GEN1018 … Moses … bring[s] the Torah to a close with a theme that has been there from the beginning. God, creator of universe, made a world that is fundamentally good, the word that echoes seven times in the first chapter of Genesis. It is humans, granted free will as God’s image and likeness, who introduce evil into the world and then suffer its consequences. Hence Moses’ insistence that when trouble and tragedy appear, we should search for the cause within ourselves and not blame God. God is upright and just. The defect is in us, His children. This is perhaps the most difficult idea in the whole of Judaism. It is open to the simplest of objections, one that has sounded in almost every generation. If God is just, why do bad things happen to good people? This is the question asked not by skeptics and doubters, but by the very heroes of faith.   We hear it in Abraham’s plea [this verse]… it is an argument that has never ceased. It continued through the rabbinic literature. It was heard again in the kinot, the laments, prompted by the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages. It sounds in the literature produced in the wake of the Spanish expulsion, and echoes still when we recall the Holocaust. The Talmud says that of all the questions Moses asked God, this was the one to which God did not give an answer Berachot 7a. The simplest, deepest interpretation is given in Psalm 92, “The song of the Sabbath day.” Though “the wicked spring up like grass” 92:7, they will eventually be destroyed. The righteous, by contrast, “flourish like a palm tree and grow tall like a cedar in Lebanon” 92:13. Evil wins in the short term but never in the long. The wicked are like grass, the righteous like a tree. Grass grows overnight but it takes years for a tree to reach its full height. In the long run, tyrannies are defeated. Empires decline and fall, goodness and rightness win the final battle. As Martin Luther King said in the spirit of the psalm: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “Out of the Long Night,” The Gospel Messenger, February 8, 1958, 14.… Difficult though Jewish faith is, it has had the effect through history of leading us to say: if bad things have happened, let us blame no one but ourselves, and let us labor to make them better. It was this that led Jews, time and again, to emerge from tragedy, shaken, scarred, limping like Jacob after his encounter with the angel, yet resolved to begin again, to rededicate ourselves to our mission and faith, to ascribe our achievements to God and our defeats to ourselves. Out of such humility, a momentous strength is born. SACKS 331-3