To Break or Mend A World:
Thoughts on Theodicy After the Tsuanmi
Leonard Levin
This article was published in the journal Conservative Judaism, Summer, 2005.
I had been working on distilling the theological outlook of Bavli Berakhot when the tsunami of 2004 struck all the countries of the Indian Ocean rim at a single blow, killing over 200,000 human beings. It shocked me into appreciating at least for a moment the force of Stephen Weinberg’s remark, “The more we know about the universe, the more pointless it seems.”[1] The present crisis also reminded me how the Lisbon earthquake of 1759 sparked Voltaire’s Candide pillorying Leibnitz’s theory of “the best of all possible worlds.” It raised once again the question: What does classical Judaism say to relieve the canker sore of evil in the world? And how relevant does that message seem for us?
What I offer is not a complete survey or analysis. Israel Zinberg prefaced his monumental history of Jewish literature by saying that all Jewish literature addresses the problem of why the righteous suffer. His history ran to seven volumes in Yiddish and twelve volumes in English, and left much out. In this little essay I will focus on two small vignettes in that saga – one chapter of aggadah in the Talmud, and ten chapters of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed – and tease out some ideas that came to me in my encounters with those texts as a tiny contribution to an enterprise that has been going on for as long as we have been a species and will continue going on for untold time to come.
What Bavli Berakhot Chapter 1 Says About The Problem
The first chapter of Tractate Berakhot in the Babylonian Talmud is among other things a marvelous example of literary structure in the Talmud. One may summarize the presentation by saying that the Mishnah restricts itself to the “when” and “how” of prayer, whereupon the gemara expands on the “what” and “why” of the matter. In doing so, it delves into the larger questions that the Mishnah glosses over – such as what is God? What is humanity, sin and retribution, justice and mercy, exile and redemption? Why do we live in a world that is in need of prayer?
The chapter starts with the Mishnah: “From what time do they recite the Shema of evening? From the time when the priests enter to eat of their heave-offering until the end of the first watch…” The Apollonian majesty of this opening must be appreciated along the lines of Jacob Neusner’s observation that the Mishnah in its totality responds to the catastrophe of the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth by instituting a sacred regimen of ordered conduct. The times of prayer are first of all a reminder that the order of prayer perpetuates in memory the order of the Temple service, of which the priests were the major players. In the serenity of maintaining that order, the pain of loss is covered over for now, but will re-emerge with devastating force in the gemara, a few pages later. But for now, the orderliness of the daily regimen is an implicit affirmation that the world is well-ordered under God’s rule.
The gemara does not burst this bubble at once, but first engages in an orderly analysis of the mishnaic law in relation to its sources in the written Torah. The traditional time-designation with references to the priests is correlated with the (by now) more familiar times of ordinary people sitting down to their evening meals. But the reference to the “end of the first watch” focuses our attention on that time of night when decent people are asleep and the lone individual looking into the heavens encounters God roaring (or moaning) “Woe to the children, on account of whose sins I destroyed My house and burnt My temple and exiled them among the nations of the earth!” [2] Repression fails. The searing wound is out in the open and must be dealt with.[3]
One way in which the rabbis often deal with the problem of suffering is through appealing to traditional theodicy. If we can believe that our suffering is the product of our sins, then we have subsumed the anomaly to an orderly pattern. Presumably we can then mend our ways and restore ourselves in God’s good graces. It is noteworthy that in the course of the long gemara to this mishnah, this traditional explanation is raised for discussion in two important passages, and each time it is questioned or rejected.
The first of these passages is found on pages 5a-5b. The darshan expounds on the verse from Psalm 4: “Tremble and sin not; commune with your heart upon your bed and be silent.” This verse suggests a series of prophylactic measures against sin: moral self-control, study of Torah, reciting the Shema, and reflecting on the finality of death. Torah-study itself is recommended as a prophylactic against suffering. If one suffers, one should look to the probable causes: sin, or neglect of Torah study, in that order. However, it is possible that neither of these applies in an individual case! One should then conclude that the suffering one experiences is a “chastisement of love” – “whom the Lord loves, He chastises.” But it is objected: If the person’s suffering is such as to prevent him from study of Torah or prayer, these could not be chastisements of love! What if, indeed, one suffers leprosy or buries one’s children? These might be an “altar of atonement,” but surely not “chastisements of love”!
This line of argument culminates in a story which is repeated in three variants, with Rabbi Hiyya, Rabbi Johanan, Rabbi Hanina, and Rabbi Eleazar alternating roles as the protagonists. In each account, one rabbi is ill and another rabbi visits him and asks him, “Are your sufferings dear to you?” The patient replies, “Neither them nor their reward.” The patient then requests, “Give me your hand.” The visiting rabbi extends his hand and lifts him up.
The moral of the story (reinforced by its position as the culmination of the gemara passage) is clear. We can go from level to level seeking explanation for our sufferings. If any of the offered explanations works for us, well and good. But we reserve the right to reject all explanations – including the most inclusive and powerful of all (“chastisements of love”). What, then, is left? The hand of friendship and assistance – love and cooperation, practical action to lift us up out of our suffering.
The other discussion of the problem of theodicy is found on page 7a. Here the darshan expounds on the passage in Exodus 33 where God and Moses have a prolonged exchange on whether God will show favor to the Israelites and whether He will show Moses the divine glory or the divine face. In this context, God tells Moses, “Let My anger pass and I will give you rest.” The darshan infers from this (and from the verse in Psalm 30 “His anger is for a moment”) that God is angry every day for a “moment” that lasts one 58,888th part of an hour (i.e., about one-sixteenth of a second, or a phenomenological instant). This is an intriguing explanation – such a tiny time-interval, multiplied by the infinite divine power, can indeed wreak a lot of havoc in the world! But on what principle is the divine wrath exercised? Moses’s request of God, “Please show me Your ways” is understood as asking: please reveal the answer to the eternal mystery, why the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper!
To this, several solutions are proposed. It is first suggested that the righteous who suffers is the righteous son of a wicked father, and the wicked who prospers is the wicked son of a righteous father. This suggestion is rejected. It is next suggested that the righteous who suffers is one who is not perfectly righteous, and the wicked who prospers is not perfectly wicked. But the last word in this discussion is given by Rabbi Meir who says, “The other two of Moses’s requests were granted, but this request was not granted.” Moses – even in his most intimate moment with God – was not given the answer to the theodicy question! How much less should we presume to have the answer. (It is hardly an accident that this negative answer is ascribed to Rabbi Meir, who suffered the tragic loss of his children in his lifetime to the plague.)
In short, we are left before God with our suffering. The way of understanding has proved futile. What remains?
The first step is to reduce the pain. This is not an automatic response. Sometimes we are tempted to resort to revenge, thus compounding the problem. The gemara tells us of such a case. Rabbi Joshua ben Levi was tempted to make practical use of his knowledge of the secret of God’s anger. He had a sectarian neighbor who constantly pestered him by quoting Biblical verses proving the truth of his heresy and the falsity of rabbinic Judaism. It was commonly believed that at the moment of God’s anger a cock’s comb turns completely white. R. Joshua thereupon tied a cock to his own bed, determined that when the cock’s comb turned white he would call down God’s wrath on this neighbor and be rid of him. But when the moment came, R. Joshua slept through it and missed his opportunity. He took this as a sign that it is not proper to harbor such grudges, nor to act on them.[4]
What is fitting for man, is fitting for God also. God regrets His own anger and its consequences. He seeks to reduce it. One method is by engaging in prayer. God prays, “May it be My will that My mercy may suppress My anger.” Another way is by relying on human prayer. When R. Ishmael was offering incense in the inner sanctuary, God asked him for a blessing. R. Ishmael replied: “May it be Your will that Your mercy suppress Your anger, and that in Your dealing with Your creatures You stop short of strict justice.”[5] The parallel and similarity of God’s prayer and R. Ishmael’s blessing is intentional and highly significant.
The last pair of anecdotes stresses the reciprocity of God and Israel. This is an extremely common motif in the rabbinic lore. A classic instance of it that occurs in the present gemara is the description of God wearing tefillin. The tefillin of Jews reminds them of their loyalty to God, as it contains the verse “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It is altogether appropriate, therefore, that God’s tefillin reminds Him of His obligations to the Jewish people, and indeed they contain several verses which share the common sentiment of “Who is like Israel Your people, a unique nation in the earth?”[6] Thus the tefillin are like love tokens – each is a reminder to one partner of the other partner in the relationship.
Where there is relationship, modern therapeutic wisdom says that it is a mistake to blame one partner exclusively for whatever trouble or fault may exist: responsibility is shared. Though the rabbis tended toward a unipolar view in the divine-human case (“Yours, Lord, is the righteousness, and ours is the shame”), there are places where they anticipated this modern insight. Rabbi Alexandri used to pray: “Sovereign of the universe! You know full well that we desire to perform Your will, and what prevents us? The leaven in the dough, and subjection to other nations.”[7] The “leaven” is of course the evil impulse. But God created it, so He shares responsibility. As R. Hiyya the Elder said elsewhere, “Sad is the dough whose baker testifies that it is bad!” And Abba Yossi the potter said, “Sad is the leaven whose maker testifies that it is bad!”[8] The present chapter voices God’s lament in the first person: “Woe to the children on account of whose sins I destroyed My house and burnt My temple!” And “woe to the father who had to banish His children!”[9]
As we share responsibility for the tragedy, so the effort at rebuilding and repair requires a cooperative effort. That is why it is so significant that prayer is depicted as a coordinated activity that takes place both in heaven and on earth. God “roars” from heaven at the three watches of the night. Rabbi Yose heard a voice in the ruin which Elijah informed him can be heard three times every day, corresponding to the three times of human prayer. The same passage explicitly says that when Israel say “May His great name be blessed,” God responds by saying, “Happy is the king who is so praised!”[10] The divine and human prayers are linked in time-frame and in mutual reference. Both pray for the redemption from exile, which will require an even greater cooperative effort, for which the antiphonal prayer is a preparation.
Translating religious discourse from parable to prepositional form is notoriously risky. Nevertheless, I will hazard that the outlook of the rabbis expressed in the aggadah of the Bavli Berakhot can be faithfully paraphrased in the following propositions:
1) The world is in disrepair. Prayer articulates an ideal order of existence (we set our times of prayer as if the Temple is standing) while at the same time it laments the absence of that order and yearns for its restoration.
2) It takes two to produce a broken world. We sinned. Our sins are a major contributing cause of the world’s disrepair. But God bears responsibility on two levels. For one thing, God is the “baker” who produced us, and we are His “dough.” Our sinful nature is what it is because God made us that way. Moreover, God is also directly responsible for bringing about the destruction as punishment. God has an anger problem. A split second of the divine wrath wreaks havoc in the world.
3) We are not privy to understanding the reasons for the world’s disrepair in all their profundity. We have partial answers but no complete answer. The partial answers help us cope, but only up to a point. At that point, we must confess ignorance before the ultimate mystery.
4) Better than understanding, we must act to bring about mending. Rabbi Johanan and his colleagues were aware of the “sufferings of love” doctrine but found little comfort in it. Instead, when they were in the midst of suffering they all said, “Give me your hand and help me up.”
5) Mending the world requires divine-human cooperation. Prayer is important as an expression and strengthening of the partnership between God and us. We wear tefillin reminding us of God, and God wears tefillin reminding Him of us. We pray for God’s mercy to overcome his divine wrath; God solicits our prayer, delights in it, and prays similarly for the same objective. By working together to strengthen our partnership, and by praying together for the redemption, we prepare ourselves for the cooperative divine-human effort that alone can mend the world.
What Maimonides Says About the Problem
The midrashic treatment of evil and redemption that we have just examined is mythic in tone. It rejects certain easy answers (such as the simple ascription of suffering to sin on a proportional basis), but it is still hard to apply literally to a scientific world-outlook. If we turn from here to Maimonides’s theory of evil and providence, we are confronted with a tradeoff. Maimonides introduces a very important factor that is barely noticeable in the Berakhot passages: the constraint of natural law. Yet his account is missing some of the outstanding virtues of the Berakhot outlook: the sense of divine-human cooperation, joint responsibility and reciprocity.
Maimonides takes a clear stand in favor of natural law throughout the Guide, especially in his withering critique of the Kalam. The Mutakallimun, especially the Asharites, held that God determines directly, instant by instant, every minute event that will occur in the universe, down to the falling of a leaf or the injury of a flea. Against this total dependency on divine caprice, Maimonides maintains with Aristotle that the external world has a stable configuration on which we can rely (at least for the most part). Interpreters of Maimonides differ as to whether this natural order is implanted in the world by God at the moment of creation, or whether it is (as with Aristotle) eternal and beyond even God’s power to institute or modify. However, on either interpretation it is a practical limit within which the possibilities of all action (including divine action) in this world are currently constrained.
With this view of natural law as a fundamental assumption, one may read the sequence of Chapters 8-18 in Part III of the Guide as a consecutive development of a consistent thesis of the limits of divine action in the existing world, and the understanding of evil in that context. The existing world is a theater of conflict between the principles of “form” (representing moral discipline and the realization of higher values) versus “matter” (representing the tendency for nature to take its course oblivious to considerations of value).[11] Our corporeal nature is a kind of partition that blocks us from the understanding and realization of higher truths.[12] Evil may be defined first of all as a privation or lack, a failure to realize the highest potential of which material beings are capable – in other words, the inevitable failure of matter to be fully realized in ideal form.[13] Ignorance – the lack of knowledge or wisdom – is a cardinal instance of such failure of higher realization, and is a prime or contributing cause of most human-caused evil.[14]
For purpose of convenience, the evils of existence can be categorized into three categories: (1) those which are an inevitable product of our material condition (such as illness, death and earthquakes); (2) those perpetuated by one person against another (such as murder, war, and robbery); and (3) those committed by a person against himself (such as addiction to luxury and ignoring medical advice). Maimonides exonerates God of responsibility for evil of any of these kinds, including the first. He also maintains that the majority of evils that we suffer are of the third kind, and he minimizes those of the first and second kind.[15] He also derides as naïve the conceit that people have that the universe was created for the sake of humankind, or that we are the crown of creation, the supreme beings of value in the universe.[16]
Maimonides adds the further observation that there are things impossible in principle, such as logical contradictions, and that it is no defect in God to be incapable of overcoming the limits of possibility.[17]
As to providence, Maimonides delineates six theories (including his own):
1) The Epicurean view, that all is random, without order.
2) The Aristotelian view, that there is “general providence,” to be identified with natural order. This includes the provision to the various species of their equipment for survival as species – strength and claws to the lion, fleetness to the deer, etc. The fate of individuals is however a matter of chance.
3) The Asharite view, that all – even the death of a fly or the falling of a leaf -- is the will of God, who acts capriciously, beyond our understanding.
4) The Mutazilite view, that everything to the last detail is wrought by the divine wisdom. We may rest assured that seeming injustice in this world will be compensated in the afterlife.
5) The Torah’s view, that God does not condescend to manage the detailed affairs of subhuman creatures, but every detail in human affairs is arranged in accord with justice.
6) Maimonides’s variant of the Torah’s view, that providence extends proportionately to intellect: the animals, without intellect, are not the recipients of individual providence, and even among human beings the more intellectually developed an individual is, the more providence he is accorded. (Between the lines, we may read in Maimonides here a secret agreement with the Aristotelian outlook. Intellect is itself a gift of providence, the survival equipment specific to humans, as strength and claws are specific to the lion. The development of this gift is up to us. Our reward for doing so is the survival advantage that it confers on us, neither more nor less.)[18]
The coherence of all these statements of Maimonides is left for the reader of the Guide to ponder, and has occasioned much discussion among his interpreters. I find most plausible the view that Maimonides seeks to reconcile the principles of divine justice and natural order, but he warns that complete reconciliation is not possible (even for God), and where they come into conflict, natural order wins out. Had he been privy to the findings of modern sciences such as genetics and geology, he might have pointed out that there is no evolution of life without genetic variation, which has the downside of genetically-based disease. Similarly, there would be no mountains (and possibly no life-producing earth) without continental drift and earthquakes. Only a capricious Asharite God could override natural law constantly to avoid its amoral consequences, and the physical unpredictability of such a world would make it very difficult to live in it.
Kenneth Seeskin has rightly called the God of Maimonides’s theological imagination a “distant God.”[19] He is distant because of the doctrine of “negative attributes,” according to which any positive predicates that we propose are ipso facto inapplicable to God, who is beyond human conception. But this God is distant also because nature in its material aspect is conceived as a partition separating us from the divine rather than as a manifestation of divinity. God is exonerated from evil, but at a price; material nature is saddled with evil and divested of divinity.
Putting These Two Outlooks Together Today
In evaluating our theological options today, we have a varied legacy on which to draw. Ideally, we should probably want to combine the advantages of different past traditions – for instance, to combine the intimacy and engagement of the rabbinic theology with the scientific realism of the Maimonidean approach. Such a balancing act is not easy.
A present catastrophe such as the tsunami of 2004 makes the need for theological affirmation more acute, and the content of such affirmation more difficult. Is natural catastrophe a manifestation of God? Is God master of good and evil, life and death? A God who produces such evil may be demonic, but a God who is totally aloof from it may be irrelevant.
In my recent theological searchings, I have been drawn to the notion of a “bipolar” God in the panentheistic mode, as depicted by Charles Hartshorne, drawing on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (to whom I would add William James, Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin).[20] Such a God participates in nature, yet also stands apart from it; nature, in relation to such a God, is both a manifestation and a product of the divine activity. The artistic metaphor is apt. The artist expresses his creative activity in his product then steps back from it, evaluates it, and steps forward again to remold it, trying to improve it in the direction of his evolving conception.
In the view that I am considering, God strives to create life through the medium of this physical universe, which as divine creation is both an end in itself and a means to the higher ends of life, consciousness, intelligence and ethical cooperation. Natural causality is the primary means by which God has chosen to achieve these ends. However, the recent advent of quantum physics has shown that natural causality is not the straitjacket that the Stoics, Averroes, and Spinoza (and possibly Maimonides) thought it to be, but includes a subtle degree of freedom, tiny as we measure things but possibly enough to account for directional genetic evolution and human free will. To modify the traditional determinist adage – natura non facit magnos saltûs – nature does not make large leaps, but maybe tiny ones are enough to advance God’s purpose.
The degree of freedom described by quantum mechanics – if used by a participating God – is great enough to predispose the emergence of life from pre-biotic molecules, but it is not nearly great enough to prevent the seismic catastrophe snuffing out that selfsame life. Here we must reckon with Maimonides’s principle that even God’s action is constrained by the limits of possibility. As Leibnitz said (in a further refinement of the same principle), not all goods are compossible. God had to choose between the capricious world of the Asharites, and the natural order that brings with it natural evil. Some of us may disagree with the choice that God made, but it is as clear as day that if this world is the creation of a divine purpose, then God chose the Maimonidean alternative.[21]
We may disagree, however, with Maimonides’s argument that evil, as mere privation, does not really exist, and that God is to be exonerated from the production of evil. An automobile company that designs an overall superb car with some design flaws is legally and financially responsible for the injuries that ensue from the design flaws. By analogy, if the overall excellence of God’s creation Earth is enhanced by the presence of mountains that are produced by continental drift, but the same process causes earthquakes and tsunamis that annihilate Sodom-Gomorrah and Banda Aceh respectively, then God is both to be praised by the excellence of the mountains and to be questioned (in the tradition of Abraham and Job) for the associated evil.
It is part of the strength of the rabbinic tradition that it validates the protest against God that Maimonides seeks to silence. It also insists that the participatory God suffers when human beings suffer. (Rabbi Meir said: When a person suffers, God says, “My head hurts! My arm hurts!” This is so when the wicked suffer; how much more so for the righteous![22])
Above all, the evolutionary-process view can give new meaning to the concept of divine-human partnership, which is a vital part of the rabbinic theological legacy and is especially relevant to our present historical moment. As junior partners to God, we are both passive beneficiaries and active contributors to the ever-evolving task of constructing a bio-friendly world. The process of biological evolution endowed us with the gift of intellect, whose special providential role Maimonides pointed out so emphatically. The natural environment that produced us and conferred the gift of intellect on us is limited by the constraints of physical causality that have natural evil as a side-effect – including disease, earthquakes, and tsunamis. But our intelligence then becomes a God-given, providential factor in the next stages of evolution of the natural environment of which we are a part. The Bible expressed this in the divine command to the human race: “Rule the earth and subdue it.” Whenever we try to bring the terrestrial environment somewhat closer to perfection, we are exercising our God-given endowments in furtherance of the divine plan.
It is not my business to justify material evil as the spur to human enterprise – though some have argued along these lines. It is enough to concede the necessity of material evil as the flip-side of natural order: the best-conceived physical law is at partial cross-purposes with moral law; the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. But if we see the divine purpose in the origin and advancement of life, then we must surely see it in the application of human intelligence to securing and improving the conditions of life.
We can see how all these factors interact in an area such as the development of medicine. Disease is a defect in the material constitution of our bodies, and may be regarded as a flaw in the divine design. It is inevitable that given the conditions in which life evolved in this material universe, the random play of genes should lead to anomalies that in unfortunate cases are stunting, crippling and even fatal. When we or our loved ones suffer these diseases, we struggle against them with every fiber of our being – a struggle that may well be continuous with the primal struggle that brought about life in the first place. But in our struggle we also deploy our intelligence against the conditions of the disease, and in so doing develop the art of medicine. At a minimum, this art aids us in the specific struggle against a specific disease. At a maximum, it transforms the whole human condition, improving longevity of the species and constituting an advance in the progress of life that is an unfolding of the divine plan.
All the resources of Jewish theology – both from the Biblical-rabbinic and from the philosophical tradition – must finally be combined to construct an adequate response to a catastrophe such as the recent tsunami. We must first of all recognize the natural dimension of the catastrophe as a product of the geological processes that continually mold the earth – its mountains, its oceans and its coastlines. This was not the arbitrary act of a willful deity, but the consequence of universal laws of nature. At the same time, if we conceive of nature as God’s creation we must attribute at least indirect responsibility to God for the catastrophe – contextualized by the complex of good and evil that is the totality of creation.
Next, if we see the rise of life in the universe as a supreme manifestation of God’s purpose, we must allow that God may be pained at the imperfections in His design and the resultant loss of life, pain and suffering that they cause. The God who grieved at the exile of Israel must surely grieve for the victims of the tsunami.
Moreover, we must confess a residue of absurdity in this evil that defies all our attempts at understanding. We are as perplexed as Moses, Job and Rabbi Meir at the unfathomable quality of God’s ways.
But when all is said and done, the most adequate response is that of Rabbi Johanan: “Give me your hand and lift me up.” As God’s agents on the scene of the catastrophe, we are called on to exercise our God-given intelligence and compassion to carry out God’s purpose of the securement and enhancement of life. Aid and rescue to the survivors is only a first step. Ultimately, we must construct systems of detection and warning in every similar situation to prevent the recurrence of such catastrophes, insofar as it is within our power to do so.
And if we do so, the rabbis might well conceive God as observing approvingly and saying, “Happy is the king whose children share up the ramparts of His castle and save His obedient subjects from harm! Happy is the master whose servants step in the breach and – by salvaging His enterprise – deserve to be called full partners in it!”
[1] Stephen Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, Basic Books, 1993 (2nd edition), p. 154.
[2] TB Berakhot 3a. And in the parallel version that immediately follows: “Woe to the father who had to banish his children!” God suffers too.
[3] The esthetics of this procedure is analogous to the opening movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, where the single sour note in the sunny major opening theme presages the tragic outburst in the climax of the development section.
[4] Ibid. 7a.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid. 6a.
[7] Ibid. 17a.
[8] Genesis Rabbah 34:10, on the verse, “For the devisings (yetzer) of man’s heart are evil from his youth.” The Genesis narrative, too, expresses God’s regret and shortcomings in trying to get society off to a decent start but suffering the setbacks of human violence and the Flood.
[9] TB Berakhot 3a.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Chapter 8.
[12] Ibid., Chapter 9.
[13] Ibid., Chapter 10.
[14] Ibid., Chapter 11.
[15] Ibid., Chapter 12.
[16] Ibid., Chapters 13-14. This Maimonidean assertion provoked unusually wide dissent among later Jewish philosophic thinkers who otherwise accepted the Maimonidean philosophy.
[17] Ibid., Chapter 15.
[18] Ibid., Chapters 17-18.
[19] See his recent book, Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides, Oxford, 2000.
[20] See Hartshorne & Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, Prometheus Books 2000, especially “Introduction: The Standpoint of Panentheism” and “Epilogue: The Logic of Panentheism”; also William James, A Pluralistic Universe (1909, reprinted 1996 by University of Nebraska Press); Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911, reprinted by Dover in 1998); Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Macmillan 1929; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Harper 1955; also articles published in the journal Zygon over the years. Echoes of this movement in Jewish theology have been examined in Sandra Lubarsky & David Ray Griffin, eds.: Jewish Theology and Process Thought, SUNY 1996.
[21] The Western tradition of theodicical discourse has tended to raise objections based on absolute notions of God’s perfect omnipotence and perfect goodness ignoring the considerations of a finite, ordered reality, and at most admitting human freedom as a possible complicating circumstance. (A classic recent discussion on these premises is Anthony Flew’s “Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom,” in Flew & Macintyre, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, Macmillan 1964, pp. 144-169). When the requirement of a finite and predictable natural order is added to this picture, it becomes clear that even if the theoretical omnipotence of God was granted in theory, a divine self-limitation (or tzimtzum) is required in practice for the finite world to have any autonomy, and only in that finite context is human moral choice meaningful. Biblical thought and modern process theology both take the given finite world as a starting point rather than the theoretical notion of divine perfection, and both the Talmud and Maimonides continue in that tradition. Given that starting-point, it even makes sense to question what implications the notions of divine “omnipotence, omniscience, etc.” could possibly have in practice. See Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes, SUNY 1984.
[22] Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5.
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