God’s Helplessness?

By JONATHAN WITTENBERG

The Eternal Journey
By Jonathan Wittenberg
270 pages. Aviv Press. $23.95.

The three weeks before the Ninth of Av are the most painful in the Jewish year, and the fast itself is Judaism’s most painful day. Here we re-encounter our worst tragedies, but we also encounter the courage and passion with which Judaism has kept faith with God.

Keeping faith in spite of tragedy means asking painful questions, both of ourselves and God. It means having the vision to see God differently and the humility to relinquish expectations. This is not to suggest that God becomes different. But the way we think about God does change, as our people attempts to understand the trials and terrors of history, and to make sense of what God did or did not do for us, and why. For we have both a need for faith and a need to try to explain, even if one or both appear impossible. It is the interaction between these two basic human requirements that is reflected in the history of Jewish theodicy, of how through the generations we have attempted to understand why God lets tragedies happen. Indeed, the very courage and creativity with which Judaism has grappled with these problems are powerful testaments both to its own tenacity, and to God.

Jeremiah’s contemporaries at the beginning of the sixth century B.C.E. expected God to protect the Temple. It was to them not only a bastion against national disaster but a stronghold of the divine. God was powerful and would not allow Jerusalem to be sacked. If God did, in their eyes it might mean God’s defeat, just as when a pagan temple was destroyed and the invaders replaced the statue of the local deity with one of their own divinity. God could not let the Temple fall, for God might then be gone forever. God, in the idiom of the twentieth century, would be dead.

When the First Temple was sacked, Jeremiah challenged that assumption and presented a different understanding of why God lets bad things happen. According to this view, rooted in the theology of the Torah but expressed most poignantly in writings attributed to Jeremiah, God is not bound to buildings or even to countries. In our relationship with God, geography comes second to morality. God’s protection of the people in the Land of Israel is contingent on their conduct, and even God’s forgiveness has limits if we persistently and repeatedly ignore what God requires of us. Thus Jerusalem falls because its citizens are unworthy and the destruction of the Temple has to be understood not as God’s fault but as our own. Jeremiah thus popularizes a theology which we echo to this day when we say in the additional prayers on festivals, “On account of our sins have we become exiled.”³


When the Second Temple fell some six hundred and fifty years later in 70 C.E., the theology of “mipnei h.ato’einu — on account of our sins,” was not superseded. Indeed, in placing the cause for disaster in the human, rather than the divine, sphere, the “for our sins” theology proved to be spiritually empowering. It engendered soul-searching, repentance, and a commitment to responsibility. The Rabbis of the time blamed themselves and the society in which they lived for what had happened. They taught that Jerusalem fell because of sinat h.inam, groundless hatred.

Yet, as the persecutions continued through the subsequent generations, culminating in the ruthless crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 c.e., a new note of challenge entered the discourse about God. No longer was it only the idolatrous enemies who said, “Where is their God?” God’s silence prompted questions closer to home. Self-blame could not explain either the cruelty of the enemy or the suffering entailed by the “punishment”:

In the school of R. Ishmael it was taught: [Read not] “Who is like thee among the gods [’elim]?” [but], “Who is like thee among the dumb [’ilmim]?”⁴

God was experienced not as powerful, but as silent. Behind the anguish in this subversion lay a shrewd, if painful, reasoning: God’s might lay in the divine self-restraint, which enabled God to watch the Romans triumph and keep silent⁵ God’s power was expressed precisely in the painful policy of non-intervention, which allowed human beings to do both their best — and their worst. Here we anticipate Rabbi Hugo Gryn’s penetrating observation that the question is not, “Where was God?” but, “Where was man?”

During the same period, there were dramatic new developments in Jewish thought. Indeed this is the time when the foundations of rabbinic Judaism were established as we know it today. There is a deep and thorough dem­o­cratization in the approach to God. God is present wherever the sacred community establishes the framework of Jewish life and observance. Where the congregation prays, there God is. Where a group, where a single person, studies Torah sincerely, there the Divine Presence rests. “I am with him in trouble,” says the psalmist (Ps. 91:15); where there is suffering, there the All-Present One dwells. Where we go, God’s abiding presence, the Shekhinah, goes too. God, in other words, is to be thought of less as the cause of our tribulations than as the comforter when they happen. God, furthermore, suffers with us, weeping at the effects of a history in which even the Divine is vulnerable, a victim like ourselves. Hence the story of Rabbi Yossi, who enters a ruined building and hears a voice moaning like a dove. When he emerges Elijah tells him that every day this voice can be heard saying, “Alas for the father who has exiled his children and alas for the children exiled from their father’s table.”⁶

The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 had a cataclysmic influence on the whole house of Israel. Where was God now, when his people were scattered across the wide seas? Isaac Luria, who died in Safed in the middle of the sixteenth century, taught in his immensely influential interpretation of Kabbalah that God could be seen as somehow scattered, too. There had been a disaster in the very process of creation, as a result of which sparks of divinity were flung far and wide, and lay lost and concealed in every husk and kernel of creation. The spiritual task of each human being was to remove the material garb in which they were hidden and uncover their illumination. Only then could they be reconnected to the source of all light.

Surely one can glimpse in these scattered sparks of God an image of the dispersed and wandering families of Jews, seeking to be reunited with their people. In a haunting poem, Yehudah Halevi compares the lamps of the hapless refugees with the reflected lights of the night sky in the dark ocean:

And the stars will be bewildered in the heart of the seas
Like exiles driven from their own homes.⁷

God, too, was seen to be driven from home, little flames of the divine floating on the waves and waiting to be rescued.

To our generation, the Shoah brings the question, “Where is God?” with renewed force. What shall we say about God’s justice now? God is not dead, as those who testify to God’s presence even in the death camps surely assert. But what kind of god is God? Can we change our expectations once again and still retain the sense of a transcendent being of whose power it is meaningful to speak, who is still “mighty to save”?

As after other disasters, there is, and will continue to be, a theological reaction. We stand too near in time to perceive the general trends of a new response, but it is likely that we will find fresh ways of reaffirming our faith, according to our own experience and in our own idiom. This is surely part of our national recovery, of our reaffirmation of spiritual creativity, in spite of everything. Why should our enemies take this from us? After all, we never allowed them to do so in the past.

One of the ways in which we will reaffirm our faith may be through valuing the stirring literature of personal testament that has come into our hands and which is still in the process of being recorded. Perhaps we can find God in a new way through the experiences of each “ordinary” individual — as “ordinary,” that is, as each and every unique human being. Consider, for example, this extract for July 1942 from the diary of Etty Hillesum as she faced the prospect of deportation from her beloved Amsterdam:

I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there ­doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.⁸

On the day we mourn the destruction of the Temple, we should consider that every single life is God’s sacred Temple and that God’s power in this world lies substantially in what each of us chooses to do with that part of the spirit which is delegated to us.

Footnotes
3 Liturgy, Musaf for h.agim.
4 B. Gittin 56b.
5 B. Yoma 69b.
6 Berakhot 3a.
7 Yehudah Halevi, The Jewish Poets of Spain, 900–1250, trans. David
Goldstein (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 136.
8 Etty Hillesum, Etty, A Diary, 1941–1943, trans. A.J. Pomerans (London: Cape, 1983), p. 197.

Excerpted from THE ETERNAL JOURNEY by Jonathan Wittenberg. Copyright 2004. Published by Aviv Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.