As a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall pass away;
But Thou art the selfsame, and Thy years shall have no end.”[425]
5. Second. The numberless beings and forces of the universe comprise a unity, working according to one plan, subserving a common purpose, and pursuing in their development and interaction the aim which God's wisdom assigned them from the beginning. However hostile the various elements may be toward each other, however fierce the universal conflict, “the struggle for existence,” still over all the discord prevails a higher concord, and the struggle of nature's forces ends in harmony and peace. “He maketh peace in His high places.”[426] Even the highest type of heathenism, the Persian, divided the world into mutually hostile principles, light and darkness, good and evil. But Judaism proclaims God as the Creator of both. No force is left out of the universal plan; each contributes its part to the whole. Consequently the very progress of natural science confirms more and more the principle of the divine Unity. The researches of science are ever [pg 150] tending toward the knowledge of universal laws of growth, culminating in a scheme of universal evolution. Hence this supports and confirms Jewish monotheism, which knows no power of evil antagonistic to God.
6. Third. The world is good, since goodness is its creator and its final aim. True enough, nature, bent with “tooth and claw” upon annihilating one or another form of existence, is quite indifferent to man's sense of compassion and justice. Yet in the wise, though inscrutable plan of God she does but serve the good. We see how the lower forms of life ever serve the higher, how the mineral provides food for the vegetable, while the animal derives its food from the vegetable world and from lower types of animals. Thus each becomes a means of vitality for a higher species. So by the continuous upward striving of man the lower passions, with their evil tendencies, work more and more toward the triumph of the good. Man unfolds his God-likeness; he strives to
“Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.”
7. The Biblical story of Creation expresses the perfect harmony between God's purpose and His work in the words, “And behold, it was good” spoken at the end of each day's Creation, and “behold, it was very good” at the completion of the whole. A world created by God must serve the highest good, while, on the contrary, a world without God would prove to be “the worst of all possible worlds,” as Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, quite correctly concludes from his premises. The world-view of Judaism, which regards the entire economy of life as the realization of the all-encompassing plan of an all-wise Creator, is accordingly an energizing optimism, or, more precisely, meliorism. This view is voiced by the rabbis in many significant utterances, such as the maxim of R. Akiba, “Whatsoever the Merciful One does, [pg 151] is for the good,”[427] or that of his teacher, Nahum of Gimzo, “This, too, is for the good.”[428] His disciple, R. Meir, inferred from the Biblical verse, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good,” that “death, too, is good.”[429] Others considered that suffering and even sin are included in this verse, because every apparent evil is necessary that we may struggle and overcome it for the final victory of the good.[430] As an ancient Midrash says: “God is called a God of faith and faithfulness, because it was His faith in the world that caused Him to bring it into existence.”[431]