Human beings throughout history have committed acts of unspeakable evil. In addition, natural disasters have killed untold millions; babies and children have suffered terrible illness and deformity. Tectonic plates shift; people act sadistically; cells mutate; oceans overflow. And for the religious believer, there is an added component of agonizing perplexity, as the modern French existentialist Albert Camus recognized: “the only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal God who has created and is therefore responsible for everything.”

I am by no means suggesting that atheists would not be deeply troubled by suffering. But their anguish does not extend to the cosmic level of wondering why God would create a world which is then seemingly abandoned to fate. Oddly, the inclusion of God in such discussions induces hope in some and despair for others. The “hopefulness” is that somehow God’s awareness of evil perhaps removes the feeling of randomness that accompanies horrifying events; though it would not seem so in the aftermath, perhaps there is an underlying order to the craziness. Otherwise, the believer confronts not just tragedy, but meaninglessness, as the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes:

“As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable – something, as we say, sufferable…the dumb senselessness of inexorable pain, and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man’s life in the world, has no genuine order at all…no moral coherence.”

But the drive to forge meaning out of chaos can often lead to strange rewritings of the implications of events, even reversing what seems to be their obvious import, in the search for lucidity. Especially in religious contexts, this frequently leads to a dismissal of the obvious—the world is often cruel, unfair and incomprehensible—and a denigration of our own interpretive abilities, as the British thinker Isaiah Berlin points out: “For the teleological thinker all apparent disorder, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations or random events are due not to the nature of things but to our failure to discover their purpose. Everything that seems useless, discordant, mean, ugly, vicious, distorted, is needed, if we but knew it, for the harmony of the whole which only the Creator of the world…can know.”

At its worst, the impulse to explain can heap insult upon injury, blaming victims for their own misfortunes, their ill fate brought about by their sins. This notion of retribution proposes that suffering comes to Jews at any point in history, as a deserved punishment for their iniquities. Given the choice, on the on hand, between denying God’s goodness or control over the world, or on the other hand asserting that God remains absolutely good so that if, for example, six million died, it must have been punishment for their wrongdoing, advocates for this argument choose the second option, preferring to maintain God’s reputation at all costs.

The strategy at its heart is fairly transparent. If God’s goodness cannot be reenforced, then the fate of traditional Judaism is precarious. It is assumed that the blow to faith caused by uncertainty about why God allows evil will eventually lead to the downfall of religious commitment. Most people find such perspectives simplistic and even obscene. But retribution theory is not without great precedent in Jewish moral teachings, foremost among them in the Torah itself. Witness the well-known divine rebukes, near the end of the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, as well as passages in the Talmud that attribute the First Temple’s destruction to an outbreak of murder, idolatry and sexual immorality among the Jews, and the loss of the Second Temple due to “groundless hatred.” After being soundly beaten by two empires (Babylonia and Rome), with ensuing images of death, exile, and degradation, this particular rabbinic response is thus remarkably self-critical. Were it not for our sins, the Temple would still be standing.

It is instructive to review this rabbinic mode of self-criticism in light of certain modern psychoanalytic formulations. An essential hallmark of emotional maturity is the ability to tolerate ambivalence. The tendency to forge rigid, inflexible categories that place everything into “right or wrong, black or white choices,” is characteristic of a much earlier developmental stage in childhood. Because we cannot stand the unresolved – the tension of competing realities or truths, the `mixed’ picture – we’d prefer to force certainty, however illusory or damaging.

Ronald Fairbairn was a very influential psychoanalyst who was born, lived and worked in Scotland, publishing his central works from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. In one paper, Dr. Fairbairn writes the following: “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God, than a saint in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad; but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good.”

Fairbairn expresses the emotional reality of children who must navigate–consciously and unconsciously–harsh, neglecting, or simply unpredictable treatment by the authority figures in their world. That child, in his or her childish, `black and white’ conception of things, must `choose’, so to speak, who is to be thought the `bad’ one. Is the real `sinner’ himself, or the parental `world around’? And he chooses himself.

Fairbairn himself called this “the moral defence”, which emerges from the fact that if children are neglected by their parents through abuse or sheer indifference, they cannot simply replace their parents but are forced to find a way to cope with this behavior. As Fairbairn puts it, “If a child’s parents are bad objects, he cannot reject them…for he cannot do without them.” The child is caught in a life altering dilemma. To “recognize” and affirm the `badness’ of her parents, she is now alone in the world without a secure parental base that nourishes and protects. Thus, Fairbairn suggests, in order to feel secure, the child has to imagine or believe that his parents are `good.’

The only way out, then, is to blame himself for his parents’ actions, which allows the child to feel firstly a modicum of security, even if it is illusory, that the ones who are `running things’, who have `power’ over him, mean well and know what they are doing. Otherwise, the world feels very frightening, unstable and insecure. And secondly – it allows the child the illusion of personal control: “If I decide that I am `bad’, then I can have the hope that – if I act better – then things will go better for me. I can, therefore have some control, over my parental `world around’.” The alternative is simply intolerable. To live in a dangerous and terrifying world ruled by the `Devil’– where there simply is no safety and no hope and no control–is an impossible scenario. If the `loving and concerned’ parent is a myth, then the trauma would be too overwhelming, the disappointment shattering for the child.

Although there cannot be an easy correlation between Fairbairn’s analysis to our discussion of human beings and God, I bring it here to observe a certain inclination in religious thought when presented with what feels like an inscrutable or unpredictable God, and the strategies then employed to cope. The covenant between God and the Jewish people is an agreement that is based on mutual promises and expectations. The covenant holds out the promise that if you “do good,” you will receive the good. If you carry out a righteous life in which you adhere to God’s commandments, then parts of the Bible promise rewards of longevity and prosperity. In the wake of the destruction of the Temples, the rabbis of the Talmud faced the possibility that the contract does not follow a predictable pattern, that behaviour might not be recompensed in the way they had expected.

That is the real trauma of the destruction, more than the loss of certain sacred buildings. And it raises fundamental questions. Has God, as it were, held up His end of the bargain? How do human beings reconcile their understanding of what is promised by God in this contract and the events that actually take place in history? How do we sustain this relationship or trust it, and maintain faith in the face of ambivalence?

The educator’s best friend are the words “I don’t know.” As we approach Tisha B’Av, a day set aside to commemorate tragic events in Jewish history, including the destruction of both Jerusalem Temples, we should keep in mind that bad explanations occur when the words “I don’t know” are suppressed, out of pride or ego or embarrassment, or out of a misguided belief that we can answer all questions, and instead a forced and often not credible response is substituted. We must learn that doubt is not the antithesis of faith, but its constant companion.