It is the question of questions for religious belief. Why does God permit a tragedy such as the Indian Ocean tsunami? Why does he allow the innocent to suffer and the guiltless to die?
It was just such a disaster -- the Lisbon tragedy of All Saints' Day, 1755, in which as many as 100,000 people died as a result of an earthquake followed by a tsunami and fire -- that led Voltaire to write "Candide," satirizing religious faith. The butt of his irony, Dr. Pangloss, is generally thought to be modeled on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher who held that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
What incensed Voltaire was that there were religious believers who thought that the quake represented God's anger at Lisbon's "sinful" ways. After all, didn't the Old Testament speak of divine anger? Were catastrophes not interpreted as punishment against sinful nations? Is there not justice in history? Yet, in the end, that interpretation was unsustainable. Why Lisbon and not other cities? Why were the young, the frail, the saintly among the casualties?
Even the most dogmatic found it hard to answer these questions. In any case, the suggestion is morally unacceptable. It blames the victims for their fate. After the Holocaust, such thoughts ought to be unthinkable.
Jews read the Bible differently. One of its striking features is that the most challenging questions about fate come not from unbelievers but from the heroes of faith.
Abraham asked: "Shall not the judge of all the Earth do justice?" Moses asked: "Why have you done evil to this people?" The book of Job is dedicated to this question, and it is not Job's comforters, who blamed his misfortunes on his sins, who were vindicated by heaven, but Job, who consistently challenged God. In Judaism, faith lies in the question, not the answer.
Earthquakes and tsunamis were known to the ancients. Job said: "The pillars of the heavens quake, aghast at his rebuke; by his power he churned up the sea." David used them as a metaphor for fear itself: "The waves of death swirled about me.... The Earth trembled and quaked, the foundations of the heavens shook.... The valleys of the sea were exposed, and the foundations of the Earth laid bare." In the midst of a storm at sea, Jonah prayed: "Your wrath lies heavily upon me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves." Yet God taught Elijah that he, God, was not in the earthquake or the whirlwind that destroys but in the still, small voice that heals.
