A king summoned Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania and pressed him with a hard question. Is your God really just? He creates some people blind, others lame, others deformed, through no fault of their own. That is not justice.
Rabbi Joshua answered carefully. These afflictions are not random punishments, he said, but signs. God marks certain people this way because of wickedness He foresees in them. Let me prove it.
He asked for permission to stage a demonstration. The king agreed. Rabbi Joshua took a thousand dinars, a small fortune, and went to a blind man who lived as a beggar. In the presence of two of the king's own witnesses, he spoke loudly and carefully.
Take this money, he said. Guard it for me. The king has ordered me executed. When I am dead, the gold is yours. But if by some miracle I am spared, I will come back to claim it.
The blind man tucked away the bag of coins. Weeks passed. Rabbi Joshua was not executed. He returned to the blind man and asked for the money back.
I have no idea what you are talking about, said the blind man. I never met you. I never received a single coin from any rabbi.
Rabbi Joshua brought him to court. The two witnesses testified under oath. The blind man still denied everything. The king ruled he was a thief and ordered him hanged.
On the road to the gallows, a stranger leaned in and whispered into the blind man's ear. I saw your wife, he said, taking her pleasure with a young man. She told her lover to wait until the hanging was done, and then they would marry and spend your thousand dinars together.
The blind man broke. He confessed everything. He had hidden the gold at home. He produced the bag, handed it to Rabbi Joshua, and admitted his guilt before the king.
The king turned to Rabbi Joshua. I see now, he said. The affliction was the outward sign of an inner corruption God already knew. The blindness was the label, not the sentence.
This story from The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), drawn from Rabbi Nissim's Hibbur Yafeh me-ha-Yeshuah (an eleventh-century North African collection), is a theodicy in parable form. The rabbinic tradition is often uncomfortable with the idea that God afflicts people arbitrarily. This exempla offers one ancient answer: sometimes the body is a warning label. The reader is left to decide whether to be comforted or troubled.