A philosopher named Proklos, son of Filoslos, once pressed Rabban Gamliel with a hard question. “If the idols of the nations are false, why does your God not simply destroy them?”
Gamliel answered with a parable. “If a man named his dog after his own father, would the father be angry with the son, or with the dog?”
Proklos pressed. “But suppose a town burns to the ground and only the temple of the idol remains standing. Is that not proof the idol has power?”
“Does a king,” Gamliel replied, “wage war against the living or against the dead? If the idol is truly nothing, why would God bother toppling a pile of stone?”
Proklos tried again. “Then if they serve no purpose, why not erase them?”
“Because,” said Gamliel, “people worship the sun, the moon, the stars, rivers, mountains. If God destroyed every object humans have misused for worship, He would have to dismantle the world itself. The world cannot be unmade every time a fool in it behaves foolishly.”
Proklos made one last attempt. “Then why does God allow the temptation at all?”
Gamliel’s final answer cut cleanest. “It is the human being who is punished for his foolishness, not the object. The stone does not sin. The person who bows to it does.”
The rabbinic point still holds: God does not rearrange the furniture of reality to protect us from our own bad decisions. He asks us to grow up instead.