Covenant, Responsbility, and the Problem of Evil
This is the first part of reflections/assignments for a Theodicy course in my rabbinical program.
Introduction – Why study theodicy?
Theodicy is a very difficult subject. Religion generally attempts to explain the mechanics of human existence through a transcendental explanation. Articles of faith can be as simple as “the coconuts fall from the tree because a ghost haunts the tree top”, to deep explanations of how we came to be via Creation mythologies. That invariably invites the notion that we evince gratitude to unseen forces for the favorable things that happen. If the good then only occurs by providence of the hidden or the unseen, then, too, must the evil or bad things, be a result of either supernatural negligence or belligerence.
So yes, for Jews specifically, explaining evil in a world created by God ends up being a very challenging intellectual and spiritual question.
My motivation for taking this course is, well, obviously, I need the elective credit. It is also because in my previous life as a soldier, these questions have dogged me for decades, and I want to test my own moral or value constructs and conclusions I’ve reached on the nature of good and evil, and what role the Divine plays in that.
I want to make clear, I never ask, “Why does God allow evil?” My answers always focus, as a Jew, on human responsibility within a covenantal framework.
Forms of Evil that Disturb Me Most: Moral Evil
Rabbi Patrick Beaulier delineates in our course several permutations of evil. I do not believe in natural evil or demonic evil. This does not mean that I am not disturbed by evil. The deliberate infliction of suffering on innocent or defenseless people is a form of moral evil I cannot stomach.
I enlisted in the military for “all of the above” answers on a multiple choice test, but one of the reasons was growing up hearing stories of the Holocaust. I believed that a moral nation with a moral military is a force for justice (re: good) in the world, a view I still generally hold.
I find this form of evil disturbing because it requires intention in the form of direct action or neglect, whether profligate or incidental. I even believe the kind of blind obedience and bureaucratic duty Hannah Arendt wrote about in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil represents a conscious decision to surrender moral duty in the face of authority.
It would be easy for me to relate military experiences in the Balkans or the Middle East, but that’s too obvious and frames moral evil as always being external to ourselves due to the scale.
The question of evil among our side is part and parcel of why I will not join any association for the 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry regiment. This is despite my time as an arctic paratrooper in Alaska remaining one of my most cherished service memories.
In the 1990s, on a unit exchange in the United Kingdom, Blackfoot Company, my airborne rifle company from the 1/501st, enjoyed considerable liberty. Disturbingly, to me, our platoon sergeant went about lecturing us about “what goes on deployment, stays on deployment,” as many married members of our platoon indulged what I can only describe as a Bacchanalian orgy of drinking and adultery. They were concerned about the consequences of infidelity when news reached wives at home, and he used his authority to avoid accountability.
It is my belief that there is a connective tissue between his admonition to us then and what happened that resulted in Sergeant Evan Vela, an Army sniper, being convicted and sentenced for killing an Iraqi civilian during a 2007 deployment. The same platoon sergeant was, a decade later, the battalion’s Command Sergeant Major, or senior enlisted advisor, for that deployment.
From this article: “During testimony, sniper Spc. Michaud said that LTC Balcavage and CSM Knight ‘constantly pushed for “If you feel threatened, you know, obviously eliminate the threat.” But they kind of said it in a manner in which a lot of us took it like, “Hey, you need to go out there and you guys gotta start getting kills.”‘”
This man was later made honorary Command Sergeant Major of the regiment, something which continues to disgust me to this day. I do not believe he was a moral or decent person when he was my platoon sergeant, and I do not believe that he was moral with regards to the 1/501st sniper team in Iraq. Do I think he is evil? No, but I believe he made choices that could be considered evil while in leadership, and I believe it is also evil to avoid consequence for orders, explicit or implied, that you give your subordinates.
That’s the fertile soil for human abuse at scale, like the Holocaust.
There are less abstract and more visceral brushes with human evil that I have experienced, but I feel our tradition urges us to explore within before we look outside. I interrogate my own experiences, in part, because they’re more instructional.
Suffering doesn’t happen on its own. Human beings choose cruelty. They choose to abdicate responsibility. They choose deceit over honesty when accountability comes around.
Forms of Evil That Do Not Challenge My Theological Framework
I would like to further clarify my possibly surprising position: no form of evil fundamentally threatens my theological framework.
Both through lived experience and careful consideration, I tend to hew to the Sephardic rationalist tradition in my theological approach to evil. Thanks to Rabbi Bill Siemers, our congregational rabbi at Beth Israel in Bangor, the principal influence for me is Hakham José Faur.
In his amazing works, In the Shadow of History, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, and The Horizontal Society, Hakham Faur lays out a very solid definition of good or evil.
They’re not primarily metaphysical mysteries, but rather moral categories. Good is best realized through covenantal responsibility expressed through rational law, while evil is a betrayal of moral responsibility.
In citing the examples above with my old platoon sergeant, I think I can explain the two key categories of evil identified by Faur. Adultery isn’t just about cheating on a wife but rather exists in a broader biblical sense of covenantal betrayal, and denial of human moral responsibility.
Everything evil with regards to the sniper section in Iraq in the linked article begins with a denial that we are accountable to morality, and it ends in the literal murder of innocents.
Where is the divine permission in this equation? Just as God didn’t stop Cain from killing Abel (but did hold him to account), evil is always conditioned on human beings failing their covenantal obligations.
From a theological perspective, I must again reiterate that I do not believe natural forces such as earthquakes, storms, or disease to be challenging. My explanation for those is simply that there’s an order to Creation that exists outside a framework of good and evil. It wasn’t evil that shattered New Orleans over twenty years ago. It was a hurricane. Why did God allow that hurricane to happen? The question only leads to more useless and unanswerable questions to my mind. You can take it back all the way to the emergence of life if you don’t believe in a literal Creation story…why did God create the perfect conditions for life to proliferate on this planet and not hermetically seal us away from obvious cycles of regeneration and regrowth? Why does disease cull us as humans?
I’m not indifferent to suffering here. To me, the evil manifest in the natural world comes into play when the indifference to suffering caused by it manifests, in other words, where natural disaster, famine, or disease intersects with human morality.
Similarly, it bears repeating that I wholly reject any explanation that attributes evil to supernatural malevolent forces. Any explanation that shifts responsibility away from humans is uninteresting to me.
My Own Reflection
Honestly, I think I’ve embedded the kernels of my own reflection throughout. Once again turning to Faur, I think evil emerges in recognizable patterns when societies abandon a framework like our Torah’s legal-rational structure.
There are recurring signs that emerge: personality cults, political absolutism, mythic nationalism, or religious mystification that bypasses law.
These systems all undermine the ability to debate, they are avoidant of accountability, and they deny or outright refute moral responsibility.
And this is why I come back to the value that I think it is my job to sell as an aspiring rabbi. We embed authority in law and not personalities. We debate rather than command. We turn to the argument of scholars rather than the decree of a ruler.
In our system, individuals remain morally responsible, and no authority can erase personal accountability.
This is a big, abstracted answer, I realize, when Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People is on our course reading list. At the same time, I do not believe the common pastoral interaction with theodicy, the answer to “why me?” should be treated like a real philosophical inquiry.
No, those are cries of pain, or protests suffering. Even in Job, the why is unfathomable. We’d be quick to point out the obvious: God is not punishing someone, even if we do have traces of causality in our proof texts. We don’t say “everything happens for a reason” or “who can understand God’s plan?”
The covenantal framework in which we abide does not say, “why me?”, but rather “what now?”
Crucial to my view on Theodicy, which I hope to explore further in this course, is that human effort is evidence of Divine compassion. Our human impulse to cure disease, to offer shelter and rebuild after a hurricane, to extend pain management in palliative care, reflects something really profound about the covenantal relationship.
God is not absent in that covenantal relationship, rather, it means that God has entrusted human beings with the responsibility to confront evil and suffering together. The existence of relentless human effort to improve medicine, how we build in flood zones, and end wars is the clearest evidence I can find that the covenant between God and humanity imparts responsibility for good and evil to us.
