It’s probably the oldest question in the history of human thought. It’s surely the most disturbing, the most frequently asked and the least satisfactorily answered: Why, oh why, do bad things happen to good people?
Everyone asks the question: philosophers, theologians, butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers. No one really answers it. The Bible devotes the 41 chapters of the Book of Job to the subject, offering several interesting explanations only to refute them all, the conclusion being that finite man cannot fathom the ways of G‑d.
For most, the protest against evil is something that rises out of one’s own encounters with the rough spots of life. To a true leader who feels the pain of his people as his own, it is a bottomless cry issuing from the seemingly bottomless well of human suffering.
It didn’t take long for Moses to issue that cry. Shortly after G‑d appeared to him in a burning bush to appoint him liberator of Israel, Moses was back.
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Published with permission from Chabad.org.
