 The truth is that for all religions in the world, all theological, spiritual paths in the world, tonight's topic is really by far the most difficult, the most vexing, the most sensitive, the most perplexing theological problem that exists. By far the most difficult thing that any theologian, clergy person, any person that is involved with any religious tradition, struggles with, any person with a soul, we're dealing with a very, very difficult, troubling, and sensitive issue tonight. It's interesting that one of the major world religions was a religion that arose specifically and almost exclusively to deal with the problem of suffering. Buddhism basically is a spiritual path that arose after Siddhartha became the Buddha, growing up in a palace, witnessed after he left the palace where he was protected from the travails and the pains of this world. He went out and he saw the suffering that goes on in the world. People that are sick, people that are poor, people that are dying. And this really, really threw him for a loop. He had a very difficult time dealing with all the suffering that he saw. And so the spiritual path of Buddhism basically arose as a response for human beings to be able to grapple with and deal with suffering in life. Philosophically tonight's problem is called theodicy. That's a technical term what philosophers call it. It means literally the question of God's justice. Theodicy means we're discussing God's justice in the face of all the evil and suffering in the world. Now it's very important for us to have a clear understanding of this problem's definition. We have to understand what are the parameters, what's the definition of this problem. We only have a problem with suffering and evil from a theological perspective. It's only a religious problem. If we understand God to be totally good and beneficent, as well as totally powerful, omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent. Unless we have these factors, these criteria, there really is no problem with suffering and evil in the world. It only becomes a problem if we understand that there's an all-powerful God that is also all good and then we have a problem with evil. If we take away any of those parameters, the problem melts away. So for example, if God is not all good and he may even delight in torturing his creatures, then suffering shouldn't be a big mystery. And if we're not dealing with a deity that is all good, then we shouldn't be surprised or bothered by the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Secondly, if God were not omniscient, meaning if God didn't know everything that's going on in the world, then we shouldn't wonder about why it is that he allows an innocent child to be abducted and murdered because he may not know about it. If God doesn't know everything that's going on, maybe God doesn't know about that innocent child somewhere in a remote part of the world. What will we expect him to do if he doesn't know about the problem? And finally, of course, if God is not omnipotent, if he's not totally powerful and totally able to do anything that he wills, then even if he knows about all the problems in the world, perhaps he's simply powerless to stop them. So we have to appreciate that tonight's question, tonight's problem, is only a problem if we have an all-powerful God that is also all good. The truth is that we are not necessarily scandalized by suffering. People don't have serious theological problems when suffering seems to be worthwhile and for some important purpose, doesn't really get under our skin. So for example, when we see a woman going through terrible labor pains to deliver a child and the woman herself is experiencing agonizing pain in the delivery process, or a young soldier who bravely sacrifices their life to save their platoon, perhaps jumping on top of a hand grenade, or if a brave soldier falls on the field of battle, defending their country, we seem to be able to accept that. It's only when the suffering seems meaningless and pointless that we begin to get very upset. Now the problem of suffering and evil is exacerbated when righteous people suffer, and good people experience evil. After all, doesn't God repeatedly say in the Bible that the righteous will be blessed? So if we have this idea that the righteous will be blessed and live lives of blessing, then their suffering becomes an even greater problem. Now we have to appreciate that this problem of suffering and evil is not ignored in the Bible, and it's not ignored in all of our spiritual tradition. There's a long line of people that voiced their protest against what they perceived as injustice in the way God runs the world. In the book of Genesis chapter 18, verse 25, God has informed Abraham that he is about to destroy the four major population centers of the world, Sodom and Amorah and Adma and Sivoyim, and Abraham says to God, almost grabbing God by the lapels and saying it would be a sacrilege for you to do such a thing, God, to bring death upon the righteous along with the wicked so that the righteous will be treated like the wicked? It would be a sacrilege for you. Shall the judge of the whole earth not do justice? Abraham's not going to accept it in the book of Exodus. We know that Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh and they say, listen, God has sent us to tell you that you are to set the Israelites free. God sent us to tell you, let the Israelites, the children of Israel, go free so they can serve God. And what does Pharaoh do? Pharaoh doesn't comply. Pharaoh says, what are you, crazy? Who is this God that you're talking about? And what Pharaoh does instead of letting the Jews go free, he orders that instead of them being given straw to produce bricks to make the cities they're supposed to build, Pharaoh says, you're not going to get straw anymore. I'm not going to give you straw. You're going to have to go out and get your own straw and we're not going to diminish the quota of bricks that you're supposed to make. So instead of freeing the Jewish people, Pharaoh makes their lives much more difficult. And in book of Exodus chapter 5, verse 22, Moses says to God, my Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Moses is very frustrated. Here, God, you send me to free them of their burdens and to free them from their slavery and I show up and things get even worse. And he comes and complains to God. In the book of Exodus chapter 33, after the Jewish people have built a golden calf and they've worshiped it, we know what God's response was. God was intending to destroy the entire people and start all over again with Moses. And we know that Moses launches into a very, very long and heartfelt prayer for God to spare the Jewish people. And in the middle of this very difficult chapter, chapter 33 in the book of Exodus where Moses and God are having it back and forth, at one point in chapter 33, verse 13, Moses says to God, make your ways known to me. Moses says to God, God, show me your ways. What exactly does Moses mean by that? What does God want and what does Moses want to know? So the Talmud in tractate Brachot 7a says that Moses said before God, Lord of the universe, why is it that some righteous people prosper and others suffer while some wicked men prosper and others face adversity? Here Moses asks really his only question, his only curious question that he ever asks God, he basically has God one on one, Mount Sinai. And Moses has one question that's bothering him and he says to God, show me your ways. And the Talmud understands that to mean that what's bothering Moses more than anything else in the world is God, I can't understand why you allow righteous people to suffer. That's the $64,000 question that Moses wants answered. And by the way, in Moses' question, we see another side to theodicy issue. It's not only the suffering of the righteous that presents a problem to God's justice. It's also the prospering of the wicked, meaning if people are totally wicked, why are they having wonderful lives? So Moses is asking both questions. I don't understand God, why is it that the righteous suffer sometimes and the wicked seem to have lives of prosperity? Both seem to be unfair. And actually the wisest man who ever lived, King Solomon in his book of Koheles, Ecclesiastes chapter 8 verse 14 expresses the same thing. He writes, there is a futility that takes place on earth. Sometimes there are righteous people who are treated as if they did the deeds of the wicked. And there are wicked people who are treated as if they had done the deeds of the righteous. Solomon cannot understand this. And as we go through the Bible, we see that Samuel and David and Jeremiah and Habakkuk, many of our prophets wanted to understand why is it that God allows so much injustice to persist when clearly it's within his power to end it. And by the way, this refers both to individual suffering and our national corporate suffering as a people. We know there's an entire book of the Bible, a book of 42 chapters that deals exclusively with this intractable mystery of suffering. This is the famous book of Eov, or Job. Job is described as a uniquely righteous individual, yet he experiences an entire catalog of horrible suffering and tragedy. He was a very wealthy person who overnight loses all of his herds and all of his shepherds and his servants to both more orders and to fire. Everything is wiped out. Then his sons are killed when their home collapses on them. And then finally Eov himself is afflicted with horrible, painful boils. One thing after another comes heaped upon his head, and yet he's described as a totally righteous person. And so soon Job has three friends who hear about his suffering and they come to console him. And they spend almost the entire rest of the book arguing with Eov about why he's suffering. But that's the theme of this entire book of the Bible. And even the angels get in on this question. In the Talmud Tractae Brachos 61b, Rabbi Akiva, our great holy Rabbi Akiva, was taken out for execution by the Romans. And the Romans scraped off his skin with an iron comb. That's how they killed him. They tortured him like this. And while they were scraping his flesh off with these iron combs, he was reciting Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. He was accepting upon himself the kingship of heaven. And the ministering angels were told, said before the Holy One, blessed be he, such suffering is the reward for a life devoted to your Torah. The angels couldn't believe it. Here is a holy, righteous person who devoted his whole life to your Torah, God. And this is what you were allowed to happen to him. Ravleva Yitzchok, a Burditcheth, the saintly Hasidic teacher from the 18th century in the Ukraine, famously defended the Jewish people. And he said to God once, you know, God, when a Jew drops his tfilin, his phylacteries, the Jew drops his tfilin on the floor. He says, God, what would this Jewish person do? He would lovingly pick them up. He would wipe them clean. And he would kiss them. Why? Because our tfilin, the tfilin that we wear on our heads, proclaim your unity, God. Our tfilin say, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. They declare the unity of God. God is one in the world. The Ravleva Yitzchok said to God, but God, the Talmud says that you wear a tfilin. Whatever that means, it's not for tonight, obviously allegorically. God doesn't have a physical body that he puts a tfilin on his head. This is meant symbolically. But the Talmud says that God also wears a tfilin. And Ravleva Yitzchok said to God, God, what is written in your tfilin? Your tfilin, don't speak about the unity of you, your unity. Your tfilin speak about the unity of Israel. Your tfilin say, according to a verse from the book of Samuel, 2 Samuel, chapter 7, verse 23. Who is like you, O Israel, a single nation, one nation in the world? And Ravleva Yitzchok said to God, God, your tfilin have fallen onto the ground. And they're laying in the dust of exile for almost the past 2,000 years, suffering in exile. And he challenged God and says, God, why do you allow these tfilin, your tfilin, to remain on the ground? Why do you not pick them up and kiss them? According to the Talmud, Alicia Benavuya was a great sage. She was a teacher of a mayor. Became a heretic because of his frustration with what seemed to him to be God's injustice. Talmud tells a story about a man who asked his son to bring home some eggs. And the boy went climbing up a tree. He found a nest with eggs. And he was fulfilling the biblical commandment that says that you can't just take the eggs away without first sending away the mother bird. So the boy sends away the mother bird, he grabs the eggs, and on the way down, he falls off the tree and dies. Now the Torah almost never explicitly gives a particular reward for any commandment. And yet, these two commandments that this boy fulfilled are given an explicit reward in the Torah. The Torah says both about honoring your father and mother and for fulfilling the commandment of sending away the mother bird that you will have long life. And so Alicia Benavuya sees this incident where this boy is fulfilling two commandments at the same time, both commandments promising long life. And yet this boy is killed in the process. And so Alicia Benavuya became a heretic. This story is found in Kedushin 39b, and it became one of the central stories in an important book by Milton Steinberg called As a Driven Leaf. Now I mentioned before that Buddhism, to a great extent, came into existence to address and deal with the problem of suffering. But the truth is that for Buddhists, it's not a theological problem because Buddhism does not have a God concept. In Buddhism, there is no belief, no idea of a God that created the world. So for them, it's not a theological problem, it's more of a human problem, a problem of the human condition. But as I mentioned, all theological systems, all religions have dealt with the problem of suffering. For example, Zoroastrianism, which was a religion beginning in ancient Persia, a very ancient religion, also had a major concern with the problem of evil, a theological concern. If evil exists in a world that is run by a good God, how is that possible? And so the Zoroastrians proposed a solution to this problem. Their solution is what we call dualism. They claim that there isn't one God. The Zoroastrians claim that there are two powers that run the world. There's a God of light and a God of darkness. And they proposed that when things in life are going well, then we see that the God of light is running the show. But when things are not going well and there's tragedy and there's pain and there's suffering, then the Zoroastrians said, there we see the God of darkness is running the show. And that was a very simple and elegant solution to the problem of evil in the world. However, Judaism strongly rejects such an approach. As I said before, the central declaration in Judaism is Shema Yisrael, Hero Israel, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad. These are two names of God. Hashem, the four letter tetragamaton is the aspect of God, the aspect of His mercy, His kindness, His closeness to us. Eloheinu, Elohim is the aspect of God that we see as God, not the Father, but God the Judge, God that's strict, God that judges, God that is not imminent, but God is transcendent. So we do see a world that seems to be dualistic. We see a world of light and darkness, a light of dualism, a good and evil. We see a lot of duality in the world. And yet the insistence of the Torah is at the end of the day, it's Hashem Echad, it's still one loving God that controls everything. Even though the world seems to have both elements, the world is controlled by only one power. In Isaiah the prophet said it even stronger. In chapter 45 verse 7, Isaiah says, I am the one, God says, I am the one who forms light and creates darkness. I make peace and I create evil. I create evil. I am responsible for everything. We don't have two powers that are running the show. Now one of the most famous Jewish treatments of this topic of suffering was written by Rabbi Harold Kushner in a book back in 1978, many of you have heard of it called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Rabbi Kushner's son Aaron died as an adolescent from rapid aging disease called Prajuria. It is a horrible disease where little babies age very rapidly, they will look like they are a 90 year old man when they are about 8 years old. And Kushner as a rabbi had an impossible time reconciling his belief in an all powerful loving God with the horrible disease inflicted upon his son. So his approach after struggling with this problem was to suggest that God was not responsible for what happened to his son because Kushner insisted that God is not in total control of everything that is happening in the world. And with this approach, Kushner was able to make peace with God. He was finally able to make peace with God. He no longer held God responsible for the fate of his son. I believe that there are several serious problems with Kushner's approach. Even though the book received rave reviews by countless numbers of people who said it really made them feel much better. They took great solace from this book. I want to share three problems. Problem number one is that Kushner solves the problem of theodicy by being, his problem of being upset with God by doing what? By reconstructing God into an impotent God. This is very clearly not the God of Judaism or of the Bible. Our Bible speaks about God creating every molecule and atom of existence. He brought every single atom of existence into this world. Our Bible speaks about God performing ten miracles, ten plagues in Egypt which clearly demonstrated his absolute control over every aspect of nature. The Torah speaks about God splitting the Red Sea as the Jewish people came to it being pursued by the Egyptians and as soon as they crossed the Red Sea, God had the sea come back and drown the Egyptian pursuers. The Bible speaks about God miraculously sustaining the people of Israel for forty years in the desert with daily miracles of manna coming from heaven and water coming out of a rock. This miracles, it's very clear in the Torah that God is in total control of the world. Simply the miracle of Jewish survival that for three thousand years despite every single element that would mitigate against our survival. Many ancient powerful cultures are no longer here in the world. We don't hear anymore about the Hittites and the Babylonians and the ancient tribes that lived three thousand years ago. They disappeared. The ancient Roman culture, the Greek culture, the Egyptian culture, magnificent fantastic powers, superpowers disappeared and yet ancient Israel is still here. That's impossible without a God that is intervening in history. That's one problem I believe with Kushner's thesis. Number two, Kushner himself recognizes another problem because he himself asks in his book if God is not in total control, if God is not all powerful, then why are we going to synagogue and praying to him? He's after all a rabbi leading a congregation of people coming to pray. What is the point? Why are we praying for God to do anything if God is not totally powerful and can answer our prayers? And so he struggles in his book to answer this question. What is the point of having a synagogue where we come to pray? And finally, I think we have to ask this question. He obviously proposed this idea to make himself feel better. He felt he couldn't live with a God that he blamed for what happened to his son. And so he in his book proposes that he can't blame God because God could not do any better. But does it really make us feel better to see the world as essentially random with no possibility of seeing any explanation or purpose for the things that are happening to us, especially things that are painful? If God is not in control, there isn't any explanation for what's happening. So does it really make us feel better to propose a world where everything is basically meaningless and we're just subjected to the random, impersonal, horrible forces that are in the world? There is no real ultimate meaning or purpose. And I want to stress something. It's very important for us to bear in mind that the problem of suffering is not just an intellectual or philosophical problem. It is an emotional problem. It's an emotional issue. If we're going to think about the possible meaning or purpose of suffering, we have to recognize this limitation. For example, a child might understand why their parents spank them, but it still hurts. So even if we can come up with some way of understanding why we may go through suffering, it doesn't take away the pain. We have to understand that there are two parts to this problem. There might be the theoretical, intellectual, philosophical aspect to it, but then is the real-life emotional impact of pain, which does not go away because we are intellectualizing the problem. In the book, Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, chapter 4, Rabbi Shimon Ben-Elazar says, never try to comfort your friend while his dead is still lying before him. If your friend has just lost a close relative, don't try to console them at that time. And I would extend this to mean in general that when someone is in pain, someone is going through some emotional pain because of suffering that they're going through or suffering that a loved one is going through, that's not a time for philosophical discussions. Don't intellectualize with them at that time. What they need is to have their suffering and their pain validated, and they need emotional support. They don't need you to explain away what happened. I want to offer one more caveat before we proceed. Before trying to explore the issue of suffering tonight, we need to be very, very clear about our starting point. There is a fundamental foundation that has to be established about the very question that we're asking. We have to appreciate what are we really asking tonight. We are ultimately asking to understand the mind of God. When we are dealing with the problem of suffering, we're really trying to understand the mind of God. Let me give a more mundane example to illustrate this. People might ask, why can't we eat lobster? What's wrong with lobster? Now what the question is really seeking, we have to appreciate this. What the questioner is really seeking is to understand why did God forbid lobster to us? That's what they're really trying to understand. Why did God say we cannot eat lobster? And so here tonight, we're asking, why does God allow suffering to exist? Or why does God cause suffering to exist? Why does God behave that way? But what we need to appreciate is that even if God were to grant us a private audience, even if God were to come into your living room and you could ask him these questions, if you were to say, God, please explain to me what your reason was for forbidding lobster? Or God, could you please explain to me why it is that righteous innocent people suffer? If we had the ability to sit down with God and ask him, do you think, and I mean this with all seriousness, do you think that we'd be able to understand his answer if he answered us directly? I often give the example, do you think that your goldfish could understand why you prefer jazz to classical music? If you tried explaining this to your goldfish, I want you to understand, little man, this is why I happen to resonate more with jazz. You can speak for the half hour. Your goldfish is not going to comprehend what you're saying. So we need to understand that we are not able to grasp the way God thinks. We are incapable of appreciating, understanding, grasping the mind of God. Isaiah says it very clearly in chapter 55 verse 9. He writes as high as the heavens are over the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts. Human beings are not able to access the mind of God. The medieval Jewish philosophers expressed it this way. They said, if I knew God, I would be God. Now we mentioned before that according to the Talmud, when Moses asked God, show me your ways. What did Moses want to understand? He wanted to understand why the righteous suffer. This is the really big question that Moses asks God. And what does God say to him? God says, you will not be able to see me, for no human can see me and live. What does that mean? You cannot see me and live. It doesn't mean that Moses won't be able to see God like I see you in the audience. Obviously, God is not visible. God is not physical. God is using the word see here in the sense of understanding. Like we say, oh, I see what you mean. I see what you mean. That means I understand what you mean. Or when it says in the Bible that Adam and Eve saw they were naked, obviously they realized they had no clothing on. It means that now they understood they were naked. So when it says, when God says to Moses, you cannot see me, what God is saying is you are not able to understand me. Why? Because you are a living being. You are a human being that is a finite, physical, limited human being. And as a physical, finite, limited human being that's going to die one day, you cannot understand me, God, who is transcendent and all-powerful and created everything in the universe. You're not able to understand me. In Pyrkaiyavot, again, Ethics of the Father is chapter 4. Rabbi Yanai said, we are unable to understand both the well-being of the wicked and the tribulations of the righteous. The sages say straight out, we are not able to understand either the well-being of the wicked or the tribulations of the righteous. And the commentaries, Rabbeno Yonah, for example, says on the spot not that there isn't an explanation, not that there isn't a reason, but we are not capable of understanding the reasons that exist for these things. Now we get back to the book of Eov, the book of Job. The whole book is a struggle. Why is this poor, innocent, righteous person struggling? And Job's friends keep on saying to him, look, God does not inflict punishment on people that are innocent. You must have been sinning. You must be guilty. There must be something wrong with you. Otherwise you wouldn't be suffering. And Eov is protesting the whole book. No, I'm innocent. I never did anything wrong. And they're going back and forth. And then finally a fourth friend comes, Elihu, get back to him in a few minutes. He has another possibility. But then towards the end of the book, God intervenes. And God says basically, you guys have no idea what you're talking about. And I want to share with you the gist of what God says to Eov. Listen carefully. Then God answered Eov and said, who is this that contemplates ideas with words without knowledge? Get prepared like a man. I will ask you and you tell me. Now God is going to answer his question the way Jew answers a question with a question. That's how God's going to answer Eov with a series of questions. And God says to Eov the following, where were you when I established the world? Tell me if you know so much. Who drafted the dimensions of the world? Do you know? Did you ever command forth a morning? Have death's gates been revealed to you? Have you examined earth's expanse? Tell me if you know. Can you guide the bear with her cubs? Does the hawk soar by your wisdom? Does the eagle mount at your command? And makes his nest on high? God answered Eov and said, will the contender with God yield? He who reproves God let him answer for it. And Eov answered God and said, lo, I am small. How can I ever answer you? My hand I lay on my mouth. I have spoken once. I will not reply. I have talked of things I did not know, wonders beyond my ken. What God basically says to Eov is, how do you think you could possibly ever understand the way I run the world? How could you possibly understand anything about the way I run the world? What do you know about the creation of world in the first place? So I wanted to establish at the outset tonight that we have to be very careful when we're thinking about this problem of suffering and evil because we have to appreciate our limitations. Rabbi Yosef Dov Salavichek wrote something very important in this regard. He writes, the error of modern representatives of religion is that they promise their congregants the solution to all the problems of life, an expectation which religion does not fulfill. Then on the contrary, deepens the problems but never intends to solve them. The grandeur of religion lies in its mysterium tremendous, its magnitude and its ultimate incomprehensibility. To cite one example, Rabbi Salavichek says, we may adduce the problem of theodicy. We may focus on this question of suffering and evil, the attempt to justify evil in the world that has tantalized the inquiring mind from time immemorial till this last tragic decade. The acuteness of this problem has grown for the religious person in essence and in dimensions. But when a minister, a rabbi or a priest attempts to solve the ancient question of Job's suffering through a sermon or a lecture, he does not promote religious ends, but on the contrary, he does them a tremendous disservice. The beauty of religion with its grandiose vistas reveals itself to men not in solutions, but in problems, not in harmony, but in the constant conflict of diversified forces and trends. So we need to always remember that we don't have ultimate answers to the problem of suffering. However, our sages advanced a number of ideas and approaches that might provide a glimmer of insight that can be helpful to us. I won't have time to share with you all of these approaches tonight. I'm just going to share with you a few. Number one, a tremendous amount of our suffering is the harm that we cause ourselves and the harm that we inflict upon each other. Genocide is not something committed by God. People that are killed in car accidents because they're texting was not something that God did. Destroying our environment in a way that can lead to flooding and famine is not something that God does. Many diseases that we contract are the result of not taking care of ourselves. Not eating properly, not exercising, not sleeping enough, not managing our stress. Many people have observed that believing in God is difficult after Auschwitz, but believing in ourselves is impossible. So we have to appreciate that a tremendous amount of the suffering and evil in this world is man-made evil. We can't simply blame God for it. Would we rather live in a world where God interfered with every human misbehavior? Would we rather live in a world like that? Every time someone was about to rob someone else, God struck them blind. Every time someone was about to ignore a poor person asking for money, God just basically manipulated their hand to go into their pocket, pull out a dollar and give it to the poor person. Would we rather live in a world where God manipulated us like marionettes? Would we be happier as robots living without any free will? Evil is part of the price that we pay for being human. Not only does God grant us free will, but He does not diminish it by making His providence of the world too obvious. If God's running of the world and God's providence was too obvious, it would interfere with our free will. If all sinners and all criminals were immediately punished by breaking out in boils or in shingles or having their houses destroyed, as soon as they did something wrong, every adulterer, every person that violated the Sabbath, every person that cheated on their income taxes, every person that was not honest was immediately punished, or if every virtuous person would automatically rise to the top of the world, and as soon as they did something good they would get a large deposit in their name in a bank in a Swiss account, and they would live perfect lives. No one would ever do wrong, no one would ever sin. So we have to understand part, I use this word advisedly, part of the calculus in the way our lives play out and the way God interacts with our lives is in order to preserve human free will. I'm going to go a little bit deeper now so please listen very carefully. God allows evil in the world by restricting His presence. Let's call this Tsimtsum restriction. Evil is basically the flip side of godliness. If the world was pervaded by godliness there'd be no room for evil. So God restricts His presence in the world, but that restriction allows a vacuum where evil is able to jump in. If God's presence were totally manifest in the world there would be no possibility of sinning. If God's presence was entirely clear to us we could never do the wrong thing, and if we couldn't sin there'd be no opportunity for virtue. So imperfection, imperfection is built in to the fabric of our universe. If the universe were perfect and godliness was pervading it there'd be no room for humans to do anything. And if God were totally manifest we would not have any personal moral autonomy. Now our sages illustrated this idea in an amazing teaching and this is difficult so please listen well. In Genesis chapter 1 verse 16 we're told that in the creation story God created the two great luminaries, the two great luminaries. But in the same verse it goes on to describe these two great luminaries as the great one to rule the day and the lesser one to rule the night. Now the sages of the Talmud are bothered if these are two great ones to begin with why is one now great and one isn't so great? Now don't take this too concretely, realize we're talking about deep conceptual ideas. But the sages suggest that what happened is there were two equal sized luminaries and the moon complained to God. And the moon said it is not proper for two kings to share the same crown. And so God said you're making a very good point it's not proper for two kings to share the same crown so you should make yourself smaller. And God made the moon, God diminished the size of the moon. Now in our monthly prayer we have a monthly prayer called the sanctification of the moon. We say the following. May it be your will, my God and the God of my fathers, that you will fill the flaw of the moon and that there be no diminution in it. May the light of the moon be like the light of the sun, like the light of creation as it was before it was diminished. We speak about the idea that in the future perfected world the sun and the moon will both be equal again. But that's not the kind of world we live in now. And in the Talmud, tractate Hulun 60b, we're taught something very daring. The sages say man is obligated to perfect what his creator impaired. We as human beings are obligated to perfect what God impaired. And Rachel Lukish, one of the great sages asked, why is the sacrifice for the new moon? If you go to the book of Numbers, chapter 28, it gives you all the sacrifices for the different holidays. Rachel Lukish asks, why is the sacrifice for the new moon, which was the offering of a goat, different from the sacrifices of other special days? Because the scripture says about the sacrifice for the new moon, a sin offering for God. A sin offering for God. That's Numbers chapter 28 verse 15. And Rachel Lukish says something incredible. He says, because the Holy One blessed be, he said, this goat shall be an atonement for my diminishing the moon. We bring this sacrifice every month on behalf of God to atone for God's diminishing the moon, which means we're atoning for the fact that God created an imperfect world, a world that's not perfect. And Rabbi Soloveitchek writes in Halachekman, the Jewish people bring a sacrifice to atone as it were for God's not having completed the work of creation. The creator of the world diminished the image and stature of creation in order to leave something for man to do. But as we've seen, there's a downside to an imperfect world, which is the possibility of evil. Now, of course, this kind of world where we are free moral agents and we can act creatively in the world without being manipulated like marionettes by strings of God. This is the best kind of world for us. This world we're living in, which is not perfect, where things can go wrong, where there is the potential for evil and there is the potential for suffering and we're not living in an idyllic world where everything is just nice and smiles. It's the best kind of world for us. We mentioned in previous lectures an idea of the Ramchar Moshe Chaim Utsato, that God could have created a perfect world where each one of us was born in heaven. Each one of us would be born in paradise. And as soon as we came into the world, we're living in bliss. Everything is set for us. We don't have to do anything. We just bask in the pleasures of heaven. God could have made a world like that, but he chose not to. He chose to create a world where we have to earn our place in heaven. We have to work for it. Because the only pleasure we get in life is not when we get something as a free gift like charity, but when we work for it and we earn it by overcoming obstacles. What are the obstacles that we have to overcome? It is the obstacles of living in a world where there is this evil that occludes the presence of God. We are living in a world where we don't see godliness. As a matter of fact, we see things that scream against the presence of God in the world. And by overcoming these obstacles, we achieve greatness and closeness with God. So according to the Midrash, this imperfect world is for our benefit. But nonetheless, God apologizes. It's like my dental hygienist. She should be Miss Canada every second. I'm sorry, did I hurt you? Excuse me. Are you okay? It's unbelievable. Obviously, what I'm going through in that dentist chair is for my benefit. And yet constantly, she's asking for my forgiveness and she's asking me to forgive her. And she's asking for apologies and it's unbelievable. That's what God is doing. God is saying, look, I made this world, it's the best place for you. Even though there's this possibility of evil and suffering and pain, I want to apologize for it. It's still the best world for you. Now a major possibility taken very seriously by the Bible about suffering is an uncomfortable one for us to consider. And that is that suffering may be a consequence of sin. This is a major idea in the Bible that suffering may be a consequence of sin. Deuteronomy 8 verse 5 says that just as a father disciplines their child, so does God discipline us. This is not the punishment of a vengeful God. No parent enjoys punishing their child. But a loving parent has to discipline their child. It says in the book of Proverbs, ne emmanim pitse ohave, beloved are the wounds of a loved one. Because the truth is to ignore someone who is ruining their lives is cruel. If you close your eyes and don't do anything, that's cruelty. So God's discipline of us in the response in the wake of sin, in the wake of living improperly is often a wake up call to get our attention. Getting us up, getting us to improve ourselves. I heard numerous people, I'm not on a level to say this myself, but I've heard numerous people tell me that the illness that they had was the greatest blessing in their life because if it wasn't for that serious illness, they would never have woken up and changed their lives. They would still be the same superficial self-centered person that they had been their whole life. And it was this illness that brought them out of it. Suffering can have the effect of loosening our unhealthy bondage to the physical that often pulls us down and pulls us away from a more spiritual direction in life. In tractate Brachot 5a, Rava says, if a person sees afflictions coming upon him, he should examine his deeds. As it says in the book of Eichelamentations, chapter 3 verse 40, let us search and examine our ways and return to God. So our sages definitely point out that in this direction, we have to look in national suffering. When our nation suffers, we say, for example, in our prayers every week, because of our sins, we were exiled from our land. The Talmud says there was a reason why the first temple was destroyed because the people of Israel, at least some of them were engaged in horrible sins, idolatry, murder, sexual immorality. And the Talmud says the second temple was destroyed. For many reasons, most of them, the most significant of them being that we were not getting along with each other. We were acting with hatred towards each other. However, and I have to emphasize this many times, however, while suffering may at times be a response to sin, it's not necessarily so. Do not walk out of here tonight thinking that when someone is suffering, it is necessarily because they were sinning. Suffering may be a response to sin, but it doesn't have to be. For example, the Talmud speaks of Yusurim Shalava, afflictions that God gives us out of love. It might be to refine a righteous person to help them become closer to God. For example, the righteous are sometimes tested to bring out a latent potential they have. Abraham was tested with having to take his son Isaac up to be sacrificed. That test was a way of bringing out of Abraham incredible inner resources that would never have been manifest had he not been tested. So righteous people will rise to the occasion if they are tested. Many people go through incredible suffering only to grow from it. We see that people experience tragedies and they end up doing incredible good in the world. The woman who started Mothers Against Drunk Driving herself went through the tragedy of losing a child to a drunk driver, but went on to live a life that helped save many, many more people. And this happens routinely where people overcome a personal crisis and a personal tragedy and they rise to incredible heights. When we go back to the story of Moses, we saw that according to the Talmud again, he wanted to understand the suffering of the righteous. And God says, you cannot understand my ways. But God did provide two clues to Moses. Even though God says you cannot see me and live, God did give Moses two clues. In Exodus chapter 33, let's read verses 21 to 23. God says to Moses, behold, there is a place near me. You may stand on the rock. When my glory passes by, I shall place you in a cleft of the rock. I shall shield you with my hand until I have passed. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back, but my face may not be seen. If you want a mystical, difficult passage in the Bible, this would be it. What does it mean God's hand, God's face, God's back? God is not physical, doesn't have a body. But in this story, many of our sages found clues to help us understand a little bit more about our suffering. The Chasam Sofer says, what does it mean that God says to Moses, you will be able to see my back? The Chasam Sofer says that what God is saying to Moses is sometimes in retrospect, looking backwards with the advantage of hindsight. We may be able to appreciate some of the difficulties we go through in life. They might make sense. It's like they describe a needle point. Have you ever seen a needle point? It could be this beautiful tapestry, this beautiful needle point. You turn it over and it just looks like a loose collection of random threads and knots. It looks like a big jumble and a big mess. So that's how we see the world. We see the world. It doesn't seem that it makes any sense. It's random. Things are not just the righteous sufferer, the wicked prosperer. And we see the back of that tapestry, the back of that needle point. So God says that in retrospect, you may be able to see things clearer. When we turn over that needle point and you see it's actually a beautiful design, things will make more sense sometimes in retrospect. You know, God's name, the tetragrammaton, the name of God that manifests his nature of beneficence and kindness and love and mercy, is made up of basically the letters yud, hey, vuv, and hey, which are the letters that make up the words haya, hove, ye, ye. The name of God indicates was, is, will be. It's three words that indicate eternity. God is not just in the present. God is in the present, in the past, in the future, all together right now. God is beyond time. And so what God is saying here is to understand the ways of God. We have to go beyond time. We have to be able to get out of what we're seeing right now, which is limited. We're in the present moment. And God is saying, maybe if you could see my back, you'll be able to look in retrospect, you'll be able to appreciate a bit more of what's going on. In the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva, who would always say, comad, doovid, rachman, le'tav, whatever God does is for the best. So he went through a story like this, where he went to a city once, and he had with him a lantern, and he had a rooster, and he had a donkey. And he wasn't able to get into the city. He was chased out by the people there. That wasn't good. And yet he said, whatever God does is for the best. And then he's camping outside the city. And an animal comes, and it kills his donkey. And then another animal comes, and it chases away his rooster. And then a big wind comes, and it blows out his lantern. Everything is going wrong. And yet he keeps on saying, comad, doovid, rachman, le'tav, whatever God does is for the best. The next morning, he finds out that this city was attacked by marauders. And he realizes now, thank God I wasn't allowed to stay in that city. I would have been killed. Thank God my donkey was killed, because it wasn't braying all night and giving away my location. Thank God my rooster was chased away. It wasn't making noise to betray my location. Thank God my lantern went out. No one could see me. So in retrospect, sometimes things get clarified. There's often a silver lining in many tragedies. Person might lose a job, only to get a much better job later on. A person might go through a very painful divorce, only to find their bashert later on. So we don't understand the big picture when we're going through the tragedy. And then if you go a little bit before this, in verse 19 in this chapter, 33 in Exodus, verse 19, God says to Moses, I will make all of my goodness pass before you. Ani avir call to thee, all of my goodness. What is this hinting at? I read before from Isaiah chapter 45, where the prophet Isaiah said, God forms light and creates darkness. He makes peace and he creates evil. Our sages, when they quoted this verse in our daily prayers, changed it. We don't say in our daily prayers, God makes peace and creates evil. We say, God makes peace and he creates everything. He makes everything. He makes haqqol. So here, what the Torah is hinting at is we can't appreciate what we're going through now because we don't have hindsight. We can't see with retrospect. And we don't have the big picture in terms of the future. Not just the past, but the future also. We don't see everything. If we knew everything, things might become clearer. For example, we studied a few weeks ago that there's much more to our lives than what we think there is. We think we're going to be here for 70 years, 90 years, 100 years, and that's it. But our sages say we might come back one or two or three or four times. We can be reincarnated. And according to Nachmanides, that's how Elihu explained to Eov why he was suffering. He said, you're right. You're not suffering because of anything you did in this life, you're perfectly righteous. But he says it could be that you're suffering now for what happened in a previous life. So when we don't take the big picture into context, it's impossible to appreciate what's going on in our lives. This life we're living now is like the tip of an iceberg. We don't see the big picture. Our sages suggest as an example that you know what, a righteous person, a righteous person may get punished in this world so they can get fully rewarded in the world to come. We don't only live in this world. This is the tip of our iceberg. We will spend an eternity in the world to come. Which currency would we prefer to be paid in? Do we really, really want if we could be paid off with another chocolate bar or another week on the beach? Is that the ultimate reward possible? Or is the spiritual bliss in the world to come even more valuable? So the Talmud suggests, you know what, maybe it is that a righteous person, every righteous person sins. So maybe a righteous person will get punished in this world so that the books can be cleared and when they go to the world to come, all they will receive is reward and bliss. Because that's where the righteous people would rather get rewarded. They'd rather get paid back in diamonds rather than in chocolate bars. They know the currency in the world to come is much more valuable than whatever simple trinkets we can get down here in this world. But a wicked person might get fully compensated and rewarded in this world. Why? So that they won't have any reward in the world to come. And there they'll have nothing. So we don't see the big, big picture when we're looking at people's lives. Oh, this righteous person is suffering. This wicked person is prospering. What are we looking at? They're 80 years in this world or are we taking into account the call to the all of my goodness that God speaks about? I mentioned before, I can't really cover with you all of the ways and parameters in which our sages looked at suffering. Trust me, there are many, many more. But in conclusion, the Ramchal Moshechaim Ruzato says in his book, Das Tvunos, which deals basically with understanding the way God runs the world. He says that one of the rewards in the world to come will be that we will achieve clarity in that next life about all the suffering we went through in this life down here. I mentioned last week that our sages say, e'en simcha ele ke ha tarat as feiqot. There's no joy is great as understanding something, getting clarity, resolving doubts. And so one of the things that's gonna happen in the world to come is that things will become clear. And for all the years in this life, we didn't understand a lot of why we went through pain and suffering, we will become clear about it in the next world. Our sages teach us that in this world right now, when something good happens to us, we're supposed to say, boruch atovah mateev. Something good happens, we thank God, blessed is he who good, who is good and does good. When something terrible happens to us, we also make a blessing. We're supposed to say boruch dayin ha'emet. Blessed is the true judge. But our sages say in the next world, we will be able to say about everything that we ever went through, boruch atovah mateev. We'll be able to say about everything we went through in life, blessed is he who is good and who does good because we'll appreciate finally that everything that God does, ultimately is for our benefit is for the good.