Is suffering unfair? Let’s look at an example.
Only a very slim seven year old child can creep into a narrow gap in a sealed building to switch off a ticking launching device. This will – in minutes – set off an atom bomb which will destroy a country far away. Your family all live there and will be killed.
But the launching device is radioactive. It will kill the child – a child’s life to save millions of lives. You have five minutes. Tick, tick, tick….. You, and you alone, must make that decision. Tick, tick, tick….. Do you send the child in? Tick, tick, tick….. It will die slowly in agony.
Is It Unfair for the Child to Die?
Is it ‘a bit unfair’ for that child to die of radiation in order to stop that atom bomb? Unfair is the wrong word – it seems possibly necessary but incredibly hard.
The Freewill system is incalculably more important than switching off that launching device. If we knew that with absolute certainty, the system would make sense. The aim of Real Judaism’s education is to achieve this certainty.
We can argue about war’s cruelty and futility – but not if you are in the middle of a battle. And you indeed are constantly at war – within yourself. You can philosophise about purpose, reward and punishment and discover that, indeed, without a proven Creator, all is futile.
But, given the Creator, it is unintelligent to argue that the whole system as grossly unfair. Who gave you your concept of fairness or morality? Is it not unfair and cruel to stab a knife into someone – unless you are a life-saving surgeon?
Again, pain is not necessarily unfair; it is necessary to create that ultimate question that no-one can answer.
Why Would an All-Loving Creator Allow Suffering?
‘I don’t care, this world is too terrible. I want to get off! How could your purported all-loving Creator impose such a system on His creations whom He ‘loves’? Why create a system which means we must suffer to be improved? Why create imperfect beings? I don’t like this game. Let me out of the playground!’
Perhaps for the first time ever, you agree with the Creator. That world, which you would prefer, did exist. But, bad luck, you missed it! It was the Garden of Eden.
The 974 Prior Worlds and This One
We described the 974 Kabbalistic prior worlds, created and destroyed before this one and the following strange Midrash. We mentioned that each was also meant to be the Garden of Eden – the Perfect World – but in each, the creations acted like we did; that they were destroyed in that same initial Kabbalistic moment of their creation; that we still walk above their fossilized remains, on this last surviving 975th world, because of Noah and the promise given to him not to destroy this world; and that this is why the Torah starts ‘As a beginning of creating….’ with the first account of, yet again, the unblemished beings, Adam and Eve, in the unblemished 975th world.
It was another Creation – itself being part of the ‘beginning of creating’. This why ‘In the beginning …’ is a hopelessly incorrect translation.
We Rarely See the Full Picture
By now we know that we will never have the ultimate justifications for our travails. The example often used is that of a poor villager carrying all the goods he has spent the winter making. He breaks his leg on a hillside on his way down to catching a ferry.
Every year this voyage makes his annual income. He sits on the ground watching the boat leave without him, in agony and utterly distraught. Then, as he watches in horror, that ferry that he would have given anything to have caught, sinks and all on board drown in the whirlpool created. What should he think?
Our destiny and test is that we rarely see the sinking ferry on which we would have drowned. We cry over our broken leg and scream, ‘But what could be worse than this?…. It is all too much. Too harsh. I could never believe.’
And, even our villager, who now knows the entire truth, is still left with no income, a broken leg and that great loss of life. We protest, ‘What would have been truly ‘good’?! Obviously, that neither the leg nor the sinking should happen!’
No, that is our version of ‘good’. We have established all this. Our test is to have the simple faith that His good is also our good. But we cannot expect actually to have any reassurance or the comfort of ocular proof of this. Our problem after all is only our understanding – perception and expectation.
The Highest Purpose
So you cry, ‘Who can understand this so deeply that he above suffering? At least give us a means of surviving without total understanding!’
You know something, you are again agreeing with your Maker. He did provide just that perception by providing the irrefutable, non-faith ‘means of surviving without total understanding’ – Real Judaism. A person trained in it from the earliest simply knows his task and understands each moment of Life as fully as he needs.
Thus perhaps your value system is the problem, not ours. In your system, that child who saved millions from the atom bomb unknowingly perhaps achieved its highest purpose. But in our system, another child who died ‘senselessly’ from illness also unknowingly achieved its highest purpose.
In secular terms, millions of soldiers have done no less and no more; every Remembrance Day, Veterans’ Day, War Anniversary states just that. Yes, this world is a war in which you are – perhaps unwillingly – a foot-soldier.
This is why each human being who chooses the right response is playing his minute part in the whole. This is why each human being is completing the universe in a sense when he strives to raise his visiting soul’s level and status. But with the wrong response, he is destroying the universe by making his soul ‘suffer’.
The Power of Proper Education
As mentioned, the extremely successful and resilient Chassidic movement manages to keep such Kabbalistic ideas at the forefront of the simplest minds. It combines zestful action and the plainest simple reliance on and trust in the Almighty. The innermost and outer reactions are constantly balanced.
It creates a truly powerful alternative world within Real Judaism by allowing a simultaneous appreciation of the metaphysical within everyday life.
But every vibrant community fully living the Torah life – from all traditions – Yemeni, Sefardi, Ashkenazi – has the same permanence and zest.
The greatest man I ever knew explained how he got through Buchenwald: ‘Education,’ he said, very emphatically, ‘education! To those with the proper education, there are no questions. The moment I went through those gates, I stopped thinking of questions, I held my head up and smiled.’
Other survivors testified to this astonishing sight – the tall, uncowed and unconcerned young man actually teaching Torah to others in the huts. He told me all this 35 years after the events.
It is important to add that his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are deemed amongst the quiet, respected aristocracy of today’s Yeshiva world. One of his ears was badly ripped and scarred. He told me in a matter of fact voice that it was because he had refused to duck when a kindly German had swung a long chain around and round forcing the inmates to cower.
He had once assisted an old man to go out to excuse himself at night. This was punishable by death. A civilised young guard, his own age, caught them. He pointed a gun at the great man’s head. Looking him directly in the eye, the latter asked, ‘If this was your father, wouldn’t also you have taken him out?’ Staring back, the handsome, sneering model German moved away the muzzle to the old man’s head and shot him without blinking. Ach, die Ubermenshen!
The great man told me that he had returned alone to his hut where he slept on the top board immediately under the corrugated iron roof, in a corner. As always the meagre heat from the crowded starving men condensed on the inside of the freezing tin roof and trickled down the eaves. It gathered and dripped in the corner just at his head. He collected it in an old tin. They were dying of thirst.
Every morning he used that water, not to drink, but, in accordance with Jewish Law, to wash his hands when he woke. He did the same that morning. He had no questions because he already had learnt the answers almost before he could walk or talk.
Freewill to Reject Freewill
Yet, even with that education, we must remain with a challenge – a shadow – when faced with apparently impossible challenges – otherwise we would not have true Freewill. Our spiritual and physical needs must test us constantly.
We all know many who have personally experienced a truly life-changing harrowing tragedy and this has convinced them that all religion is wrong. You may have suffered yourself the horror of suffering, loss, and tragedy without reason or blame. The reaction can be the normal human emotional response of trying to rationalise this. Most must have someone to blame.
This, in our terms, is as senseless as a dog attacking the stick that is hitting it and not the person wielding it – but we must be free to do this. Most Jews today are creatures of our modern world’s muddled and individual-centred morality and, faced with suffering, untutored in how to deal with it. They have lost the perspective of their own heritage.
How come two people go through an identical experience and one emerges able to continue and the other bitter, empty and paralysed? Who has triumphed over tragedy?
‘No Questions’ Is Not ‘No Thought’
Again, the greatest man I knew had said, ‘To those with the proper education, there are no questions’ but this absolutely did not mean a mindless acceptance. It is born of years of training in self-control based on parents who show ‘no end of love and no end of firmness; no end of firmness and no end of love’ as he would often repeat when talking of bringing up children.
No questions exist anymore because they are answered, not because they must not be asked. The final reward is the quality of mental life and calmness of spirit.
Yet, what can the person ignorant of or resisting the logic of Sinai do?
Nothing! There are no answers – except the jungle. That is where grief counselors make their often hard earned money. They must somehow convince us that we will get through and the pain grows dimmer. Life is to be lived and even this agony is not justification for mental suicide. They often give people reasons and a series of steps to allow them to assuage their pain.
The problem is that this answers no questions. If you say, ‘Well, there is no answer’ then you have to say that there is no spiritual element to our lives. The Jews’ problem is that this is a direct contradiction to the fact of Sinai. Catch 22!!
Remember it is evidentially proven beyond reasonable doubt. If you do not accept this then please read my Book One. The proof is over-whelming and, purely in judicial terms, must convince any jury.
But you have read elsewhere of course.
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