The following was posted in a discussion of 'why bad things happen to good people'...
http://www.torah.org/learning/issues/badgood.htmlFrom Volume 1 Digest 10
From: Micha Berger <
[email protected]>
Unfortunately, the A-lmighty gave me time to consider this question. Much of the week that my wife and I sat shiva for our daughter. "Why me?" crossed my mind alot. I mean, I may not be "good people", but surely I'm doing better than many people who haven't lived through such tragedy. Aren't I?
I reached a few conclusions:
1- The pasuk in Yeshayah that is euphamized into the text of the first brachah before the morning Shema reads:
Yotzeir or uvorei choshech
Who formed (yotzeir, from tzurah - image) light and created ex nihilo (see Rashi on Breishis 1:1, bara means yeish ma'ayin, creating something from nothing) darkness
Oseh shalom uvorei es hara (brachah reads: hakol)
Who does peace and created ex nihilo evil (brachah reads: the all, i.e. the universe).
But more to the point of our question, we see that the two dichotomies are compared; light is to darkness as peace is to evil. Both light and peace are briyos, creations ex nihilo, darkness and peace are derivatives.
A totally empty room is dark. Light is a substance, darkness is its absence. The implication of the pasuk is that peace too is the "substance", evil is merely the absence of peace, not an item iteself.
(BTW, this was my understanding of tzimtzum. In order to allow evil to exist the A-lmighty provides the appropriate absence of good.)
During shiva, this point was brought home to me on a very emotional level. The gift was that I had 3 healthy children (now 7, k"y). That is the miracle.
Left to itself the universe decays in obedience to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The fact that we can live is the exception, the Divine intervention. Just because we take usually take this intervention for granted makes this point no less true.
2- R. Nachum Ish Gamzu used to say "gam zu litovah" (this too is for the best) when faced with calamity. His student, R. Akiva, would similarly say, "Kol da'avad rachmanah litav avad" (all that the All Merciful does, He does for the best). They believed that bad things don't happen to anyone -- bad or good people. Our problem may be in that we have a misunderstanding of what a "bad thing" is.
Back to the pasuk in Yeshayah... R. SR Hirsch considers the root of ra, evil, to be reish-ayin-ayin, to shatter. The root of shalom, peace, is shin-lamed-mem, whole. Perhaps this tells us something about the definition of "good". Being good, imitating the creator, is to be constructive; evil is -- by definition -- to be destructive.
It's interesting that light vs. dark is paralled to peace/wholeness/harmony vs. evil, and not good vs. evil. This may be due to a problem with how to define the word "tov", good. For humans, Judaism defines good behavior as imitatio D-ei, acting as G-d does. With reference to Hashem, however, that definition is tautological. Of course G-d is good, if "good" means to act like G-d.
Our problem is only because we have a definition of evil that is based on humanism. The American ethic is that good is anything "that makes you happy and doesn't hurt anyone". This is the ethic of an era of instant gratification. It doesn't pursue building something for the future, to reach ultimate hights, it goes for happiness in the here-and-now. The distinction is obvious when we look at the difference between the Torah and humanistic ethics on what goes on between "two consenting adults". (This distinction is built into the systems' respective axioms: Torah, Divine in origin, takes the long view; humanism, because of the limitations of humans, can't.)
Evil never happens because everything is toward building, toward shaping oourselves to be receptacles for his goodness in the next world. This is why the gemara calls this world the "foyer of the palace." Our goal here is to get ready for the next world -- even if this means that we choose to avoid happiness, or even happiness is forcibly taken from us in the short run.