The Meaning(s) of Suffering

"...we assume that drab impression is what religion necessarily entails: specifically, the kind of theology that most Christian theologians call “classical,” by which they mean Augustine, Aquinas and the broad spectrum of medieval philosophy – which presupposes that God must be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Based on this presumption, God has – and must have – all the power (that is

what omnipotent means). God has – and must have – all knowledge, knowing everything that is, was, and will be. God is omnibenevolent - pure good. The challenge for many contemporaries is that certain intolerable consequences result from these three axioms."

--Rabbi Bradley Artson, "BA-DEREKH: On The Way —A Presentation of Process Theology"

Orach L'Chayyim on Ex. 14:30-31

Once [the Israelites] saw how real God's love for them was [after seeing their oppressors dead on the shore]... they came to understand that even in Egypt, as their burdens were made heavier when Moses and Aaron came before Pharaoh, God's great love was also present. This is like the case of a father who has a sick small child. The child needs to take a very bitter medicine that the doctors have prescribed. The child does not want to swallow the medicine. Finally, the father has to force the child's mouth open and pour the medicine into it. The child comes to think that his father must hate him. When he grows up, of course, and sees how much his father loves him, he has the mind to understand that the bitter medicine his father forced upon him was a token of great love. It was bitter also for the father that he had to hold his child's mouth open that way and pour in that medicine. But because he knew this cure was needed, he took the pain upon himself and did as was needed...The first "Israel saw" in these verses refers to sight itself; they really "saw the Egyptians dead on the shore of the sea. But the second "Israel saw the mighty hand that the LORD had raise in Egypt" refers to understanding...They understood that even back in Egypt, when the burdens had been so oppressive, those too were evidence of great divine compassion, like the bitter medicinal herbs one has to take.

"The lessons I've learned
Won't do you any good
You've got to get burned
Well the curse and the blessing
They're one in the same
Baby it's all
Such a treacherous gain"

--Indigo Girls, "Fugitive"

"In theodicy more than anywhere else, I see myself as a disciple of Nahman of Bratslav. That was what was most attractive to me about him--his theodicy. I found him the only Jewish thinker before Martin Buber who took the absence or eclipse of God as a serious reality. Nahman talks about the three levels of truth, or three levels of reality. There is a naive level of faith on which he says we all believe in God: we believe in Providence and then we have to go beyond that. For me that's not even a naive level of faith. But the naive level of faith for me is something like, 'the whole earth that is filled with God's glory." There is a level, an immediacy of faith, which opens up and sees the presence of God in the world. Nahman says you look at that faith, at that perception of Divine reality carefully, and it begins to fall apart, it begins to crumble. You look for evidence of it and there is no evidence. You try to
provide it to yourself and you can't prove it. Then you begin to confront what he calls the void. The empty space, the place where there is no God. He says that there is a level where every human being will experience it someplace, where God is truly absent, where there is no God. That is a reality as well. That absence of God has to exist if we are to be human. We become human, we grow, we stretch, only in the absence of God. If the Divine Presence were there all the time, if we lived in a world in which we could always say, "the whole earth is filled with God's flory," we wouldn't be stretching and reaching and growing and becoming what we need to be come as human beings." --Arthur Green, 1992

"For all my reading, I never found a theodicy that worked for me. I have always found the 'free will' defense powerful in explaining the origins of moral evil, but it does nothing to explain the victims of evil, and for the same reason, it is useless to explain physical evil. It always seemed to me that, to solve the problem of evil, it was necessary to surrender a belief either in God's power or God's goodness. While intellectually, I would far prefer to give up God's power, to say that God has gone into exile and that God weeps for the exile of God's people, emotionally it has always been God's power that is much more real to me than God's goodness. To say that God has no connection with evil is to deny the real power of evil in the world or to deny the oneness of God." --Judith Plaskow, 1992

"I found I was angry not at God but at the colossal irrelevance of the [Jewish] funeral service. I simply did not want to hear about God the Lord and King, mercy and judgment. I wanted to be told that people are born and die, that God gives and takes away, that the moon waxes and wanes, that tides move in and out, that nothing really dies, that everything is taken up in our memories and in the ecology of the planet. My mind floated to Nelle Morton's article 'The Goddess as Metaphoric Image' in which she discusses her fear of flying and her irritating habit of pleading with the powerful male deity in the sky whenever a plane hit turbulence. She describes an occasion on which she told herself to stop behaving like a child and to see what would happen if she invoked the Goddess. Morton discovered that the Goddess was not mistress of the skies and wind but was in the clouds and air currents, and she relaxed her tightened limbs and even enjoyed the rhythm of the plane's movements. This was the God/dess that I wanted to hear about about my mother's funeral--a God/dess who is the cycles of life and death, who gives birth to myriad life forms as the ocean gives rise to waves, and sustains us in life and also in sorrow. The transcendent and omnipotent God of my girlhood and young adulthood, who had betrayed his (sic) promises to the Jewish people and who could have prevented a brain tumor if he so willed, had simply vanished. I no longer looked to a God enthroned above me in the sky but God/dess all around and in me, in the firm ground beneath my feet that allowed me to walk upright." --Judith Plaskow, 2013