RABBI DAVID AARON
VISIONARY, AUTHOR, PARADIGM SHIFTER
Rabbi David Aaron is a spiritual visionary and master educator who has invested over four decades delving into life’s biggest questions and sharing the Torah’s transformational wisdom with adults and young adults, while exploring the most difficult questions that people have about God’s existence and their own.
As a child of a Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Aaron struggled to erase his childhood image of God as a punishing old man in the clouds, waiting for us to fail.
Learning with Rabbi Aaron is both profoundly moving and entertaining. People at every level of spiritual knowledge enjoy the adventure of peeking around the corners of mystical ideas. Finding answers to our big questions begins a process that is life–changing.
Beneath Rabbi Aaron’s light-hearted playfulness is a mature, sophisticated, and holistic understanding of Torah, well-grounded in classic and Chassidic sources.
Rabbi Aaron received his rabbinic ordination from Yeshivat ITRI. He is the Dean and Founder of Isralight. He runs Jewish educational programs in Israel and abroad, and has developed educational curricula for Jewish high schools.
Rabbi Aaron is the author of eight paradigm-shifting books, including Endless Light; Seeing G-d; Love is My Religion; The Secret Life of G-d; Inviting G-d In; Living a Joyous Life; and The God Powered Life, many of which have been translated into other languages. Rabbi Aaron lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Chana, and their seven children and grandchildren.
Is God Good?
RABBI DAVID AARON
People often ask, “How do you know that God is good, maybe God is also bad?” This question is based on a false premise. The people who ask it assume that God is a particular being, perhaps even an infinite/eternal being, who is out there somewhere in heaven. Based on this assumption, they struggle to understand whether this being has only good attributes and does only good, since they see so much bad in the world. But the sages teach that God is not a being who has good attributes, God is those good attributes and is infinitely more than those attributes. If God had attributes, that would mean that God was not absolutely one, but a composite of multiple parts, and that is not true. The best way we can put it is that God is not good, rather good is what we call God. The word God is probably the derivative of the word “good” and that’s because “God” is the personification of all good. So, when we say God, we mean the absolute good.
The sages teach us that “God” created and runs the world, which is synonymous with saying that “Good” created and runs the world. In other words, Good Almighty is our Creator and guide. Good loves us, Good speaks to us, and Good also judges us. And when Good does, it is always and only for our own good. In fact, everything that happens to us comes from Good and is always and only for our own good.
Believing in God means believing in Good. Acknowledging God as the King of the Universe means pledging allegiance to the supreme and exclusive rule of Good. Praising God means praising Good; it means asserting that there is nothing we value and admire more than the Supreme Good. Loving God means loving Good. Fearing God means fearing that we might betray our love of Good or lapse in our devotion to Good; it means fearing that our behavior might block the manifest presence of Good in our lives. Serving God means serving Good by being a channel for Good in the world. Praying to God means asking God, the Supreme Good, to guide us in living a good life – by seeing good and doing good – as well as asking Good to instruct us how to help others in a good way.
In other words, when we speak of God, we are referring to the personification of the all good. The Supreme Good is our God. Thank God. Thank goodness.