Universal Truths: Jewish Roots, Week Two: Suffering

[dorchadas]

Notes from my second week of class:

• Theodicy!


• "When Bad Things Happen to Good People", which is a lot!


• Reasons
• Karma


• Resistance Training (only what people can handle)


• Character Building


• G-d works in mysterious ways


• Suffering is a passage to healing


• All assume G-d causes all suffering. No other sources?


• Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent. But, pick two


• "What if G-d isn't tracking us like Google? Amazon knows more about us than G-d does."


• Shit happens religion poster


• Tohu v'Vohu, chaos and formlessness before creation. Leftover chaos, since G-d rested on Shabbat. But was everything done?


• Why say it was good if it wasn't good?


• Order built on top of chaos. Chaos still underneath? Qlippoth?

  Her: "Pandora goes off sometimes without turning it on."
  Me: "Speaking of chaos."

• Where is the meaning in a nature disaster? For whom? If one survives and one dies?


• Christianity has good concept of G-d's love through suffering, that either really speaks to you or it absolutely doesn't. The Deist watchmaker setting the universe in motion and ignoring everything after is the other way around.


• If G-d is connection between people, then since people pull together in the response to a disaster, then G-d is in the disaster response


• "Acts of G-d" is term of art used for events we don't have enough data to predict statistically. The "God of the Gaps" but for statistical modeling


• People who don't feel connected seem like they need G-d more, but feel it less. Not everyone gets help from other people. If you define G-d by people helping people, it sidesteps the question


• Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel lost whole family in Shoah. Where was G-d, but where was man?


• If we're created בצלם אלהים b'tzelem Elohim, and we're good and bad, then isn't G-d good and bad?


• Shedim provide a good explanation for evil!


• Why "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh"? I will be, future? Because G-d will be with people in future sorrows as well. But then what is the point of G-d's presence? Presence is not the same as witness


• Like parenting? Trusting in children to do what they can


• Jews have never read Torah literally. Seventy faces, etc. PaRDeS. Pshat, Remez, D'rash, Sod


• Noah, G-d regrets creation. Throw creation away?


• Why "chaos"? Too strong? Randomness, uncertainty? Too disruptive?


• Talk to G-d directly. Because it's hard, because it helps break through the barrier of rationality, and because everyone talks on phones now and look like they're talking to themselves nowadays

Comments

[helvetica]

I LOL'd at this "What if G-d isn't tracking us like Google? Amazon knows more about us than G-d does."

[dorchadas]

I mean:

"And the Lord God called to the man, and said to him: 'Where are you?' "
-Genesis 3:9

Why would he need to ask if he already knew? 🤔

[corvi]

Do you have a personal feeling / suspicion on Why Suffering?

[dorchadas]

I don't tend to think that G-d is personally responsible for everything, so that's a big weight off the problem.

I have a very ideosyncratic view, where I tend to conform to a much more ancient understanding of Judaism where I take all the references of other gods in the Torah as literal--other gods exist, and belong to other peoples, but their worship is forbidden to us. So there's plenty of other sources for suffering.

Another reason is that the idea that the universe was created out of "nothing" isn't set in stone. In the Hebrew phrase תוהו ובוהו tohu wa bohu, often translated as "without form and void," "tohu" can mean "emptiness," but it can also mean "wasteland" (and "bohu" itself, we don't know what it means). The word תהום tehum, "the deep," definitely refers to the idea of an abyss, or primordial waters, and is cognate with the Babylonian word "Tiamat." In Kabbalah, the קליפות qlippot are the remnants of the first creation which fell apart. All of which is to say that there's a bit of primordial chaos remaining in the world and which is essential to the world's nature and function.

Does that make sense?