R. Richard Hirsh 2018 Rabbinic Responses to the Problem of Evil

Despite the title of the more recent When Bad Things Happen to Good People (by Rabbi Harold Kushner), the rabbis of the Talmud were asking this same question and formulating a variety of responses over two thousand years ago. In this course we will look at the wide range of options rabbinic Judaism offered to this perennial problem -- everything from "there is no God" to "everything gets set right in the world to come," and a lot of other choices in-between. In addition to looking at classical texts we will discuss which approaches (if any) might be adapted for the 21st century.