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“Theodicy” is reconciling why good things happen to bad people, and vice versa, and how come it’s not just a simple one-to-one relationship that good people have good things happen to them and bad things happen to bad people. So, how do we reconcile that the wicked are prospering and there are awful things that happen to good people? So, that’s theodicy.
For me, you know, there might be times of bad events, and theodicy creeps into the discussion. But for me, it’s always been God is there.
The approach that works for me is the image that Rav Soloveitchik created of a tapestry, that with this tapestry, on the backside you can see the threads coming through. It looks ugly. What is it? You flip it over, and on the other side it’s gorgeous. It looks perfect. And I think for us, if we were to see it through God’s eyes he would see the clean tapestry. It would look gorgeous. But we see the other side where it looks ugly. There are threads all about. The colors just are mismatched. For me, I see it as we don’t necessarily see the full picture. And we see some of the bad things but we don’t see how that can actually in another way turn into a quite good thing.