The Genesis of Justice (30 page)

12.
Walzer,
Exodus and Revolution
(New York: Basin Books, 1985).

13.
See Dershowitz,
The Vanishing American Jew
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 276-80.

O
ne of the oldest philosophical and theological dilemmas confronted by religious people is the problem of theodicy: Why do
bad things happen to good people, and why do good things happen to bad people?
¹
These questions, of course, present a dilemma
only
for people who believe in an intervening God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and just. As Billy Graham said in discussing
John F. Kennedy Jr.’s tragic death: “God has a plan for every human being.” Believers in such divine planning must struggle
with the apparent injustice of so many of God’s actions. For those who believe in no God, or in Aristotle’s nonintervening
creator,
²
there is no problem of theodicy. The world is random and there is no reason why disease, natural disasters, wars, and other
misfortune should not afflict the righteous as well as the unrighteous. To expect otherwise would be to ascribe moral order
to physical chaos. Indeed, because bad people are often more aggressive and more selfish, it should follow that in a godless
world, good things should happen to bad people and bad things to good people more often. To the extent that human beings seek
to impose justice on a random world, they try to level the natural injustice by mandating—to the extent possible—rewards for
good people and punishments for bad people. Ultimately, however, natural injustice seems to outpace human justice, and, on
the whole, the world appears to be an unjust place.
³

Some people point to the reality that so many bad things happen to so many good people as the best proof of God’s nonexistence
(or nonintervention). Citing Einstein’s famous dictum “God does not play dice with the universe,” they argue if it is true
that a just God would not impose random injustice, it must follow that there is no such God, since it certainly appears that
our universe is the product of dicelike randomness. Once when I was teaching a class with Stephen Jay Gould, the evolution
expert, I wrote on the blackboard, “Gould or God?” I argued that you couldn’t have both since Gould postulates a world in
which evolution is the product of random forces. Gould replied that what appears to be random to the human eye may be orderly
to the divine and that in any event God is capable of randomness as well as order.

Out of a perceived need to justify God’s justice, religious people have struggled for millennia to answer Job’s plaintive
cry: Why me? Thoughtful religious people have devoted more time, energy, and creativity to this intellectual conundrum than
perhaps any other in human history. That is probably why the redactors of the Bible included such troubling works as Job and
Ecclesiastes, which address the problem of theodicy directly. Neither, of course, provides a wholly satisfying answer. Job’s
friends try mightily to explain why he, a righteous man, has been so afflicted. Their basic answer is a variation on the naturalistic
fallacy: If bad things are happening to you, you must deserve it, because God would never allow bad things to happen to a
wholly good person.
⁴
God rejects this explanation and offers one even less satisfying: I am God. Mere mortals can’t understand Me. How dare you
even try! Not only does this reductionistic nonanswer trivialize the question of theodicy, it discourages humans from even
seeking to confront it.

Ecclesiastes simply poses the problem, then offers little beyond a bit of hedonistic advice: Eat, drink, and be skeptical,
for tomorrow you return to dust. Eventually he appends a coda—probably added by the redactors in an attempt to make Ecclesiastes
religiously correct—that is hardly more satisfying: Put your faith in God and obey His commandments.

The Abrahamic religions ultimately devised a more sophisticated and elegant solution to the problem of theodicy: an invisible
hereafter where sin is punished and virtue rewarded out of sight of mortals. According to this solution, God has deliberately
made the hereafter invisible, in order to see whether we are willing to accept it on faith. So despite the obvious injustice
we see all around us, we are told not to trust our mortal perception. In urging His followers to have faith in the unseeable
justice of the hereafter, God paraphrases a Groucho Marx line from
Duck Soup
: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”

The Bible goes through three phases in constructing a world of invisible justice. The early books of the Bible do not mention
a hereafter. This omission is quite striking, considering the place—Egypt—where the Jews who received the Torah at Sinai had
been living for so many years. The entire Egyptian civilization was based on the afterlife. Indeed, the very last sentence
of the Book of Genesis describes Joseph’s Egyptian burial, his embalming, and the placing of his mummified body in an ark.
⁵

Yet despite (or perhaps because of) this intimate knowledge of the Egyptian focus on the afterlife, the Jewish people accepted
a Torah that appears to have eschewed life after death—or at least to have ignored it.

This is not to suggest that the Bible rejects promises of reward and threats of punishment as a means of securing compliance
with divine commands. The God of the Bible is a threatening and promising God. But in the Pentateuch God’s punishments and
rewards are
all
administered
here on earth
.

The first phase involves the threat of immediate and visible consequences here on earth. Among the threats that fit into this
category is the first one God made to Adam: “On the day that you eat of the Tree of Knowing of Good and Evil, you will surely
die.” Subsequent threats include the following: “I will kill you with the sword and your wives will be widows and your children
fatherless.” “I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever,” “bring seven times more plagues,” “send beasts
of the field among you, which shall rob you of your children,” “send pestilence,” “make your cities a waste,”
⁶
“smite you with … boils … itch … madness. … [T]hy life shall hang in doubt … and the Lord shall bring thee back to Egypt
in ships.”
⁷
Among the visible rewards are the following: “[I will] lengthen your days on the ground that God has given you.” “[I]t will
go well for you and lengthen your days.”
⁸
“I will give you rains …, cause evil beasts to cease out of your hands,”
⁹
“get thee high above all nations,” “cause thy enemies … to be smitten,” and “bless thee in thine land.”
¹⁰
Pretty specific, both as to where and when these punishments and rewards would be imposed! The “where” is here on earth,
“on the ground that God has given you.” The “when” is now, in time to make your wives widows and your children orphans. There
is no hint of an afterlife with postponed punishment and reward.

Later commentators argued that the hereafter, with its invisible justice, always existed, despite the Pentateuch’s silence
about it. But if God wanted humans to know that we will receive our divine comeuppance in a world to come, why did He keep
it a secret from those He intended to be influenced by the promise and threat of postearthly consequences?
¹¹
Surely He knows that here on earth, we see injustice all around us. Indeed, His own Bible places this observation in the
mouth of Ecclesiastes: “In the place of justice, wickedness was there. … I have seen a righteous man perishing in his righteousness
and a wicked man living long in his wickedness.” God Himself is often the moving force, as with Job. (Satan taunted God into
testing Job, just as the serpent—which some commentators believe was Satan—tempted Eve to eat of the tree. But just as Eve
was held responsible for her actions, so too must God be held responsible for killing Job’s innocent children, in order to
test their father.)

Had there been a belief in the afterlife at the time of Job, God could easily have explained Job’s suffering as temporal,
to be remedied in the hereafter. Instead the midrash criticizes Job for denying “the resurrection of the dead.”
¹²
Other concerns about the earthly punishment of the righteous and reward of the unrighteous, which recur throughout the Bible,
could have been answered by reference to the hereafter, but they were not.

All humans observe earthly injustice all the time.
¹³
That is precisely why Job is such a powerful and enduring figure. Any observant person will surely notice an imperfect relationship—at
best—between the sinner and the threatened death, plagues, beasts, and boils, as well as between the saint and the promises
of long life and prosperity. Ecclesiastes tells us not “to be surprised at such things” or to expect otherwise. But human
beings do expect more of their God than the randomness described by Ecclesiastes, whereby “all share common destiny—the righteous
and the wicked” alike. “All go to the same place: all come from dust and to dust all return.” There must be some reward and
punishment—somewhere, sometime. If life is random, why do we need God?

God’s first attempt to answer that question fails. He cannot continue to threaten the kind of immediate and visible punishment
of the type specified in the Adam story and then not carry it out. People will notice that Adam lived a long life. So God
began to issue threats against individual sinners without specific time frames: Your wives will be widows (though not necessarily
today). You will get boils and plagues (at some point in your life). But even such postponed punishments didn’t always happen.
Not only did great sinners die of old age, they outlived their wives, without ever having experienced boils. So God had to
take His system of punishments and rewards to the next level.

In God’s second attempt to assure ultimate justice, He postpones the consequences of current actions
beyond the life span
of any particular generation, but still in
this
world. God threatens, in the Ten Commandments, to punish “the iniquity of fathers on
children
, to the
third
and
fourth
generation,” and He promises to show “mercy unto the thousandth generation of them that love Me and keep My commandments.”
God postpones punishment and reward until after the death of the sinner and saint repeatedly throughout the early books of
the Bible,
¹⁴
thus making consequences invisible
within a given generation
. He has learned that by threatening
immediate, specific
, and
visible
punishments—such as He did to Adam—He risks a loss of credibility when these consequences do not materialize. By postponing
the consequences beyond the life span of one generation, He maintains the deterrent credibility of His threats.

The Bible and the midrash struggle mightily to demonstrate that God’s threats and promises are in fact carried out in future
generations. Particularly in the stories of Jacob and his children, the Book of Genesis provides numerous examples of people
who reap what they sow. The midrash elaborates on this theme with its moralistic stories of descendants who receive payback
for the vices and virtues of their ancestors. Remember Cain, whose evil “overtook him in the seventh generation,” when a descendant
accidentally shot him with an arrow.

This generational invisibility can survive only in a world without recorded history (or with the sort of recorded moralistic
folktales concocted by the midrashic storytellers). In a world of accurately transmitted accounts, it will soon be seen that
dreadful things do not necessarily befall the descendants of sinners, nor do blessings attend the offspring of saints. Indeed,
after the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust, it was obvious that God could not keep His promise and reward the
descendants of saints, for the simple reason that in many instances no descendants were left alive. Entire families, entire
villages, entire communities, were wiped out—their seed forever crushed—by unrighteous people who went on to become builders
of cities and respected leaders. Many Nazi murderers lived untroubled and guilt-free lives of wealth, health, and reward.
Their children and grandchildren honor their memories. The victims of genocide and other human horrors crave ultimate justice,
insisting that somehow, somewhere, sometime, the righteous must be rewarded and the unrighteous punished. This deep yearning
for retribution helps to explain why even sixty years after the Holocaust, children and grandchildren of victims persist in
their lawsuits against corporations that profited from slave labor. I understand the anger of victims when I occasionally
help to free a probably guilty killer, who then goes on to live what appears to be a good life. I have felt that anger myself
and continue to feel it when I see a Nazi collaborator like John Demjanjuk living a long and healthy life surrounded by loving
family.