Q&A: God Is Good
God Is Good
Question
Hello Rabbi, is God good? Is there any proof of that? (Sources won’t help me.) And if there is no proof, why am I obligated to Him? The fact that He created me is not enough if there’s no proof that it was in order to benefit me, and the fact that He commanded me doesn’t mean I need to listen if I don’t know whether it’s really for my good.
If by any chance you have a column on this, or if you’ve written about it at length, I’d be happy if you could point me to it.
Answer
Do you want videos about Him? Character references? Or maybe a psychiatric report?
You are supposed to obey Him not because it is for your benefit, but because that is the truth and because He created you. Doing something because it is good for you is not obedience and not obligation, but just an action motivated by self-interest. Look here on the site for my article on philosophical gratitude.
Discussion on Answer
From the sources.
That I understood. What I meant to ask was: how did the sources serve as proof for them? After all, even if God were not good, the sources would still say that He is good. So why did they assume that He is good? To use an analogy, if a person says about himself that he speaks the truth, I have no reason to think he is truthful rather than a liar who is lying right now too.
That’s something you need to ask them. But if you suspect the whole world no matter what they tell you, I recommend that you stop communicating with the universe. There’s no point.
God is good because the definition of good is that which is desirable, and that which is desirable is that which is right.
See Maharal, Tiferet Yisrael, chapter 6: “But from the words of the Sages it appears that one should not say that the commandments which God, may He be blessed, gave were for the sake of the recipient—that is, man. Rather, they are decrees on the part of God, may He be blessed, who imposes decrees upon His people like a king who decrees upon his nation. Although the truth is that from this there follows—as a result of his fulfilling the decree that was imposed upon him—good and success beyond which there is no greater success, etc.”
Later on he adds that even “if one deeply wishes to say that the commandments of God, may He be blessed, are upon us for our good all our days [as the plain sense of the verse says: ‘And the Lord our God commanded us to do all these statutes, for our good always’], we can say this too, but in such a way that this too is bound up with decree, and not like someone who wants to benefit another person, where if he does not want to accept the decree then the recipient can exempt himself, along the lines of ‘Did You give it to us only so that we should receive reward? I do not want it, nor do I want its reward’” (Yoma 69b).
If your soul truly longs to find rest at the root of the question of good, and what good is (hint: it is not necessarily connected to pleasure), I recommend that you study that chapter carefully and the development of the discussion in the chapters that follow.
Thank you. I accept the possibility of philosophical gratitude. In any case, it is well known that the medieval authorities (Rishonim), and also later authorities (Acharonim), among them Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto and others like him, wrote that God is good. How was that so obvious to them?