05/20/2022
Thinking about Good and Evil by Joe Palombo
Looking at the images on TV of the wanton destruction and the sheer barbarity of the killing of innocent people taking place in Ukraine, I was led to explore the concept of evil, which Putin personifies.
A search of books on Amazon turned up nearly half a dozen books with titles such as “Why do bad things happen to good people?” These books left unsaid the question of “Why do good things happen to bad people?” or why do some bad people live comfortable lives and go unpunished? A cursory reading of the tables of content of these works failed to yield a satisfactory answer to my question. A deeper search led to the book by Rabbi Allen listed above. Being born and raised as a Jew, I thought that reading it might allow me to integrate aspects of my religious roots from which I had drifted while gaining an answer to the question of the existence of evil in this world.
The book took me on a long breathtaking journey that led to a review of the concepts of good and evil in the Torah, the first five books of the bible, and the Apocrypha. These sections were followed by instructive summaries of the medieval philosophers’ and theologians’ struggles to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world. These reflections were followed by a review of the contributions of the Kabbalah and Hasidic masters and by modern thinkers’ philosophical thoughts. The book ends with a review of contemporary thinkers’ attempts to come to terms with the evil caused by the instigators of the Holocaust.
The author frames the central question as that of the conflict between theodicy and the existence of evil. Theodicy is the belief that God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, and All-good. If that is the case, why would a good and benevolent God permit such horror as ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, and the mass killing of innocent children? Furthermore, to add to the complexity of the issue, in the past, God intervened in worldly affairs to prevent the occurrence of evil or harm to His people, as happened during the departure from Egypt. Why did he not intervene now to prevent some of the calamities that beset our world?
The author summarizes the “Thirty-five Jewish answers to why there is evil in the world.” (P. 324). A selection of these answers includes:
Evil is a result of poor human choices.
There is no effective or convincing way to account for it.
Evil is part of the fabric of the universe.
Evil is the result of the human inclination to act wickedly.
Evil is not real; it is merely the absence of good.
Evil is a consequence of the sin of Adam and Eve.
Evil is a manifestation of God’s wrath.
The existence of evil allows human beings the opportunity to overcome it by doing good.
In his discussion of these proposed answers, Rabbi Allen repeatedly returns to the issue of theodicy, “Throughout this book we have tackled a fundamental challenge: how Judaism can account for the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God and the simultaneous existence of evil in the world ( p. 323). He finds all answers given by the rabbinical scholars and philosophers whose work he summarized unsatisfactory or incompatible with the powers attributed to God. It is difficult to conceive why a “good” God would create a universe that would cause so much grief and suffering.
The issue of theodicy is even more urgent in understanding the Shoah or Hurban, Rabbi Allen’s preferred way of referring to the Holocaust. He states, “the Shoah stands as a formidable challenge to traditional Jewish theology on evil and suffering.” (p. 321). He concludes, “To date, if or how the challenge of the Shoah will result in changes to traditional Jewish theology remains unresolved.” (p. 322).
The problem of theodicy and the co-existence of evil is a challenge not only to Judaism but also to Christianity, with which the book does not deal. The Catholic Church’s understanding of evil is articulated by Thomas Aquinas, who defines evil as the absence or privation of good. Because of the belief in a soul that endures after death, Christianity offers an afterlife as the point at which accounts are settled, the good are rewarded, and the evil are damned. Jewish theologians do not consider this alternative, that is, the existence of a soul that is separate from the body, as it is not part of traditional Jewish theology. Of this view, Rabbi Allen states, “… while the promise of future recompense is reassuring, the projection of an afterlife is a tacit admission that the world that human beings experience [inhabit] is unjust and that God is either incapable or unwilling to change it (p. 77).
If we dispense with theodicy, whether as atheists or agnostics, we do not escape the predicament. Scientists and believers in evolution maintain that no purpose guides the evolutionary process as it unfolds inexorably to an indeterminate end. Evolutionary anthropologists begin with the premise that there is a biological basis for aggression among humans. Aggression and violence are as old as the history of the earliest hominids. In this view, the actions of the perpetrators of violence are no more than the byproduct of their evolutionary histories or, as a historian once said, they are one of nature’s experiments.
From a different perspective, as a therapist interested in the neuropsychological makeup of the human mind, the issue of evil presents a different problem. For clinicians, the response to the question of the existence of evil is that it is not for us to judge the morality or immorality of people’s conduct. Our charge is to understand their motives, which reflect the inner psychological forces disclosed in their behaviors. Our appraisal of what constitutes deviance is based on the signs and symptoms patients present and on which we formulate a clinical diagnosis. In this view, we would regard the conduct that society designates as “evil” as reflective of a deranged mental state. The issue of each person’s responsibilities for their actions is deferred to society’s judgment of the person’s conduct, which occurs outside our clinical setting.
As clinicians, we are often asked to provide a diagnosis for celebrities or world leaders, such as President Trump or Vladimir Putin; we respond that our ethics forbid us from making such diagnostic judgments. We may only provide such diagnoses for people whom we have personally evaluated. Ethically, we cannot even offer a speculative assessment of another person’s mental state. However, we can judge whether a person we have assessed is a danger to themselves or others but cannot make the judgment that the person’s actions are morally good or evil.
These considerations leave the issue of evil as a moral invention that we humans have created to regulate the conduct of the members of our community. People adhere to the dictates of conventional conduct because of the commands of their conscience, the moral suasion of the community, or the enforcement of its laws. The evil that some people perpetrate represents a violation of those injunctions.
While we are repulsed and sicked by the conduct of evil people, and despite the fact that we may understand the neurobiological and evolutionary sources of their actions, the absence of any shred of empathy for others in such people as Eichmann or Putin is beyond our understanding.
Book Review: Rabbi Allen, R. W. (2021). Thinking about Good and Evil: Jewish views from Antiquity to Modernity. Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society.
