St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology (Jul 2024)
The Problem of Evil
Abstract
This article examines approaches to the problem of evil in historical and contemporary Jewish theology. The material is structured conceptually rather than as a chronological survey. The introduction contrasts classical Jewish formulations of the problem of evil with the standard formulations of the problem in Christian and Western philosophical thought. The former tend to focus on evil’s distribution rather than its existence, while the latter ask how evil can exist in the world God created if God possesses the traditional attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection. The Introduction then turns to Jewish conceptions of attributes of God which are particularly germane to the problem of evil and notes the important distinction between natural and moral evil. The second section turns to theodicies and defences, mainly utilizing categories familiar from contemporary philosophical discussion of the problem of evil, and analysing relevant Jewish theological material under these headings. The discussion includes Talmudic theodicies and theodicies considered by medieval Jewish thinkers such as Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, Joseph Albo, and others. The final two subsections deal with theodical approaches in Kabbalah and with the post-Holocaust theodicies of Eliezer Berkovits and Ignaz Maybaum. The third section introduces the approach to the problem of evil termed in the contemporary philosophical literature ‘sceptical theism’. Classical Jewish texts that appear to anticipate sceptical theism are noted in this context. The fourth section focuses on antitheodicy and its treatment in the thought of Jewish theologians such as Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, Joseph Soloveitchik, Emmanuel Levinas, and Irving Greenberg. The Jewish theological significance of treatments of the Holocaust in literature, for example in the work of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, is briefly considered. The fifth section explores, from a Jewish theological perspective, some strengths and weaknesses of the different general approaches to the problem of evil that have been discussed in this article – theodicy/defence, sceptical theism, and antitheodicy. Finally, the conclusion emphasizes the great variety of approaches to the problem of evil in the history of Jewish theology and argues that Jewish theological approaches to the problem can often both enrich and be enriched by contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion.
