind the semantics of violence stands the exiles’ resolute will to maintain their cultural and religious identity under the pressure of Assyrian and Babylonian oppression, as well as their energetic, ultimately successful attempt to give Israel a new foundation after the catastrophe

The friend-enemy distinction, along with the associated sacred violence toward God’s enemies, is the price paid by this new form of religion. The “faithful” God is the “jealous” God (ʾēl qannāʾ). Anyone who inquires into the enormous historical impact of these texts cannot afford to indulge in apologetics if it means turning a blind eye to the intolerance that has been a necessary part of that impact. Within the framework of the semantics of loyalty that underpins the Hoseanic and Deuteronom(ist)ic tradition, the opposite of intolerance is not tolerance but indolence. From this point of view, an indolent god, a god unmoved by the fidelity or infidelity of his people, would be of no use to Israel in times of trial, such as when faced with persecution or exile. The violence invoked here is “sacred” violence, the violence of a “holy people” that must defend itself against the pressure to assimilate exerted by its surroundings and remain true to its lord — and hence to itself — in the face of temptation and persecution. This called for the strictest possible form of self-segregation: sanctification. Such violence may once have had its day, but that day has long since passed

Nowadays, we read almost daily of people who kill innocent human beings, claiming that they are doing what God wants. We call them terrorists, or would-be terrorists if (like Abraham) they are stopped at the last minute. Whatever else we may think of such people, I presume that we do not doubt the sincerity of their beliefs. They must be sincere, since many of them deliberately kill themselves in the process. It is the beliefs themselves that are sick, demented, irrational. No God would want this, we tell ourselves. The philosopher in me still asks the question: What’s the difference between the near sacrifice of Isaac and contemporary religious terrorism?

I do not claim to have said the last word on the sacrifice of Isaac in this context. I do submit, however, that this biblical story represents a deep challenge to rationalism, perhaps the deepest in the (so-called) Old Testament. Contem- porary rationalists have attempted to come to grips with the story. Here is Louis Pojman (1998): ‘‘Many Old Testament scholars dismiss the literalness of the story and interpret it within the context of Middle Eastern child sacrifice. The story, according to these scholars, provides pictorial grounds for breaking with this custom.’’ As noted above, this account is not consistent with the praise heaped on Abraham for passing the test, or at least it diminishes the praise. Pojman continues: “But even leaving aside this plausible explanation, we might contend that Abraham’s action can be seen as rational given his noetic framework”

This concept of original sin was often presented to me in terms of natural law–like gravity, it’s just the way things are. But the analogy seemed inapt; gravity had nothing to do with what you deserved. And anyway, I’d protest, didn’t God make the laws? If so, why did He choose to make things so that you inherited your parents’ guilt? Why make the laws of spiritual heredity Lamarckian rather than Darwinian?

. . .

I am no Bible scholar but note only that the story, taken at face value, renders a trope familiar from many ancient mythologies: the stealing of a divine prerogative by the presumptuous human. Always such thefts are punished: Prometheus is sentenced to eternal torment, Pandora releases pain and sadness into the world, and Adam and Eve, with all their descendants, must toil and suffer. What’s the lesson? Well, it could be that it’s prudent to do what powerful divinities tell you to do — in Adam and Eve’s case, to remain in a state of childlike ignorance, devoid of conscience or principle, dependent but safe. Or one could extract a different, more noble message: that knowledge and reason, those godlike powers, are so valuable that having them is worth enduring the wrath of the most powerful being in the universe. On this reading, Adam and Eve did not “fall from grace,” they ascended into moral responsibility. This is how I choose to read the story, and how I conceive our struggle as a species — to claim our rationality, to confront the harsh realities that constrain us, and to acknowledge our own responsibility, in spite of the cost — therein to make ourselves “as gods”

The human interest stories in my local paper (on the front page of the ‘‘Faith’’ section — there is no ‘‘Reason’’ section) regularly honor the fidelity of people suffering the most appalling depredations: debilitating accidents, ruthless illnesses, spouses and children lost to senseless wars — all consistent, in the minds of these latter-day Jobs, with the limitless goodness of God. Likely as not, there will be featured, in the same edition, people who have prevailed against astonishing odds — the woman who survived the cancer that all the medical experts said would kill her, the husband who survived the landmine that killed all his buddies — all cheerfully attributing their own good fortune to God’s great love for them. Never mind the quick paradox (He loved you enough to get you through chemotherapy, just not enough not to spare you the cancer in the first place) — what about the illogic of divine responsibility? God is to be thanked for the good things that happen but never blamed for the bad

A college friend born and raised in a reformed Jewish household, never very religious, suddenly surprised all his childhood and college friends—not to mention his Jewish wife—by converting to messianic Judaism, becoming a ‘‘Jew for Jesus.’’ One evening a few months after his conversion, my husband and I visited for dinner. My friend was recounting an incredible story from his hellion adolescence: he had failed to see a ‘‘road out’’ sign and driven his motorcycle over a fifteen-foot cliff, tumbling off the bike, and landing, ‘‘miraculously’’ unhurt, at the bottom of the ravine. At this point in the story, he suddenly stopped, looked off into the distance, and announced solemnly, ‘‘I see now that Christ was saving me for something.’’ Oh, I thought to myself, so I guess He was just all finished with my father, who died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three, leaving behind a homemaker wife, her elderly aunt, one daughter just starting graduate school, and another (me) only eleven years old

More edifying, presumably, were the also-quoted remarks of a local rabbi, reflecting on the significance of the patterns of destruction wielded by Hurricane Fran. She saw the Hand of God in the fact that a large, expensive, and recently installed stained-glass window in the synagogue had been spared, despite a tree’s having come down right next to the building. But then in the same breath, as it were, she cautioned the faithful not to yield to the temptation to blame God for damages they had suffered. God’s plan is mysterious, she reminded everyone. (No kidding–stained glass windows are more important than people’s lives!) Apparently, in her world, God gets the credit if the outcome is good, but need take no responsibility if it’s bad. We expect our politicians to behave like that, but God?

To balance the arguments for God, we [in my class] looked at arguments against God. That was easy, too. There is so much suffering in the world that I could pick my examples. Many children have been born with horrible birth defects that caused them tremendous pain and early death. An all-good God would prevent these harms if he could. An all-powerful God could prevent them. It follows that there is no God who is both all-good and all-powerful, as traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam claim. The argument was so obvious that beginning students had no trouble appreciating its force

To be even-handed, I also presented various responses by theists. That was the hardest part of my lectures to prepare, because I really wanted to make some responses look plausible, but my main goal was to teach students critical thinking, and every response to the problem of evil has glaring defects. Maybe free will is more important than any amount of suffering, but what does free will have to do with natural evils, such as birth defects? Maybe God repaid the child’s suffering with a ticket to heaven, but then why didn’t God send him straight to heaven without the suffering? Maybe God was teaching a lesson to the child’s parents, but isn’t it unfair to use one person’s suffering to teach others (especially when you could use better teaching methods)? Maybe we mere mortals are too feeble and ignorant to see the justification for suffering, but then why should we believe that there is any justification? Maybe God is not subject to our lowly human moral standards, but then why should we love or worship such a God (except out of fear or confusion)? Maybe we need some suffering to make us appreciate the good things in life, but why do we need so much, and why must it be distributed so unevenly? It was hard for me to stand up in front of my students and try to make such feeble responses look good when I really wanted to teach them how to evaluate arguments critically

Moreover, if God is omnipotent, if he can do anything he wants to do (or any logically possible thing he wants to do), then nothing can happen except by his will. If I wind up going to hell, God must have willed that I go to hell. This takes it out of my hands. How can I prevent what an omnipotent being wills?

Theologians sometimes try to save God from responsibility for our sins by saying that he merely permits them. But to permit something to happen when you could have prevented it, and when you knew what would happen if you didn’t act, is not to escape responsibility for it. In Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes, Regina is having a quarrel with her husband when he suffers a heart attack. He asks her to bring him his medicine, and she refuses to do so. She has it in her power to bring him the medicine, and she knows what will happen if she does not. Her decision not to bring him the medicine makes her as much responsible for his death as if she had shot him

Some Christian philosophers will no doubt object that, although God could prevent me from committing the sins that will justly cause my damnation, he cannot do so in a way that would entitle me to moral credit for refraining. If he causes me to refrain from sin, then by a proper definition of freedom my refraining will no longer be a free act; the freedom required for moral responsibility also requires that the free act not be caused. His inability to cause me not to sin is a consequence of his inability to do what is logically impossible, an inability that does not detract from his omnipotence

Even if we accept the libertarian conception of freedom that this reply presupposes, it doesn’t seem to work. It doesn’t show that God can’t cause me not to perform the act that, if done freely, would be a sin. It just shows that he can’t do this without depriving me of the libertarian freedom necessary for my refraining to accrue moral credit. It’s the value he places on human freedom that prevents him from causing me not to sin, and that value may seem, on reflection, too high

Christian philosophers sometimes invoke, in this context, the analogy of a mother raising her child. Wanting him to learn to be a responsible adult, she refrains, after a certain age, from interfering in his decisions, believing that she needs to let him make his own mistakes. But parents who act this way rarely have certain knowledge of what their children will decide in the absence of their intervention. And presumably, a loving parent would act differently if she knew that her child were going to make a decision that would have catastrophic and irrevocable consequences, if she knew, for example, that it would lead inescapably to his death

. . .

It is common among Christians to believe that God is a personal being, who created the universe and who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Indeed, it is commonly said that God must possess all perfections. Yet we observe that the world this perfect being has created includes many imperfections: there is much joy in the world, but there is also much suffering — much of it apparently undeserved; and there is sin. We call these things evil. How can they exist in a world that owes its origin to a God with the attributes Christians believe their God to possess?

The usual response now is to say that though God could have created a world without evil, it was better for him to have created the world he did, in spite of the evils it contains. The occurrence of those evils was necessary for goods that are even greater. If God had so created the world that it contained no evil at all, that world would have been less good, all things considered, than it is even with all the evil it contains. This is called the greater goods defense

The Christian may say we humans rightly do many things we expect to cause avoidable harm. We build a bridge from San Francisco to Marin County, knowing that in the construction some workmen will fall into the water and drown. We could avoid their deaths by not building the bridge. But the bridge is a great good. Given our human limitations, we cannot build it without some people dying a result. So we build it and accept their deaths as part of the cost of bridging those waters. And God’s permission of evil may also be justified by the greater goods to which it leads

An omnipotent being, of course, does not face all the hard choices we do. If he wants a bridge across those waters, he need only say ‘‘Let there be a bridge’’ and there will be a bridge. One question the greater-goods defense raises is: what kind of good could be so intimately connected with evil that even an omnipotent being would have to accept the evil as the price of realizing that good? And what good could be so great that it would justify such a being’s accepting the amount of evil there is in the world as the price of attaining that good?

The usual answer these days is freedom. There must be freedom if there is to be moral goodness. And the price of giving humans freedom is that sometimes they will misuse it. Even an omnipotent being can’t cause a person to freely do good. And freedom, with the moral goodness that sometimes results from it, is a good sufficiently great that it makes the evils that also result worth accepting. This is what is called the free will defense

There is a problem, of course, about appealing to human freedom to solve the problem of evil when you also believe in predestination and divine foreknowledge. This is a problem of long standing, with which many philosophers have wrestled. No solution has gained general acceptance. And until Christian philosophers have worked out an acceptable solution to that problem, I think non-Christian philosophers are entitled to regard the free-will defense as very problematic

But there are other problems about the appeal to freedom. There are evils whose occurrence has no discernible connection with freedom. Theologians call them natural evils, meaning such things as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, diseases, and so on. If a deer dies in a forest fire, suffering horribly as it does so, that is an evil. It is not only human suffering we must take into account when we are weighing good against evil in this world

Now, if you accept the theory of evolution, you will believe there were other animals on this planet long before humans appeared on the scene. Humans evolved from other species through a long and gradual process during which many of their ancestor species died out. This is how new species are born, through the death of old species weeded out by natural selection, the elimination of living beings that are less well adapted to compete in the struggle for survival in their environment. When the less well-adapted species die out, many of their members die of starvation, or disease, or predation, all methods that involve considerable pain and suffering for the animals less able to compete. None of that suffering can be justified as a necessary consequence of permitting humans freedom. We weren’t around then. So none of it seems beyond the power of omnipotence to prevent without the loss of that good

Here’s another objection. The greater-goods defense can easily lead to a kind of cost-benefit analysis that is deeply repugnant to our moral sense. Consider the kind of case that troubled Ivan in Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. A little girl is treated quite brutally by her parents, who beat her because she has done something that made them angry. Perhaps she wets the bed repeatedly, and they think she ought to be old enough to control her bladder. Or perhaps the father is an alcoholic who abuses his daughter sexually. The Brothers Karamazov is fiction, but to hear about real cases like this, you need only listen regularly to the eleven o’clock news

The free-will defense seems to say, in cases of this kind: well, it’s all very unfortunate, of course, but this is the price we must pay for having freedom. For the father to have the opportunity to display moral goodness, God must give him the opportunity to choose evil. You can’t have the one opportunity without the other. And the father’s having the opportunity to display moral goodness is such a great good that it outweighs the fact that he chooses evil

But who gets the good here? It’s the father. And who suffers the evil? It’s the little girl. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, the questionable assumption that the benefit outweighs the cost. Freedom, we’ll concede, is a very great good, even when it isn’t properly exercised. Still, it makes some difference who pays the cost. Freedom may be a great good, even a good so great that it would outweigh really horrendous suffering. But justice requires some attention, not only to the net amount of good, after you have subtracted the evil, but also to the way the goods and evils are distributed. Some distributions just aren’t fair

The mention of Ivan Karamazov brings me to my final point. Ivan claims that if God does not exist, everything is permissible. Dostoevsky, speaking through Ivan, may have stated the problem of evil as powerfully as any atheist; but he was himself a Christian, who believed that God must exist if we are to make sense of morality

I think the opposite is true. I think Abrahamic belief makes morality, as we normally think of it, unintelligible. Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. One day God put Abraham to the test. He said to Abraham: “Take your son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering.” God gives no reason for this horrifying command. And Abraham asks none. He simply sets out to obey. And he nearly does obey. He has the knife raised to kill his son, when God sends down an angel to stay his hand. God then says he is satisfied with Abraham: “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from me.” In the end, God does not actually require the sacrifice. But he does require that Abraham demonstrate his willingness to carry out the sacrifice

What’s the moral of this story? I suggest it’s this: as God’s creatures, our highest loyalty must be to God, even if this requires the sacrifice of our deepest human loyalties; God is our creator, our Lord, and we owe him absolute obedience, no matter what he commands — and he might command anything. There are no constraints on his will, so we might be required to do anything. There is no predicting what he might require, and there is nothing to say that his commands will not change from one moment to the next. At the beginning of the story, God commands Abraham to kill Isaac; in the middle he commands Abraham not to kill Isaac

If there is a God who is liable to command anything, and if our highest loyalty must be to this God, there is no act — save disobedience to God — that we can safely say is out of bounds, no act of a kind that simply must not be done, not even genocide, to use a crime I think most of us would shrink from committing, even if we believed God had commanded it. If this God exists and we must obey him unconditionally, then anything whatever might turn out to be permissible. This view is destructive of morality

From this line of thought there seem to be only two possible escapes. One is to say, as Robert Adams does, that the God he believes in is a loving God, who simply would not issue a command as brutal as one which required the killing of an innocent child, or of entire people — men, women and children. Anyone who claims that he has issued such a command must be rejected as speaking falsehoods about God. This line leads, I think, to a deep skepticism about the validity of scripture as a record of God’s revelation to his human creatures, since scriptural passages that report that God did in fact issue such commands are not hard to find; for example to exterminate all the inhabitants of Canaan

If the scriptures are at all accurate in their portrayal of God, then he has frequently acted in a way that did not display love toward all his creatures. We can avoid this conclusion only by being deeply skeptical about the accuracy of the scriptural portrayal of God

The alternative, I think, is to say yes, the scriptures are generally accurate in their portrayal of God. He does frequently command things apt to
seem
to us abominable. But if he has commanded them, they must be right, however they seem to us. This alternative leads to a deep skepticism about our ability to make moral judgments. If the mass slaughter of the innocent is not wrong, then we don’t know how to tell the difference between right and wrong, even in what would appear to be the clearest cases. We must either give up belief or give up morality. I choose heresy

The core evidence for theism, then, is Scripture. What if we accept Scripture as offering evidence of a God who has a moral character and plans for human beings, who intervenes in history and tells us how to live? What conclusions should we draw from Scripture about God’s moral character and about how we ought to behave? Let us begin with the position of the fundamentalist, of one who takes Scripture with utmost seriousness, as the inerrant source of knowledge about God and morality. If we accept biblical inerrancy, I’ll argue, we must conclude that much of what we take to be morally evil is in fact morally permissible and even required

Consider first God’s moral character, as revealed in the Bible. He routinely punishes people for the sins of others. He punishes all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth, for Eve’s sin. He punishes all human beings by condemning them to labor, for Adam’s sin (Gen. 3:16–18). He regrets His creation, and in a fit of pique, commits genocide and ecocide by flooding the earth (Gen. 6:7). He hardens Pharaoh’s heart against freeing the Israelites (Ex. 7:3), so as to provide the occasion for visiting plagues upon the Egyptians, who, as helpless subjects of a tyrant, had no part in Pharaoh’s decision. (So much for respecting free will, the standard justification for the existence of evil in the world.) He kills all the firstborn sons, even of slave girls who had no part in oppressing the Israelites (Ex. 11:5). He punishes the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great great-grandchildren of those who worship any other god (Ex. 20:3–5). He sets a plague upon the Israelites, killing twenty-four thousand, because some of them had sex with the Baal-worshiping Midianites (Num. 25:1–9). He lays a three-year famine on David’s people for Saul’s slaughter of the Gibeonites (2 Sam. 21:1). He orders David to take a census of his men, and then sends a plague on Israel, killing seventy thousand, for David’s sin in taking the census (2 Sam. 24:1, 10, 15). He sends two bears out of the woods to tear forty-two children to pieces, because they called the prophet Elisha a bald head (2 Kings 2:23–24). He condemns the Samarians, telling them that their children will be “dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open” (Hosea 13:16). This is but a sample of the evils celebrated in the Bible

Can all this cruelty and injustice be excused on the ground that God may do what humans may not? Look, then, at what God commands humans to do. He commands us to put to death adulterers (Lev. 20:10), homosexuals (Lev. 20:13), and people who work on the Sabbath (Ex. 35:2). He commands us to cast into exile people who eat blood (Lev. 7:27), who have skin diseases (Lev. 13:46), and who have sex with their wives while they are menstruating (Lev. 20:18). Blasphemers must be stoned (Lev. 24:16), and prostitutes whose fathers are priests must be burned to death (Lev. 21:9). That’s just the tip of the iceberg. God repeatedly directs the Israelites to commit ethnic cleansing (Ex. 34:11–14, Lev. 26:7-9) and genocide against numerous cities and tribes: the city of Hormah (Num. 21:2–3), the land of Bashan (Num. 21:33–35), the land of Heshbon (Deut. 2:26–35), the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites ( Josh. 1–12). He commands them to show their victims “no mercy” (Deut. 7:2), to “not leave alive anything that breathes” (Deut. 20:16). In order to ensure their complete extermination, he thwarts the free will of the victims by hardening their hearts (Deut. 2:30, Josh. 11:20) so that they do not sue for peace. These genocides are, of course, instrumental to the wholesale theft of their land ( Josh. 1:1–6) and the rest of their property (Deut. 20:14, Josh. 11:14). He tells eleven tribes of Israel to nearly exterminate the twelfth tribe, the Benjamites, because a few of them raped and killed a Levite’s concubine. The resulting bloodbath takes the lives of 40,000 Israelites and 25,100 Benjamites (Judg. 20:21, 25, 35). He helps Abijiah kill half a million Israelites (2 Chron. 13:15–20) and helps Asa kill a million Cushites, so his men can plunder all their property (2 Chron. 14:8–13)

Consider also what the Bible permits. Slavery is allowed (Lev. 25:44– 46, Eph. 6:5, Col. 3:22). Fathers may sell their daughters into slavery (Ex. 21:7). Slaves may be beaten, as long as they survive for two days after (Ex. 21:20–21, Luke 12:45–48). Female captives from a foreign war may be raped or seized as wives (Deut. 21:10–14). Disobedient children should be beaten with rods (Prov. 13:24, 23:13). In the Old Testament, men may take as many wives and concubines as they like because adultery for men consists only in having sex with a woman who is married (Lev. 18:20) or engaged to someone else (Deut. 22:23). Prisoners of war may be tossed off a cliff (2 Chron. 24:12). Children may be sacrificed to God in return for His aid in battle (2 Kings 3:26–27, Judg. 11), or to persuade Him to end a famine (2 Sam. 21)

So, why were the ancient biblical peoples as ready to ascribe evil as good deeds to God? Why did they think God was so angry that He chronically unleashed tides of brutal destruction on humanity? The answer is that they took it for granted that all events bearing on human well-being are willed by some agent for the purpose of affecting humans for good or ill. If no human was observed to have caused the event, or if the event was of a kind (e.g., a plague, drought, or good weather) that no human would have the power to cause, then they assumed that some unseen, more-powerful agent had to have willed it, precisely for its good or bad effects on humans. So, if the event was good for people, they assumed that God willed it out of love for them; if it was bad, they assumed that God willed it out of anger at them. This mode of explanation is universally observed among people who lack scientific understanding of natural events. It appears to be a deeply rooted cognitive bias of humans to reject the thought of meaningless suffering. If we are suffering, someone must be responsible for it!

Why did these representations of God as cruel and unjust not make God repugnant to the authors of Scripture and their followers? They were too busy trembling in their sandals to question what they took to be God’s will. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes already observed that people honor raw power irrespective of its moral justification

The well-known “problem of evil” in the case of God is just a special case of this strategy: one would reasonably expect an omni-being to have created a moral world; the patent lack of such a world (in the plethora of cases that have nothing to do with “free will”) provides reason to doubt there’s any such being, as does the overall poor record of answered prayers (where one remembers to count not only positive anecdotes, but all of the failures people tend not to remember). And note that this argument doesn’t justify mere agnosticism: people are presumably not agnostic about bogeymen; rather, it justifies full disbelief. What’s bad enough for bogeymen is bad enough for God

. . .

I don’t think you need to be an atheist to have the reaction I’ve mentioned to the content of religious claims. Were the claims about a supernatural entity who loves, commands, scolds, forgives, and so on, to be encountered in a fashion removed from the rich, “respectable” aesthetic and cultural traditions in which they are standardly presented, they would be widely regarded as delusional, if not psychotic. Think of how most normal, even religious people react to people who murder their children because ‘‘God told them to’’ ( just as He told Abraham!); or to the claims of the Koresh cult in Texas, or those claims about the Hale-Bopp comet made by the recent Heaven’s Gate cult — and then remember that many religions were themselves once just such ‘‘cults’’ (see in this regard the work of the noted biblical scholar, Elaine Pagels 1979)

In a similar vein, even the noted theistic philosopher Robert Adams (1999) writes: “What would you think if you asked your neighbor why he was building a large stone table in his backyard, and he said, ‘I’m building an altar, because God has commanded me to sacrifice my son as a whole burnt offering. Won’t you come to the ceremony tomorrow morning?’ All agree that the neighbor should be committed to a mental hospital” (p. 284)

. . .

they know that a biological war of all against all likely leaves most animals starving, diseased, and scared; and that most of human life ends in humiliating misery, perfectly nice people wasting away from awful diseases and mental deteriorations, often unable to recognize family and friends, much less retain any wisdom they may have earlier acquired (Can anyone seriously think that Alzheimer’s helps in the building of a better immortal soul?). Of course, it’s perfectly fine to be selective about what one focuses upon and enjoys; it’s self-deception only if it leads one to avow hypotheses that one knows to be belied by the majority of the evidence

. . .

ignorance (read: mystery) is standardly a reason to not believe something. Imagine the police arresting you merely because it’s a ‘‘mystery’’ how you could have murdered Smith! Just so: if it’s really a complete mystery how God designed or created the world and permits so much pointless suffering, then obviously that’s a reason to suspect it’s simply not true that He did — and my point is that this is sufficiently obvious that everyone knows it and people simply pretend that religion affords some very odd exception

. . .

Philosophers have, I think, rightly pointed out that death may not be as bad as people suppose, but it’s hard to think of any story — least of all the glory of God! — that would justify the sufferings of, for example, children slowly dying from a plague, cancer, or aids, or people wasting away with Alzheimer’s or completely debilitating strokes

ומשם הוראה יוצאת כי היותנו נידונין בהשגחתו הבלתי בעלת תכלית והיותנו זוכים לפניו בדין, הוא דבר לא יסבלהו הטבע בשום פנים; רק הוא חסד גמור מאתו ית׳ ומנגד אל הטבע תכלית ההתנגדות. כי לב אדם יחשב דרכו שלא יזכה ילוד אשה בהישפטו; גם לא תיאות אליו הסליחה מאשר אשם לו, להיותו בלתי בעל תכלית. והוא ית׳ להורות כי גבהו דרכי טובו וחסדו על הדרכים הטבעיים, קבע לנו הזמן הזה לתשובה ולסליחה, הוא הזמן אשר הורחק בתכלית ההרחקה מראשית הזמן הטבעי, לומר כי נגד כל עמנו יעשה נפלאות להגביר חסדו על יודעיו ולדון אותנו ברחמים, אע״פ שהמשפט הטבעי שיגזור שכלינו ירחיק זה וידחנו דיחוי גמור.

ומאמר הרמב"ם שההשגחה נמשכת אחר השכל, אין עניינו כמחשבת הטוען, כי כבר יצא לקראתו בעל נוה שלום (מאמר ד פ״א) שכתב כי שוא ותפל חזו החושבים שהר"ם ז"ל דיבר סרה באמרו שההשגחה נמשכת אחר השכל, ונראה אם כן שאין למעשה המצוות רושם בשלימות האדם. כי זה קרה להם מקוצר רוח הבנתם דברי הרב, וידענו שהעמידה על הפסד הסברא קודם ההקפה במושג ממנה - שקר. והבדיל בעל נוה שלום בין אמרנו נמשכת 'אחר השכל' לאמרנו 'אחר החכמה'. וזה - כי שם 'שכל' ישולח גם כן על המעשה והפועל הישר הראוי לאדם לעשותו מצד היותו משכיל, וכמאמר הכתוב (דברים כט, ח): "למען תשכילו את כל אשר תעשון" - שיכל את ידיו, להורות שפעולתו לא היתה דמיונית.

There is another reason that I just cannot believe that all of the Pentateuch’s words come directly and literally from heaven. There are biblical passages that cannot be reconciled with a God who is merciful or just, much less a deity who is both. The Bible sometimes appears to be all too human not simply because it has trouble deciding whether Noah took two or seven of the clean animals onto the ark, but more importantly because it describes a God who sweeps away the innocent along with the guilty – if not in the Noah story (which tells us that all humans other than Noah were blameworthy), then surely in the exodus narrative, in which God slays first-born Egyptians who had no say in Pharaoh’s labor policies

Even more disturbingly, the Bible commands Jews, if only in a few specific cases, to imitate God in disregarding both justice and mercy: all Amalekites, even children, are to be slaughtered (Deuteronomy 25.17-19); genocide or expulsion is the fate of all Canaanites who do not submit to Israel (for example, Deuteronomy 7 and 20). It helps only a little that rabbinic commentators through the ages have ruled that the laws regarding Canaanites applied only to the time of Joshua and not in perpetuity, so that nobody living after Joshua’s era has the right, much less the obligation, to apply them to anyone at all. (I’m thinking here, for example, of m. Yadaim 4:4, t. Qiddushin 5:6, b. Berakhot 28a, b. Yoma 54a; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Kings,” 5:4.) The law, even if no longer applicable, is still there

Similarly, I receive only a little comfort from the suggestion that these laws don’t mean what they seem to mean but are to be construed metaphorically. (The Talmud proposes this idea when it grapples with the disturbing law in Deuteronomy 21.18-21 that allows parents to execute a rebellious son. In b. Sanhedrin 71a and t. Sanhedrin 11:2, the rabbis maintain that this law is in the Torah only so that we can receive a reward for interpreting it away.) This well-known teaching does not fully solve the moral problem that passages such as these raise. The fact remains that the Torah at the very least gives the appearance of encouraging cruelty and injustice in these verses (or, in the case of the Canaanites, the Bible appears to have done so for a single generation)

These texts diminish my ability to accept the notion that the Torah in its entirety was composed by God: a just and merciful God would not write a Torah that seems unjust, even in a small number of passages, even on a surface level. I can understand how non-verbal commands from a just and merciful God were in rare cases misunderstood; I can’t understand how the words in those specific verses came literally and directly from God. By acknowledging that the Bible combines human and divine elements, that it contains human reactions to non-verbal divine commands — that is, by adopting the view of revelation found in the writings of Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel — I can continue seeing the Bible as scripture, and not only as artifact

The violence of war disturbed ancient people, as it does modern people. Often the wars were for the glory of the king and his court, and of little benefit to the average citizen, whose family members might be called up to fight or might be subject to the predations of counter-offensives. Therefore, to justify war, ancient kings and their scribes believed that it was the will of the gods. Biblical Israel was no different, in this regard

. . .

The ancient world waged wars constantly, causing great loss to human and animal life, alongside terrible economic destruction. Thus, the ancients explained wars using religious language, claiming that the god or goddess joined in the war, that the enemy was judged by the deity to be deserving of destruction, or even that the war was commanded by the deity. Such explanations could not change the terrible realities of war, the destruction of cities and the loss of life, but they allowed kings to continue with their constant wars without taking moral responsibility. In the end, it was all up to the gods

By this exegetical license the Sages annulled the plain sense of the law and the narrative, and conformed the Scriptures to their conception of "the way of the Lord, doing what is right and just"

The policy of the Sages serves us as a guide, with this difference: our nullification of the authority of these biblical passages is not by what Y. Heineman called "creative [midrashic] exegesis" but by historical exegesis. We understand these passages as reflecting (1) a war measure customary in the biblical period (see the Mesha inscription), which because of its prevalence did not jar with the sense of justice of the biblical authors; (2) the extreme anxiety of those authors over the survival of biblical religion as an island in a sea of paganism

From a theological viewpoint, the herem may be classed as an instance of the medieval dictum "the Torah speaks in human language" - that is, the divine word accommodates itself to the level of the recipients to whom it is directed. Only whereas the Jewish intellectual tradition applies this dictum to language about God's attributes (to remove the scandal of anthropomorphism), we extend it to moral issues as well. The herem law was the brutal embodiment, coarse and brutal as were those times, of a praiseworthy concern lest biblical religion and morality be undermined by pagan enticements. By late antiquity that embodiment was out of line with the moral sense of the Jewish Sages. But the exegetical remedy they devised (by which Joshua is made to give warning before making war on the Canaanites) does not go far enough for us. For although the Sages introduced a measure of justice into the procedure for the herem, they did not and could not erase the law itself and the story of its fulfillment in the book of Joshua. In the Bible and in Maimonides' code they stand as models of zealous piety, expressions of devotion to God

(A historical critique of the biblical texts indicates that the war-herem as legislated by Deuteronomy and purportedly executed wholesale by Joshua belongs to the realm of theory rather than to historical reality. This may salve our consciences, but only aggravates the problem - that, under no pressure of facts, the biblical authors found compatible with their faith a divine command to commit genocide, whose fulfillment does credit to Joshua and his army!)

Jews, a people massacred systematically on the basis of an ideology that justified genocide, cannot regard as timeless torah an ideological legitimation of mass killing. Our historical experience forbids us to admit such concepts into the treasury of eternal values of our heritage. In the face of our history, to suggest that the war-herem concept remains in any way valid is to merit the contempt of civilized mankind, to become a model of what must be avoided rather than a model of what deserves to be emulated, and to defame Judaism

Our biblical ancestors, out of extreme anxiety over the survival of their faith in its purity, conceived and received the herem as a divine commandment. The Sages, trusting in their sense of justice, partially annulled the Scriptures dealing with it. Jews of today, out of extreme anxiety over the purity of our faith, and in obedience to the lesson of our history, must with the same confidence annul the present authority of that concept in all its forms. When we teach the herem passages in school (and given the pivotal nature of the book of Joshua we cannot avoid teaching them) we must explicitly neutralize them (e.g., by stressing their specific ancient context, their obsolete motivation, and the annulling precedent set by the Sages, along the lines suggested above). It must be made clear to pupils that our general regard for the Bible as a treasury of enduring values does not extend to these passages. The urgency of such a repudiation corresponds to the evidence that the new empowerment of Israel stirs atavistic longings to act out what existed throughout all of Jewish history (and, on the scale depicted in the Bible, in its time as well) only in the imagination

In his book “Biblical Prose Prayer,” from 1983, Professor Greenberg examined every instance of people praying in the Bible and concluded that their prayers were what he called “a vehicle of humility, an expression of un-self-sufficiency”

“Many of those who prayed in the Bible were commoners; you don’t have to be a priest in the Bible to pray,” Professor Sarna said. “Greenberg shows how the biblical concepts influenced the subsequent history of Jewish prayer, that Jews don’t need an intermediary”

Professor Tigay added: “He reasoned that the frequency of spontaneous prayer must have sustained a constant sense of God’s presence and strengthened the egalitarian tendency of Israelite religion, which led to the establishment of the synagogue”

Language is an abstraction based on man's capacity, through speech, to manipulate that part of his environment composed of other organisms like himself and to discriminate between stimuli occurring within his environment which take the form of speech. Some people talk to cats and some to trees and some to gods without receiving answers in speech, so communication, the interaction between two organisms utilizing the same speech behavior, is not the only use of speech. It would be inaccurate to suggest that we spend our lives talking to ourselves, however. It would be more correct to state that we talk from ourselves, and that repertoires of speech patterns are shaped and inaintained by environmental consequences following speech behavior

Once they have committed language, two organisms are no longer independent of each other. The instances cited of people talking to cats, trees, and gods are not really exceptions, since the individuals concerned are anthropomorphizing their respective cats, trees, and gods, and playing both social roles

I personally am comfortable removing God from almost everything that takes place in the world... While my view is certainly a break from what is often expressed among the Orthodox, Maimonides... and other thinkers of his time believed that the world generally functions according to the laws of nature and humans act in an autonomous fashion. They did not assume that religiosity meant seeing God's hand in everyday events or that God was continually pulling the strings of this world... With such an approach, theodicy, among other things, is no longer the burning problem it usually is for believers.

...my theology... is probably not the sort of approach that would work well in a communal setting. When a family is grieving... they want to be told... that their loss is part of some higher purpose and that it fits into some larger plan. Being told that bad things happen to good people because, well, sometimes bad things happen to good people, will probably not be of much comfort

Spinoza’s philosophy is founded upon a rejection of the God that informs the Abrahamic religions. His God lacks all the psychological and moral characteristics of a transcendent, providential deity. The Deus of Spinoza’s philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics (1677), is not a kind of person. It has no beliefs, hopes, desires or emotions. Nor is Spinoza’s God a good, wise and just lawgiver who will reward those who obey its commands and punish those who go astray. For Spinoza, God is Nature, and all there is is Nature (his phrase is Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’). Whatever is exists in Nature, and happens with a necessity imposed by the laws of Nature. There is nothing beyond Nature and there are no departures from Nature’s order – miracles and the supernatural are an impossibility

There are no values in Nature. Nothing is intrinsically good or bad, nor does Nature or anything in Nature exist for the sake of some purpose. Whatever is, just is. Early in the Ethics, Spinoza says that ‘all the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end; for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God’

The elimination of a providential God helps to cast doubt on what Spinoza regards as one of the most pernicious doctrines promoted by organised religions: the immortality of the soul and the divine judgment it will undergo in some world-to-come. If a person believes that God will reward the virtuous and punish the vicious, one’s life will be governed by the emotions of hope and fear: hope that one is among the elect, fear that one is destined for eternal damnation. A life dominated by such irrational passions is, in Spinoza’s terms, a life of ‘bondage’ rather than a life of rational freedom

Spinoza attacked the belief in the afterlife of an immortal soul. For Spinoza, when you’re dead, you’re dead. There might be a part of the human mind that is ‘eternal’. The truths of metaphysics, mathematics, etc, that one acquires during this lifetime and that might now belong to one’s mind will certainly remain once one has passed away – they are, after all, eternal truths – but there is nothing personal about them. The rewards or benefits such knowledge brings are for this world, not some alleged world-to-come

The more one knows about Nature, and especially about oneself as a human being, the more one is able to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to navigate the obstacles to happiness and wellbeing that a person living in Nature necessarily faces. The result of such wisdom is peace of mind: one is less subject to the emotional extremes that ordinarily accompany the gains and losses that life inevitably brings, and one no longer dwells anxiously on what is to come after death. As Spinoza eloquently puts it, ‘the free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’

Even in the depths of his anguish, and even though he is now convinced that God does not enforce a l moral law in the universe, Job clings to one value: righteousness is a virtue in and of itself, and even if it brings no reward Job will not give up his righteousness. Face to face with the shocking insight that good and evil are met with indifference by God, that righteousness brings no reward and wickedness no punishment, Job although bitter, refuses to succumb to a moral nihilism

So in his darkest, most bitter hour with all hope of reward gone, Job clings to the one thing he has - his own righteousness. In fact, when all hope of just reward is gone then righteousness becomes an intrinsic value. Yehezkel Kaufman writes of this moment, "the poet raises Job to the bleak summit of righteousness bereft of hope, bereft of faith in divine justice". Or in the words of another scholar, Moshe Greenberg, "we see here… the sheer heroism of a naked man, forsaken by his God and his friends and bereft of a clue to understand his suffering, still maintaining faith in the value of his virtue and in the absolute duty of man to be virtuous. The universe has turned its back on him. We may add he believes God has turned his back on him - yet Job persists in the affirmation of his own worth and the transcendent worth of unrewarded good." Job ultimately remains firm in his moral character, clinging to righteousness because of its intrinsic value and not because it will be rewarded. Indeed, Job knows bitterly that it will not

. . .

Elihu repeats many of the trite assertions of Job's friends. He does hint, however, that not all suffering is punitive. He also hints that contemplation of nature's elements can open the mind to a new awareness of God and in these two respects, Elihu's speech moves us towards God's answer from the storm

One wonders what the purpose of all these rhetorical questions posed by God in his theophany to Job is. One senses that they are irrelevant. Job has posed some very specific challenges to God. Why am I suffering? Is there a pattern to existence? Is God's refusal to answer these challenges a way of saying there is no answer? Or is it God's way of saying that justice is beyond human understanding?

Or maybe this theophany of God in nature and the focus on creation, is an implicit assault on the fundamental tenant of Israelite religion: that God is known and made manifest through his interactions with humans, his rewards and punishments in historical time. You'll recall that the monotheistic revolution is generally understood to have effected a break from mythological conceptions of the gods as indistinguishable from various natural forces, limited by meta-divine powers and forces of the cosmos. The biblical God wasn't another Ancient Near Eastern or Canaanite nature God ultimately, but a wholly transcendent power - He was figured this way in many parts of the Bible - known not through the involuntary and recurring cycles of nature but through His freely willed and non-repeating actions in historical time

Such a view of God underwrites the whole system of divine retributive justice. Only an essentially good God who transcends and is unconstrained by mechanistic natural forces can establish and administer a system of retributive justice, dealing out punishment and reward in response to the actions of humans in time. Is the author of Job suggesting that history and the events that befall the just and the unjust are not the medium of revelation? Is God a god of nature after all, encountered in the repeating cycles of the natural world and not in the unpredictable and incoherent arena of human history and action?

God, I think, is now getting at the heart of the matter: your friends Job were wrong, they condemned you. They attributed sin to you, so that they might be right. But you, too, have been wrong condemning Me, attributing wickedness to Me so that you might be right. Job's friends erred because they assumed that there's a system of retributive justice at work in the world and that assumption led them to infer that all who suffer are sinful, and that's a blatant falsehood. But Job also errs: if he assumes that although there isn't a system of retributive justice, there really ought to be one. It's that assumption that leads him to infer that suffering is a sign of an indifferent or wicked God, and that is equally a falsehood. Job needs to move beyond the anthropocentrism that characterizes the rest of Scripture and the Genesis 1 account of creation, according to which humankind is the goal of the entire process of creation. God's creation, the Book of Job seems to suggest, defies such teleological and rational categories. In a nutshell, God refuses to be seen as a moral accountant. The idea of God as a moral accountant is responsible for two major errors: the interpretation of suffering as an indicator of sin, or the ascription of injustice to God

In his final speech, Job confesses to a new firsthand knowledge of God he lacked before, and as a result of this knowledge Job repents. What is he repenting of? Certainly not of sin; God has not upheld the accusations against Job. Indeed he states explicitly that the friends were wrong to say he had sinned. But he has indicated that guilt and innocence, reward and punishment are not what the game is all about, and while Job had long been disabused of the notion that the wicked and the righteous actually get what they deserve, he nevertheless had clung to the idea that ideally they should. And it's that mistaken idea - the idea that led him to ascribe wickedness to God - that Job now recants. With this new understanding of God, Job is liberated from what he would now see as a false expectation raised by the Deuteronomistic notion of a covenant relationship between God and humankind, enforced by a system of divine justice. At the end of the story Job is fully restored to his fortunes. God asserts he did no evil and the conventional, impeccably Deuteronomistic view of the three friends is clearly denounced by God

For some, the happy ending seems anticlimactic, a capitulation to the demand for a happy ending of just desserts that runs counter to the whole thrust of the book, and yet in a way I think the ending is superbly fitting. It's the last in a series of reversals that subverts our expectations. Suffering comes inexplicably, so does restoration; blessed be the name of the Lord. God doesn't attempt to justify or explain Job's suffering and yet somehow by the end of the book, our grumbling, embittered, raging Job is satisfied. Perhaps he's realized that an automatic principle of reward and punishment would make it impossible for humans to do the good for purely disinterested motives. It's precisely when righteousness is seen to be absurd and meaningless that the choice to be righteous paradoxically becomes meaningful

God and Job, however we are to interpret their speeches, are reconciled. The suffering and injustice that characterize the world have baffled humankind for millennia. And the Book of Job provides no answer in the sense of an explanation or a justification of suffering and injustice, but what it does offer is a stern warning to avoid the Scylla of blaspheming against the victims by assuming their wickedness, and the Charybdis of blaspheming against God by assuming his. Nor is moral nihilism an option, as our hero, yearning for, but ultimately renouncing divine order and justice, clings to his integrity and chooses virtue for nothing

Having studied Job, we've seen that the Bible is not a book with a single uniform style and message. It's an anthology of diverse works that may have different, conflicting points of view. So the conventional religious piety of Proverbs, the firm belief in a system of divine reward and punishment, that's so important to the Deuteronomist - this is challenged by the Book of Job. Job concludes that there is no justice - not in this world, not in any other world. Nevertheless, Job feels that he is not excused from the task of righteous living

And it's a wonderful and fortuitous fact of history that Jewish sages chose to include all of these dissonant voices in the canon of the Hebrew Bible without, for the most part, striving to reconcile the conflicts

Careful exegesis of the biblical text requires you to set aside your presuppositions and to attend to the many, complex and often conflicting details of the text

Some of the other presuppositions that you need to set aside are, as I hope you've seen by now, that the Bible is not a set of stories about saints or pious people who always say and do what is right or exemplary. Even the Bible's heroes are human, they're not superhuman. Their behavior can be confused, it can be immoral; and if we try to vindicate biblical characters merely because their names appear in the Bible, we can miss the moral dilemma that's being set out by the writer. We can miss the psychological complexity of the stories

Secondly, remember that the Bible isn't a manual of religion. It's not a book of systematic theology. It doesn't set out certain dogmas about God, and you need to be careful not to impose upon the Bible, theological ideas and beliefs that arose centuries after the bulk of the Bible was written. For example, a belief in a heaven and a hell as a system of reward or punishment, or the belief in a God that doesn't change his mind. The character “God” in the Bible changes his mind; it's just a fact of the text

If we wish to understand the Bible on its own terms and in its own context, then we have to be prepared to find ideas in it that may conflict with later theological notions that we hold dear. Don't assume you're going to agree with the Bible. Don't assume that the Bible will agree with itself

The Bible can be seen also as an anthology that struggles against great odds to sustain a peoples' covenantal relationship with God. The contrast between reality and the religious-moral ideal that good prospers and evil is defeated was a distressing and perplexing problem that occupied the biblical writers. The existence of evil, the suffering of the righteous, the defeat of God's chosen, all this seemed basically incompatible with certain fundamental monotheistic intuitions; that God holds supreme power in the universe, that God is essentially good and just, and his providential care extends throughout creation. How can faith in such a God be upheld in the face of evil and suffering?

Although, all ancient - and modern - cultures struggle with the problem of evil, it had particular poignancy for ancient Israel. In other Ancient Near Eastern literatures, we find doubt about the existence of a moral order, certainly. But only in Israel does the question of evil touch on the very essence of God and the very foundation of religious faith. Paganism posits the existence of primordial evil demons or gods, and thus the existence of evil and suffering does not impugn the good gods themselves. Later religious systems that grow out of the Bible will in fact increasingly posit demons or a devil. Second Temple Judaism, later-rabbinic Judaism, and most especially Christianity, will posit some devil to account for evil in the world. Undeserved suffering, outrageous and frustrating as it might be, can then be explained at least by the jealousy or the caprice of the evil angels or gods or the demons or devil, who are indifferent to man's fate. But in biblical religion there is no independent evil principal. And so, undeserved suffering and rampant evil impugn the goodness and justice of God himself. Biblical persons have no refuge from evil and suffering other than faith in God's justice. And if that justice is slow in coming, then despair and doubt threaten

For this reason, Israelite theodicy, I think, is charged with great pathos because the stakes are so high. If one loses faith in an essentially moral universe, one loses God. Or at least as we saw in the Book of Job, one loses a God who governs the world according to a clear moral standard

But the biblical writers don't approach the problem as philosophers or theologians might. For the philosopher, theodicy, the problem of evil is primarily a logical problem, it's a contradiction. How can a just and good God allow evil and suffering to exist in the world? And like any other logical problem, it's best solved - according to the philosophers and theologians - through the careful construction of a systematic argument. This is not the method or the approach of the biblical writers. For them, the problem is not philosophical; it is personal, it is psychological, it is spiritual. The burning question is really this, how can one sustain a commitment to Israel's God in the face of national catastrophe and personal suffering? How can one have the strength to embrace, to trust, to love this God knowing that unpredictable suffering and chaos have struck and may again strike at any moment?

And various writers from various periods add their voices to Israel's struggle to come to terms with the problem of sustaining faith in the midst of evil and suffering. The Bible's aim is not to solve the philosophical problem of theodicy, so much as it is to enable the relationship with God to survive all shocks, to make life in covenant with God a viable option, despite the evil and the suffering that are experienced by the faithful. The Bible doesn't offer one single model of how to cope with this problem. A dynamic relationship with what is perceived to be a living personal God rather than the static God of the philosophers, is too complex to be captured in a single dimensional theology. Systematic theology could not do justice to the variegated experiences of the nation and of an individual life and that's not the mode or genre chosen by the biblical writers. And so various models are presented, not all consistent with one another, but each serving a particular segment of the community coping with a particular challenge at a particular time. Each is an attempt to sustain Israel's relationship with God in the face of challenges to that continued relationship

Biblical writers tell stories and they interpret history in order to illustrate the many ways in which various individuals and the nation as a whole, have managed to make sense of the covenantal relationship with God. There's room for multiple models, multiple images of God and his relationship to Israel. And as modern readers of the Bible, we can only marvel at this unresolved polyphony in this ancient anthology. It's as if the rabbis who were later to canonize this collection saw the truth in the words of Qohelet, that to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. And so they included books with very different approaches to the fundamental problems that face the ancient Israelites as Israelites and as human beings

So after 586 BCE the Deuteronomist salvaged Yahwism from going the way of other defeated national religions by arguing that Israel had suffered not because God's promises weren't true but because they weren't believed. And this enabled the Israelites to continue faithful to their God, despite the destruction of his sanctuary, his chosen city and his ruler. The prophets emphasized the moral and communal aspects of the covenant without which all sacrificial worship was anathema. And so they unwittingly prepared the way for a worship without sacrifice in the Diaspora, and in later Judaism. The Psalms give expression to the deepest emotions of the worshiper struggling with personal despair and anger or brimming over with joy and faith. Job gives vent to the outrage we feel over unjust suffering, while Ecclesiastes preaches existential pleasures as a solace for the vanity of all human endeavor. Ezra and Nehemiah confront the very real problem of assimilation and identity with a call to Israel to close ranks, while Jonah and Ruth remind Jews of the universal providence of their God and the power of repentance. Esther and Daniel provide encouragement of radically different types for Jews under threat of persecution and massacre - one a plea for self-reliance and solidarity, and the other, a promise of divine intervention in an apocalypse

Do all these books contradict each other? No more than I contradict myself when I say that today I feel happy, but yesterday I felt anxious. Israel's relationship with God has always been a dynamic and a complex one. To each of these books there was a time and a purpose in the past, and as countless readers of the Bible have discovered over the centuries, these books offer continued teaching and inspiration in the shifting moments of every age