A Din Toyrah Mit Gott: Jewish Theodicy, Starring

Job, Elisha ben Abuya, Akiva and God

Hello! It's good to see everyone. Thank you all for coming
today.
There are sixteen handouts to accompany this presentation.
Please don't panic! None of them is essential to following the
talk; anything I want you to hear from the pages of the
handouts, I will be either quoting or paraphrasing. Many of the
handouts are printouts of the original sources for material I
refer to from the Torah, the rest of the Tanach, the Talmud or
the Midrash. In addition, any time I mention a book, there will
be a handout describing the book. Any handout that is in
Hebrew contains an English translation as well. Unless the
handout is very short, or the entire handout content is relevant,
I have underlined the relevant portions. The underlining
appears in the English portions of the handouts, except in cases
where I think the translation is too free and does not convey
what I want to focus on, in which case the relevant Hebrew will
be underlined as well. You can glance through the relevant
handouts as I speak, or you can take the handouts with you to
review later, or you can ignore the handouts completely. The
choice is yours!
Now let's get to theodicy. "Theodicy" (not to be confused with
"The Odyssey", as in Homer) is a word rooted in Greek,
meaning, approximately, "divine justice". People of a religious
turn of mind have been preoccupied for millennia with the
question of how to reconcile the existence of a benevolent and
omnipotent god with the overwhelming presence of evil in the
world. "Thieves get rich and saints get shot"—how is this just?
To put it in almost mathematical terms, we are given three
propositions:
 God is benevolent
 God is omnipotent
 Evil exists
We are asked to consider that any two of these propositions
taken together may be true, but that all three cannot be
simultaneously true. If God is both benevolent and
omnipotent, then presumably God both wishes to prevent bad
things from happening and is capable of doing so. Yet bad
things happen. So how does this add up?
It seems that the answer must lie in demonstrating the falsity of
one of the propositions. First, many have argued over the years
that evil does not, in fact, exist, because what we see as evil is,
in reality, intended to bring about a greater good in a way that
we do not, indeed cannot, understand.
There is another, more pernicious (in my opinion), version of
this, which is common to the extremely religious, or

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fundamentalists, of many religions—the denial that there is any
injustice at all: what appears to us to be unjust is never unjust
because we are all sinful and any harm that befalls us is always
justified as punishment for our sins. This is what you might call
the "when bombs fall on your elementary schools, check your
mezuzahs" school of theodicy. It has been a standard position
for some Jews for millennia, showing up in the Tanach, the
Talmud, and the writings of the later commentators.
The world-wide impact of the corona virus, a laboratory for
students of theodicy, provided a perfect example of this
response to disaster. The Chief Rabbi of Tzefat and other
leaders of the religious right in Israel were quoted as explaining
the outbreak of the virus as God's punishment for human
sinning, for insufficient adherence to God's commands.
Homosexuality and non-marital sexual relations were popular
sins to cite as inspiring divine punishment. One rabbi went so
far as to say that the virus was all about punishing sinful Jews,
and that any harm that came to non-Jews was "collateral
damage".
Of course, it wasn't only rabbis who propounded the "virus as
punishment for sin" approach. A prominent fundamentalist
pastor in the United States urged his flock to "repent of LGBT
sin" in the face of the virus, saying that "obeying God protects
the USA from diseases such as the corona virus". And an imam

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speaking on an official Palestinian television channel
proclaimed, "If the epidemic harms non-believers, from among
the abusers and the aggressors, then that is punishment. This
virus is one of Almighty Allah's soldiers, and he is unleashing it
on those who attack his believers. For the believers, this is a
trial."
While this is a common response to the dilemma of theodicy
among the very religious, there are moral reasons that I regard
as sufficient to reject it, such as the presumed innocence of
infant victims of catastrophe (unless you're a big believer in
original sin). I will note that the Talmud, in tractate Shabbat,
considers at length, and rejects, the proposition, "There is no
death without sin and no suffering without iniquity". [The
relevant portion of Shabbat 55 is on Handout A.] In any case, I
will not deal with this approach further, because if it is true, it is
to me profoundly uninteresting: it removes the dilemma
entirely by removing the injustice. If all the harm we see is
nothing but deserved punishment, then theodicy is no mystery
at all. As Abraham Lincoln famously said about the misery
caused by the Civil War, quoting Psalm 19: "The judgments of
the Lord are true and righteous altogether". End of story.
So much for the first attempt to show the falsity of one of the
propositions. Second, a less popular solution has been to deny
that God is benevolent, at least in any terms that make sense to

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us. Of course, that can easily blend into the first solution, if we
argue that it is truly "benevolent" to impose evil on us for the
sake of some greater good we do not understand.
And finally, in recent years, one well-known rabbi, faced with
his own child's horrible illness, explained that his soul revolted
at either of these two solutions, and preferred to deny that God
is omnipotent. In When Bad Things Happen to Good People,
Rabbi Harold Kushner argues that God weeps with us at the evil
that happens, and would change it if God could, but God
cannot. [A description of Rabbi Kushner's book is on Handout
No. 1.] (Incidentally, although this is a much less discussed
issue, there are also complaints when good things happen to
bad people. See, for example, Jonah's anger when God
pardons the inhabitants of Nineveh despite God's earlier
intention of destroying the city.)
Of course, this non-omnipotent-God proposal gets tangled up
with arguments about free will. Has God deliberately chosen to
give humans the ability to choose evil, and voluntarily restricted
God's own ability to prevent that choice? Is this necessary in
some sense for true virtue to exist, in that the deliberate
rejection of evil in favor of good would not be possible in the
absence of true, consequential evil? Here we are back in the
realm of "What, really, is evil?" and "What, really, is
benevolence?" These philosophical approaches to theodicy

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have been common to thinkers of all persuasions, not just
Jewish ones. What is the one thing we know is true of all of
them? They must have been in some measure deemed
unsatisfactory, or we would not still be sitting here attempting
to solve the riddle of theodicy! There clearly are flaws in each
approach; for example, even if we accept the free-will-requires-
the-possibility-of-choosing-evil hypothesis, what does this have
to do with evils, like diseases, that are not chosen at all, let
alone freely? And, since our tradition describes more than a
few divine miracles, how do we explain why some
circumstances are worthy of divine intervention while others
are not?
It is not my ambition to solve this conundrum. I am sorry if you
expected otherwise. What I would like to do is to highlight
some idiosyncratic, even quirky, Jewish reactions to the
questions raised by theodicy and see whether any of them
resonate with you. Our Yiddish-speaking Eastern European
ancestors would, when overcome by the tribulations of
everyday life, demand that God appear with them before a
legal tribunal to answer for God's refusal to make life bearable.
A Jewish legal process before a tribunal is known as a "Din
Torah (Toyrah in Yiddish)", a judgment under the Torah, and
the theme of having such an confrontation with the creator was
known as a "din Toyrah mit Gott", literally (in Yiddish), a

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"litigation with God". At the end of this talk, I will have another
word to say about this process of a din Toyrah mit Gott.
The conundrum of theodicy was, as far as I can tell, first
expressed by Abraham when he challenged God's plan to
destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. [Chapter 18 of Genesis, which
contains the dialogue between God and Abraham, is on
Handout No. 2.] Abraham exclaimed, "Far should it be from
you, God, to behave in that manner, to slay the righteous along
with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are
treated alike. Shall the Judge of the Universe not do Justice?"
"What if there are fifty righteous people in Sodom?", Abraham
asks. Will God destroy them along with the wicked? What
about forty-five righteous, or thirty, or ten? God's response is
to yield to Abraham's bargaining, offering to spare the cities of
the plain if an ever-smaller number of righteous people is found
in them. But because God appears to be humoring Abraham
here—presumably because God knows that there will not be
even ten righteous people to be found—there is no defense of
God's position presented. No-one makes a motion to dismiss,
arguing that even if the righteous are destroyed along with the
wicked, that is not an impeachable offense (remember when
impeachment was the biggest issue we had to worry about?)
That level of argument had to wait for later.

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So far as we know, the first elaborate attempt to summon God
before a tribunal to account for God's self was made by Job, in
the Biblical book of the same name. Job lived a righteous life,
as the book attests, and would have been fine if Satan hadn't
decided to stick his nose in and incite God to enter into a wager
by which God would test Job by throwing at him misfortune
after misfortune. After the opening, no further reference to
Satan or his wager with God appears in the book, the balance
of which is purely philosophical, considering the justice of God's
actions without regard to the bet. Archibald MacLeish, one-
time poet laureate of the United States, wrote a poetic drama
called JB based on Job, in which he expressed the dilemma at
the heart of the book as "If God is God, he is not good; if God is
good, he is not God", a succinct restatement of the quandary of
theodicy. [A description of JB is on Handout No. 3. The
relevant portions of the book of Job are on Handout No. 4.]
Despite efforts by his helpful neighbors and family to "comfort"
him by explaining that Job must, in fact, have been guilty of
some horrible sins, since God could not possibly be making him
suffer for no good reason, Job maintains his innocence and
demands that God appear and explain God's self. Job cries out
to Heaven: "Oh that I knew where I might find God, that I
might come even to God's seat! I would order my cause before
God, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the

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words which God would answer me, and understand what God
would say unto me. . . . Let God answer me!"
In the famous climax of the book of Job, God appears as a voice
out of a whirlwind to answer Job just as Job had demanded.
But God's response is along the lines of "Where were you when
I created the universe? Can you impose your will on Behemoth
and Leviathan? Who are you to demand an accounting from
me?" This is usually summarized as "'Shut up', God explained".
As we will see today, a demand for silence in the face of
perceived divine injustice is certainly one theme we often
confront in Jewish theodicy.
But is the harangue that was addressed to Job from the
whirlwind really an instance of the demand for silence? I am
not sure; in fact, I rather think not. A kinder, more optimistic
and perhaps more profound, understanding of God's lecture to
Job would be "You really cannot understand what is just and
what isn't until you understand the principles that underlie the
functioning of the universe. Keep studying and learning your
physics, and perhaps someday you will know enough to
understand My justice." As I will explain later, in my view, this
comes as close as possible to a fruitful and hopeful Jewish
response to the riddle of theodicy.
Moving on through history, we come to another significant
character in the history of theodicy. Elisha ben Abuya is one of

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the most fascinating people in all of Jewish scholarship. He
was born in the land of Israel around the time of the
destruction of the Second Temple, and apparently followed the
usual path of study and argument to becoming a Talmudic
rabbi, perhaps more than ordinarily gifted, when something
happened that abruptly ended his involvement with traditional
Judaism. Thereafter, according to some sources, he frequented
prostitutes and violated many of the commandments of the
Torah, including by luring young Jews away from the Torah. It
is even said that he became an informant for the Romans,
betraying a number of sages who were unlawfully teaching
Torah. There is a debate over whether, when God recites the
teachings of the sages, God recites any in the name of Elisha
ben Abuya; there is also a debate over whether Elisha repented
on his deathbed or not, and whether or not he was received
into Olam Haboh, the world to come. [Many of the relevant
sources from both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmuds
that deal with significant episodes in Elisha's life appear on the
very long Handout No. 5. The first four pages are something of
a summary; the remainder consists of all the pages of Tractate
Chagigah of the Babylonian Talmud whose contents I will be
discussing. There are other tractates, including Kiddushin, that
contain information about Elisha ben Abuya, but enough is
enough for one handout. Feel free to thumb through the
handout at your leisure—or not.]

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The Talmud describes Elisha's downfall in a very abstract and
metaphorical parable: four rabbis, Elisha, Akiva, Ben Zoma and
Ben Azzai, are said to have entered a "pardes". "Pardes" is the
Persian term for an enclosed garden, and has become the
English word, "paradise"; the Talmud presumably means that
the four embarked on some enterprise involving an encounter
with esoteric knowledge, whether secular Greek learning or
some more mystical form of understanding (for more details,
see Rabbi Milton Steinberg's novelized biography of Elisha ben
Abuya, As A Driven Leaf). [A description of Rabbi Steinberg's
novel appears on Handout No. 6. You should be aware that
there are those who say that the novel paints an overly
favorable portrait of Elisha ben Abuya.] In any event, the
results of the journey through the pardes were not good: one
rabbi died; one went mad; Elisha "cut the shoots", which means
became an apostate; only Akiva emerged safely.
Elsewhere in the Talmud, we are given a more detailed
explanation of what caused Elisha's apostasy—in fact, two
similar explanations. In one, Elisha saw a pig dragging through
the streets the tongue of a great expounder of the Torah
executed by the Romans, and exclaimed: "Is this the tongue of
the great utterer of words of Torah, now dragged through the
dust by a pig? Is this Torah, and is this its reward? Zu Torah
v'zu s'chorah?"

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A little digression here, to point out that many Jewish
theodicies are focused on the plaintive cry, "Zu Torah v'zu
s'chorah?"—in essence, why has someone who has lived the
right kind of life and done what is commanded been rewarded
with a painful fate? In other words, why do bad things happen
to good people? True, Abraham does not ask or allude to this
question. Job does not use the words, but the gist of his
complaint is the same. Throughout the generations of Jewish
history, when there is a din Toyrah mit Gott, the opening of the
plaintiff's complaint is often "Zu Torah v'zu s'chorah?", as it is
with Elisha. Even Moses uses this line, as we will hear later on.
And it's not just mortals who employ this complaint. There is a
brief theodicy in the Yom Kippur liturgy, in the original
Martyrology. Here we read the great poem "Eleh Ezkerah",
"These I remember", based on a Midrash of the same name.
The poem is set in the land of Israel during the Hadrianic
persecution that followed the revolt let by Bar Kochba and
Rabbi Akiva (much more on Akiva later). In Eleh Ezkerah,
Emperor Hadrian searches Jewish sources for an excuse to kill
more Jews, and comes upon the prohibition against selling a
fellow Jew into slavery. Seizing on this, he condemns Joseph's
brothers for violating this commandment, and announces that
because they are no longer around to be subject to his
judgment, he will instead execute the ten leading
contemporary sages of Judaism. These sages ask heaven
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whether they must submit, and are told that it has been so
decreed.
Here, it is the angels in heaven who witness the fatal tortures
imposed on the sages by the Romans, including the fate of the
same Torah expounder's tongue that falls into the dust, and
here it is the angels who exclaim, "Zu Torah v'zu s'chorah?".
God's response, reminiscent of God's response to Job, is
literally "Shut up!"; God says, "If I hear one more word, I will
cause the whole Earth to return to chaos and water! This was
decreed since the beginning of time; let no-one question it."
[Eleh Ezkerah appears in Hebrew, with a very free English
translation, on Handout No. 7. The translation I have given
above is more literal.] This is a clear example of the demand
for silence being one orthodox Jewish response to theodicy.
Back to Elisha ben Abuya. The other Talmudic explanation of
Elisha's apostasy is that he witnessed a boy climbing a tree at
his father's request to drive away a mother bird and take eggs
from her nest. The only two mitzvot for which the Torah
expressly promises a specific reward are obeying one's father
and driving away the mother bird from her nest before taking
her eggs, for each of which one is promised long life. Yet the
boy, who was observing both of these mitzvot simultaneously,
nonetheless fell out of the tree to his death. Meanwhile,
another man who violated both laws was unharmed. Elisha's

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reaction was "Eyn din ve'eyn dayan"—"There is no judgment
and there is no judge". This denial that there is any order to
the universe is, of course, the very essence of apostasy. (There
is a third explanation in the Talmud for Elisha's apostasy, having
to do with a visit to Heaven during which Elisha sees the angel
Metatron, but it is not relevant to the mysteries of theodicy. All
three explanations are found in Handout No. 5, in case you are
interested.)
The injustice that so struck Elisha is compounded by the fact
that, according to the Talmud, his apostasy was fore-ordained
as a result of his father's sin. Abuya, Elisha's father, gave a
party when Elisha was circumcised, and invited all the sages in
the neighborhood. When he saw the deference with which the
sages were treated, Abuya decided to dedicate his son to the
study of Torah. This is considered Torah she lo lishmah, Torah
studied for an improper purpose—for worldly benefit. Torah
lishmah—studied for the proper purpose—is promised to have
good results, while Torah she lo lishmah is guaranteed to have
bad results. Thus, Elisha's Torah study was destined to lead to
evil consequences, even though in this case the improper
purpose was that of the father, not of the son who suffered for
it. How unfair is that?!
Whatever the reason, we see that Elisha's response to the
riddles of theodicy was to deny not only God's benevolence but

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even God's very existence. Needless to say, this was not a
popular reaction among the rabbis of the Talmud. The penalty
imposed on Elisha ben Abuya was to be deprived of his name—
thereafter he would be known as "Acher"—the Other. It is also
related that he is told by God that while all other Jewish sinners
are invited to repent and return to God, Acher is not. The few
times Elisha is cited in the Talmud, with one exception in the
Mishna and one in the Gemara, he is referred to as Acher. (In
the Gemara, if anyone is curious, he is cited by his original
name as ruling on a question related to the rules of mourning,
in Tractate Moed Katan.)
A recent article in the Jewish magazine Mosaic, by Professor
James Diamond of the University of Waterloo in Ontario,
Canada, makes a great deal out of the one Mishnaic exception,
when Elisha is cited by his original name. [The Mosaic article is
on Handout No. 8.] In Pirkei Avos, The Ethics (or Chapters) of
the Fathers (or Sages), Elisha is identified as the promulgator of
the dictum that one who learns Torah in his youth is like one
who writes in ink on new parchment, while one who learns
Torah later in life is like one who writes in ink on parchment
that has been erased. [The relevant verse of Pirkei Avos is on
Handout No. 9.] Professor Diamond rejects the usual
interpretation of this verse, which is that older people simply
are more forgetful and find it harder to learn new things.
Rather, he notes that "new" parchment is opposed not to "old"
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parchment, but to "erased" parchment; he concludes from this
that the problem with older learners is not that they are more
forgetful, but that their minds have been cluttered up with so
much secular learning and knowledge of the world and its
tribulations that it is hard for them to put that learning and
knowledge aside in order to appreciate and internalize the
value of the Torah they seek to study.
Professor Diamond goes on to contrast Elisha's reaction to the
dilemma of theodicy with that of Rabbi Akiva. Elisha's
experience with theodicy we have already observed. Akiva's
was even more personal. In the famous legend of his death,
Akiva is punished by the Romans, during the Hadrianic
persecution, for teaching Torah. As he is being flayed alive, he
sees dawn breaking and, in the midst of his death agony, finds
the time and energy and will to recite the Shema. [The
Talmudic recitation of Akiva's martyrdom is on Handout No.
10.] Once again, the angels in heaven, who witness Akiva's
death agonies, exclaim to God, "Zu Torah v'zu s'chorah?" (as
they do in Eleh Ezkerah), to which God responds, "Happy are
you, Rabbi Akiva, as you are destined for life in the World to
Come". This is another orthodox Jewish solution to the puzzle
of theodicy: any apparent injustice represented by a righteous
person's suffering in life is redeemed by an eternity of reward
after death.

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Another digression related to the "Zu Torah v'zu s'chorah?"
complaint: Elsewhere, the Talmud describes Moses in heaven,
hearing from God about Rabbi Akiva and asking to observe
more about his life. After witnessing a fascinating lesson taught
by Akiva about the crowns on letters in the Torah, Moses
wishes to know Akiva's fate. What he is shown is Akiva's flesh
being weighed in a butcher's shop. Moses cries out to the
Master of the Universe, ribono shel olam, "Zu Torah v'zu
s'chorah?" God's reply is "be silent". [This discussion is on
Handout No. 11.] Once again, in the face of apparent injustice,
God demands silence.
We have time for one more digression relating to the demand
for silence in the face of perceived divine injustice. We read in
the Torah that when two of Aaron's sons, Nadav and Avihu,
brought fire to God's altar after the dedication of the mishkan,
the portable temple in the desert, God's fire emerged from the
altar and struck them dead. For millennia, our commentators
have been unable to ascertain what sin Nadav and Avihu
committed that warranted this punishment, or even whether
they committed a sin at all. Moses could offer his brother no
explanation, save that God would be sanctified by those close
to God. Aaron, the boys' father, who does not seem to have
any idea of what, if anything his sons did wrong, must have
been stunned by the tragedy. We can imagine that he
perceived God's action as unjust. Yet Aaron's reaction, as
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reported by the Torah, was only silence. [Chapter 10 of
Leviticus, which contains the relevant verses concerning Nadav
and Avihu, is on Handout No. 12.]
Back to Elisha and Akiva. It is interesting that the reactions of
Elisha and Akiva to God's apparent injustice are the reverse of
what Elisha's adage in Pirkei Avos would suggest: Elisha, who
learned his Torah young, is unable to subordinate his
experience of the world's unjust cruelty to his faith in God, and
rejects God, while Akiva, the most famous exemplar of one who
learned Torah at an advanced age, can subordinate the torture
he is unjustly undergoing to his faith in God. So in addition to
every other bad consequence Elisha experiences, he even
subverts his own teaching. He just can't win!
Obviously, Judaism prefers the Akivan response. A proper
solution to the dilemma of theodicy, this implies, is to treat it as
beyond human understanding and to reaffirm one's faith in
God. Akiva is a great hero of Judaism, and Elisha ben Abuya is
relegated to the status of an outsider, identified only as the
"Other".
Or is he? In fact, Elisha has not been completely written out of
the corpus of Talmudic learning, as he easily could have been.
Apart from the Pirkei Avos dictum we have discussed, Elisha's
rulings and arguments are occasionally cited (in the name of
"Acher") by Rabbi Meir, a great scholar who was a disciple of

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both Rabbi Akiva and Elisha ben Abuya. There is even a theory
—not widely held or even known—that after his name was
replaced by "Acher", Elisha took on a new identity, that of
Rabbi Ishmael, who is another frequently-cited, great Talmudic
scholar.
Oddly enough, just as Elisha's attitude is contrasted with that of
Akiva, Rabbi Ishmael is claimed by some, notably Rabbi
Abraham Joshua Heschel in his encyclopedic Heavenly Torah, to
have been the great antagonist of Rabbi Akiva in matters both
doctrinal and technical. [A description of Rabbi Heschel's book
is on Handout No. 13.] Whether this is true is far beyond the
scope of this presentation; if you want to pursue it further, I
recommend How Do We Know This?, by Harvard Professor Jay
Harris. [A description of Professor Harris' book is on Handout
No. 14.]
But let us explore just a little further this notion of why Rabbi
Heschel thought of Akiva and Ishmael as antagonists. In his
view, Akiva stood for one school of thought in the history of
Jewish scholarship, commentary and theology—the school that
stood for the importance of intuition in interpreting Scripture,
while Ishmael stood for a competing school—the school that
emphasized the primacy of logic in interpretation. If this is the
case, then doesn't it make sense to see Elisha ben Abuya in the
same role as Ishmael? Elisha knew that God had promised that

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behavior X would be rewarded by consequence Y. When he
saw that behavior X in fact resulted in consequence not-Y, he
logically concluded that there was no judgment and no judge.
Akiva, on the other hand, reacted to the enactment of
consequence not-Y on his own flesh with an intuitive insistence
that, nonetheless, there was both a judge and a judgment. So
it may, in a way, make sense to link Elisha ben Abuya with
Rabbi Ishmael. Besides, I know of no one who claims ever to
have seen Elisha and Ishmael together!
Before I sum up, I want to note the continuation of Jewish
sages' efforts to reconcile their sense of justice with their faith
in God into the folklore of modern and contemporary Judaism.
The title of this talk, "A Din Toyrah Mit Gott", is also the name
of a poem written by the great Hasidic master, Reb Levi
Yitzchak of Berdichev, who lived from 1740 to 1809, and was
known as "the defense attorney of the Jewish people". His
poem, which emotionally protests God's refusal to relieve the
suffering of the Jewish people, and describes the anguish that
refusal causes, has repeatedly been set to music, and has
continued to be sung in recent times by many great artists,
including Jan Peerce. [The text of this poem, in Yiddish and
English, and a brief biography of Levi Yitzchak, are on Handout
No. 15.]

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Now the time has come to summarize what we have learned
about Jewish proposed solutions to the mystery of theodicy.
We have seen the argument that there is no mystery because
any harm that befalls us is punishment we have merited. We
have seen one rabbi argue that God is not culpable because
God is not omnipotent, and a related argument that says God
has deliberately refrained from exercising God's omnipotence
in order to leave room for human free will. We have seen the
claim that the recurrence of injustice demonstrates that there
is no God, or at least no just God. We have seen several
occasions on which we are flatly told to be silent, not even to
raise a complaint about injustice, not to seek to understand.
Furthermore, we have seen instances where we are told that
we cannot understand what divine justice would look like, what
evil is or what benevolence is. We have seen injustice justified
as merely an artifact of this life, erased and redeemed by
justice in the world to come. And we have seen pure faith, able
to surmount the appearance of injustice and continue to
worship God without seeking to understanding God's justice.
But despite all the commands to be silent, and despite the
insistence that we are unable to understand God's justice, we
clearly see that challenges to God's apparent injustice remain a
part of both our scholarly and folk traditions. Just as Job's
attempted indictment of God has not been written out of the
Hebrew Bible, so Elisha ben Abuya has not been totally erased
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from Jewish history and scholarship, but instead remains one of
its more interesting anomalies, very rarely cited as an authority
but very often studied and interpreted. And the indignant
question, "Zu Torah v'zu s'chorah?" has been asked repeatedly,
and the instances of its asking have not been erased from our
holy writings.
What does this say about Judaism and its attitude toward
theodicy? It says, first of all, that there is a place for both
intuition and logic in our religion. If we, at our current,
primitive stage of knowledge and understanding, cannot come
up with a logical solution to the dilemma of theodicy, then
perhaps we can be satisfied with an intuitive acceptance based
on faith. But we are nonetheless free to continue seeking a
logical explanation, and to express our dissatisfaction when we
cannot find one. What is the meaning of the persistence in our
legacy of Job and Elisha ben Abuya and "Zu Torah v'zu
s'chorah?" if not this: if Job's plaintive demand, "Let God
answer me", is important enough to be recorded forever in the
Bible, and if the question, "Zu Torah v'zu s'chorah?", is
important enough for Elisha ben Abuya, Moses and the angels
to ask over and over again in our holiest writings, then the issue
of theodicy is important enough for us to continue to explore it.
Job, Elisha ben Abuya, Moses and the heavenly angels have
tried to put God in the dock. Here we have sought to do

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likewise, and we have heard the various defenses put forward
in God's behalf. Our din Toyrah is almost over. Are you
prepared to vote whether to acquit or convict God of injustice?
So, by a show of hands, who would vote to find God guilty of
creating or permitting injustice? Who would vote to acquit?
[Summarize result of vote. Discuss. Questions?]
There seems to be no doubt that the struggles of the Jewish
people will continue into the foreseeable future, and that there
will unfortunately be plenty of occasions for us to exclaim
again, "Zu Torah v'zu s'chorah?" Our din Toyrah mit Gott is not
over, and in our litigation, may we all be worthy of such an
accomplished defense counsel as Reb Levi Yitzchak. And may
the verdict ultimately be a just one, in favor of all the Jewish
people. It is in our DNA to demand justice; the Torah itself
commands us, "Tzedek, tzedek tirdof"—"Surely justice shall you
pursue, that you may live". So it is hard for me to believe that
God would ever seek to discourage us from pursuing justice,
even against God God's self. As I understand God to say to Job,
"Keep studying, keep learning, keep asking; perhaps one day
you will achieve understanding of My justice". Keyn yehi
ratzon; so may it be God's will.
Thank you.

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