Problem of evil

Problem of evil is the central theological and ethical dilemma through which Chaim Lerner interprets the Holocaust: an omnipotent and benevolent God should have both the power and the desire to prevent innocent suffering, yet evil exists and children die. Lerner refuses explanations that dissolve the reality of evil into mystery, sin, or divine purpose. His argument therefore reaches beyond abstract theology. It becomes a demand that Jewish thought confront what the Holocaust, war, and the abuse of political power do to every inherited account of God.

Definition and Theological Structure

Problem of evil enters the novel through Lerner’s attempt to reduce a vast philosophical conflict to three mutually incompatible claims. God is omnipotent, meaning all-powerful; God is benevolent, meaning wholly good; and evil exists, especially in the form of innocent suffering. If the first two claims are retained, God possesses both the ability and the motivation to stop evil. The existence of evil therefore challenges the coherence of the traditional picture of God rather than presenting merely an emotional difficulty.

Lerner grounds the problem in the Holocaust. He asks why the Nazis slaughtered and burned more than one million Jewish children and why babies were thrown against electrified barbed wire. The questions are deliberately concrete: the issue is not suffering in the abstract but the murder of children whose deaths cannot plausibly be treated as deserved punishment. Holocaust suffering becomes the point at which theological vocabulary is forced to answer for history.

His reasoning allows several possible escapes, but he treats each as morally or conceptually costly. God may not be omnipotent and may want to prevent evil without being able to do so; this produces a limited, weakened deity. Alternatively, believers may deny that evil truly exists by claiming that everything happens for a reason, that suffering results from hidden sin, or that all apparent injustice will be balanced in another world. Lerner identifies these positions as ways of protecting logic by negating one of the original statements. His own insistence is uncompromising: evil exists, and no explanation should erase that fact.

Chaim Lerner’s Holocaust Theology

Lerner’s teaching links Problem of evil to the responsibilities of the Holocaust writer. Bella Shmozic calls him “the six million and first victim” and “the eighth Holocaust writer,” placing him in a lineage of writers who died by suicide after bearing witness to the camps. Her interpretation of Lerner’s final short story—a blind man suddenly granted sight, overwhelmed by the amount of reality he must process, and eventually killed by a tumor—turns sight into a figure for Holocaust testimony. The writer sees without mediation and must transform unbearable chaos into narrative; Lerner’s forty years of continued seeing may therefore be understood as both vocation and burden.

This interpretation does not replace the theological argument with psychology, but it shows why the argument remains personally dangerous. Lerner’s problem is not simply whether God can be defended. It is whether any mind can continue to mediate the Holocaust through stories, doctrines, and moral explanations without deforming what happened. The conflict between experience and explanation is repeated in his image of children dying and in his refusal to let “mystery” function as a moral conclusion.

Lerner’s theology also opposes the claim that the Jews suffered because they sinned. In his attack on Orthodox interpretations, he mocks the idea that God used the Germans to punish Jews for the creation of Reform Judaism, asking whether a God would burn babies alive because German rabbis practiced Judaism differently. He likewise rejects the broader answer that an unknown sin deserved punishment even when no one can identify it. For him, such explanations impose a moral vacuum on God: they preserve divine omnipotence by making divine goodness indistinguishable from cruelty.

From Theology to Political Power

The novel makes Problem of evil political by connecting Lerner’s view of God to his criticism of Israeli power. According to Meir Alon, Lerner concluded that Jews must possess less power and should withdraw from Lebanon, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shechem wherever military control places them in power over enemies. Alon regards this as an obscene heresy because it transforms Holocaust survival into an argument for relinquishing the means of self-defense. Lerner, however, reads the Holocaust as a warning that victims can become agents of domination and that military strength does not automatically confer moral innocence.

This dispute shows that the theological contradiction has consequences for the state. Alon interprets national power as the condition that prevents Jews from again becoming helpless before genocidal enemies. Lerner interprets power as an ethical danger when it enables the strong to treat vulnerable people as expendable. The disagreement is not only about whether God is powerful; it is also about what human beings do when they acquire power in the aftermath of catastrophe.

Yoav Lerner’s account of the Lebanon War gives this political theology its most painful human form. During an attack, Yoav heard an order to return fire and shot two targets he believed were Hezbollah fighters. He hit both with two continuous rounds, despite being known as an exceptionally poor shooter. The targets were actually two ten-year-old Lebanese boys. The army later cleared Yoav of responsibility, but the legal decision could not undo the dead children or the moral injury that followed.

Chaim’s recurring nightmare transformed this event into a Holocaust analogy: in the dream, he became a Nazi colonel in the Israeli army hunting Arab children instead of Jews. Yoav describes the nightmare as escaping into reality, with the generational roles displaced so that the son became the child-killing Nazi in the father’s imagination. Chaim’s theology thus turns the Holocaust into a judgment on the use of force, while Yoav experiences that judgment as inherited guilt. His claim that Chaim killed himself because of him shows how Problem of evil migrates from the question of God’s responsibility into the question of what a survivor can bear when his own people inflict suffering.

Competing Explanations and Human Consequences

Different characters translate the same death into different theological systems. Rabbi Kaplowitz interprets Chaim’s fall through providence: “God gives and God takes. God took him.” He argues that Chaim dared God by calling the Holy One less than all-powerful, and that God demonstrated divine power through a tragedy. This explanation preserves omnipotence by making Chaim’s death an act of divine response, but it also turns an unexplained death into evidence for the doctrine it appears to threaten.

Meir Alon offers a secular-nationalist counterpart to that defense. He condemns Chaim for believing that he owned the Holocaust and for treating his own survival as moral authority. Alon’s objection is directed at the implications of Lerner’s theology: if Jewish power risks reproducing Nazi violence, then the nation must surrender power even when its enemies pledge destruction. Alon agrees with the political conclusion that Israel can become an aggressor, but he rejects the demand that Holocaust memory be used to delegitimize military strength. The disagreement exposes how the same historical trauma can authorize opposing moral imperatives.

The problem also appears in the language used to judge suicide. Kamal calls suicide cowardly, cruel to the family, selfish, and wrong. Yet the surrounding narrative distinguishes a person’s suicide from an attempted bombing intended to kill others. That distinction matters because moral labels can flatten different acts into one category. The novel’s wider treatment of Chaim’s death likewise resists a single explanation: it may be suicide, divine punishment, Holocaust trauma, or the consequence of an undisclosed human struggle.

The Problem as Narrative Method

Problem of evil governs not only what Lerner teaches but also how the novel distributes truth. Characters repeatedly offer confident explanations that conflict with one another. Yoav insists journalists invent philosophical theories instead of reporting facts, yet his own account connects a military incident, his father’s nightmares, and Chaim’s suicide through a highly interpretive causal chain. Alon presents a rehearsed denunciation of Lerner, while Rabbi Kaplowitz supplies a providential interpretation. Zehava finally reveals that Chaim’s fall followed an assault and that she pushed him away in self-defense, complicating every earlier theory of divine causation and survivor guilt.

Zehava’s account is especially important because it restores human agency to an event that others have mythologized. Chaim raised his hand to strike her; she caught and twisted it, pushed him toward the balcony railing, and his injured knee and hip contributed to his loss of balance. His fall was not simply the fulfillment of a theological dare or the inevitable eruption of Holocaust trauma. It was also the consequence of domestic violence and an immediate act of self-defense, followed by Zehava’s decision to conceal what happened while pursuing peace negotiations.

The novel therefore refuses to solve Problem of evil by replacing God with a new absolute explanation. Its recurring reversals expose the danger of turning suffering into a neat lesson. Holocaust theology, military ethics, suicide, domestic violence, and peace politics remain connected, but none can be reduced to a single cause. The enduring force of the concept lies in that refusal: evil must be named without being justified, and explanations must remain accountable to the bodies, choices, and historical consequences they claim to explain.