As I stood meditating over the Yom Kippur Amidah this week I was struck by the phrase “and all wickedness will evaporate like smoke when you remove the dominion of evil from upon the world”. These words were cited in A Guide for the Jewish Undecided a recent fascinating and thought-provoking analysis of the parameters of Orthodox theology by Rabbi Professor Sam Lebens.
“Imagine that God gives us free will, and then, so to speak, He says, like a film director, “Take 1”. Then we live our lives. We do some good and we do some bad. All of it is of our own creation. At the end of time, God says, “Cut”. Imagine that scenes 1 and 3 are fantastic, but that scene 2 is horrific. Well then, wouldn’t God simply edit the film and cut out scene 2, because, even after the scene has happened, God can change the past? Admittedly, this would leave a gap in the history of the world. But then God can say “Scene 2, Take 2”. We’d then get another shot at linking scenes 1 and 3 together.”
While I totally identify with and embrace the motives which underpin this theory – an absolute refusal to countenance any trace of evil or suffering to be ultimately caused by a benevolent God – the practicalities of what is proposed are mindboggling. I recall a favourite film from my youth, A Matter of Life and Death, in which a celestial mishap causes a jettisoning World War II airman to be missed by the grim reaper. By the time this mistake is registered, the airman has fallen in love with a local lady and the notion of extracting him from history without upsetting other divine calculations becomes incalculably complex. With this in mind, the proposition that God could edit scenes without irreparably ruining the whole script of human history is hard to imagine. Placed on top of this, Jewish tradition often acknowledges crucial benefits which are gained from certain instances of suffering; as Judaism Reclaimed explores, the “iron crucible” of Egyptian servitude and other such episodes of Anti Semitism may be credited with the continuation of the Jewish people itself.
While Lebens certainly recognises and proposes fixes for some of these objections, my personal feeling is that he is too quick to dismiss the “free-will” model, in which God is understood to have created a world in which the primary purpose is the free-functioning of human free will. Success, righteousness and heroism is only meaningful – and perhaps even possible – in a setting which allows for the genuine possibility of failure and evil.Objecting to this model, Lebens quotes an atheist philosopher, Stephen Maitzen, who argues that:
“To put it mildly, there is something less than perfect about letting a child suffer terrible for the primary benefit of someone else – whether for the benefit of a bystander who gets a hero’s chance to intervene, or for the benefit of a child-abuser who gets to exercise unchecked free will.”
Yet isolating this single incident presents us with a severely skewed set of scales. It is not only the bystander or abuser who can potentially gain from the existence of free will. It is every single human being alive; every person who has ever lived and will ever live – including the victim of the offense under consideration. All of their lives, according to Jewish theodicy as I understand it only stand to hold any meaning if humans are free-choosing creatures – who can reliably trust that the fruits of their pursuits will not be interfered . Once we add into the mix the notion of a World to Come with the prospects of unfathomable reward and punishment, we cannot possibly even know how to set the scales to weigh up humanity’s free will with the very real suffering of such victims. (How this may fit with the notion of Divine Providence has been addressed in a previous post).
Revisiting the evaporating cloud metaphor, perhaps a more apt interpretation would be to compare it to how the same phrase is used at the end of the Netaneh Tokef where humanity’s fragile and mortal existence is said, among other things, to be like “dissipating smoke”. This to my mind does not mean that our existence will one day be retroactively erased, rather it implies that our lives are brief and insignificant when compared to God’s everlasting existence.
The same notion can be applied to what I understand to be Jewish theodicy’s approach to evil. It is real, it is truly awful – and therefore it is something to be fought with all our might and all of our resources. But were we in a position to fathom and appreciate the rewards and pleasures of the World to Come which our tradition states are even beyond the comprehension of our prophets – such evil would be “like an evaporating cloud”.
On a related note, while we rightly protest and pray to God for His assistance in overcoming the forces of wickedness who take cruel pleasure in oppressing and tormenting others, Rambam emphasises in Moreh Nevuchim that the predominant cause of evil is humanity’s own doing. Collectively we must work unceasingly to educate and inspire; to use God’s great gift to humanity of free will to bring about the Messianic era in which:
Through awareness of the truth, enmity and hatred are removed and the inflicting of harm by people on one another is abolished. It [Tanach] holds out this promise, saying “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb…”. Then it gives the reason for this, saying that the cause of the abolition of these enmities, these discords and these tyrannies, will be humanity’s knowledge of God… [Moreh, 3:31]
The primary and perhaps exclusive causes of warfare and misery are obsession with and competition over material possessions, power and pride. Once humanity becomes aware of this folly, its energies and capabilities will be channelled towards achieving universal happiness, thus “they will beat their swords into ploughshares…” and “your sons and daughters will prophesy”. When God’s teachings will reign supreme and “the dominion of evil will be removed from the world”.
First posted to Facebook 26 September 2023, here.
