Q&A: Religion as Moral Confusion
Religion as Moral Confusion
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I recently heard the following claim against God:
If we were to hear a story in which a man comes to the home of a righteous religious family at night, threatens them with a gun, ties them up, tortures them all night, and finally kills them and then burns down the entire house with the people inside it — and afterward the police catch him and ask him why he did it, and he answers: Satan persuaded me to do it — we would presumably say that this man is utterly wicked.
And yet, in the Book of Job, there is a righteous man who did only good, and then the Holy One, blessed be He, kills all his children and causes him diseases and other terrible things. And when one investigates why He did what He did, one finds that He did it because Satan persuaded Him. But here people will say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not a wicked being.
Does religion not cause moral confusion?
Answer
It isn’t religion; it’s a certain interpretation of the Book of Job. I have already written more than once that you can’t learn anything from the books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), because they are open to many interpretations. Especially since there is a view that Job never existed and was never created, so this is a story meant to teach us something and not actual events.
Discussion on Answer
It’s a two-level argument: (a) nothing can be learned from it; (b) even if something can, it’s not a fact but some kind of message.
Honorable Rabbi, isn’t there a contradiction here? On the one hand you say that nothing can be learned from the books, and on the other hand you say that the story comes to teach us something.