When I write about “meaning,” add the point that the statement I make – that Hester Panim is a period of meaninglessness – does not automatically nullify all meaning to Jewish history. I am not of the Ben-Gurion school which denies any significance or value to Diaspora history. Rather, what I mean is that the totality of Jewish history, from the beginning to the end point, is the highest form of meaning, in that it represents the engagement of man with God; and by “meaning,” I intend just that – the redemptive design of history. However, within this process of meaning there exists a hiatus, a blank, an empty space in which meaninglessness pervades. In this period, which is the epoch of Hester Panim, the history of the people as such makes no sense; by which I mean that this period taken by itself, other than the sheer survival of Israel, shows no specific responsiveness to a divine plan. It is thus, in a manner of speaking, a period of “meaningful meaninglessness.” This does not, however, mean that in the period of Hester Panim individuals can find no meaning in their lives. There is a mysterious economy of meaning, whereby individuals may find meaning in their engagement with God, whereas the people as a whole suffers meaninglessness – even as it is quite conceivable that individuals should be lost in a Hester Panim of meaninglessness while the people as a whole rises to new levels of meaningfulness. With regard to the present, one of the reasons I refuse to recognize contemporary history as Nesiat Panim is not only because we have obviously not reached the desired level of religious conviction and experience, but also because, even in the time of the glory of Israel’s triumphs, we must remember the agony of Russian Jewry.

My thesis that Hester Panim (on the national level) removes or at least dulls the one-to-one correspondence of Reward and Punishment, has been criticized on the grounds that it goes against various texts which speak clearly of such a correspondence in the realm of distributive justice. Certain things must be made clear. For one, the difference I alluded to between individual and national Reward and Punishment. Second, even on the individual level, while it is true that ish be’heto yumat, nevertheless this is a general principle of theodicy, justifying G-d's decree, but not quite allowing man to pin-point the sin and thus blame the victim. If it were so, how could we ever eulogize the dead, including the greatest Zaddik, whereas according to this thesis we should berate him and try to figure out which sin it is that he is being punished for. This is a little more than reminiscent of the friends of Job and their point of view, which was rejected by the Almighty.Third, and most important: A study of Avot reveals many passages which speak of a clear relationship between sin and punishment. Nevertheless, there is a contrary statement, the famous one by R. Yannai, that ein be'yadenu lo mi'shalvat ha- resha'im ve'lo mi-yesurei ha1tzaddikim. According to this latter opinion, every attempt to sketch with any clarity the relationship between Sin and Punishment is doomed to failure.Finally, the efforts by the Sages to identify such a relationship between sin and punishment must not be seen as an endeavor to uncover the secrets of the Most High, but rather to accept the mystery as impenetrable and nevertheless seek to convert suffering—both the suffering of the righteous and the anguish of religious man trying to understand the eternal enigma of suffering—into something constructive, something creative. (Compare S. R. Hirsch’s comment on lamah azavtani.) In other words, the effort by the Sages is one of leading from yisurim to teshuvah, by encouraging the sufferer to enhance h…

See Rav Hutner’s Pachad Yitzchak on two kinds of providence: hashgachat tzaddik v’ra lo – the providence of the righteous who suffer – and hashgachat rasha v’tov lo – the providence of the wicked who prosper – recommended by Y. Elman. Elman will be sending me, in the near future, copies of two of his reprints on evil and suffering, which may be relevant to my projected expansion of The Face of God to book length.

What is the paytan trying to tell us? We know, of course, of the anachronisms of the piece. The framework about the tyrant and his daughter is also probably a convenient literary fiction. But what's his point? I believe that a careful reading will yield the message: the martyrdom of these giants – and by extension any suffering – is not to be simplistically interpreted as punishment for any specific or even general sin. גזירה היא מלפני as the Divine response is sufficient evidence that the suffering is decreed by God for His own reasons though they seem quite arbitrary to humans, even such spiritual giants as R. Ishmael.Moreover, the only one to mention the theme of suffering as punishment is—the tyrant, who declares his sadism as punishment for the Jews in place of their ancestors who sinned by selling Joseph into slavery! (Indeed, this may even have been a disguised polemic against Christianity which held that we are guilty of deicide, etc.)

"בקשו מלאה"ש לומר שירה, אמר הקב"ה: מעשי ידי טובעין בים ואתם אומרים שירה?" למלאה״ש לא ניתנה רשות לומר שירה, אבל בנ"י כן הריעו ב"אז ישיר", ולמה? מפני שבנ״י נשאו על שכמם סבל וענות משך תקופה של 210 שנים, הרי שמגיעה להם גם שמחת הניצחון...