Description
Perfectly Imperfect: Why The Chaos Was, Is, Necessary For Redemption – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
This is not a perfect world. Tell you something new? Okay. How about, it is not a perfect world, but it is a perfectly imperfect one? How about, it is this world’s very imperfections in all of their gloriously imperfect detail that makes this world so, well, perfect?
Weird? At first. Difficult? A lot of the time. But “all” this really means is that Creation’s failings are not accidental. They were intended, every last one of them, from the most trivial to the most critical, by God ever since He spoke Creation into existence. Even before. And, He has done everything necessary to make sure that Creation stays this way…at least until it becomes time for a perfectly perfect world.
Why? What would have been wrong with starting with a perfectly perfect world from the beginning? Then we could have avoided all the mistakes, all the destruction, all the waste and, most important of all (at least to us), all the pain.
Creation seems so prone to error that they eventually developed a “law” to describe it. It’s called “Murphy’s Law,” which states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. They weren’t the first to address the issue, but it is one of the best to encapsulate the reality that billions of people have to contend with moment to moment, day after day, lifetime after lifetime.
People who believe God has to be good use it as an excuse to assume either that He doesn’t exist, or that He doesn’t care. Some people are okay with the assumption that God is there, but that He is sadistic. A third group believes that He is there, He cares, and is always good, but that His ways are often mysterious to man, forcing them to trust God come what may.
There is a fourth. They know God is there. They know God cares. But they also know that, as much as man knows and as much as he can understand, it’s not enough to fully answer all the questions. While others start by assuming that man should be able to fathom the ways of God, that God owes it to man to make sense to him, they know the opposite. They know enough secrets about God’s creating of the world to put all the difficult questions aside, even if not enough to fully answer them.
But that’s okay. Because whether we get it or not never changes the fact that whatever God does, it is for the good of man. Even the worst evil man can do still has to fit into the idea that nothing happens if not for the good of mankind. If history is perfectly imperfect, then it has to be, by necessity, perfect for man.
How? That’s another story. Sometimes you can see how right away. Sometimes we only see how many years later. And, sometimes, how won’t get answered until later periods of history, perhaps the World to Come at earliest.
But in the meantime, here’s what we do know…
