If You Were G-D

This book is written in beautiful Aryeh Kaplan's style, simple and deeply profound, that makes it possible to be read with fascination by high-grader and religious scholar alike. Like all Aryeh Kaplan's books it's written with deep love to Creator and to our world. Book is touching on mysteries with a touch of light that makes it essential reading for both, a layman in religion and Kabbalah, and for a spiritually advanced. If you really want to understand the ABC of the spiritual Judaism and Kabbalah, this 'little book' is a must read.

Aryeh Kaplan was a great expositor and defender of Judaism. Here he takes on the hardest problem of all, the injustices and cruelties of a world made by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent G-d. He tells the reader to imagine themselves building an ideal society and imagine how they would run it. All this as a way of making one central argument i.e. that had G-d run the world down to the last detail there would be no human freedom. And that therefore G'd-s hiding His Power is the very basis of the world we have. For only if there is a hidden God can man have the freedom to act. Kaplan indicates that it is through the free decisions of Mankind that it comes to such suffering and cruelty. Kaplan in the end gives the example of the holy Klausenberger Rebbe who lost his whole family in the Shoah, but afterwards remarried, founded a Hasidic sect and moved it to Israel. He points to the Klausenberger's unwavering faith through the greatest of horrors. The more detailed defense and explanation are given in Kaplan's volume.