Ain od Milvado - Peter Himmelmans Morning Musings
Someone once asked me how I could have faith in God when we live in a world as frightening and uncertain as ours is—a world where evil shows its face every day. It’s both a good question and an impossible one to answer.
By way of providing an admittedly incomplete answer, I cited a short but crucial Hebrew phrase that observant Jews say when the Torah is removed from the ark during festivals and Sabbath services. In transliterated form, the phrase is written as Ain od milvado, which literally means “There is none but Him.” Its simplest interpretation is that there is only one God—as opposed to two gods or twenty gods. But it also has a deeper meaning: there is no conceivable—or inconceivable—thing, entity, or truth other than God.
Moses Maimonides—physician, philosopher, and arguably the greatest and most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages—explained the omniscience of God this way: God is the knower (the subject who knows), the known (the object of knowledge), and the knowledge (God knows all by knowing Himself). God’s existence, for lack of a better term, is a oneness that is comprehensive, entirely unique, utterly inexplicable, and empirically unprovable. God’s unity is so complete that it precludes the existence of all else. In a poetical sense, the phrase also implies that God alone is truly alone.
Here’s one more way of looking at it: at this very moment, God in some sense, is responsible for my fingers tapping out these sentences on the keyboard of my computer, for each of the raindrops falling on the rooftops outside my window, and for every feather of every pigeon seeking shelter under the eaves.
According to the logic of Ain od milvado, there can be no separate force of evil in the world. So it follows that there could be no such thing as the devil—or at least there couldn’t be a force working independently of God. The dilemma is stark: assuming one believes that there is nothing other than God, logic dictates that there can be no force or power besides God. But how can an all-perfect God permit evil? How to explain the Holocaust or the death of a single child?
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