God the Programmer

Yesterday as I was walking my daughter home from school, my mind wandered and I found myself thinking about the mabul. Specifically, about how unfair it was for Hashem to punish everyone with death. After all, I reasoned to myself, if the product is defective, it’s the fault of the designer! If a computer programmer wrote a program which failed to function properly, it wouldn’t be reasonable to blame the program. Obviously, it’s the programmer’s fault. He messed up somewhere in the code, and he needs to fix it, not yell at his computer.

Then I had an epiphany. Hashem IS a programmer. And the mabul wasn’t a punishment. It was God saving the bits of the program that worked properly and deleting the faulty code so that He could try to fix the program.

Unfortunately, God isn’t a very good programmer.

With this perspective, so much makes sense.

God created the Universe (the program): In the beginning, God created the program. And the page was empty, blankness was on the monitor, and God’s fingers were hovering over the keyboard. And God typed, “Let there be light” and there was light. God saw that the code for simulating light effects was good, and He separated the light effects from the shadow effects. God called the light program “day” and the shadow program “night.” By then it was evening, and He powered down His computer until the morning – this was the first day.

God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent (more or less): He knows everything about the program and can see all of the results of the program (but doesn’t quite know why it’s not working properly); He can change the program as He wishes (but He’s not a very good programmer, so his code often doesn’t do quite what He wants it to); and He wants the ultimate good for the program, that is, for it to work properly (but individual pieces of the program are unimportant in themselves). He cares about and investigates the behavior of each part of the program, and is constantly involved in adjusting it.

There is a wonderful theodicy: Bad things generally are a result of bugs in the program. The plane crashes because of a bug. The little girl emerges from the wreckage without a scratch because God was furiously coding to try to fix the bug.

Other gods are software pirates who try to take credit for the program. This understandably upsets God.

And so on…

Suicide is Painless…

I sat at one of the long tables in the dining room, idly munching on potato chips while I listened to the bearded man at the front of the room. It was motzei Shabbos, and like every week when Shabbos ended early enough, the yeshiva had a melave malka after night seder. The man at the front of the room was a guest speaker, a rebbe at one of the other high schools in the city.

I’ve long since forgotten most of his drasha, but one story that he told stuck with me. A couple had bought a house and discovered that part of the floor in the attic was broken. They called a contractor, he came the next day, and after a few hours of work it was repaired. A few days later, they went up to the attic to put some boxes away and found that the floor was broken again in the same spot. They called the contractor back. This time he spent an entire day reinforcing the floor. A week later it was broken again.

A few days later the couple was discussing the problem with a neighbor. “I’m surprised you bought the house at all.” he said. “After that boy hung himself in the attic, the house was vacant for years.”

“That was why the floor was breaking.” The rebbe declared. “The neshama of this boy was barred from gan eden, and even from gehenom. With no place to go, he kept returning to the place where he had killed himself. And every time his neshama visited, the floor broke. If he had only known what would happen, he would never have killed himself!”

In retrospect, it sounds like the kind of ghost story ten year olds tell around a campfire to scare each other. For some reason, though, it brought the afterlife into sharp focus for me. This boy, who had killed himself hoping to end it all, was instead living on and suffering for his misdeed. I, too, would live on after I died in this world. I too would be judged. I no longer saw Olam Haboh as a fairytale, but as a real place that I would one day go to. I, not a character in a story called “my neshama.” For years, I would periodically have dreams in which I stood before the Heavenly court.

It’s the association with that sudden insight, rather than any inherent quality of the story, which made me remember it.

When I took Abnormal Psychology in college and learned about major depression and suicide I was reminded of the story. This time, instead of bringing a religious concept into focus, it raised some disturbing questions. Nearly everyone who commits suicide does so because they are clinically depressed. The only exceptions are terminally ill patients who wish to end their pain and religiously-motivated people such as suicide bombers or the Jonestown Massacre. A clinically depressed person who dies by suicide was killed by his illness no less than someone who dies of cancer. Could a person be held morally responsible for dying of an illness, condemned because of it to exist in limbo for all eternity?

It turns out that the rabbonim today agree that a clinically depressed person is not responsible for committing suicide. The family sits shiva for them, and they may be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But what, then, of all of the suicide victims of the millennia between matan Torah and advent of modern psychology? How many families of clinically depressed suicide victims were denied the opportunity to mourn their loss and to give their loved ones a Jewish burial (something that I assume would have caused them pain). And why would Hashem dictate a halachah that He knew would be improperly applied until the modern rise of psychology?

It would be a long time before I came to the obvious answer: He didn’t. The severe condemnation of suicide reflects a time when there was no recognition of mental illness. Perhaps it was a way of punishing someone who murdered himself: after all, he couldn’t be executed for his crime, so denying him a proper burial and condemning him in the afterlife was the next best thing. Perhaps the knowledge that they would be denied mourning and burial in a Jewish cemetery served to dissuade some people from committing suicide. But the divine mandate of an all-knowing God it was not.


[Inspired by this post from Onionsoupmix]

The title, of course, comes from this: