How Judaism approaches pain and suffering

The hardest moments that any rabbi or religious figure have to deal with tend to relate to pain, grief and suffering of innocent people. Sometimes this can involve otherwise less-religious people who are trying to make some sort of sense of their devastating difficulties, but for many religious people too, witnessing such inexplicable suffering at close hand can present a significant challenge to their faith.

What range of responses does Judaism offer to people who find themselves in such an unfortunate situation – or to rabbis who are approached to advise them?

Perhaps the most important words of wisdom that Jewish tradition has for rabbis – and indeed anyone who finds themselves in a position of providing support – are taught in Pirkei Avot (4:23):

Rabbi Shimon ben (son of) Elazar said, do not appease your fellow at the time of his anger, do not console him at the time his dead lies before him…

A person’s profound suffering will sometimes express itself in the form of theological questions: “why is this happening?” “why is God doing this to me?”. Those numb with grief are unlikely to be genuinely seeking a deep philosophical response, and their minds are typically not settled enough to appreciate such a response anyway. At a particularly tragic shiva I attended a couple of years ago, the parents of the deceased stared blankly across the room – clearly uninterested in engaging any of the visitors in conversation. After what seemed like an interminable awkward silence, another family member told the gathered crowd that their very presence was providing support and comfort for the mourners – even if no words, conversation or advice were being sought.

While knowing when to remain silent and avoid theological discourses is certainly important, Judaism certainly does contain an interesting range of responses to why the innocent suffer. The closing section of Judaism Reclaimed’s chapter relating to parashat Vayeshev focuses primarily on Rambam’s approach to explaining human suffering in Moreh Nevuchim.

Rather than trying to explain and justify individual cases of suffering, Rambam seeks to provide a broader perspective on why an all-powerful perfect deity should have constructed a world which contains so much suffering and pain. His answer presents three primary categories of suffering experienced by humanity, all of which are necessary components of creation.

The first category is caused by the inevitable disintegration of all aspects of physicality. Only God and spiritual entities can be unchanging and eternal. Humanity’s purpose is to transcend mortal physicality, and for people to develop their souls in order to earn the eternity of the World to Come. Our physicality, indispensable to this fundamental purpose, automatically makes us subject both to mortality and to the illnesses generated by the process of decay, a natural consequence of the body’s temporal physical existence. Natural disasters are also included in this category, these being the inevitable result of the dynamic nature of the cycle of growth and decay which characterises the physical world.

According to this approach, God’s plan required a world which could operate by itself through perpetual, dynamic and self-regulating rules of nature. Humans, the sole bearers of the ‘tzelem Elokim’ divine intellect, possess the ability to transcend this mundane physicality by connecting to the metaphysical divine, thereby attracting hashgachah (divine providence) and the prospect of entering the World to Come.

[As an aside, Rambam’s proposition that illness and natural disasters are the result of a necessary process of decay is developed on the basis of modern scientific understanding by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (The Great Partnership p 244). Rabbi Sacks finds support for this understanding from the dynamic conditions necessary for the emergence and evolution of life.]

The second category consists of the evil that humans are capable of inflicting on one another through the operation of their free will. Allowing free will to function is of fundamental importance to the purpose of the world, therefore God will rarely interfere with it.

Finally, Rambam considers that the most prevalent form of suffering in the world is self-inflicted through the choice of unwise and imbalanced conduct such as the pursuit of unhealthy lifestyles. Lack of control over one's desires for worldly pleasures not only has a negative impact on the intellect but can also lead a person towards illness and hardship

Rambam’s explanation certainly does not cover and explain all instances of suffering, and may well be too cold and detached to comfort many people. A more common approach to coping with grief and difficulty in this world seeks to place it in a wider perspective of the function and purpose which Jewish tradition attaches to our lives. As another Mishnah in Avot (4:16) teaches:

Rabbi Yaakov said: this world is like a corridor before the World to Come; prepare yourself in the corridor, so that you may enter the banqueting-hall.

The most far-reaching version of this approach explains suffering of innocents in terms of gilgulim, and each soul having its own specific mission and rectification that it needs to achieve. As someone put it to me earlier today, this is “surely the correct approach within Judaism as it is the only way to explain such suffering”. For those whose Judaism includes belief in gilgulim, this is probably correct. Its place within Jewish thought has been strongly challenged however by great figures such as Rav Sa’adiah Gaon, and it is notably absent from biblical passages – such as Job and Habbakuk – which address the suffering of innocents.

One final dimension to suffering of innocents emerges from a debate between Rabbi Akiva and Turnus Rufus, the Roman governor of Judaea. Turnus Rufus confronts Rabbi Akiva with the question: “If your God loves the poor so much why doesn’t He feed them?” Rabbi Akiva’s profound response is that it is of course within God’s power to feed the poor. But, in a perfect world which contains neither suffering nor poverty, there would be no real opportunity for humans to perform acts of kindness.

Reflecting further upon Rabbi Akiva’s response, one can ask which other forms of suffering it can be extended to cover. In a world in which there were no poor, suffering or sick people, what opportunities would there be for individuals to empathise with others and demonstrate the sort of self-sacrifice which really sets apart the greatest among us.

The Ramban, at the start of his commentary on the akeida, explains the concept of nisayon (a divine test): that God will sometimes test us in order to draw out the latent potential within us and thereby improve our character. But how far can such an argument be taken? There were certainly many Holocaust heroes including Raul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler and many righteous people who risked their lives to protect others that they did not know. Had it not been for the Holocaust would these people still have pushed themselves to become great? Yet I’m not sure anyone would agree that the Holocaust was justified in order to produce such heroes.

While this approach may seem insufficient in its own right, taken in combination with some of the other ideas contained in this post, it may be able to provide a degree of comfort to those who are suffering (personally or their loved ones).

Ultimately, we cannot expect to fully understand or explain such events. One thing that we can take from the experiences of Ya’akov and Yosef in these parshiyot, is that years of painful and apparently pointless suffering can sometimes be part of a bigger picture and project that we are not aware of at the time.

The true prophetic response may therefore be contained in the words of Isaiah:

For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts [higher] than your thoughts.

First posted to Facebook 28 November 2021, here.

Shemot: a theological perspective on the Holocaust and Anti-semitism

The chapter of Judaism Reclaimed that relates to parashat Shemot develops an approach to an extremely sensitive area of Jewish theology: the attempt to place anti-semitic hatred and violence – and the devastation of the Holocaust – in a theological context.

Much ink has been spilled by Rabbis and scholars far greater than I on this difficult topic. In the Modern Orthodox world, Rabbis Eliezer Berkovits and Jonathan Sacks have attempted to shift the focus from God to mankind. Since God’s plan for the world requires the unfettered functioning of human free will, the argument goes, His modus operandi involves the provision of moral and spiritual guidance rather than micro-managing human affairs. Accordingly, the real question that should be asked is not “where was God during the Holocaust”, rather “where was man”? While I find this approach attractive, and adopt it more generally in my chapters concerning providence and free will (see recent post on parashat Vayeshev), it does not seem sufficient when dealing with a tragedy of such magnitude inflicted upon the entire Jewish nation. Nor does it strike me as consistent with the Torah’s attitude to significant national events. Other Rabbis have adopted a perhaps more traditional approach which sees the Holocaust as heavenly punishment for sins. This understanding is also open to fundamental questions: as many such as Primo Levi have pointed out, an assessment of victims and survivors does not appear to reveal any obvious punishment-for-sin pattern.

Judaism Reclaimed seeks to place the Holocaust, as well as the broader phenomenon of antisemitism, in a biblical context starting with the first episode of brutal national enslavement and suffering for 210 years in Egypt. Our search for a theological explanation for this bitter servitude takes us back to the brit bein habetarim. This covenant, when the enslavement was first disclosed by God, links the suffering to the concept of a “chosen nation” and the role which God intended it to fulfil. In the conversation that takes place at the time of the covenant, Avraham asks God, “Bemah eida?”: “How can I know that my descendants will be worthy of inheriting the land? That they will fulfil the daunting task of standing apart from the other nations of the world as a leading light?” God responds that Avraham’s descendants will be enslaved in a strange land. The clear implication is that this suffering holds the key to their ability to succeed as the chosen nation.

We note historical precedents for the notion that collective suffering can forge a cast-iron collective identity, and cite Rav Soloveitchik’s suggestion, in Kol Dodi Dofek, that the Jews’ experiences in the ‘’crucible’’ of Egypt formed an intense unity (or Fate Covenant) and separation from other nations. This role of the Egyptian servitude in establishing an independent Jewish identity is underscored both by the Torah’s account (which repeatedly emphasises how the plagues will distinguish Jew from Egyptian) and copious Midrashic commentary as to both the extent of this separation, and as to how it was in the merit of Jewish identity (represented by the retention of names, clothing and language) that the Jews were redeemed. This theme is followed through to the symbolism of the carefully orchestrated commandments relating to the redemption, as the emerging nation approached the daunting challenge of succeeding as a lone island of monotheism surrounded by a raging sea of paganism.

In his Beit HaLevi, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik draws upon some of these ideas as part of his analysis of antisemitism, a seemingly illogical phenomenon which has accompanied Jews around the world throughout the centuries. Initially, he is startled by a verse from Tehillimwhich includes Egyptian oppression among the acts of kindness that God performed for the Jewish People. He then notes midrashim that connect the start of the oppression to the Jews’ attempts to conceal their Jewish identity. His great-grandson and namesake, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, elaborates on a similar theme, that a history of persecution and martyrdom has had the effect of hardening attitudes toward any form of assimilation which could challenge the distinct identity and values of the Jewish People.

According to this approach, the key to understanding both the suffering in Egypt and continued antisemitism through the ages is to view them not as a punishment but rather as God’s tool to ensure that His promise to Avraham at the brit bein habetarim would be observed. It is only as a result of unabated antisemitism, particularly severe at times of heightened assimilation, that the Jews have survived as the chosen nation, retaining the ability to carry out their holy and extremely challenging mission. This idea is given full expression in Radak’s commentary to a passage in Yechezkel in which the prophet describes God’s refusal to countenance Jewish attempts to assimilate among the nations:

But when they disobey My commands, I will strengthen the nations against them… Israel, whom I took out from the house of slavery to be my treasured nation etc., and to them a God, My eyes will be constantly on them for good and bad, as it states in the prophecy of Amos: “Only you have I known from all of the families of the world, therefore I will be attentive to all of your sins.” And if you wish to depart from My worship, I will not grant permission for this. Even though you will be many years in exile, you will never cease to be a nation before me…and with force I will reign over you, and will purify you…

Rav Meir Simchah of Dvinsk, in his Meshech Chochmah, makes a similar connection between antisemitism and the preservation of Jewish identity. Writing in the 1920s, he concludes with an ominous warning: that the assimilation of European Jewry and attitudes such as “Berlin is the new Jerusalem” would necessarily lead to a “storm” against the Jews that would serve to preserve Jewish national identity. This dark prediction was based upon his answer to the fundamental question of where God was during the brutal Egyptian servitude. The response, it would appear, is located within God’s covenant to Avraham at the brit bein habetarim.

I would like to make it clear that this post is not intended to trivialise or belittle the indescribable suffering of the Holocaust, accounts of which are prone to reduce me to a flood of tears. Nor am I fully comfortable and at peace with the conclusion that it reaches. My agenda here is merely to share my exploration of biblical and rabbinic texts for a perspective on the devastation of the Holocaust which I find theologically convincing.

First posted on Facebook 15 January 2020, here.

Grappling with suffering: will evil "evaporate like smoke?"

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.

In one of the later chapters of this book, Lebens looks to break new ground in theodicy – the old question of how to reconcile the religious notion of a good and loving God with the widespread evil and suffering that is very evident in this world. Having discussed why, in his view, traditional solutions to the question of theodicy fall short, Lebens proposes a radical new theory (developed along with Tyron Goldschmidt), built upon the premise that God’s omnipotence grants Him power to change the past: 

“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.