The problem of evil in Judaism

Jewish thought on the problem of evil differs from Christian and Islamic traditions in a striking way: it tolerates, and sometimes celebrates, sustained protest against God. The Book of Job is the oldest and most unflinching document of this. Job refuses the comfortable theodicies of his friends, demands a hearing, and is not rebuked for demanding it — only for his limits in grasping the answer. This argumentative posture runs through the entire rabbinic corpus.

Medieval philosophers imported Aristotelian tools. Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, distinguishes three kinds of evil: evils rooted in the perishability of matter (inevitable), evils humans inflict on each other (curable through education), and evils we bring on ourselves through appetite (the largest category). On this reading, much of what we call evil is not caused by God at all, and much of the rest serves intelligible ends. But Maimonides also concedes that some evils cannot be rationalized and must simply be endured.

The Holocaust forced twentieth-century Jewish thought to revisit the question with new urgency. Emil Fackenheim formulated the '614th commandment' — not to hand Hitler a posthumous victory by abandoning the covenant. Richard Rubenstein, by contrast, argued that traditional theodicy could not survive Auschwitz; God of history is dead. Eliezer Berkovits located a classical precedent: hester panim, the hiding of the divine face. No single answer has emerged, but the Jewish habit of wrestling with God rather than justifying him to himself remains intact.