Overdrafts. Summer electric bills. Computer crashes. Rained-out ball games. Junk mail. Bear markets. Bureaucracy. These are the problems that ruin our days, sour our moods, and raise our blood pressure.

But Job had it worse. He lost his wealth, his children were massacred, and he was afflicted with painful lesions covering his entire body. All this despite a level of righteousness that distinguished him above every other person on earth. He had good reason to be bitter.

Job’s friends tried to convince him that the resentment he felt toward the Almighty was misplaced. Since you are suffering, you must not be so righteous, one suggested. Since you are so righteous, you must not really be suffering, posited a second. Since you are righteous and you are suffering, there must be no connection between the two, observed a third. Job brushed their suggestions away like the worthless platitudes they were.

The conclusion reached by Job was more subtle and sophisticated. He could not bring himself to believe that G-d was evil. Neither could he accept that G-d was absent from the world, or ignorant of any event that transpired in the world He created. Job concluded, therefore, that G-d must not be in control, that although in general there is a correlation between good deeds and reward, an individual may occasionally get caught in the gears and cogs of history and be chewed up through no fault of his own.

The climax of the Book of Job arrives with G-d’s revelation to Job, a monologue that language guru William Safire calls the greatest speech of all time. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” the Almighty asks the humbled Job. “Have you contemplated as far as the wide expanses of the world? Tell, if you understand it all!”

G-d’s speech goes on at great length, all to make one fundamental point: You never doubted Me, the Almighty says to Job, even though you do not understand the design of the heavens or the structure of the earth; you never cried out against Me, even though the cycle of the seasons and the miracles of birth and old age remain mysteries to you; and since there is so much you admit that you do not understand, through what arrogance do you insist that every facet of your own fate be comprehensible to you?

Job renounces his questioning of G-d immediately. What’s striking, however, is that G-d never explains to Job the reason for his own suffering. Still, Job finally recognizes that G-d does not need to explain Himself, that He has demonstrated His own wisdom through the miraculous complexity of all creation, and this by itself assures us that all His acts are right and just.

In attempting to understand the world around us, we have much more to work with than Job did. We have our heritage and our tradition, which answer many of the questions that Job struggled to understand. We know, for instance, that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they caused good and evil to become almost inextricably woven together so that, as their descendants, we face suffering and moral ambiguity every day of our lives.

We know, too, that the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed because the Jewish people refused to act civilly toward one another, because they were more concerned with winning arguments and debates than doing what was best for their community, and because they sought the most minimalistic observance of the law, rather than laboring to understand and uphold the law according to its full spirit.

Finally, we know that the ninth day of the month of Av was chosen as a day of Jewish tragedy because on that day the Jewish people refused to enter their land, demon-strating a disregard both for their responsibilities as a nation and for the inestimable privilege of living as a model of morality and virtue to the rest of the world.

And so we live in a world where reward and punishment appear random, as random as our loyalty to one another and to the ideals that define who we are. And so too we may look forward to the time when all human suffering is nothing but a distant memory, on the day that we set aside our selfishness and our petty squabbles and learn to walk in the ways of righteousness together.