DEUT1373 Not only does God, according to the Bible, possess justice as a defining characteristic of His being but He enforces His demands of justice on human beings. He hears the cry of those who suffer injustice and responds by punishing the perpetrators. Thus the Torah admonishes (Deuteronomy 24:14-15). From the Torah to our own day, though, Jews have been questioning God’s enforcement, noting that sometimes the righteous suffer and the evil prosper (tzaddik v’ra lo, rasha v’tov lo) B. Berachot 7a. That challenge has become all the more strident in our own time, with some Holocaust theologians denying God’s justice altogether and others, somewhat more moderately, claiming that God failed to enforce justice during the Holocaust and, therefore, our own relationship to God must change (citations omitted). As horrific as the Holocaust was, though, it was clearly the product of human beings, and so morally and even theologically the “free-will defense” must surely carry considerable weight. That is, human free will can be preserved only if God lets us use our powers for ill as well as for good, and so God may have allowed the Holocaust to happen but is not solely or even primarily responsible for it. That defense does not work, though, to explain why some people are born with many more intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and physical gifts than others, and why some people have strong families, schools, and enough money to live comfortably while others suffer from broken families, poor schools, and poverty. Even worse, how can we justify God in the face of, say, a three-year-old child suffering from leukemia? These are, for me, the really hard challenges to God's justice. As I have developed elsewhere, I myself maintain that God is indeed involved in injustice as well as justice, that the fundamental principle of the oneness of God requires that we assert that. Still, while not hiding from the concrete and awesome evidence against God’s justice, I nevertheless affirm that by and large God enforces the rules of justice, grounding that faith in the many times that we do indeed see that individuals and groups reap what they sew. (Dorff, Knowing God: Jewish Approaches to the Unknowable. Aronson. (1992), 129-148.) I have a much harder time wrestling with the inequities that people inherit as their lot in life and even more problems with the child with leukemia and similar cases in which people suffer for no apparent fault of their own. It is such cases that make me resonate with the passages in the Jewish tradition in which Jews have angrily challenged God’s justice and declared it inscrutable. Such people-- Abraham, Job, the Rabbis, and Levi of Berdichev especially come to mind -- nevertheless maintain their faith in God, His link to justice, and the importance of our own efforts to achieve justice. Indeed, while some who lived through the Holocaust lost their faith in God, others who suffered through that same awful experience came to the exactly opposite conclusion -- namely, that the Holocaust proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that human beings could not be trusted on their own to render justice and that, therefore, we must turn to God for that, however many problems we have at times in understanding God's justice.
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