MY FRIEND WAS A POEM: A PHILOSOPHICAL MEMOIR

Timothy Chambers

The ‘Problem of Evil’ has been the focus of a number

of articles in Think. Here, Timothy Chambers offers
an unusual perspective on this seemingly intractable
difficulty facing theists.

Think winter 2007 • 31

‘Did not I weep for him whose day was hard? Was
not my soul grieved for the poor? But when I looked
for good, evil came; and when I waited for light, dark-
ness came.’
Job 30:25

Matt and I were seventeen when we first discussed Job.

We were streaming along Interstate 91, en route to a parent-
less New Year’s party in our suburban American hometown.
Our girlfriends, who’d grown used to our philosophical flights,
looked on in amusement.
‘We have to believe two things,’ Matt was saying, ticking
off the reasons on his right hand. (This only left one hand for
steering, but no one thought to protest.) ‘First: Job is a good
person. Second: God wouldn’t let evil befall a good person,
if He could prevent it.’
I nodded abruptly, as if hearing a new riddle, eager for the
punch line.
‘So since evil befell Job,’ Matt proclaimed, ‘we’re left with
only one conclusion: that God couldn’t prevent Job’s suffer-
ings. Otherwise, He’d have done something.’
Matt glimmered when he pursued a new notion; his passion
was the elixir of persuasion. But this time, I wouldn’t budge.
After all, didn’t our traditions — Matt was Jewish; I was, at least
nominally, a Christian — proclaim that God was nothing, if not
all-powerful? Wasn’t God omnipotent...well, by definition? As
a child, I’d always felt a twinge when I crayoned outside the
lines of a coloring-book; the same feeling reared its foreboding
head now. But only briefly. By the time we reached the party,
our flirtation with theology had ebbed, and Matt’s brown fam-
 ily-van flourished with The Kinks’ ‘Hollywood Boulevard’, and
the patter of teenaged banter.
It was this festive venue that baptized my acquaintance
with (what philosophers call) the Problem of Evil. Shortly after
JFK’s death, his brother Robert put the problem poignantly:
The innocent suffer, he’d scrawled on a legal pad. How can
this be possible and God be just? Now Matt had beckoned
me to join the campaign: one way or another, we’d someday
Chambers My friend was a poem • 32

put the question to rest.

Someday…a quaint luxury bought by youth. I had had no
doubt that someday would always exist, that it would carry Matt
and I into gray age. The alternative was unthinkable, hence
unthought. Which shows how faith-steeped a notion someday
is: even before we see it, we know it exists, and that it holds
everything we hope for.
Matt’s eager Siberian Husky always panted at the prospect
of a nightly jaunt. So many evenings, while Cody deliberated
over trees, Matt and I deliberated about everything else. One
of Matt’s favorite topics was Zen Buddhism, and its perplexing
koans (‘What’s the sound of one hand clapping?’). I no longer
remember if we made much headway in understanding any of
them. Matt and I always recognized their central moral, though:
that words alone don’t bridge the way to wisdom.
‘You said that God allowed Job to suffer because He couldn’t
prevent it,’ I remarked during one of these outings. ‘But how
is that possible?’
Matt thought for awhile — which is quite a trick with 50
pounds of impatient Husky tugging the leash. ‘Well,’ he offered,
‘sometimes I wonder whether God is who we traditionally think
H,e is. Maybe when we say ‘God,’ all we’re referring to is…our
religious community, our congregation.’
My eyes betrayed my astonishment. The gambit intrigued;
still, it struck me as cheating somehow. I mean, if you say
‘God’, mustn’t you mean God?
Matt sensed my skepticism. ‘Think about it. We say God
cares for us; well, it’s true: our religious community cares for
us. We say God is like a father; again, it’s true: the religious
community is as a father to us — it bestows wisdom, matures
our spirit, et cetera’.
I drew the conclusion. ‘It would also explain why God can’t
prevent suffering. After all, if the religious community isn’t
all-powerful, then, given your equation, it would no longer be
surprising that God isn’t all-powerful, either.’
Matt beamed. ‘That’s the idea.’
That’s where our project stood when high-school graduation

Think winter 2007 • 33

arrived. According to my friend’s ‘God-as-code-word’-theory
(as I’d dubbed it), God couldn’t eliminate all evils, because
the body ‘God’ referred to (the religious community) couldn’t
prevent all evils. The solution had the virtue of consistency,
not to mention the glitter of novelty. But I had misgivings. The
most pressing was this: since the religious community didn’t
create the world, then neither did God, if we presumed Matt’s
theory. An odd consequence, to say the least.
But as it turned out, I wouldn’t need to press Matt on such
persnickety points. For, something soon happened which led
him to renounce his nascent theory.
Matt and I traipsed off to different colleges, but we kept in
touch, and devoted many a summer evening to our ambula-
tory brainstorming sessions.
I’d opted for a math and physics major; Matt chose Judaic
Studies. He’d just returned from a semester-study in Israel,
and I was eager to hear about Matt’s experiences there, and if
he’d gathered any insights which would further our Job-project.
‘I’ve been thinking about your idea’, I said, ‘about whether
‘God’ surreptitiously means ‘the religious community’. You
still believe that, right?’
‘No,’ Matt said flatly. ‘God’s real.’
Matt’s matter-of-factness — the stony certainty — left me
stunned. I’d heard that religious experiences can transform
a life, a mind, a soul. But I’d never had such an experience
myself, nor seen its effects up-close. Until now. Something,
I knew, had happened in Israel — something ineffable, no
doubt, but meaningful enough to drain away Matt’s fanciful
views of the Deity, and replace them with the silent, conviction
of robust faith.
 I never again heard Matt speak of God as a sociological
fiction, or, for that matter, as a Being bearing limited powers.
Now it was my turn to offer an abortive solution to Job’s
puzzle. How does an all-good God permit evil to exist?
As my science-studies advanced, I’d started to wonder: does
evil ‘exist’, in the first place? After all, it wasn’t something
you could measure with a Geiger counter, like radioactivity.
(The very thought of an ‘evil-detector’, click-clicking near Lex
Chambers My friend was a poem • 34

Luthor, but falling silent near Superman, inspired a moment’s

mirth.)
‘Maybe it’s like what Hamlet said,’ I tried, as Matt and I sat
in his night-silent living room. ‘There is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so.’ (II:ii)
Now it was Matt’s turn to be skeptical. ‘You don’t believe in
evil, Tim?’ He queried, both incredulously and sternly.
‘What I mean is, when we say something is ‘evil’, that just
means we find it painful,’ I tried. ‘But what we find painful is
subjective — thus, evil is subjective, too.’
Matt was unmoved. ‘You don’t believe in evil, Tim?’
‘Well,’, I said, hesitantly, sensing I was atop a trap door, ‘not
as an objective feature of the world; but—’
‘I want you to read something.’ Matt disappeared upstairs,
and returned with a tiny, well-thumbed paperback. ‘Read this,
and then tell me if you don’t believe in evil.’ The book was Elie
Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night.
Back home, I perked coffee, and spent the evening in a gal-
lery of horrors. Matt’s point was clear: If I was saying that evil
wasn’t ‘real’, then I had to infer that Auschwitz and Buchenwald
weren’t ‘really’ evil. But to say that — even to think it — was
godlessly ghoulish. Thus ended my simplistic grope toward
solving the puzzle of Job.
So six years after our search had commenced, Matt and I
had stalled at the starting-line. God exists. Evil exists. How
is this possible? Matt had tried to deconstruct God, and then
renounced that tack; I’d tried to soften evil’s reality, to no avail.
After finishing my master’s, I paid a visit to our hometown, my
mind still simmering over the problem.
 Matt wasn’t around, I was told. His graduate program at the
Jewish Theological Seminary involved studies in Israel, and
he wouldn’t be coming back for some time. I thought about
sending a letter, but never got around to it. There’d be plenty
of time to while away the philosophical hours when Matt re-
turned, after all.
On Monday, February 26, 1996, I woke up, bought a news-
paper, and checked my email. One of the messages bore a

Think winter 2007 • 35

simple subject line: Sad News.
‘Matt Eisenfeld was killed in a bus bombing in Israel,’ it
read.
Psychologists have a fetish for ‘stages’; even grief, they
tell us, is as phase-laden as the moon. First there’s denial,
and, at last, there’s acceptance. (Acceptance? Sometimes I
think psychologists wouldn’t be so absurd if they read some
Wiesel.) Years came and went — but the grief never went, and
acceptance never came. I often wondered what my partner-
in-philosophical-crime would have thought about some article
I’d published, or a novel notion I’d hatched.
At first, I pursued the elusive quarry of ‘closure’ — another
shrinks’ fiction. Perhaps it would spring into sight, I thought, if
only I could complete the pursuit Matt and I had launched. If I
could solve the riddle of Job, if I could explain innocent suffer-
ing, then maybe the past’s ghosts would disperse. Not that I
harbored any illusions about the task’s difficulty; ‘I sought the
source of evil,’ the astute St. Augustine had written about his
research, ‘and I got nowhere.’ (Confessions, VII.7.11) The goal
I’d set, if nearly unattainable, was at least a concrete one.
One day, I hit upon a novel theodicy — a way to explain why
God permitted inscrutable evils to exist. (Most likely, my idea
was vulnerable, somehow; but if so, at least the mistake was
a new one.) I outlined it eagerly, and wrote it up.
But the relief I’d expected — well, half-expected — remained
a distant dream. Instead, I ruminated: Would Matt would have
granted my premises? Would he have found my conclusion
sound?
In all my mental meanderings, I’d lost sight of an inflexible
 fact: nothing I wrote could make my late friend into more
than a memory. Only then did I remember something Matt
had written, shortly before his death: ‘I could write a poem;
or, instead of writing a poem, I could be a poem. Do I dare?’
I smiled. The spirit behind the thought was singularly his. To
the end — even in the thick of an orthodox rabbinate — there
remained a Zen-like tinge to Matt’s vision.
And then, turning my friend’s koan over in my thoughts, I
Chambers My friend was a poem • 36

saw it. From the start of our project, Matt and I had made a
crucial mistake. We’d treated the problem of evil like a riddle
— a knot to be untied by twisting the right words. But that’s
wrong. If the problem of evil is a riddle, then it’s a riddle with-
out a punch line; because no pat set of words can relieve our
vexation in the face of innocent suffering. Evil exists. God ex-
ists. The problem doesn’t demand our spotting some abstract
connection between unbounded goodness and inflexible evil.
The real problem is to face these incompatible facts, without
losing hope. The ‘answer’ to the problem of evil consists simply
in this: acknowledging the darkness of suffering, without losing
our faith that, someday, a newer world might dawn.
Then Matt’s spirit pressed me another step. Yes, I had writ-
ten a (flawed) solution to Job’s perplexity. But could I be a
solution to the problem of evil? Could I, no longer innocent of
the dark, still project the light of hope?
Do I dare?

Timothy Chambers is a teaching fellow in philosophy at

Brown University.