Why, God, why?

In those times when terrorism and hate break into our world – clearly the case in the death of four innocents in Tel Aviv last week, and even more so in the death of fifty or more in Orlando days later – those of us who are religious are tempted to ask those classic questions: where is God in all of this? and Why does God allow such evil to happen in our world?

Better minds than mine have attempted to answer these questions, but the questions remain unanswered. So, here goes a fool rushing in where angels fear to tread…

Where is God in all this?

I find this one to be the easier of the two questions to answer: to me it is clear that God is in the suffering and in the outpouring of care and love and hope that inevitably follow these events. God's arms are holding each of the victims, easing the way for each of their souls to make their peace with the life just ended and begin their journey to the life to come. God is standing in solidarity, weeping and angry, next to each parent, sibling, partner, friend or loved one who mourns this senseless loss of life. God is in the first responders who rushed bravely in to keep the loss of life from getting worse, and God is in the skilled physicians who treat the wounded. God is in the people who care enough to give blood for those who survived. The voice of God is whispering in the ear of every person who is asking today how we keep these tragedies from repeating themselves, even if we may not all listen very carefully or agree on what we hear. The image of God is visible in every person who responds to these acts of hate with love.

But why did God allow this?

I'm going to risk making the reader mad here and say that this is, in my opinion, the wrong question to ask, for three reasons.

1. This question is wrong about how God works. I don't really believe that God does – or perhaps even that God can – spend God's time foreseeing every possible action of each of God's creatures and then deciding which ones to allow and which to somehow block. Mathematicians would agree with me on this, I think, even if theologians might not. Life on earth is a chaotic system: there are simply too many variables, too many moving parts, for the behavior of the system to be predicted deterministically from moment to moment, much less with any greater time scale than that. And whatever God is, God is not a great a great computer designed to exhaustively predict Bad Things that might happen, nor is God a great security checkpoint who must "allow" all potential Bad Things to proceed. I cannot help but imagine that God is taken aback by the bad choices God's creatures sometimes make, that God is just as surprised and just as dismayed as we are by the inhumanity God's humans sometimes choose to exhibit, and that God is perhaps almost as daunted as we are by the problem of how to stop humans from going to those inhuman places, over and over again. After all, God has been working on that particular problem for how many thousands of years, now?

2. This question puts me at the center of the universe. God, this question implies, should just drop everything God has to do to keep an entire universe running to stop anything bad from happening in my little corner of it, to myself or to those I happen to care about. There are what, 6 billion people on this planet? I'm not saying 4 people here and 50 people there are not important – the Talmud tells us one life is worth an entire world – but I am saying that God has a pretty big population to care for. How many people die each day that we do not notice? And God should care about these 50 and not those? And that's still assuming that human lives are the only ones that count. What about the trillions of other living things God cares about on this earth? Would you be happy if God bent the laws of nature to stop every ecologically-careless activity from happening? (and fess up, here: even us eco-hippies leave our footprints) Do you know for a fact that if God interrupted the natural order of things enough to stop a bombing here and a mass shooting there that it would have no repercussions on the rest of the planet whatsoever? I can't say that with any certainty. The point is, God has a whole universe to look out for and God can't just bend the laws of physics whenever we – or God – would like to see that happen. So give God a break on this one, perhaps. After all, if I were running an entire universe, it would probably be in much worse shape than this one we live in.

The book of Job agrees with me on this, btw. Ignore for a moment the "framing story" about God and one of his employees making a bet about how this poor dude Job would respond to a sudden downfall, the core of the book is about those arbitrary misfortunes that just happen in life with no reason. And when Job confronts God (in the form of a whirlwind, mind you: the very embodiment of chaotic nature), God's response is more or less this: "Did you create the entire world, Job? No? Then don't tell me how I could do a better job running it!"   

3. This question shifts responsibility. If God "allowed" the bombings and the shootings to happen, then that means I can put the responsibility on God's shoulders. I can feel hopeless and helpless and angry with God. These are easy feelings, but they are cop-out feelings. What if, after every major disaster, we asked "why did we allow this to happen?" Then, we'd find out two things: First, none of us is so powerful that we can stop every major disaster. Second, all of us together are more powerful than we think. How did we allow enough hate and distress to fester in the near east that its inevitable spilling-over claimed some of the lives we care about? How did we fail to see this coming during all of the political debates where we said our country has no business ensuring human rights in other countries? How did we allow people and religions to use homophobia for personal and political gains? How did we allow someone the FBI had investigated more than once to get his hands on such an awesome weapon of destruction? How do liberals in America call for gun control at home but still support a Palestinian state that has yet to renounce terror? How did we fail to see that violence would follow hate? (it always does) Where now can we de-fuse the hatred instead of just calling for the haters to be stopped?

God, in my view, works in this world through God's people. Maybe God did try to stop Tel Aviv and Orlando from happening. Maybe God put people in the way who did try to stop things from getting as bad as they got. Maybe without those people it would have been far worse. Maybe in the future those people will be us. Maybe next time our love will win out over their hate. Maybe that is where hope comes from.

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