My husband does not remember his accident. When the car that ran a red light collided with his bicycle on Rosh Hashanah in 2016, he hit his head so hard that it wiped his memory clean — not only of the moment of impact, but of the hour before when he was riding home from synagogue and the two weeks after when he was regaining function in the rehab hospital. I wasn’t biking with him that day, so I do not remember this defining moment in our lives either; it is something of a black hole in the galaxy of our collective memory. We talk about this sometimes, how odd it is that such a decisive moment is lost, somewhere else, inaccessible.
We were both relieved to eventually get the police report, thinking it might help us reconstruct how, exactly, this event — one that brought us face to face with suffering in a new way — had happened. We skimmed the report, hungrily: which intersection, what time, what witnesses, what damage, whose fault? It helped to see it all in print, facts on a page. He suffered a traumatic brain injury, a broken neck and nerve damage to his leg.
But even though it was detailed, official and incontrovertible, it didn’t answer the question we were really asking when we talked about the missing memories. The real question was the same one that titles the book of Lamentations, in its original Hebrew: Eikhah? How? The question became even more pronounced for me when, three months into my husband’s recovery journey, my dad died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm. After a life of relative stability and blessing, that autumn disoriented and wrecked me. How could this have happened, I kept asking? Eikhah?
The problem of theodicy is one that has troubled theologians — and the rest of us — as long as humans have suffered. How do we make sense of the world — and make sense of God — when there is so much evil? What kind of a God would allow so much suffering in the first place? Is the universe essentially random or ordered, meaningless or meaningful? Perhaps these are the questions that inspired the writers of the Unetaneh Tokef, the central High Holidays prayer that my husband prayed right before his accident:
We shall ascribe holiness to this day, for it is awesome and terrible. Your kingship is exalted upon it. … In truth You are the judge, the exhorter, the all-knowing, the witness, He who inscribes and seals, remembering all that is forgotten. You open the book of remembrance which proclaims itself, and the seal of each person is there. … As a shepherd herds his flock, causing his sheep to pass beneath his staff, so do You cause to pass, count and record, visiting the souls of all living, decreeing the length of their days, inscribing their judgment. On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. How many shall pass away and how many shall be born? Who shall live and who shall die? … But repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the severe decree.
This prayer, at least on the face of it, offers a classic solution to the problem of evil: Suffering is punishment for sin. God is the just, all-powerful judge, but we can influence His decrees with good behavior. Feminist theologian Rachel Adler sums up this view simply: “Bad things happen because you as an individual or as a member of a community or nation deserve them. You are guilty and you were punished” (171). While this is the answer embedded in some of the traditional liturgy and in much of the Book of Deuteronomy, modern theologians, especially liberal humanists, have struggled to find other solutions.[1]
Approaches to theodicy take into account three assumptions about God’s nature: omnipotence, that God is all powerful, and could therefore presumably stop suffering if God wished; omnibenevolence, that God is all good and therefore not a part of evil; and omniscience, that God is all knowing, and therefore aware of our pain. Clearly, the question of what the relationship is between God and the evil that befalls us is a question about God’s nature. Who is God? How does God relate to our suffering? Is there a conception of God that can square with the realities of suffering and which also satisfies our need for meaning?
Jewish process theologian Bradley Shavit Artson’s approach to theodicy and God’s nature is helpful. He adapts Alfred North Whitehead’s process theology and reimagines Divine power and knowledge to explain suffering without fully abandoning God’s goodness. Feminist panentheist Judith Plaskow emphasizes God’s oneness as wholeness, which includes God in all reality, including that of evil. Both of these thinkers have shaped my own current conclusions.
I. Dynamism, Invitation, Relationship: Artson’s Process Theology
How long, God?
Will You ignore me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me? — Psalm 13
For process theologians like Bradley Shavit Artson, God is forever baderekh, on the way, in motion, being and becoming. Taking issue with the traditionalist theological assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, which he argues are misguided imports from Greek philosophy, Artson argues that these claims about God’s nature are in conflict with the God of the Torah:
The Torah has terms for great power and unsearchable strength, but it has neither concept nor term for omnipotence. The prophets have no such term, nor does the Talmud. There is no classical Hebrew or Aramaic term for being able to do absolutely anything” (5).[2]
His problems with omnipotence are clear: a God that could prevent suffering and chooses not to do so is not one we would want to worship. The conception of power forwarded by such a God is one of force, not relationship. Additionally, God’s omniscience, he argues, implies that God knows the future, which obliterates the notion of human (and Divine) freedom. Process thinking, in contrast, he argues, “offers a way to recover a biblically and rabbinically resonant, dynamic articulation of God, world, and covenant, integrating that portrayal with contemporary scientific knowledge of the cosmos and of life” (8). Process thinking reclaims a God who is not static, one who affirms freedom as a fundamental aspect of reality and is a partner with us in the world’s becoming.
Instead of omnipotence, Artson turns to a Divine power that is relational and persuasive instead of coercive and absolute. This is not God as “bully in the sky,” but God who “works through persuasion and invitation” (13). In this conception, God hopes we make the right choice, but we are free to make the wrong one. Suffering, then, is a result of our own wrong choices, of free will. God set up a universe based on natural law and doesn’t break its rules, but God does work to persuade us to do right. Artson interprets a line from Midrash Tanhuma to this end: “The blessed Holy One, the Majesty of Majesties, loves law, and does nothing unless it is with law. This is the meaning of ‘Might is the Majesty who loves law’” (13). That is, God works within natural law — respecting physics, chemistry, mortality — towards the good. This approach leaves God without the power of a tyrant; God needs us as co-creators in an unfolding creation and revelation. When we make the wrong choice, God suffers alongside us.
This is a description of a Divine power that, though constrained by natural law, is radically open to possibility. “In choosing to create,” Artson writes, “God made a world that has the capacity to make choices, too” (10). In this theology, God is not omniscient. God knows a lot but cannot know the future. We are in a dynamic relational structure, and instead of coercing us into a predetermined future, God gives us life, choice, potentiality and room for growth. Creation, here, is unfolding, a “process of mobilizing continuous self-creativity from within” (17). The world and creation is not passive, not an object God acts on; it is a subject in its own right, forming itself and beyond itself in partnership with the Divine.
Where does Artson’s conception of a process-oriented God leave us on the problem of evil? The God that Artson describes — far from the tyrannical, controlling and therefore implicated-in-our-suffering God that many traditional theologians would have us believe in — is one who wishes the best for us, but is not able to engineer the world or our lives to steer us clear of all suffering or pain. He defines evil as “that aspect of reality not yet touched by God’s lure or that part of creation that ignores God’s lure” (22). In this definition, God is seemingly separate from evil.
However, Artson forwards an explanation alongside this one that seems, at first, to contradict it: What we deem evil, he argues, may be the result of a limitation in perspective. What we experience as unpleasant or contrary to our desires may actually be in service of a whole we cannot understand. “Much of what we understand to be evil is the very source of dynamism and life. … Events that are disasters for some are sources of emerging novelty and development for others” (22). This seems to be a far cry from his notion that evil is reality that is “not yet touched” by God. In this second explanation, God has at least some hand in evil, but we fundamentally misunderstand it. Suffering is not a punishment, and not something God wants or wills for us. But it is an inescapable result of the world God created, and of the natural laws God cannot and would not break.
Artson’s God appeals to me in many ways: a God that resists the philosophical problems that omnipotence and omniscience create, a God that is dynamic and in process, and who encourages us to be dynamic and in process too. My primary concern with Artson’s view on the problem of evil, however, is that it appears self-contradictory, at least on its face. “God’s presence,” he writes, “is in all places,” but at the same time, evil is all that God’s lure “has not touched.”
Regardless of the nuances of the question of theodicy, Artson is clear that God is not responsible for our human suffering. God wants the good for us and uses persuasive power to lure the world into good, but the laws of the universe get in the way.
II. The Holiness of Wholeness: Judith Plaskow’s Mystical Panentheism
“Hear, O Israel — The Divine abounds everywhere and swells in everything; the many are One.”
— Shma, Marcia Falk
Plaskow departs from Artson almost immediately in her later theological treatise, “Wrestling with God and Evil.” She describes God as “the creative energy that underlies, animates, and sustains all existence … the power of life, death, and regeneration,” refusing to separate God from the evil that befalls us (184). Where Artson is loath to give up God’s benevolence, and sees God as a source of support, Plaskow comes to embrace the side of God that he wants to reject. She describes her point of view poetically, quoting a Sioux teacher’s words: “The thunder power protects and destroys. It is good and bad, as God is good and bad, as nature is good and bad, as you and I are good and bad” (172). This God, according to Plaskow, is somewhat ambiguous, the “Ground of Being that sustains and enlivens all that is, good, bad, and indifferent” (189). This is a more unapologetically mystical view, that God truly is in everything, full stop. “To see God only in the good,” she argues, “seems to me to leave huge aspects of reality outside of God. Where then do they come from?” (185).
Plaskow leans on the north star of God’s oneness as an existential orientation. For her, monotheism is less a rejection of paganism than a creed of total inclusion. God’s oneness means that God includes everything. Since we have capacity for both good and evil, both must be in God’s sphere. “An inclusive monotheism,” then, “must embrace the complexities and ambiguities of existence as part of the nature of God” (172). Wholeness is thus privileged over goodness. Artson argues that God creates a world in which evil can happen, but that God is constantly persuading towards the good. Instead, for Plaskow, God is ultimately wholeness, comprising all, without exception.
She herself recognizes the challenges that arise from this theology:
I realize that, in affirming the power of the sometimes-awful Torah or insisting on the ambiguity of God, I come perilously close to an aesthetic theodicy that sees the loose threads on the back of a tapestry or the blot in the corner of a painting as contributing to the beauty of the larger picture. I have always hated this theodicy because it ignores the reality that the broken threads and blots are people’s lives negated, cut off, or made abject. (Plaskow, 180)
She counters this concern by emphasizing human agency. The specific role that humans have to play in the universe, unlike God’s, is to “be concerned with justice” (189). The task of humanity is to “choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19), to ally ourselves with the voices of justice, compassion and loving kindness in the Torah and the world in order to help create a society in which everyone shares in the earth’s resources without depleting or destroying them” (180). While for Artson, God and the universe tend towards the good, for Plaskow, persuading the world towards the good is up to us humans. Plaskow highlights free will as humanity’s answer to God’s ambiguity.
I don’t experience suffering as separate from God as Ultimate Reality; I just experience my life, which includes pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, good and evil.
Plaskow’s version of God’s oneness — God’s inclusiveness of all, evil included — is not ethical. She writes, however, that “while the creative energy flowing through the world may have no moral purpose, the notion of a unity or oneness of being embodies a profound moral trajectory.” Plaskow continues: “To say that God is one … is to say that we are all bound to each other in the continual unfolding of the adventure of creation … When we harm, diminish, or oppress any one of us, we harm ourselves” (185-186). Oneness thus also means interhuman interdependence. Interdependence charges humans with the duty to take care of each other. God’s oneness is a powerful teaching about humanity’s responsibility, if not God’s.
Plaskow’s unflinching commitment to inclusion seems to me to be more faithful to the human experience. I don’t experience suffering as separate from God as Ultimate Reality; I just experience my life, which includes pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, good and evil. To separate some things out of God because it offends our sensibilities cuts against the truth of God’s oneness.
III. There’s Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Theodicy and Me
“I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”
— Mary Oliver
After my husband’s accident, it took him a long time to be healed enough to read again. As soon as he could, his favorite college professor suggested they study the book of Ecclesiastes together. Some thought it was a strange choice, seeing as how the book explores death, meaninglessness a disordered world, and how “all is vanity.” But he loved it. Denying or apologizing for brokenness wouldn’t have worked; staring at it head on made the most sense.
The purpose of religion, and the purpose of intimacy with God, is to help us get in touch with things as they are.
One year after the accident, he was miraculously back at work and experiencing very few remaining symptoms from his injuries, none that got in the way of his daily life or flourishing. Once he was healed, however, it was time for me to fall apart. The emotional weight of my dad’s death finally collapsed on me, and I spent the next nine months, mostly, sitting meditation retreats in the Vipassana Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw. What I loved most about retreat was the invitation to get underneath “story” and explanation, to let go of “figuring it out” or fixing. Instead, the path was about being with things as they were. While I experienced much pain and suffering (alongside peace and joy) on retreat, I wasn’t burdened with the question of where evil was, or what God had to say about it. My aim was simple: get intimate with reality. And as I did that, I noticed a few things I came to think of as natural laws, which Buddhists call the three marks of existence: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self (the concept that there is no permanent, unchanging self). When we are deluded about any of these things or want them to be other than what they are, we suffer. Everyone’s dad dies, I thought, one day. In fact, everything dies. Everything is dying all the time. There is no way to outsmart life. I often found comfort in The Five Remembrances, which speak especially to the truth of impermanence:
- I am of the nature to grow old, I cannot escape old age.
- I am of the nature to get sick, I cannot escape sickness.
- I am of the nature to die, I cannot escape death.
- All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
- My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.Translation by Thich Nhat Hahn
For me, God is not only the creator of a world that is ruled by these natural laws; God is these laws. God is the way things are, ultimate reality. God is the ground of being, the truth that we so often run away from or delude ourselves about. These laws are ultimately neutral, I think; impermanence is not good or bad, and it doesn’t bend towards good or bad. It just is. The purpose of religion, then, and the purpose of intimacy with God, is to help us get in touch with things as they are. It may seem a modest goal, but I have experienced it as profound and healing. Paradoxically, sometimes the most transformative thing is to simply be in touch with things as they are.
When I stop running from the pain I feel, and instead just feel it, I am gifted compassion for my fellow human beings, who also experience loss and struggle.
This theology may sound cold or hard, but for me it has been deeply comforting. First of all, it speaks to our experience instead of cutting against it. We experience life as challenging. We experience suffering. And even though God, here, is amoral, the truths of not-self and interdependence spur us into action. Being in touch with impermanence, I can finally stop running from the pain I feel, and instead just feel it. In doing so, I am gifted compassion for my fellow human beings, who also experience loss and struggle. I don’t ask “Where is God in this?” God is in all of it, right in the middle of this messy world, in the way things are. We might ask instead: “How can I navigate this? How can I be with it? And how can I offer compassion to others experiencing their own sorrows?”
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Works Cited:
Adler, Rachel. “Bad Things Happen: On Suffering.” Judaism and Health, ed. Jeff Levin and
Michele Prince, Jewish Lights, 2013, pp. 169-173.
Artson, Bradley Shavit. “BaDerech: On the Way – A Presentation of Process Theology,”
Conservative Judaism, v. 62, nos. 1-2, Fall-Winter 2010-2011, pp. 3-35.
Berkovits, Eliezer. “Faith After the Holocaust.” Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological
Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Katz et al, Oxford, 2007, pp. 463-485.
Plaskow, Judith. “Wrestling with God and Evil.” Goddess and God in the World:
Conversations in Embodied Theology, 1517 Media, 2016, pp. 171-90.
Rebbe Nachman. Likutei Moharan, Part I: Lesson 69.
Rubenstein, Richard. “The Dean and the Chosen People” Wrestling with God: Jewish
Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, ed. Katz et al, Oxford, 2007, pp.
410-418.
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Plum Village Chanting Book. Parallax Press, 1991.
[1] In the post-Holocaust moment, especially, Jewish theologians tackled theodicy anew. Traditionalists doubled down on the image of the God of Judgment, arguing that just as the destruction of the First and Second Temples was due to our own bad behavior, the Holocaust was punishment for Jewish misdeeds like assimilation. Other thinkers, like Richard Rubenstein, have called the Holocaust the death of the God of history, and have conceived of God, instead, as “the Holy Nothingness known to mystics of all ages” (416). Many others, like Eliezer Berkovitz, explain suffering by pointing to free will: “If there is to be man, he must be allowed to make his choices in freedom. If he has such freedom, he will use it. Using it, he will often use it wrongly; he will decide for the wrong alternative. As he does so, there will be suffering for the innocent” (469). Other theologians emphasize a theology of protest, one that empowers the practice of lament and challenges God. Still others point to mystery as an answer of sorts, arguing that our human conceptions of the “good” and “just” are necessarily limited, and that we simply do not get to know the answers to the most profound questions.
[2] I do not find it convincing that “the omnis” are a “sickly green overlay of Greek philosophy” on a pure or somehow essential Judaism represented by the Torah or the rabbis (4). I am skeptical that there is an Essential Judaism we can trace and preserve. I view the claims of God’s omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevelonce as just as represented in the Jewish canon as those views that challenge them. I am not convinced by appeals to a “true Judaism,” no matter how compelling they are.
