“The great question of why God permits evil is usually treated in Judaism less as a “why” question than as a “what” question: Given the evil in the world, what do we do about it?

We can wonder about God’s role, but it is ultimately inscrutable. We cannot know. Imagine how little a two-year-old understands an adult. He cannot even understand what he does not know. The Jewish tradition conceives of the gap between humans and God as far greater than that between an adult and an infant. So how, ultimately, can we understand?

What we can do, is act. Faced with evil, we can choose goodness. In a weary world, mitzvot enable us to begin closing the breach between what is and what should be. Even in the most difficult circumstance, we can choose. As the great Viktor Frankl writes in Man’s Search for Meaning: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.’”

-Rabbi David Wolpe - From a past edition of his weekly Off the Pulpit.