The Question Moses Could Not Answer

Moses argued with God about the Golden Calf and won. He argued about Israel's destruction in the wilderness and won again. He asked to see God's glory and was refused, but he kept asking. The man was not easily silenced. And yet there is one question that even Moses, the greatest of all the prophets, could not resolve. He asked it, according to the tradition, and received no satisfying answer. He sat with it for the rest of his life.

Why do the righteous suffer? Why do the wicked prosper?

The Ramchal, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, opens a crucial section of his Da'at Tevunot, composed in eighteenth-century Padua, with a statement that should stop any reader cold. These questions, the problem of divine providence, reward and punishment, the fate of the righteous and the wicked, were difficult for the great sages and prophets. They were difficult even for Moses. And they are impossible to fully grasp.

Impossible. The Ramchal is not describing a temporary limitation waiting to be overcome by better scholarship. He is describing a structural feature of the relationship between human understanding and divine governance.

The Talmud's Honest Record of the Question

The Talmud Bavli, compiled in sixth-century Babylonia, records the exchange directly. In Tractate Berakhot, Moses asks God to show him the ways of divine governance, and specifically to explain why some righteous people live well and others suffer, why some wicked people are punished and others thrive. God's response is not a philosophical answer. It is a refusal combined with a partial vision. Moses is placed in the cleft of a rock and shown God's back as God passes by, but told: you cannot see my face and live. The full view of divine governance is, literally, fatal to a living human being.

This is not evasion. The rabbis who preserved this exchange in the Talmud were not uncomfortable with the question. They were honest about the limits of what any living person can hold. The Da'at Tevunot passage draws directly on this tradition and amplifies its implications. If Moses himself, the man to whom God spoke face to face as a man speaks to his friend (Exodus 33:11), could not resolve this question, then the inability to resolve it is not a failure of the questioner. It is a feature of the question itself.

Why This Matters More Than Any Other Problem in Theology

The Ramchal understood the problem of divine providence as the central challenge to Jewish faith in any era, not just his own. If God is just, why does justice seem so unevenly distributed? If God is compassionate, why does suffering fall on those who least deserve it? If God governs history, why does history look so ungoverned?

Midrash Rabbah, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, contains dozens of stories about righteous figures who suffered and wicked ones who flourished, and the rabbis' attempts to make sense of these cases. Some are resolved narratively: the righteous person was carrying a hidden sin, or the suffering was preparation for a greater reward, or God was allowing the wicked to exhaust their merit before a final reckoning. But the Midrash itself does not pretend these explanations are complete. Rabbi Yannai, preserved in the Talmud Yerushalmi, simply says: it is not in our hands to explain the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous. Some things are beyond the tools available.

The Zohar, compiled around 1280 CE in Castile, frames the same problem through the concept of gilgul, the transmigration of souls. What looks like an innocent person suffering may be a soul completing a repair begun in a previous lifetime. This is not a resolution of the problem, but it expands the frame enough to make the apparent injustice less conclusive. The Kabbalistic tradition consistently prefers expanding the frame to forcing a resolution that the frame cannot support.

Shabbat and the Shape of the Repair

The Ramchal in Da'at Tevunot argues that the Messianic era is the point at which the full shape of divine justice becomes visible. Not before. The world is, in his framework, a process of repair, a tikkun, that is currently incomplete. The righteous who suffer are contributing to a repair whose full dimensions extend beyond any single lifetime. The wicked who prosper are spending down a credit that will eventually run out. The system is just, but it is just over a timescale that no living human being can see from start to finish.

Shabbat, in this reading, is a weekly rehearsal for that completed state. Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, compiled between 1909 and 1938, records traditions about Adam and Eve's first Shabbat: they sat in the garden in perfect peace, sheltered by the divine presence, neither hungry nor cold, time suspended. Then the sun set on the first Shabbat and the week began, and with it came all the asymmetries and unpredictabilities of ordinary historical time. The rabbis read Shabbat as a taste of the world that will exist when the repair is complete, when the hidden logic of divine providence becomes fully visible.

Moses spent forty years on Shabbat, and the Talmud Bavli in Tractate Shabbat records that he was the one who gave Shabbat to Israel. This is the same Moses who could not resolve the question of divine providence. The connection is not coincidental in the Ramchal's reading: the gift of Shabbat is the gift of a regular experience of how things will look when the full picture is finally available. You cannot see God's face in ordinary time. You can, for twenty-five hours every week, stand in the cleft of a rock and see God's back as it passes.

What Does It Mean to Live With an Unanswered Question?

The Ramchal does not resolve the problem. That is not a failure of his; it is the point of the teaching. Da'at Tevunot argues that the soul which accepts the impossibility of fully grasping divine providence is not a soul that has given up. It is a soul that has matured. Certainty about the foundations, humility about the details.

Moses received the Torah. He taught it for forty years. He died on the threshold of the land God had promised. He never crossed over. And the tradition does not read this as abandonment or injustice. It reads it as the final demonstration of the principle Moses could not resolve: the purposes of divine governance exceed the capacity of any single life, even the greatest life the Jewish people have ever produced, to contain them.

The question remained open. It still does. That, the Ramchal says, is not a problem with the question. That is the shape it is supposed to have.