Why does God let us suffer...

There was a sort of "heated" class discussion in World Religions today. It started off being about the Jews and the Holocaust and then turned into why they were made to suffer and God didn't intervene, even though he could've. So I present the question: If God is so benelovent and good, then why does he let so much suffering in the world happen and not intervene to stop it? Granted, we all have free will and are capable of great evil but there are things like hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami that leave us wondering what we did to deserve something like that. Yes, we are evil and deserve to be taught a lesson, but to what extent does the "teaching" have to reach? I totally agree with Deitrick's analogy of the father teaching the son that the stove is hot. Does the father let the son touch the stove for a split second, just enough to learn that the stove is hot? Or does the father grab his son's hand and shove it onto the heat coils until his son can smell the burning flesh, and go " there son, that oughta' teach you not to put your hand on the stove" whilst leaving his son with severe 3rd degree burns. This analogy, personally, is a good way of seeing this issue in a more personal light. We definitely wouldn't put our sons through that kind of torture just to tell him that the stove is hot would we? I mean, we aren't even perfectly good like God and yet we still wouldn't do such a thing. The same concept can be applied to intervening of the evil that happens in this world. A normal, good person would 98% most likely intervene a crime against a child. But then God, a perfect, holy, and all powerful being will not intervene when 6 million people are killed in the Holocaust? This all powerful God will not intervene when hundreds of thousands are killed in the great Tsunami in Asia? Of course I do believe in God and worship him, but I think no matter what religion you are, things like this are to be looked at subjectively in order to attain a higher understanding of the truth, not what's just told to us.