Free Republic

What do we mean by professing that G-d is good and man was created in His image? When G-d allows and even causes unbearable pain to befall man, afflicting him with sickness, cruel death, earthquakes and the most horrible wars, there seems little room for these claims. If G-d, by our moral standards, cannot be justified for many of His actions, as we have suggested previously, how are we to revere Him?

ON THE FOURTH DAY G-D CREATED THE SUN, and it began to function as the center of our solar system. After approximately 365 1/4 days, the sun would be at its original place in the sky and a new year would begin, in a cycle that still continues without change. Tradition teaches that the sun's first appearance in the newly-created heaven is reckoned from Nissan, the month of Passover and springtime. A quarter of a year later — after about 91 days, 7 1/2 hours — the next season would begin and so on. If that very first year began...

Tradition marks this time of year as the occasion for Jewish calamity, and a biblical perspective helps us understand why.The weeks preceding the saddest of Jewish holy days, Tisha b’Av, have seen remarkable displays of anti-Jewish sentiment, from the deadly to the merely despicable. As Israel was slammed with long-range missiles from Hezbollah, the world’s “civilized” nations (with a few exceptions, including the United States) condemned the Jewish state for striking back in self-defense. In Seattle, where I live, a depressed Muslim gunman opened fire on six women at the Jewish Federation office, killing one. Later the same weekend, Mel...