Theodicy on the street

The Book of Job, part 2: Theodicy on the street

A woman stands over her dead child's body in a hospital. The child suffered from leukaemia and her long fight with this horrid disease has ended. Is the mother standing over her dead child not entitled to question: why her? why not me? where was G-d when I needed Her? What has my little girl, what have I done to deserve this?

Issues of providence often arise out of suffering. At the core of Job's message is that not everything is fathomable to mere mortals and that reward and punishment is not a simplistic formula that can be used to explain suffering. At first glance, it may appear a cruel conclusion that there is a limitation to our knowledge and comprehension of why things are happening to us. I would never advocate that anyone administering pastoral care should tell a cancer patient to read Job and then they'll understand their predicament.

What the book has given us is a more subtle and multi-layered answer: not just argument, but action. Job teaches us that we need to slowly be reintegrated into society following a bereavement: it is from Job we derive the intense seven days of mourning (shiva), where Jews stay at home and receive comforters. For the first 30 days of mourning Jews do not shave but do return to work after the week. Following 11 months of Kaddish we finally erect a stone to mark the grave and the mourning process is over. Every year, on the anniversary of the death, a candle is lit, and prayers are said. Slowly, we heal.

Jewish teaching has long realised that at our weakest moments we need a process to deal with suffering and that rather than simply processing the reason for the tragedy there is a need to heal the pain. The Jewish mourning process is formulaic, staged and requires the support of the entire community. The immediate act of the mourner at a funeral is to say the Mourner's Kaddish prayer. The prayer is then recited by Mourners for a period of 11 months, three times a day within a quorate of 10 people. The content of the Kaddish prayer itself is a blessing to G-d and really no more. At our weakest moment, just as was the case with Job we reaffirm our belief in the Almighty and are obliged to make our supplications in the belief it assists the departed's journey to the Garden of Eden (Paradise). In the process, it is the living that are helped and who are given a crutch when the world around them is seemingly falling apart.

The why of suffering is a more complex question and one that cannot be answered by ritual. The basic problem of theodicy is set out as follows: if G-d is All-knowing, All-powerful and Benevolent then why do bad things happen at all? The Torah states that at the beginning of time humanity had a choice in the Garden of Eden. We were told to eat from the Tree of Life but not the Tree of Knowledge. We chose to eat from the latter. With knowledge came free will and we were excluded from the Garden and from the Tree of Life and presumably immortality. Free will results in self-autonomy and moral responsibility: we have a choice to put up with suffering or change the world for the better; to work in partnership with the Creation or destroy it and ourselves in the process.

We are urged to chose to work for its betterment in partnership with G-d. It would be inhuman for us not to sense our faith was tested by tragedy. Job responds first with humility and then when challenged with anger. G-d's response is to speak with him. Our conversation with those we love is not always easy and Job teaches us that the conversation with our Creator can be difficult at times too but urges us to look beyond our own circumstances, to have patience in letting our suffering heal, to accept limitations to our understanding and that there is a much wider picture that is not always clear at first.