Evil is Meta-Good.

The One, the many, and the shape of the ultimate story.

Hovhannes Aivazovsky, “The Ninth Wave” (1850).

I. The Ultimate.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the world. And the world was formless and void…”
— Genesis 1:1-2

One must imagine God spending an uncountable eternity basking in pure perfection.

Utter unity. Utter simplicity. Utter sufficiency. Not the smallest hint of lack, of suffering, of separation, of otherness.

One must then imagine God deciding, at some point in the “timeline” beyond time itself, that even the By-Definition-Enough is somehow just... not enough. Deciding to conjure a story about something Other — something more, because less, than what He is. Deciding to “break” His perfect Unity, or at least, to imagine what that might be like, were it possible, to break it.

Deciding that, by imagining imperfection, the Perfect One might make something interesting seem to happen.

II. The Proximate.

“And God said: Let there be light; and there was light.”
— Genesis 1:3

This is a meditation on the problem of evil, and I want to approach it with care. I want to implicate myself in it, but without claiming any kind of authority to speak on it. I am aware that thus far I have had (keneynehore), and I can only pray I will continue to have, a monumentally lucky life, as lives go. I feel afraid to write and publish this post, with my fears ranging from medieval-peasant-style superstitions to (more credible) worries of causing people pain who are going through terrible things.

But I’m going ahead, because I can’t help feeling that it’s valuable to speak the truth as best we see it. We have to try to think hard things through together. Because for all of us — no matter how good or how bad the hand is that life deals us — some kind or another of hard things will happen.

One of the odd things about suffering is how easily it can shrink and grow to fit the size of what happens in our lives. To be a little kid and have the ice cream scoop fall onto the ground; to lose (God forbid) someone you love — both of these things are near-universals of human experience. If you don’t ever live to experience those things, it’s probably because something much worse has happened. And they’re both real; they both count. About that much the Buddhists are right: Life entails suffering.

But some of us are forced to face a lot more of it than others. It’s only proper for me to acknowledge that some readers of this newsletter are situated much deeper right now within the concentric circles of suffering than I am — some in ways I know about, and others, doubtless, in ways I don’t. So if any of you feel I’m out of line in writing this, then all I can say is: I respect that. I’m speaking only for myself individually.

Since we’re grounding ourselves in the immediacy of hard things, now is as good a time as any to share a brief update on the rehab journey of my brother Eli, whom I have not mentioned in this newsletter since this post from November 2024, when he was still in a “minimally conscious state” following a traumatic brain injury while rock climbing. I hasten to add that the path of Eli’s recovery is not itself an example of the problem of evil — in fact, praise God, his recovery to date has been far better than some of the scenarios we initially feared might happen. The accident and entire ordeal, however, obviously comprise a Bad Thing that I fervently wish his wife, his sons, himself, and the rest of his family and friends could have been spared.

But here’s an update, and the news is good: Eli is in a rehab facility for the present. He is making excellent progress in all his therapies. He can wheel himself around in his wheelchair by himself and he’s working on walking. He speaks with fluency. He has some vision problems, delusions, and cognitive limitations at the moment, but his overall personality remains remarkably consistent with what it was before — sweet, calm, kind, playful, cheerful, upbeat. He knows who all his loved ones are and remembers plenty about his life before the accident. (Hard for me to assess his long-term memory, as a non-expert; long-term memory seems to me a fickle and uncertain thing for all of us.) He can beat us in card games. While a year ago he could barely lift one hand, now he can play catch with both. He still has a long path in front of him, but he has already made tremendous progress. Your continued prayers for the full recovery and healing of Eli Asher ben Yehudis are appreciated.

I also want to ask for your prayers for someone else I know, a dear friend (and reader of this newsletter) who is facing an extremely serious cancer diagnosis. I am not including his English name because he is a fairly private person, but I do ask everyone reading this: Please pray for Eliyahu Mordechai ben Yehudit.

Thank you for your prayers. And thank you for your patience. This post explores some implications of what I think may be the ultimate level of things, but I invoke these specifics because I don’t want to let my theoretical musings remain “sanitized” from the visceral pain of how all this can cash out in the lives that are — for us on this human level — as real as anything can be.

III. The One and the Many.

“And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.”
— Genesis 1:4

One must imagine God deciding, then, to create a World.

And what is a World? A thought in His mind, but it must begin with plurality, with distinction. This is Self, and this is Other — one and zero, near and far, safe and strange, something and its lack, or its foil.

Here is something called Light, as opposed to something called Dark. This is Matter, versus Void.

One might picture Him playing with these simple dichotomies, arranging them in an arena called spacetime, making rules for them, letting them dance, and finding that they are interesting. One might see Him creating new divisions, new complexities, each with more moving parts than the last. These are supernovas. These are black holes. This is dust; this is plasma. This is wet; this is dry.

Near-infinite numbers of stars and planets form, until on one little part of the vast whole, the chosen rules yield things that somehow move and copy themselves, on their own power. Here is Life, as opposed to non-life — and here is Death, Life ceasing to be.

He watches life grow and change for millions of years. He sees and feels everything from the inside, since all of it is nothing but His thoughts. Here is some life living by destroying other life — Animal, as distinct from Plant. Here is reproduction of the same through uniting difference — Male in contrasting tandem with Female. Here is Fish and Fowl. Here is predator and prey. He hears through every ear, feels through every pore. He lives, He gives birth, He dies, He hunts, and He is hunted.

And in living all these experiences of His creations, there arises in His mind (which is Everything) another pair that is not real in the atoms, but is nonetheless as real as everything else in His mind: Good and Evil.

God muses on this theme and watches the story of His thoughts unfold as one species gets ever more social, intelligent, and reflective. He sees hundreds of thousands of years pass in His story while this species begins to worship a welter of created things, until His own creativity surprises Him — in a very postmodern turn, His characters begin to discover their Author. They begin to question plurality, begin to suspect that Someone is watching, begin to feel shame at their wrongdoing as if literally naked. The character named Human calls the implicit bluff, eats the forbidden fruit, breaks the fourth wall, builds a tower toward the heavens, smashes the old idols... Until at last, God the Author thinks, Okay, fine, if that’s how it seems to be going, I will write myself into the story as a kind of character, too...

And this is Torah.¹

And so Good and Evil, within One Mind, become not only an obsession but a conversation.

IV. The Good and the Evil.

“And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
— Genesis 1:31

“Rabbi Shmuel bar Yitzḥak said: ‘Behold it was very good’ — this is the angel of life; ‘and behold it was very good’ — this is the angel of death.”
— Bereshit Rabbah 9:10

Do you like good things? Good; me too. Since we like good things, we should be glad that Goodness exists.

But Goodness cannot exist without Evil.

I am not merely saying, “Free will requires the ability to choose evil,” or “Goodness requires randomness, which will include evil.” Nor am I even saying, “We can’t recognize the good without comparing it to evil.” I am saying, Goodness doesn’t even exist as a coherent thing except as part of a pair alongside Evil. In a world without heat, “cold” is just mouth sounds — and vice-versa. It’s the same with light and dark, high and low, left and right. These things all exist, but they exist only relationally. They cannot exist in any way that matters without their opposites. Good and Evil are like that, too. No death, no life; no pain, no pleasure; no ugliness, no beauty; no grief, no love.

So, if we like Good things… Should we be “glad” that Evil exists? Obviously not. For Evil (and Good) to exist and be meaningful, Evil has to be that which we abhor. But… maybe we should be something like “meta-glad” that Evil exists?

A lesson from Douglas Hofstadter: You can always jump up a level. I have quoted Hofstadter’s gloss on Lewis Carroll on this concept previously, in my exploration of the limits of logic. You may have proof of something, but do you have a meta-proof (a proof that your proof really is a proof)? I raise this again because level-jumping works for other things, too — in this case, Goodness. What is Good, is good, and what is Evil, is evil, but if we want Goodness to exist, then, since Good and Evil only exist as a pair, one relative to the other, we must say that the existence of Evil is meta-good.

This often gets elided when people talk about the claim of Leibniz (or, let’s be honest, Dr. Pangloss) that ours is the best of all possible worlds. One Panglossian move is to say, “Hey, if Bad Thing X hadn’t happened, that might have begun a series of causations such that twenty more Bad Things would have happened instead.” But that misses the deeper and darker truth: The point of the “best” (or really meta-best) world can’t be minimizing the number of Bad Things. Because a theoretical world that was uniformly “good” — a world of complete perfection, in which nothing bad ever happens — would be a world where “goodness” wouldn’t really exist. “Good” would be a word that described everything, and therefore nothing. Creating such an all-good world can even be considered meta-evil, since it would functionally eliminate actual good.²

One tricky implication of my argument, for the pious, is that if you buy it, you can’t quite agree with the statement, “God is all good.” My argument bites that bullet; I think we have to give up “God is all good.” To justify that Biblically, I would point to Isaiah 45:7 — “I form light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil: I, HASHEM, do all these things.”³

But we can jump up a level and say that “God is meta-good.” He is the relevant equivalent of good that applies prior to and outside first-order goodness, the kind that creates the pair of Good and Evil, and with them the entire story that is the Universe, with all of its suffering, yearning, and drama, and with all of its relief, beauty, vivacity, pleasure, and meaning.

V. The Author.

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair…”
— William Shakespeare / The Three Witches, Macbeth I.1

We often consider evil “a problem” because we judge it to be morally wrong for God to inflict evil, or allow evil to befall people. But I think that’s just level-confusion — an inadmissible mixing of the ontological layers in our moral analysis.

Is Shakespeare morally culpable for the murders committed by Macbeth? I would say no. Unless you count the curse he unwittingly unleashed on theatres (which he could hardly have predicted), Shakespeare didn’t hurt a fly by writing that play; on the level of reality on which Shakespeare exists (ours), Macbeth’s victims don’t exist. They’re fictional.⁴ Now, since we can see into that one level “down,” these characters are still of concern to us in the sense that we can have real empathy for them. It is sincerely affecting to watch Macbeth! The stage murders even arouse our real sense of moral judgment — but against Macbeth, not Shakespeare. And that’s as it should be. We don’t wish Shakespeare arraigned, and we don’t wish the play unwritten. Watching Macbeth is both entertaining and enlightening. It is a good play, and it is good (for us, for society, and objectively) that Shakespeare wrote it.⁵

Similarly, God can only be judged on His own level. On God’s level of reality, we are fictional. That doesn’t mean we aren’t real on our own level of reality; we are as real as anything else is in the universe! But beyond the universe, or at the truest level of that universe, we are God’s fictional characters, and on that level there do not exist any victims of the evils that (rightly) vex us.⁶ Our problems are real problems to us, but seeing them as moral grievances against our Author is as incoherent as it is fruitless.

VI. The Editor?

“So there are these two parts of the plot — reversal and recognition; a third is suffering… Suffering is an action that involves destruction or pain (e.g., deaths in full view, extreme agony, wounding, and so on.)”
— Aristotle, Poetics

“In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.”
— Anonymous, first attested in print in the Bridgeport [Connecticut] Herald, 1897

In discussing the problem of evil in his book A Guide for the Jewish Undecided, and elsewhere, R’ Prof. Samuel Lebens (drawing on Hasidic thought and in collaboration with Tyron Goldschmidt) advances the idea that God will someday “edit” the world so that all the evils that happen in “take one” of the world (if you will) will no longer happen in the final cut. (Actually, to be precise, since we’re talking about God’s hyper-timeline that transcends the world’s timeline, Lebens and Goldschmidt explain that one can’t say God “will” edit the story; rather, God “hyper-will” edit the story, so that our lives “hyper-will have been” different than they currently are and will [regular-will] be.)

While appreciating the creativity of this idea, I object to the theory of hyper-future editing to remove evil. My objection is at once aesthetic, logical, and ontological.

Aesthetically, as Aristotle or any fractionally-decent writer could tell you, a story without yearning or loss or need isn’t merely a bad story; it’s not even really a story at all. Good stories have conflict — highs and lows, progress and reversal, stakes that matter for characters who matter, palpable tension and sweet relief. As such, this notion of a story that hyper-will be edited into perfection makes an absolute hash of the idea that God is a storyteller, even though it depends on that very idea.

This aesthetic/narrative necessity of suffering is isomorphic with the logical necessity of Evil for the existence of Good. Editing out all the evil from the story would be meta-evil; it would neuter, and effectively eliminate, all of the remaining good. A life without suffering and struggle would not be not a good life. It would be (hyper-would be) a bland, pareve, utterly meaningless life, not substantively different from annihilation.

Nor would it help to edit out only some of the most egregious evil. One might ask, “Fine, there must be war, but must there be the Holocaust? There must be death, but must there be (God forbid) the death of children? Why not just a few non-totalizing edits?” But no special carve-outs would help the overall situation. Just as no amount of money, fame, or power is ever “enough” for human nature, because we get used to what we have and yearn for more, wherever God hyper-were to move the line of how far evil is allowed to go, we hyper-would only take that move for granted and be effectively just as we now are. If you doubt it, reflect that we have no way of ruling out the possibility that our current reality actually is a partially edited Hypertake Two, and in the hyper-past, there hyper-was some horrible thing now unknown — perhaps every sixth minute all people suffered unbearable physical agony, or something — and God already hyper-did edit that out. If all this hyper-were (or is) true, does that give us any sense of relief, gratitude, or help in facing the suffering that now remains? Obviously not; we can’t even tell whether or not it hyper-did happen.

If we believe (and I do) that the ultimate reality is probably One Conscious Mind, then these aesthetic and logical objections take on ontological significance. God has done more than hyper-exist hyper-forever in static and unified perfection, and I think it’s reasonable to conclude that He has done so on purpose — that the cluster of things called plurality, narrative, and imperfection (suffering, evil) are not accidents, but essential and connected parts of the artistic creation (for an audience of One) that is the universe.

VII. The Experience.

“Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba, fell ill. Rabbi Yoḥanan entered to visit him, and said to him: Is your suffering dear to you?”
— Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 5b

J. B. S. Haldane quipped that “The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other”. By that metric (sheer volume), one might expand Haldane’s list and suggest that God must love not only stars and beetles, but also bacteria, dark matter, and suffering.

But the metric isn’t right. What Good means is that God loves it; what Evil means is that God hates it. God hates suffering even as He makes it happen. God loves us, He loves Goodness, and He hates Evil. But in order for any of that to mean anything in the first place, God creates and meta-loves a story that includes plenty of all of them.

Knowing that Evil is necessary for Goodness does not relieve or remove our suffering. Indeed, it insists that suffering has to be actually suffered. I cannot agree with the Buddhist (or maybe pop-Buddhist, I’m not sure) take that the answer to suffering is to let go of all attachments so that we will have less to grieve when we inevitably lose it. It seems to me that this whole drama of the Universe — love, loss, pleasure, pain, life, death, families, beetles, parasites — it’s all meant to be lived.

What Good and Evil mean is that we are called upon to do what we desire anyway to do: relish and maximize the Good, and fight like mad against Evil. Our most wrenching griefs and fervent hatreds of Evil are not to be calmed, nor assuaged, nor comforted, nor meditated into tranquility. Not here on this plane; not inside the story. Zen masters make boring protagonists. Our yearnings for love and care and wholeness are to be pursued, not stifled, and if (since) that means grief, then so be it. We are meant to be here in this whole thing of life. We are meant to strive and play out the whole story. We are glimmers of God; we are God’s chance to feel something. We are here to drain the cup, when it is sweet and when it is bitter.

That doesn’t help. That can’t help. That refutes and refuses help.

Still, to me, it meta-helps. It doesn’t make any suffering more bearable, let alone “dear.” But it may offer some of us (which is to say, at this moment in my very privileged life it offers me) a sense that all suffering has value and meaning. Not merely because suffering is ennobling, although it can be. Not just because suffering engenders compassion, although it may. But because the existence of suffering is a load-bearing part of the larger whole that allows goodness itself to exist.

Theistic-Idealist Monism

1. It has long fascinated me that Judaism, a religion famously obsessed with God’s Unity, is also so clearly obsessed with dualities. Israel and the nations, man and woman, Sabbath and weekday, holy and profane, pure and impure, meat and dairy… Plurality and specifically dichotomy are central themes in this religion that is about The (Only) One. But if meaning, relationship, and love are all predicated on plurality and separation, then it begins to make more sense that the Ultimate One might still want to create a world that seems coded, as it were, in binary.

2. I like this Chabad take implying that need and interdependence are ultimately good, even as they include non-ultimate evils.

3. If further traditionalist credentials are required, refusing to assent that “God is good” can also be defended on Maimonidean apophatic grounds. As Maimonides wrote (Guide for the Perplexed I.52): “Attributes describing the essence of a thing, or part of the essence, or a quality of it, are clearly inadmissible in reference to God, for they imply composition […and] He is absolutely One.” … “Know that the negative attributes of God are the true attributes: they do not include any incorrect notions or any deficiency whatever in reference to God, while positive attributes imply polytheism…” (Ibid. I.58.)

4. They are all fictional even though Macbeth is based on history, because the characters in the play are not identical with the real people on whom they are based.

5. A related but different question: Is it good for the characters of King Duncan and Banquo that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth? Arguably yes. Arguably it is better to live a life, and have experiences, and be cut down by an ambition-mad Scottish aristocrat, than it is not to have existed at all. But when all of existence is ultimately just God’s existence, I am not sure about this point. I don’t think “not to have existed at all” is even a live option, within the ontology I think most likely.

6. This doesn’t mean, by the way, that God doesn’t love us or care about us. A writer can love his characters. God can even love us as Himself, and have not just empathy but identity with our suffering, since our selves are waves in the ocean of His Self.