Finally, the good stuff. Rambam in this chapter discusses his beliefs about what causes evil, and gives three root causes of the evils that happen to people, and (drum roll, please) none of them can be directly attributed to God, nor does their existence raise the question of why they happen, as we will see. Theodicy, the question of how God lets bad things happen to good people, is a mirage in Rambam’s view. A personal point: Rambam’s goal is to show that the world God created does not inherently have evil in it, which absolves God of responsibility/blame for the evils that do occur. This question is a particularly touchy one, and so I will allow myself to point out what I see as insufficiencies in Rambam’s explanations.

THE ERROR OF SELF-CENTEREDNESS

Before Rambam actually discusses the 3 causes, he points out that many thinkers, including philosophers (in particular, he picks on an Arab philosopher named al-Razi), claim that the evil found in this world outweighs the good. Rambam notes that their error stems from placing themselves in the center of existence, such that whatever happens to an individual is an act of the universe against them. Such a perspective can lead people to view a part of nature as an evil directed at them, for example a person who eats a bad food and gets leprosy, or has intercourse too often and goes blind (I note the examples because they show us medieval medicine in practice). More modern examples might be a person who smokes and gets lung cancer or engages in risky sexual intercourse and contracts AIDS. It is only our self-centeredness that would lead us to view these as attacks against us (I will leave my comments for where Rambam gives his view of the root causes of bad things).

Indeed, Rambam notes, Scripture stresses humanity’s insignificance in the larger picture of the universe, which is meant to also relieve us of our delusions of grandeur around this question. A piece of Rambam we have been studying in the RJC between Minha and Maariv on weekdays, is relevant here. Rambam there says that the character trait of arrogance is an exception to the usual median rule, in that we are prohibited from being at all arrogant, at all aware of our value. One who is arrogant, Rambam says, is as if he has denied the Creator.

I believe that is related to this; part of a proper perspective of ourselves includes (in Rambam’s view) the recognition that we are not the center of the universe. Part of that realization, in turn, is to recognize God’s benevolence in having created us at all. The goodness of creation already tips the scales away from viewing the world as full of evil.

AREN’T WE THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE?

Perhaps we can stop here for some commentary of my own. The thrust of this passage is to move people away from the notion that the world is created for us, since that leads to the idea that things that go wrong in our terms are actually directed at us. To make this point, Rambam says that we need to recognize our insignificance in terms of Creation as a whole. With all due respect for Rambam, and (I hope) appropriate humility about my personal value to Creation, it’s not clear to me that the Torah gives an impression of insignificance regarding humanity. Certainly other Jewish thinkers saw human beings as the goal of Creation, as did various Midrashim. In particular, I would mention the Midrash that the angels challenged God as to why He was giving the Torah to human beings, since they would simply violate it; God passed the question on to Moshe, who pointed out that the angels have neither free will nor desire. The Midrash implies that the goal of the Torah (which is central to the world) is that it be fulfilled by creatures with free will and an inclination to disobedience—it is in uplifting ourselves that we fulfill our purpose in the world, and that of the world as a whole. If so, however, we are (at least as a species) important to the world, and would have some legitimate right to view events as focusing on ourselves.

EVIL AS A NECESSARY FEATURE OF A PHYSICAL WORLD

Rambam now moves on to specific discussion of the causes of evil. First, there are the evils that befall us by virtue of our being physical. The physical of necessity decays, Rambam points out, and when it does so, we should not blame God for that happening. It is impossible to both endow us with physical existence (an undeniably great good) and yet not have that include degeneration of our bodies, and eventually death.

Rambam does not go into full detail as to how far he would carry this, but his notion at least explains why we shouldn’t complain about aging, for example. While some people age better than others, part of our humanity is that, as we get older, our bodies age—slow down, are unable to perform the way they could in our youth. There is no point in viewing this as an act of God directed at us, since it is just a necessary part of a physical existence.

This notion, however, seems only to apply to those aspects of aging that are directly tied to our physical being, such that people who experience those signs of illness or aging would not see it as an attack on them. In cases of nonnatural aging, however, it seems difficult to claim that it is just a function of the body’s decay—why do some people get Parkinson’s disease and not others? Or Alzheimer’s? In those cases, where a minority of the population is affected by some illness, and no obvious connecting factor has been identified, the choice is either to say it’s random (some percentage of bodies break down in a certain way, and it’s random as to which do so) or that it comes from God.

Rambam seems to be leaning towards the randomness explanation, which strikes me as not matching the general attitude of the religion—we don’t generally view the world as random. On the other hand, he does point out that we should not err on the other side, ascribing completely ordinary aspects of nature to the Creator, except insofar as this sort of Creation was His idea.

PEOPLE-PERPETRATED EVIL

The second type of evil Rambam recognizes consists of wrongs perpetrated by people against each other— crime. Here, obviously, God is not to be blamed for people’s actions. Rambam adds—correctly, but I’m not sure if we always pay attention—that in all societies, the good people do for each other vastly outweighs the evil. In times of war, however, the level of evils rises dramatically.

I would note that even in times of war, from a certain perspective, the good still outweighs the evil. Even in WWII, with the great misery it brought for vast amounts of people, in each society, the majority of people were still largely ok. So from that perspective, Rambam is correct.

Even here, though, Rambam’s assertion raises questions—given that people create evil against each other, does that simply disconnect God from the process? Wouldn’t there be a point where we would expect/hope that God would suspend the freewill of the evildoers (as, indeed, Rambam believes He did in the case of Pharoah)? And if God chooses not to, doesn’t that lend Him some sort of hand in the evil then perpetrated—hadn’t Rambam previously said that allowing something to happen can sometimes be equivalent to causing it? And if God has chosen not to interfere in the runnings of the world, isn’t that a decision we can wonder about as well?

I raise these issues to point out that Rambam’s answers are incomplete—I don’t know that he meant them to be complete, or if he had some other purpose here. Possibly, Rambam thought some answer on these issues was better than leaving them in the hands of people like al-Razi (who see the world as generally evil) and he thought that he could leave the nuances for another time, or for further study.

EVIL WE CAUSE TO OURSELVES

The third source of evil is humans themselves. Mostly as a result of our various desires—jealousy, lust (for any physical pleasures), or honor [Rambam does not mention those 3 here, but he does in Hilkhot Deot]--- people act in a way that causes harm to themselves and others. To others, obviously, they may steal or hurt others in their pursuit of their own physical wants. But how does this striving hurt themselves?

Rambam claims that in seeking gratification of our physical needs, we not only damage our physical side (by overindulgence), but also our nonphysical/ intellectual side in two ways. First, since it is housed in our human body, our souls are affected by everything that happens to our body. A body that is out of balance—overly interested in food, intercourse, or other physical pleasures—will tip the soul out of balance as well. [Not that it’s relevant now, but this is an important perspective to remember if we ever consider the mind/body problem, the question of whether we have a mind separate from our body or whether it is all one unit. Rambam here agrees that we have a soul, but believes it is intimately affected by what happens to the body]. Second, in indulging ourselves in physical pleasures, we train our souls to indulge its desires, and those desires feed other desires, trapping us in an endless loop of desire.

Aside from the damage these desires cause us personally—which we are not always attuned to in the context of good and evil—our attempts to gratify those desires lead us to dangerous situations, such as risky sea voyages and so on; when something happens in those circumstances, we blame God, when it was really our overextending ourselves for unimportant reasons that led us to that situation.

To support this point, Rambam notes that our actual physical needs—bread, water, air, for example--- are generally in great supply and inexpensive. What is expensive are luxury items, which, after all, are not necessary for our existence. It is only in searching for those luxuries—which do nothing to improve our souls—that we get into situations where evil can befall us.

DOES RAMBAM’S VIEW OF THE ECONOMY MAKE SENSE?

Rambam’s economic point is interesting—that staples of life are much cheaper than luxury items, because God created a world that would easily support us at a minimal level. It is not clear to me if the conclusion he draws—that we seek to expand beyond the minimal only to satisfy our desires—is the only way to view human progress. Clearly Rambam thinks expensive clothing are an unnecessary luxury; what about computers? The wheel? Does Rambam believe that a sea voyage to advance technology in a way that furthers human understanding of the world would not have accidents happen to it? I would also mention that Rambam lost a brother at sea when he, Rambam, was in his late 30’s. I don’t want to psychologize too much, but it strikes me as possible that that experience soured Rambam on the need for humans to stretch their horizons. Certainly we can live on bread and water fairly easily, but much of human discovery of the world (a value in Rambam’s mind) has been fueled by the desire to ease our burdens, to create greater leisure than the hard labor required to produce our bare survival.

To summarize: Rambam believes our having been created was itself a great boon from God, since in the context of the universe we are fairly unimportant. Evils that happen to people, then, need to be placed in the greater context of the universe, rather than seen from our solipsistic perspective. In addition, though, all those evils stem from the nature of the universe, or from people. The physical world inherently leads to the degeneration of its elements, including people. At least some illnesses and death, then, are simply part of being physical, and should not be seen as an evil, but as a necessary part of the much greater good. In addition, many evils are caused by people towards each other (and even then, such acts are the small minority of any society), while others result from our own attempts to gain greater physical pleasure, an attempt that damages our souls and leads us to risky situations and possible tragedy.