Parshat Shemini

Parshat Shemini

Rabbi Daniel Levitt

There’s a lot of scary stuff happening in the world and to the Jewish people these days.  Political unrest, War, bombs at busstops in Israel, the return of rocket attacks against the Israeli civilian population, gruesome murders of children, natural disasters, threat of impending nuclear disasters, the list goes on and on.  I can’t recall so much happening in such a short period of time ever before in my lifetime.  

I used to get in the car and turn on the radio to listen to music, but recently I have been switching my radio to news instead.  I’m sure that most, if not all, of us have been affected in one way or another by the realities we are hearing about on a daily basis.  It’s scary.  Times like these prompt many of us ask where God is in all of this.  It is not uncommon when faced with overwhelming tragedies for the human person to wonder about God’s involvement in the world.  This is the classic philosophical question known as theodicy.  This problem was summed up by the English philosopher David Hume: "Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but unable? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then where does the evil we see come from?"

Many people take this problem as proof that there is no God; or if there is a God, it is either a God that doesn’t care, isn’t involved in the world, or is powerless to stop Evil.  The great Jewish sage Nachmanides highlights this saying, that the problem of evil is "the most difficult matter which is at the root both of faith and of apostasy, with which scholars of all ages, people and tongues have struggled."  So how do we as Jews deal with this problem of faith?

Full disclosure: For a number of reasons, this is a REALLY difficult problem to address adequately in general, especially from the pulpit.  Judaism doesn’t have a single answer, the Talmud has a number of conflicting stories and approaches which can confuse and frustrate us sometimes.  My goal is to provide a glimpse into the way our tradition has dealt with these realities, because they are so prevalent in our minds these days.  But, as the prophet Isaiah says: “because your thoughts are not our thoughts and your ways are not our ways.”  We are not God, we will never be able to see the world from God’s perspective, so we can never know for sure.  It is a sad reality, but something we all have to deal with that one way or another in order to maintain faith. 

The first Jewish obvious source to deal outright with suffering is the book of Job.  In the beginning of the story we are introduced to Job, a righteous man who was very well off.  At the urging of the Satan, God tests Job and makes him suffer terribly.  The majority of the book is the conversation between Job and his friends who help him try to make sense of the tragedies that have befallen him.  His first three friends that come to visit him and try to make sense of what has happened, place the blame on Job, their argument is that it is impossible for God to make Job suffer if he didn’t deserve it in some way.  According to this perspective, suffering must be punishment of some kind. 

Afterwards, another friend enters the story, Elihu.   He tells Job that we don’t know why he is suffering but he should know that there is justice.  God is all merciful and all wise and therefore even if we can’t see it, there is an adequate answer out there if we could only find the correct perspective.  This is sometimes called the Tapestry theory.  Meaning, that a tapestry when viewed from the correct perspective is seen as a work of art, but if you were to see the tapestry from the back it would just look like a chaotic mix of strings.  Elihu’s opinion is saying that the perspective of the sufferer is like a person seeing the wrong side of the tapestry and that we have to have faith that if we would see it from the correct perspective we would understand.  But Job is not comforted by any of his friends, so at the end of the book God speaks and then only then does Job accept his fate.  I will leave a discussion of the content of what God said for a later point. 

It would go way beyond the scope of this sermon to adequately cover all the different ways in which the Talmud handles these issues, but I will highlight a few points that I think are useful for the point I want to make.

There is a story in Talmud in tractate brachot (ה.-ה:) which is thematically similar to Job’s experience.  Job experienced suffering and went about trying to figure out why he was suffering. The Talmud says that if a person experiences suffering he should scrutinize his deeds.  If he does that and can’t find any faults, then he should attribute the suffering to a neglect of torah study.  If that also doesn’t apply to the individual, then you know that it is a suffering of love. 

What you may ask is a suffering of love?  Rashi explains to us that sometimes God makes the righteous suffer in this life even though they have not sinned in order for them to merit greater reward in the afterlife.  This Talmudic approach is a decent way to deal with the problem intellectually.  The Talmud here is giving us an explanation of what the proper perspective from which to view suffering, which elaborates on what Elihu was trying to teach Job.

 But emotionally, we are still left without any clue about how to interpret our suffering when we actually experience it or how to deal with suffering on a national or global level.  As I mentioned, there are many other sources which deal with suffering in the Talmud, but there isn’t one Jewish answer to the problem found in the Talmud because many of the passages in the Talmud even conflict with each other. 

We have passages in the Talmud which state that we must believe that God rewards those for their deeds and punishes for sins.  Then we have statements that say health, life and wealth don’t depend on merit, but rather on luck.  If we had the time I could show you passage after passage in the Talmud that seem to offer conflicting approaches to this problem.   The bottom line is that there isn’t one answer; it is difficult for us to know.  

There are a number of possible approaches to explain away the problem of theodicy, but there isn’t one absolute answer.  The advantage to Judaism’s lack of a clear answer to this problem is that there is room for a number of perspectives.  This is so necessary when the question of Theodicy pushes so many people to the extremes of their acceptance of God.  We can incorporate a number of approaches on how to deal with this problem.  There is room for us to find an approach which gives us comfort even if it is not the same approach as the next person.

Whether we find an adequate answer to this theological problem or not, I believe that there is still an important religious lesson in this issue.  I think that this approach is hinted at in this week’s parsha.

In this week’s parsha there is the story of the death of Aaron’s two eldest son’s, Nadav and Avihu.  Their death was, according to most commentators, a punishment for the infraction of bringing a foreign fire in front of the lord.  The Torah is unclear what the infraction really was or why it incurred such a harsh punishment.  What we do know is that losing his two oldest sons must have been traumatic to Aaron.  How does Aaron deal with his suffering?  We don’t really know, because the Torah says Aaron fell silent.  Aaron deals with it, it is difficult, no question about that.  But when faced his own personal suffering, the Torah seems to be showing us that Aaron accepts it.  In reward for this, Rashi tells us that he merited for God to address him personally a few verses later.

There is room to question, we are permitted to go through the intellectual excercises of trying to figure these things out.  This is one reason that the book of Job makes it into the Jewish canon, the desire to figure out this question is real.   But, sometimes we have to accept the will of God too, we aren’t God so we can’t always know the answer. 

Going back to the book of Job, God goes on in detail, with very poetic language, for 4 chapters explaining to Job that there is no way for Mankind to ever totally understand the ways of God.  The verse acknowledges the confusion this leaves us in when it says that God begins his response to Job out of the whirlwind.  Our confusion is acknowledged, but God doesn’t try to minimize the confusion, he instructs us to accept it.  We can spend lots of time and mental energy trying to figure out these important questions, but in the end we’ll never really know. 

So where does that leave us?  What do we do with that?  How are you or I supposed to grapple with our emotions and our faith in the face of all the tragedies going on around the world in general and in Israel in particular?

In his book “Fate and Destiny,” the great teacher and inspiration to the Modern Orthodox world, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik provides us with some worthwhile advice.  Rabbi Soloveitchik differentiates between the person whose attitude about life is to be a victim of fate, verses the person whose attitude is to choose to be the master of their own destiny.  When faced with tragedy the person of fate will be stuck in question of why does this happen, they are stuck in a never ending desire to understand the fate that they are subjected to.  But the person who is master of their own destiny doesn’t get stuck in the why of what has occurred to them.  The reason is irrelevant to the person who is focused on carving out their own destiny.  For that person, the relevant question is what now.  Yes, bad things happen in this world, we could spend our lives trying to figure out why they happen without getting anywhere.  But if we focus on what to do when they happen, we can be the masters of our own destiny. 

The lesson here, is that the question is a good question, our desire to know is a valid desire.  But don’t get bogged down in the question, we still need to carry on no matter what is happening.  We can at the very least use the strong feelings that bad situations give us as an inspiration to do more good.