In our text, God does not say, Ã ¬Go [away from Me] to the wicked Pharaoh, Ã ® but ¬Come to Pharaoh,Ã Ã ® as if in coming toward Pharaoh, Moses would be, paradoxically, coming closer to God. The rebbe emphasizes the classic Chassidic teaching that God is present in every person, in every moment of experience, in all of life. God, then, is present in Pharaoh: in the tyrant, in the enemy, even in the raw face of evil. Still, God says, Ã ¬Come to Me, even when I am hidden deep within the face of your enemy, so veiled by layers of hurt and distortion that you cannot recognize Me. Ã ®Hell, even Rabbi Boteach, of all people, gets it.
The human imperative is not to reckon with God às secrets but to promote those values that He conveyed as being supreme, leading with the defense of human life.
Judaism sees death, illness and suffering as aberrations in creation. Suffering is not redemptive and affliction is not cleansing.
In Judaism, unlike in Christianity, nobody needs to die in order to bring about atonement for sin. Man às mission is not to make peace with pain and await a better existence in the afterlife. Rather, we seek to perfect this world by filling in for God whenever He chooses to be overtly absent.
At the risk of offending my Muslim and Christian colleagues, I fully affirm that any doctor, even an atheist, who struggles to cure AIDS and save life is doing far more Godly work than a cleric who sacrilegiously asserts that the disease is a divine affliction for sexual sin.
