Is God Perfect or Flawed?

Question

Is God perfect and, therefore, capable of being understood by human beings or is God flawed and, therefore, beyond human understanding?

I believe God is flawed as a perfect God would not have permitted the Holocaust, the industrial fabrication of Death.

Where was he?

And a perfect God would not have allowed Hamas to kill 1,400 Jews on 7 October.

So God is flawed and beyond human understanding.

Is a flawed God worth praying to?

0

Answers

  1. The Just Ask! - AskTheRabbi.org Team

    God is not flawed. Human beings are. God being perfect makes it impossible for flawed humans to understand Him and His Ways.

    I am not sure how anyone can possibly imagine that the Holocaust came into being because of any other reason than the Jewish Nation not collectively fulfilling the Will of God. That concept is entrenched in the Torah itself and throughout the writings of the Sages. What is true is that it is impossible for anyone to try and pinpoint any particular problem or sect within the Jewish People as being responsible for what happened. It was a collective punishment for the entirety of the Jewish People as is clearly spelled out in the Torah where God explicitly delineates what will happen to us if we do not follow His Torah and keep His commandments. In all events, the actions of the Nazis and their various disciples such as Hamas chose to behave in the bestial and inhuman way possible. If so, it would seem to me that the question which should therefore be asked, is not “Where was God during the Holocaust?” but “Where was man?”

    Although it is a subject that we are incapable of truly understanding, there are a couple of extremely thought-provoking books that help to try and give over in a limited way the Rabbis’ approach to the Holocaust.
    With God in Hell by Eliezer Berkowitz
    Path Through the Ashes published by ArtScroll

    Best wishes from the AskTheRabbi.org Team