Like I mentioned almost a month ago, I'm slowly reading through Faith After the Holocaust by Eliezer Berkovits. I'm about half way through and Berkovits is explaining that the Holocaust (and any "bad" event) was not a direct manifestation of God's will. Nor was it a case of God turning away from the Jews. He talks a lot about the nature of God and shows, via many quotes from the prophets, that God does not actively participate in humanity's day to day life (painfully obvious to most of us).

He also discusses good and evil and basically says that you can't have one without the other and that God created both. This brings him to an interesting statement.

In a sense, God can be neither good nor bad. In terms of his own nature He is incapable of evil. He is the only one who is goodness. But since, because of his very essence, he can do no evil, he can do no good either. God, being incapable of the unethical is not an ethical being. Goodness for him is neither an ideal, nor a value; it is existence, it is absolutely realized being.

If God is incapable of good or evil, how can we say that He is goodness? Maybe He is only apathy? How can He be incapable of good if He gave us the Torah, which, by definition, is good? Perplexing. He then writes that all the qualities we assign to God, He can't actually embody. "Justice, love, peace, mercy, are ideals for man alone. God is perfection."

He ends the section with a ray of hope, though. Earlier on he stated that God's "hiding" means that he is present by definition. He suggests that God is present and acting in subtle ways to ensure his creation doesn't destroy itself. But isn't that a good thing?