Living With a God of Light and Dark:
A Jewish Perspective 

As stated on the home page, Judaism does not pretend that God is all good or that finding joy and serenity is easy. 

 

Dealing with hard times--the genuinely miserable moments, events, or long stretches of pain and unhappiness, when you are inexorably, irretrievably stuck in a bad pattern, and your best isn't good enough to solve a problem--is a subject addressed at various spots on this website, particularly in the "Teshuva" and "Music" links. I didn't plan on adding a section devoted exclusively to the subject until I read Avivah Zornberg's book, The Hidden Order of Intimacy.  It caused me to stop naively thinking I can avoid hard times just by being smart and careful. I began to live the phrase from Job: "I recant and relent being but dust and ashes."  Doing so has made me better equipped to cope with hard times. 

Zornberg notes the Hebrew word shamar (שָׁמַר) "holds a rich ambiguity":

 

• It means to conserve, preserve, observe, in the sense of guard duty or resisting the urge to leave.

• Importantly, there is also a "future movement" of the word, when shamar means moving toward realization, expectant, feeling the way toward fulfillment. For example, when Jacob hears Joseph's dreams, we read "Jacob held (shamar) the story in mind. He waited in expectation for when it would come true." In Isaiah, we read about "a nation that keeps faith (shamar)." 

 
The latter means that shamar is a constant attunement, a readiness to respond, a posture of aspiration, a turning toward the future and its possibilities. In this sense, shamar is a liberation from fixation, rigidity, and inertia, a freedom from repetitive compulsions. One keeps faith in a future yet to evolve, mobilizing a larger imagination.

Crucially, for there to be shamar there must first be tragedies, disruptions, stumbles, failures, limitations, impediments, insufficiencies, unease, stupidity, wounds, slipping on the banana peel. They must be lived through and cannot be evaded. Make space for them. Shamar's optimism cannot diminish their rawness. But shamar makes darkness and despair temporary, and it teaches that the meaning of the disruption depends on what happens next, which you control to a large extent. The meaning must be imaginatively sought out.

Put another way, crises are "inherent, inevitable, perpetually repeated, constitutive of being human, part of the human reality. Much of life eludes one's grasp. Anything can happen." Life is fragile, essentially unstable & unpredictable, and may fall apart anytime. But the alternatives to shamar, to holding out hope for change, are madness, hatred, and self-annihilation, a repeated moan.

Here I must stop and ask: is Zornberg accurate in asserting madness is the only alternative? Or is it possible to be happy believing what Alan Watts said in his book The Joyous Cosmology: "Life is basically just a gesture, a completely purposeless play, an action without agent, recipient, or purpose. There is no reason whatever to explain it. The present is the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. The present does not say anything except, 'Thus!' There is no point from which to confront life or stand against it. Ego, the entity to which experience happens, is more of a minus than a plus. It is an estrangement from experience, a lack of participation, of feeling with the world. Ego creates a chronic resistance to experience which blocks the free flowing of life."

I believe Watts: there is no point from which I can block, confront, or stand against the world. As long as I’m alive I’m participating with the world. But his statements are not a helpful guide to living, especially when he asserts it is natural to see pain as no longer a problem. It is very much a problem. One cannot relax luxuriously during hard times. His ideas prod passiveness and hopelessness instead of aspiring for positive change. By contrast, Zornberg continues...

You must be able to tolerate uncertainty & the tension of waiting, to remain vigilant, to live with the unrealized possibility, to live in limbo. Shamar "runs counter to the impatient posture that can tolerate no delay." Shamar is a "waiting posture informed by alacrity, a controlled vitality, an energetic state...a forward, upward, creative movement." It waits for joy, accomplishment, meaning, laughter, beauty, goodness, sensibility. It is life in a different key, a shift in perspective. Again, the meaning of the disruption depends on what happens next, which you control to a large extent. The meaning must be imaginatively sought out. Use your linguistic power: "Anything at all may be said. Words may be combined in infinite sets. 'The limits of my language are the limits of my world,' Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote.'" 

Zornberg notes "there is an existential rhythm between deconstructive and reconstructive, emptiness and fulfillment, loss and recovery. A constant dynamic keeps the two modalities in motion and contradiction. Fullness and emptiness live together. Hope is bound up with anxiety." Be attentive to both. Open yourself, clear space, and allow access to both. Take an alert, receptive stance to both, since together they constitute the human experience. Dissolve the separateness. 
 
Other thinkers have written similarly to Zornberg:

• "Avoid loading your concept of God with a positive charge in too simplistic a way. Strive to accept that both sides of the page, good and evil, are one and the same." (Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi)

• "The shadow completes and helps show forth the light. Light is only seen in contrast to darkness. They are intermingled in myriad ways, combined in endless variations, joined together in one whole, a cosmic weave by the universal Artist." (Hillel Zeitlin)

• "The silence of God is repellent, absolute, unjust, inflexible, long, and intolerable. It is this totality of a Yes perceptible only through a No that the silence of the Bible, in majestic accord with the most tragic disharmonies, lays up for us. The created universe forms with night and death but a single unit. The hope is in the narrow limits of silence, within the time and space of the defeat.  Hope shares its bread with failure; it is its companion. At each place and at every moment both of these recreate together. They are not separated moments in the work of God. One is implicit in the other. The two themes interweave, linked in inseparable association. Whichever one is dominant, the other continues softly and never entirely disappears." (Andre Neher)

• "What is to weep? To weep is to sow. What is to laugh? To laugh is to reap. Look at this man weeping as he goes. Why is he weeping? Because he is bearing in his arms the burden of the grain he is about to sow. And now, see him coming back in joy. Why is he laughing? Because he bears in his arms the sheaves of the harvest. Laughter is the tangible harvest, plenitude. Tears are sowing; they are effort, risk, the seed exposed to drought and rot, the ear of corn threatened by hail and by storms. Laughter is words; tears are silence. Perhaps, next spring, bread will spring forth from this furrow. Perhaps, also, drought and hail will appear and perhaps, next spring, there will be only death and rottenness. What matter, so long as the act is performed? Hope is not in laughter and plenitude. Hope is in tears, in the risk, and in the silence." (Rabbi Judah Loew)

Zornberg's best metaphor for this dynamic: the gradual opening of the birth canal requires pain and counterpressure. In order to relieve the latter, something has to open, a passage has to widen. The buildup of pressure is a result of the disruptions in life.  But then there is a letting go, a softening. Using another metaphor: the hand opens, it does not clench, it relaxes its tension. Something new is born out of the wailing; the wilderness of despair can be a birthplace of creativity.

Shamar is this creativity. It offers the capacity to renew. It focuses on "what succeeds temporary darkness." It requires much practice.

 

A story about the violinist Itzhak Perlman helps:

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At one concert, Perlman came out on stage to play a violin concerto. He lay down his crutches, placed the violin under his chin, and began to tune the instrument. A crack sounded forth, audible to many in the audience. One of the strings had snapped. Rather than sending for a new string, Perlman signaled for the orchestra conductor to begin and then went on to play the concerto using the three remaining strings on his violin. Once the concerto was over, the audience rose up in applause and called on Perlman to speak. He remarked: “Our task is to make music with what remains.”

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How can it be a compliment to say I'm in the image of a One that allows evil and suffering? Why imitate it? Why try to pull myself closer?

If I believe there is a One that underlies, overlays, precedes, follows, fills, and surrounds all things, and the One is constantly flowing and extending through evolution, revealing itself through tangible and intangible means, then the One is responsible for the existence of the world and everything in it...including evil and suffering. The latter constitute, as the Zohar names it, the "other side" or "shadow side" (sitra achrah) of God.

As Christopher Hitchens remarked, "Such an entity is cruel, incompetent, or indifferent. You can't say, 'oh what a welcome, what a fine table was set for us to dine at.'" Hitchens wasn't alone. Protest, anger, outcry, and indignation against God are part of the Jewish tradition; God is chastised repeatedly in the Torah and Talmud for allowing brutality and injustice. It's a tribute to Judaism's realism, honesty, and integrity that it has a long pedigree of acknowledging this anger, distress, and disappointment.

Rabbi David Wolpe wrote: "No definitive, certain answer about evil and suffering has been found and it seems unlikely that a single, satisfactory answer ever will be. The silence of God in the face of suffering is a persistent pain that cannot be soothed. Blunting our own faculties and sense of criticism is not the answer. God seems less protective, less good than we have been promised. Even the most powerful promptings of abstract argument melt away when confronted with the heat of human anguish, the endless sufferings of history. Tears have run too freely. Suffering once felt cannot be erased. What possible recompense could there be that would permit us to feel that an innocent individual should have been racked by pain in this world? Some pains are too deep to salve and too inexplicably awful to pretend they have an explanation. Ultimately no answer to the problem of evil and suffering and God satisfies. The true or final answer eludes our grasp. There can be no adequate answers. There is no escaping the pain of suffering and the tormenting question of God's silence. That this will evoke anger is to be expected and respected. We cannot fully understand the design. It remains hard to make sense of such a God. As Isaiah says, speaking for this God, 'I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things' (Isa. 45:7). Or, to quote the poet Paul Valéry, 'God made everything out of nothing and sometimes the nothing shows through.'"

Judaism acknowledges that God allows evil and suffering. Does that make God despicable and loathsome? Partly. Of course. Certainly. Obviously. Clearly. But Judaism's perspective extends beyond "despicable and loathsome" in this way:

Judaism doesn’t declare God guilty for the bad while ignoring all of the good that constitutes the vast majority of existence. Such a declaration creates an asymmetry that permits the bad to nullify the good. Judaism asserts the world is rooted in positivity by a fundamentally decent God that--on the whole--makes life delightful and allows for joy, peace, love, kindness, mercy, compassion, gratitude, honesty, humility, slowness to anger, justice, and the avoidance of despair. 

God does not intervene but calls out to me to live a life of joy, peace, & love. I try to respond to that call with hineini ("here I am") because I want joy for myself and others, not because I think there's karma in this world or an afterlife of judgment in a different world. What I do with my heart and my hands is up to me.

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Rabbi Harold Schulweis (1925-2014) described this "split" God as follows:

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• “Elohim is the God who appears in the first chapter of Genesis: the God of being, unmoved, unaffected, amoral. Elohim represents the reality principle expressed in the Talmudic dictum: 'the world pursues its own natural course' (Avodah Zarah 54b - עולם כמנהגו נוהג). Judaism embraces a realism that keeps us from denial, fantasy, or magic. It demands acceptance, surrender to what is. But to live with Elohim alone would be to live a life of resignation, accepting all that is as inevitable, unalterable. There is another aspect of divinity…

• “Adonai appears in the second chapter of Genesis and only with the creation of the human being. The human is charged to till and tend the Garden. Adonai is the imperative to transform the world and heal it. Adonai is revealed in human efforts to make the natural world livable, to impose moral order on an indifferent natural universe. If the world is cruel, fix it. If disease steals life, cure it. If war devastates, teach peace. The presence of Adonai in the world is real, but it is contingent upon human action. Bring those potentialities into reality. Adonai calls upon us to overcome, transform, and transcend the conditions of existence. No matter how few in number, the rescuers provide testimony to the truth of Adonai. We cannot change the past but we can profoundly affect the future.”

All of which is to say that I try to be aware of, and attach myself to, the aspect of God that makes life delightful and allows for joy, peace, love, kindness, mercy, compassion, gratitude, honesty, humility, slowness to anger, justice, and the avoidance of despair. As for the aspect of God that allows evil and suffering, I despise it while shrugging my shoulders--as Job and all humans have done forever--and accept that I cannot know why that aspect has to be. A clear, concise answer will obviously not be forthcoming. What I can do, as Rabbi David Wolpe wrote, is "attempt to combat that which cannot be erased but might, with our best efforts, be subdued"...an attempt that is, to a large extent, the essence of Judaism.​​​​
 

How do I find that good essence of God?

As Rabbi Art Green says, Sinai is a vertical metaphor for an internal journey. If the good aspect of God is up there then I have to build a ladder and climb a long distance. But if the good aspect of God is inside, then the move is a deep inward glance. The journey is more like breaking through shells. It's a meditative process that takes patience, time, and concentration. I keep three thoughts in mind:

• About Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira (a rabbi in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust), author Nehemia Polen wrote, "In the desert landscape of absence he managed to find Presence, not as a response to a favorable stimulus from above, and not receiving confirmation from the surrounding environment, but initiated by his own capacity for self-awakening out of the darkness."

• Writer Alan Watts said: "the foundation upon which I sought to stand turns out to be the center from which I seek."

• Elie Wiesel described a conversation he had with Rabbi Menachem Schneerson after Wiesel moved to New York and attended Schneerson's farbrengen. He was angry with Schneerson, asking him how he could believe in God after the Holocust and telling him the farbrengen were simplistic and full of meritless conviction. Schneerson replied: "Do you want me to stop praying and start shouting? I also have eyes that see and ears that hear and a heart that feels sorrow and disappointment. What is there left for us to do? In what direction are we to go? Our celebrations are a way of saying to the universe: 'You don't want me to dance; too bad, I'll dance anyway. You've taken away every reason for singing, but I shall sing. You didn't expect my joy, but here it is.'"

  • In response, Wiesel's attitude morphed into the following: "My protest is an inner protest, from inside faith, not outside faith. It isn't even against faith. It's because of faith that I have a protest. I am not rebelling against God but I am challenging God." Put another way by Rabbi David Wolpe, "The Jewish fury at God is not vilification of an alien and hostile force. It is the distress and disappointment of being wounded by someone close."

Is there a psychological tactic for living with this "split God" that has good and bad sides?

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• ​Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, in Man's Search for Meaning, offered a view on how to accept often unwanted and unpleasant fate:

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"Humans can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. Everything can be taken from a person but one thing, the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. There are always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offers the opportunity to make a decision about one's attitude toward existence, an existence restricted by external forces. Here lies the chance to make use of or forego the opportunities. A person's inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Everywhere people are confronted with fate. It is a free decision to be cheerful in spite of fate.

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"It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our 'provisional existence' as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation that gives a person the opportunity to grow spiritually. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. Life for such people became meaningless. Yet in reality there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.

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"Think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life--daily and hourly. Find the right answer to its problems and fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets, which differ from person to person and moment to moment. Realize hidden opportunities for achievement."​​​

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• Although he wasn't Jewish, the following perspective from Rainer Rilke (in his book Letters to a Young Poet) is too fascinating to omit...note his juxtaposition of the words "painful" and "beautiful":

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"Why don't you think of God as the coming one, the future one, the final fruit of a tree? What is keeping you from living your life as though it were one painful beautiful day in the history of a great pregnancy? Could it not be God's beginning? If God is the most perfect one, would not what is less-than-perfect have to precede God? Wouldn't God have to be the last one in order to envelope everything within himself? By extracting the most possible sweetness out of everything, just as the bees gather honey, we thus build God. With any insignificant thing, even with the very smallest thing, we begin, with work, with a time of rest following, with keeping silent or with a small lonely joy, with everything that we do alone, without participants or supporters, we begin God: the one whom we shall not experience in this lifetime, even as our ancestors could not experience us. Yet they who belong in the distant past are in us, serving as impetus, as blood that can be heard rushing, as a gesture rising out of the depths of time. Is there anything that can rob you of the hope of someday being in God, who is the ultimate? Perhaps God needs exactly this, your fear of life, in order to begin? Perhaps these very days of your life are the times that God is touched by everything within you? Perhaps you are influencing God, with breathless effort leaving your mark on God? Be patient and without rancor and believe that the least we can do is to make God's evolving no more difficult than the earth does for spring, when it wishes to come."​​​

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Doesn't all of this make me a servile masochist bowing down to a sinister totalitarian dictator?

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The answer depends on one's sense of proportionality;

• As Rabbi David Wolpe notes, "How do you say bittersweet in Hebrew? It's מתוק מר...'sweetbitter.' Although they always mix together in our lives, there is more sweetness than bitterness, joy than sadness, love than hate."  So the masochist label doesn't apply as long as one has a wide frame of gratitude about life. Judaism cultivates such gratitude, which is to say that Judaism sees the scales as tipped, proportionately, in favor of pleasure not pain.

• Servitude? Hardly. Refer to the Schneerson/Wiesel/Frankl text directly above, which is to say that Judaism sees the scales as tipped, proportionately, in favor of challenging God not acquiescing to God. 

• Is God a sinister totalitarian dictator? To an extent, obviously. Refer to all of the text above. But that reality is offset, from the Jewish perspective, by using our  free will to transform that which is into that which ought to be, which is to say that Judaism sees the scales as tipped, proportionately, in favor of hope not despair. An anecdote from Rabbi Harold Schulweis illustrates this point:

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Hospitalized after a heart problem, Schulweis one night awoke to find a nurse staring intently at two kindled Sabbath lights set on his window sill. The nurse was Buddhist. He was interested in religion and they had on previous nights spoken about the kinship and differences between Buddhism and Judaism. The nurse asked Schulweis whether he should blow out the Sabbath lights so that Schulweis could return to sleep. Schulweis told him that blowing out the candles on the Sabbath was prohibited. The nurse said, "I understand the differences better now. In Judaism, the sacred act is to light the candle. In Buddhism, the sacred act is to blow out the candle."

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Schulweis later noted in an essay about his hospital stay that, in Buddhism, the world is sorrowful. The Buddha looked about and saw birth, aging, illness, dying, death and frustration and came to the conclusion that the world was filled with "dukkha": sorrow, suffering, anguish, corruption. Life is dukkha. We all live, as Thoreau wrote, lives of quiet desperation. Life, as Hobbes wrote, can be "nasty, brutish, and short." For we are all caught in “samsara” which means wandering, an endless round of existence. We are trapped in the wheel of life, in the cycle of birth and death and rebirth and re-death. We are caught in a hamster cage and we seek “moksha,” a way to escape the dreary treadmill of dukkha. 

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How do you get rid of dukkha? Schulweis explained the Buddhist escapes the samsara of this world by ripping out the root of dukkha, the root of suffering. That root of dukkha is called “tanha”: craving, desire, wanting, seeking. We must rid ourselves of this thirst. As long as you thirst for things, as long as you crave for things, as long as you seek attachment to things of this life you are chained to dukkha. But once you are enlightened you understand that everything you crave for, every thing and every ideal is transient, ephemeral, imperfect, You realize that this entire world is illusory and your goal is to be released from the treadmill of this existence. Be free of dukkha, dry up your thirst, starve your appetite, blow out the candle. This is the meaning of “nirvana”: totally extinguish the flame of desire and worldly attachment which the ignorant crave. 

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The lotus is a Buddhist symbol for living. The lotus springs from filthy waters. But it floats on the surface never getting wet or cold. It is a posture of detachment symbolic of a life uprooted from desire. Buddhists desire to live in the lotus position. 

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In contrast, the goal of Judaism stands in opposition to the goal of nirvana. My duty as a Jew is to light the candle in this world.  Of course, in Judaism there is an acknowledgment of dukkha. But in Judaism dukkha is not overcome by self abnegation, by dousing the light, by renouncing the world, by asceticism and self mortification. Dukkha, from a Jewish point of view, can be overcome not by renunciation but by transformation, not by deprecation but by sanctification of the world , not by divorcing the world, but by renewing the marriage covenant with the world.  

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As Schulweis advises, at the core of life is a fundamental choice. I can either light the candle or blow it out. Jews don't blow out the light. The flame of the Sabbath lights casts out the shadow of dukkha. Who lights the candle? You and I. ​​​​

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