Day 66
What Does Judaism Say about Theodicy?
In loving memory of our grandparents and great grandparents. Michelle & Bradley together with Simone, Alison & Jonathan Mervish.
The term “theodicy” comes from the Greek words for “God” and “justice” and literally means “justifying God.” In contemporary philosophy and theology, the term “theodicy” is used to describe attempts to “justify” God, as it were, in the face of the existence of evil and suffering in the world. This conundrum, usually referred to as “the problem of evil,” commonly takes the following form in the Western philosophical tradition: how can evil exist if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good?
The distinguished contemporary philosopher Eleonore Stump, has persuasively argued that it is preferable to refer to the problem of suffering rather than the problem of evil; after all, if bad things happened in the world, but people did not suffer as a result, it would bother us much less.
Tisha Be-Av, as the prophet Zechariah assures us, will one day be transformed from the darkest moment in the Jewish calendar to a time of joy. In the meantime, we recall on Tisha Be-Av the destruction of the two Temples and other great tragedies in our history which have brought great suffering in their wake. How does our tradition understand suffering and reconcile its undoubted existence, pervasiveness, and (something that particularly bothered Chazal) its apparently unjust distribution (tzadik ve-ra lo, rasha ve-tov lo – the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper) with our belief in a wholly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God?
