Miserable Comforters

Last night I had a conversation with my mother about the Book of Job, which is not easy to understand even for professional Bible types. Her question was, "If Judaism doesn't believe in a Devil (which it doesn't), then who is this Satan that God talks to and gets into competition with?"

According to the great Jewish Biblical commentator Rashi, the Satan of Job is properly called the Adversary, an angel tasked by God to accuse the people before the Divine Court. What that means to me is that, in Job, when God says to the Satan "Have you considered my servant Job?", He is opening the door to an examination of Job's soul to its depths. So it's not so much a competition between God and Satan, it's more of a project of God's to see if Job is really as righteous as he seems.

This led to a conversation regarding the nature of God, and my mother's difficulties with belief in Him. Like many people before her, she asks, "How can we believe in a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving and all-wise, and yet permits the kinds of horrors we read about in the paper every day? As with Job, why would a God of that description permit such suffering to be visited upon those who haven't done anything wrong, like all the children who died in the tsunami?"

The classical answer to that is: If the world were a safe place and the innocent never suffered, then we would have certain knowledge of God's supreme goodness. If we had such knowledge, evil would have no allure whatsoever - we would choose God all the time. If that were the case, then free will would be meaningless, a mere theoretical ability but one that was never exercised. And if free will were meaningless, then when we died and went to Heaven and received the incomprehensible reward that's waiting for us there, we would always know that we had received that reward through no effort of our own, and our pleasure would be the less. God has therefore created a world in which we seem, at least, to have a genuine choice between good and evil.

And that, presumably, is why we are confronted with scummy behavior like this from time to time. The question is not so much "Why does God permit evil?" but rather "What is my response to it going to be?"

Is this comforting or satisfactory? Not really. It makes sense to me, though, so I for one am willing to live with the discomfort. And, as Robert Heinlein of all people once said, sooner or later you will know, so why worry about it now?

Benshlomo says, May God sustain you when the world presses down so hard.