God is Good?
Question
I’ve been studying a fair amount recently, and one thing I am still have trouble wrapping my head around is the concept that “God is good.”
From all the arguments I’ve heard on that, I seem to be able to make the same arguments in reverse. Maybe God is just pure evil.
Just as it’s possible that an infinite God created us to give us an opportunity for goodness, it seems just as likely that an infinite God could have created us to bestow evil. In terms of the Torah saying that God is good, He could have had that written just to provide the farce which inevitably will lead to a greater evil.
How we can definitively know that God is good?
Answers
Because Judaism believes that God gave us life and created the world that we live in and continues to support us every moment of our existence.
However, what is often lost sight of on the way is that God is God, and that His definition of what is moral is unchanging. Human morals are fickle and change from society to society and, very often, from one generation to another within the same society. What is also true is that someone who does not believe in God feels no necessity to live his life according to what God defines as good, which, in turn, means that in the Western World the definition of moral behavior is always being tested and pushed to the limits.
Best wishes from the AskTheRabbi.org Team