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The Three Books of Judgment

How do we maintain a belief in God’s goodness in a world where evil and misfortune exist?
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September 16, 2022
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In Masechet Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Kruspedai says in the name of Rabbi Yochanan that three books are opened in heaven on Rosh Hashanah: one for the righteous, who are inscribed for life; one for the wicked, who are inscribed for death; and one for the beinonim, the middling ones, whose fate, as of Rosh Hashanah, is yet undecided (16b).

The image this teaching invokes—three books in heaven where our life or death is sealed—would be terrifying if it weren’t so implausible, but indeed it is implausible. We live in a world where the wicked often flourish and the righteous suffer.

There is a theological problem here, the technical term for which is theodicy: How do we maintain a belief in God’s goodness in a world where evil and misfortune exist? It is a problem that has kept theologians and philosophers awake at night for millennia, and which has inspired a number of creative readings of Rabbi Kruspedai’s teaching throughout Jewish history.

The Tosafot, medieval Talmud commentators in France and Germany, taught that “life” and “death” don’t refer to life and death on this plane of existence, but rather in the world to come.

Ramban, a medieval mystic and Torah commentator living in Spain, taught that Rabbi Kruspedai’s teaching is correct, but that only God knows who is considered a righteous person or a wicked person. It may be that a seemingly wicked person earns God’s favor in a single, unseen action. It may also be that a seemingly righteous person commits a grave offense when no one is watching.

The Raavad, a medieval philosopher, taught that each person is born with an arbitrarily predetermined lifespan. On Rosh Hashanah, a wicked person may have their life shortened by five years on account of their sins. If their predetermined lifespan was 120 years to begin with, however, this still leaves them with 115. This, then, would explain why the righteous sometimes have short lives and the wicked sometimes have long ones.

Our modern culture has produced its own responses to the problem of theodicy.

There is a psychological approach that maintains that the wicked, while they may flourish in life, will be plagued by guilt over their wicked deeds. The righteous, on the other hand, will sleep easy because of their clean conscience, even if their material circumstances are wanting.

There is a New Age approach that maintains that we “manifest” good and bad fortune with positive or negative thoughts, and thus have no one but ourselves to blame.

There is also the despairing response of the modern soul who does not believe in divine punishment or reward, but who sometimes wishes that he or she did on account of the great injustices and sufferings that are wrought upon innocent lives in this world.

The solutions offered by the Tosafot, Ramban and Raavad are successful in that they solve the central problem of Rabbi Kruspedai’s teaching, which is that it does not accord with observed reality. Nonetheless, each feels like a bit of a stretch.

The psychological solution, on the other hand, just feels like wishful thinking. We know that there are happy sinners and sorrowful saints.

The New Age solution is cruel and blames those who suffer for their own suffering.

The despairing response leaves us confounded.

Ultimately, there are no truly satisfying solutions to the problem of theodicy, for they all leave the problem intact when it would be better dismantled.

We are dealing with a faulty premise, which is the “goodness” of God. It’s not that God isn’t good—but I believe there is a bit of confusion around what we mean when we talk about God’s goodness.

Good and evil are both creations of God (Isaiah 45:7). Nonetheless, in the creation story, it is written that all of creation is “good,” as in, “and God saw all that had been made, and found it very good” (Genesis 1:31).

How can it be that God deems creation “very good” when creation contains both good and evil? The answer, it seems to me, is that the former (Genesis) deals with absolute goodness whereas the latter (Isaiah) deals with relative goodness.

By this I mean that the realities that humans experience as evil, painful, wrongheaded and destructive do not necessarily constitute a flaw in creation. Consider an example from nature: If a gazelle could be a theologian, surely it would ask why a good God would permit the existence of lions. We know, however, that this is merely the gazelle’s relative perspective. From an absolute point of view, both the gazelle and the lion are integral parts of a balanced natural order.

To take an example closer to home, consider death. Throughout the entire rabbinic discussion cited above, it is taken for granted that death is a punishment for evil. Indeed, death feels like a very evil thing to us mortals. We love each other, and thus we hate to say goodbye. We love living, and thus we hate to go. But is death really evil?

We love each other, and thus we hate to say goodbye. We love living, and thus we hate to go. But is death really evil?

If we attempt to leave behind our human subjectivity and imagine the earth as God sees it, we will come to understand that death is not a curse or a punishment but an integral part of life on earth.

The beloved spiritual teacher Ram Dass used to marvel at the fact that the world can be so full of trouble and yet so perfect just the way it is. These are not contradictory statements, but rather truths that exist on different planes of perception—one relative and one absolute.

On Rosh Hashanah, we are called to participate to different degrees in both planes of perception: the absolute, in that it is the anniversary of the creation of the world; and the relative, in that it is the day of judgment.

We are called to examine our actions and to consider how we can move forward and grow as individuals and communities, but we are also called upon to reflect on the first chapter of Genesis, which reminds us, as we tremble at the shofar’s blast, that everything is “very good” just the way it is.


Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.

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