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May 3, 2002/Iyar 21, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 33
Humanity's suffering remains a mystery
Torah study
RABBI NEIL GILLMAN
Behar-Behukotai/Leviticus 25:1-27:34
The major part of the second of this week's double portion (Leviticus chapter 26) is an extended list of blessings and threats - blessings which will follow Israel's obedience to God's commands, and threats which will follow Israel's flouting of those commands. The blessings take up 11 verses; the threats, 30 verses. In the synagogue, these 30 verses are customarily read rapidly and in a hushed voice - as if to minimize their horror.
The theological principle that underlies these passages is explicit. It is the traditional Torah explanation for the most baffling challenge to believers in every religious community: the pervasiveness of suffering. How can a just, omnipotent and compassionate God cause or tolerate human suffering? The answer: Suffering is God's punishment for sin. From within this biblical mind-set, nothing happens in the world randomly. If God's will is sovereign, and if God is just, then suffering must be purposeful and justified.
The problem with this answer is that it is defied by our experience. The Bible itself recognizes that. The Book of Job explicitly rejects it. Job was a perfectly righteous man. Satan challenges God that Job was righteous only because God had blessed him with health and prosperity. Take away his possessions and injure him and he would quickly reject God. God frees Satan to make Job suffer, but he never rejects God. Job's friends arrive and offer the traditional argument that Job must have sinned to merit such suffering. But Job rejects that argument and maintains his innocence.
At the very end of the book, God tells Job that his suffering had nothing to do with any sinful behavior on his part. In fact, God is "incensed" at Job's friends for not having "spoken the truth about Me (God) as did My servant Job."
This is astounding. The Bible subverts itself; God rejects God's own teaching. An anonymous author stands a central traditional biblical doctrine on its head and has God explicitly reject it. True, God never does tell Job why he suffered. Also we now have to deal with a God who makes a righteous man suffer simply to win a bet with Satan.
All of these questions, and many more, make this book one of the most fascinating and difficult books in the Bible. But to return to our point, the author of Job was clearly aware that the traditional doctrine didn't always work. He was clearly aware that it is not only sinful people who suffer. In fact, sometimes the very opposite is the case. Sinful people seem to prosper.
What is equally astounding is the fact that despite the clear message of Job, the traditional doctrine continues to be invoked today. Some right-wing Jewish circles insist that the Holocaust must be understood as God's punishment for the "sins" of European Jewry.
I learn three lessons from this inquiry. First, the Bible is not one book; it is, rather, an anthology, a library consisting of many books, and one does not expect all the books in a library to agree with each other. Second, it is perfectly legitimate for us to bring our personal experience to bear against a traditional doctrine, even if it leads us to abandon the traditional doctrine. The author of Job does precisely that, and the book was canonized.
And finally, the pervasiveness of human suffering, particularly the suffering of righteous men and women, is the ultimate challenge to faith. There is no easy resolution.
Rabbi Neil Gillman is a professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
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