What indeed? One possibility is that the words ‘the problem of the hiddenness of God’ are simply another name for the problem of evil: The world is full of terrible things and we observe no response from God when these terrible things happen – the heavens do not rain fire on the Nazis, the raging flood does not turn aside just before it sweeps away the peaceful village, the paralyzed child remains paralyzed. And in the works of some writers, it is hard to separate the problem of divine hiddenness and the problem of evil. But if the problem of divine hiddenness just is the problem of evil – well, there already exist many discussions of this problem, and I do not propose to add to their number in this essay.

I think, however, that the problem of Divine hiddenness (whatever exactly it may be) is not the same problem as the problem of evil, for we can imagine a world in which the problem of divine hiddenness pretty clearly does not arise and in which the problem of evil is no less a problem than it is in the actual world. Imagine, for example, that to every Jew who was to perish in the Holocaust there had come, a few weeks before his or her death, a vision of a seraph, a being of unutterable splendor, who recited Psalm 91 in Hebrew – and then vanished. The doomed recipients of these visions, comparing notes, found that the visions were remarkably consistent. Learned Jews understood the seraph's words perfectly.