The "problem of evil" is only in our hearts

notes on the divine horror

Consider G-d’s doing! Who can straighten what has been twisted? So in a time of good fortune enjoy the good fortune; and in a time of misfortune, reflect: The one no less than the other was G-d’s doing; consequently, mortals may find no fault with G-d.
—Ecclesiastes 7:13-14

I no longer believe that there is a problem of evil outside my own heart. I have yet to see whether this realisation will be a comfort to me or an enduring source of horror.

Many of us who are religious, or who were religious and departed from faith, have heard some version of the problem of evil, most commonly: how can evil exist if G-d is all-powerful and entirely good/loving? how can a G-d who loves us do or allow what bad things have been done to us? Either G-d is not all-powerful, G-d is evil, or G-d does not exist.

Then there are the inevitable answers: “Well, G-d didn’t make the thing happen, just let it happen…” “G-d works in ways outside our understanding…” Questioners will almost always find these unsatisfying. The former is purely semantic, if perhaps technically true as we shall see — but nothing happens without G-d’s will. We know pretty well that G-d creates things we find bad or evil. For instance, we read in Isaiah [45:7]: “I form light and darkness, I make weal and create woe—I G-d do all these things.” The latter response is true and adequate; it’s incorrect to think we can know the ways of G-d. If this answer strikes us as a copout, it’s because we aren’t actually operating on the same premises as the believer. After all, this is more or less the answer G-d directly gives to Job concerning his woes. Just because the idea can feel repugnant when we believers are in a bad mood doesn’t mean it’s false.

The issue with evil is deeper than that, though. There is a problem, but it’s within us, not G-d. We have to deal with our idea of evil. We read all the time in Tanakh about avoiding evil and the consequences to be faced by those who do evil. It would seem that our idea of evil comes from the words given us by G-d. Yet we also routinely see G-d do things we consider evil within scriptures and ordinary life, per our idea of evil, which we’ve formed on the basis of these same scriptures. This is a stronger problem of evil. How can we form an idea of a good G-d on the basis of scriptures that, while defining evil, tell us that the same G-d does evil?

Over the last year or so, I’ve realised that my faith will not abide softening. I don’t mean that I know everything and can’t stand for my religious ideas to face criticism, nor am I referring to how I express my faith. Rather, what I’ve noticed is that if I try to push down my faith to accommodate some mortal concern, I will become morbidly unhappy, which is a symptom of the broader stakes of the compromise. When my faith encounters an obstacle inside me, there’s no real way for me to compromise between the two forces and stay sane, let alone honest. Faith is stronger and any obstacle will have to bend or break. In this case, my idea of evil has had to break.

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Down in our world, we make sense of G-d through the models of lesser analogues: humans, in many cases. Torah itself has to anthropomorphise G-d metaphorically, due to our tiny flesh-brains. Of course, anthropomorphism can lead us astray, if left unchecked, or if darkened by misanthropy. I’ve written before about how we damage our idea of G-d by warping our view of human love. What I’ve only begun to confront is that our model of evil in general is mere human evil, which is as finite as human goodness.

For love is fierce as death,
Passion is mighty as Sheol;
Its darts are darts of fire,
A blazing flame.
—Song of Songs 8:6

Star of Venus, in whose presence
the heaven’s lights go dim with shame.
The night of lovers’ pleasure you turn
to fear before your face’s glow…
—Yisrael Najara, from “To the Sh-khinah”

I imagine G-d’s love for me from the starting point of maternal love as an analogy. Were we to think of G-d as doing evil, we would likely think of examples like letting a satan torment Job just to test him, or letting real-world catastrophes happen. But these are anthropomorphic analogies, something less than small potatoes compared to the grandeur of a divine evil.

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Like a bear robbed of her young I attack them
And rip open the casings of their hearts
—Hosea 13:8

The most common way we encounter G-d as having a cruel streak in Tanakh is G-d’s wrath, which serves the point of harsh justice, not evil. G-d’s harsh justice could go so far as to eradicate the Jewish people and start afresh, with a new nation [Exodus 32:7; Jeremiah 18:4-6]. We don’t think about this threat very often, in my experience. Indeed, in most ways, we do not take G-d’s harsh justice seriously enough, let alone the fact that evil emanated from Din, the divine attribute of harsh justice.

From the good came forth evil, and G-d neither commanded nor demanded it. All this falls under the category of silence: do not dwell on it — it is so awesome that you ought not inquire, so hidden that you ought not pursue it.
—Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob HaKohen, Treatise on the Left Emanation

When we see the most evil things imaginable, we must know that G-d is there, present in every aspect of the scenario. This is where the actual problem of evil comes in, the problem of evil in my heart. My model of evil is, say, a serial killer. G-d is so much grander and more horrifying than this minuscule human evil that to imagine G-d’s presence in evil as like a serial killer’s is to imagine seriously that G-d has a house I can visit and eat dinner at, like a human mother. Just as G-d does not have a literal womb, G-d does not have a torture implement in hand.

Jacob Frank—an unpopular source to cite, but incisive here—remarked that if the divine attributes are houses, they must have toilets. In other words, if we take comfortable, mortal metaphors too seriously, we have to admit their unpleasant side too. I could probably attribute my awakening from a dogmatic slumber regarding divine “evil” to this teaching.

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Where this line of thought leaves me is uncomfortable. G-d’s capacity for love is overwhelmingly comforting, and its incomprehensibility is the reason for the warmth I feel from it. But G-d’s relation to evil? G-d’s creation of evil, whether through direct intention or a more passive willing? As divine goodness is incomprehensibly comforting, divine evil is incomprehensibly horrifying.

I don’t think that G-d is evil, though. Of course not. It’s notoriously hard to use language like “G-d is…” to begin with. But as we see above in the Left Emanation and elsewhere, evil complicatedly has its roots in good, but is not therefore the same thing.

For everything bitter has a sweet supernal root, as the mystical teachings explain. Thus, a person’s evil actions may be turned into good, and his deliberate transgressions may be turned into merits. For when one returns in complete repentance, these selfsame evil deeds from the “Left Side,” which were prosecutors against him, enter the higher worlds and become rooted in holiness there, transforming themselves into good rather than becoming nullified.
—Ramak, Tomer Devorah

But here too the mortal sense of evil is infringed upon. If evil has its roots in good, and evil deeds can transform to good, then the divine notion of evil is vastly different from our own, even its relation to good is beyond our reason. It is also deeply unpleasant to know that what strikes us obviously evil in this life becomes good.

Now [the soul] must redeem herself as well, and in doing so she not only redeems the most hidden sparks—she transforms the most intransigent darkness to which those sparks have given life.

—Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, “Who is Sh-chinah, and what does She want from my life?”

To the point: no, G-d is not evil, just as G-d is not whatever else we want to say G-d is not (an odour, a dolphin, a colour, a country…).

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When we say that “G-d’s ways are a mystery” or whatever, let’s be real: what we usually mean is that it’s mysterious why G-d does harsh things that we don’t like, but sensible when G-d does nice things that we do like. G-d seems to “make sense” when G-d makes us feel good. This confusion comes up often in Tanakh; clearly our struggle against the mortal sense of divine injustice is ages-old.

This wicked man dies in robust health,
All tranquil and untroubled…
While this righteous man dies embittered,
Never having tasted happiness.
—Job 21:23-25

But it is my fault, only mine, if I get carried away applying a mortal sense of justice, and its accompanying mortal sense of evil, to G-d in a literal way. From a slightly different point of view, what we frail mortals perceive as sensible kindness from G-d might be perceived by another mortal as divine evil. Yet G-d is not relative. Even we people of the book can end up with wildly different perspectives on fundamental issues. This felt relativity is not a limitation of G-d, but of ourselves and our position in the lowly world. As is my general point here, our eyes are clouded by the husks of this world. The divinity we can glimpse through the swirling bone-dust of the lost is thus dimmed and distorted.

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The horror for me does remain, and perhaps grows, but so does the love. I have had to cast aside the anthropomorphic idea of “evil” we see in the so-called “problem of evil,” which is ultimately an issue of my own heart’s limited comprehension of the Divine. This sloughing of bad theology brings the comfort of knowing more firmly that G-d is not evil in the way a murderer is, but it also introduces the cosmic horror of knowing that G-d’s capacity for what we perceive as evil is as infinite and ineffable as G-d’s love.

It’s hard to describe how much of a mental paradigm shift the process of sorting through this issue of divine evil has been for me. In the end it more or less wraps back around to extremely basic points (quite a horseshoe!). Something in the process, though, has stirred up fundamental and corrosive distortions in my perception of G-d, which I won’t go into, but which have to do with the anthropic basis from which I conceived of G-d’s harshness or evil. However, the difficulty of thinking through this issue does not just have to do with introspection; although the problem of evil is in the heart of the beholder, any honest pursuit of theological clarity has to lead through some troubling teachings. After all, the lower the descent, the higher the ascent. Who are we to think ourselves above what the Holy Maiden Herself must suffer through?

With you as her agent uncovering and redeeming those sparks, the Sh-chinah digs Herself yet deeper, lower, into yet greater darkness, to find sparks still unknown. Not without compensation. As with the sparks themselves, the greater Her descent, the higher She will later ascend.
—R” Freeman

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Thumbnail image from Flickr.

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For more on religion, horror, and evil:

What I will say is this: horror is not nihilism. Nihilism is a belief in the absence of meaning (or, in more specific cases, of extreme scepticism in the philosophical sense). Horror media usually displays a philosophy diametrically opposed to nihilism... Read Lamentations or Talmudic passages on demonology and get back to me about religiously tinted horror media being a uniquely modern phenomenon.
—Linked below.