Who runs things here? Nature and natural evil

The midrash and the angel

So far we have spoken of human deeds. Now a further step, a harder one: what about nature? Here the traditional view is much better grounded. There is a well-known midrash about an angel that stands over every blade of grass and says to it “grow.” And there are many verses, and the Sages, and Nachmanides. But the midrash can be understood as a literary description of the laws of nature in the language of angels. And in general, statements that God “runs” everything too can be understood this way: he created the laws of nature and gave them the power to bring about what happens.

And the logical problem is the same problem. A law of nature is a sufficient condition: it is enough for dry wood to be in fire for it to burn, even without God deciding so. And if God’s will is also a sufficient condition for everything that happens, we have two complete causes for the same event, and that is impossible. Nachmanides, when explaining why a stone falls, attributed it to the force of gravity “by the will of God.” But if gravity is enough, what did the will add? And if the will is the cause, gravity is superfluous.

“But the laws of nature are his will”

Some reply: true, the laws of nature are rigid, but they themselves are an expression of God’s will. He wants exactly what the laws determine to happen in every situation. Fine, but then one must understand what this means. It means that the laws do not take into account who stands before them. Fire burns the righteous too. “God’s will” here is not a decision about each case on its own, but a general decision that the world should run according to laws. And that is exactly the claim here.

One can put it as a thought experiment. Does righteousness affect recovery from illness? That is a claim that can be tested statistically, like any medical claim: take a group of righteous people and a group of ordinary people and compare. One may wonder at the very idea of measuring “fear of Heaven,” but the claim “righteousness heals” is a claim about reality, and if it cannot be measured, that is a sign it has no empirical content. And in practice, there is no evidence that it is true.

And in fact, here is what we actually see: almost everyone lives by the picture described here. Whoever is sick goes to the doctor, and whoever needs a livelihood goes to work. And then they say that “everything is from God,” and invent the concept of “hishtadlut”: that one must “make the effort,” but the result comes from above. The concept of hishtadlut, it seems, was invented to preserve the belief that “everything is from above” without slackening our natural actions. It has no source, and no logic. And whoever lives this way lives in a contradiction. By the way, Calvin and Luther, the founders of Protestantism, went all the way with “everything is from above,” to predestination that determines in advance who will be saved, and from there reached very strange conclusions.

“The Lord has forsaken the land”?

This expression appears in the Sages as a description of heretics, and the Sages rejected it. But what is meant there is denial of passive providence: that God does not know what is happening, does not care, that there is no reward and punishment. That is not what is claimed here. The claim here is that after God created the world and its laws, “the reins are no longer in his hands” as regards the ordinary course of things. He knows, he will see, he will judge, but he does not operate every event.

It is true that this has a cost with respect to the sources. Nachmanides wrote that whoever keeps the commandments merits abundance and health, and so the righteous did not need doctors. But the Gemara (Kiddushin 39b) says something else: “There is no reward for a commandment in this world.” And in any case, the question of whether God intervenes in nature is a question of fact, and on facts, as we saw, there is no authority. The decision here is according to logic and reality, not according to who said it.

The righteous who suffers

And now the ancient question: how can it be that there are righteous people who suffer, and wicked people who prosper? According to the picture here, this is no longer a question. The laws of nature do not distinguish between righteous and wicked, and human deeds are given over to human choice. The question was hard only for someone who assumed that God decides every detail. Rishonim like Maimonides already hinted that individual providence over nature is not what is commonly thought, and in the note to this part we will return to it.

Natural evil as a logical constraint

But then why did God create a world with earthquakes and diseases? Here the answer is not “it is a punishment” and not “we do not understand.” The answer is that God wanted a world that runs according to fixed laws. We have already seen that this is exactly what testifies to him. But fixed laws are also a price. Without fixed laws one cannot understand the world, study it, heal, plan. And if nature changed according to who happens to be nearby, we would live in a “Kafkaesque” world: you jump out of the window and fly upward, because a righteous man is standing below. And in such a world there is no choice either, because one cannot know what the results of our actions will be, and without knowing the results there is no meaning to choice.

In other words, God, when he came to create, stood in an impossible situation: on the one hand he wants a world with laws and with creatures who choose, and on the other hand fixed laws sometimes harm the righteous. There is no perfect system of laws that is both fixed and takes every case into account. In this sense his hands are “tied”: not because of weakness, but because of logic and because of what he himself wanted. Natural evil is not arbitrariness and not punishment. It is a necessary consequence of the decision to create such a world.

And what about lotteries?

This has a small and interesting consequence. In the Bible, a lot is seen as a decision of God: that is how the land was divided, that is how Jonah was singled out on the ship. Today, whoever casts lots to decide a dispute that cannot be decided any other way does something fair and useful. But there is no reason to think the result is “the will of Heaven.” It is simply a fair method, and whoever sees in it a divine revelation assumes a conception we have already rejected.

And what about the verses?

“And if you surely listen… I will give the rain of your land in its season.” We say this every day in the Shema. The Torah promises reward and recompense in this world for our deeds. How does this fit? Two things must be said here. First, even in the picture described here there may be interventions by God, rare ones, at certain points and for certain people. What was said concerns the ordinary course of things. And second, it may be that in the biblical period divine involvement was greater, and it gradually diminished. More on this later. But in any case, the question of proportion matters: in the ordinary course of things it is not reasonable to count on intervention, at most in exceptional situations and for special people. And the service of God looks completely different in this picture.