God for all seasons
Nitzavim Deuteronomy 29:9-30:20
Vayelech Deuteronomy 31:1-31:30
Some six weeks ago, while I was following the reading of the book of Eicha (Lamentations) on Tisha B’Av, I focused on its portrayal of God. I was particularly struck by these verses from chapter three, the theological heart of the book:
“Let us search and examine our ways and turn back to the Lord; let us lift up our hearts rather than our hands to God in heaven. We have transgressed and rebelled; You have not forgiven. You have clothed Yourself in anger and pursued us; You have slain without pity. You have screened Yourself off with a cloud, that no prayer may pass through. You have made us filth and refuse in the midst of the peoples.” (3:40-45)
I am quite familiar with harsh images of God in the Bible, but even I found these verses particularly shocking. And since I believe that all our images of God are products of human understanding and no human being knows what God is really like, I can only wonder what led our ancestors to conceive of God in such a stark way and marvel at the fact that our liturgical year takes us from Tisha B’Av to Selihot in a matter of weeks. What a theological leap that constitutes!
Eicha reads, “We have transgressed and rebelled; You have not forgiven!” Really? Then why, this Shabbat night, will we recite the Selihot prayers, which are all about God’s readiness to forgive? And why, over the next two weeks, will we be celebrating the festivals of forgiveness? What troubled me most about these verses is not the punitive portrayal of God, or that God had made Israel “filth and refuse.” I found the image of an unforgiving God much more troubling, theologically problematic, and out of synch with the rest of our tradition.
Why do we preach the power of repentance, and God’s readiness to accept our repentance, if when we do “search and examine our ways” and “lift up our hearts rather than our hands to God in heaven” — all of which we shall be doing these coming days — God does not forgive?
Quite coincidentally, one of the very few references to repentance in the Humash itself (in contrast to the books of the prophets, where such references are omnipresent) is in this week’s Torah portion. But here, repentance is possible only after punishment and as a result of punishment:
“When all of these things befall you…and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which the Lord your God has banished you, and you return to the Lord your God…and heed His command with all your heart and soul, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love.” (Devarim 30:1-3)
This is a slightly less austere image of God than the Eicha image, but it is hardly the image we take with us into this season of repentance. We don’t want to worship a God who will take us back “in love” only after we have been punished. We want the God of the prophets, for whom our repentance cancels the punishment. We want the God of Jonah, who forgives Nineveh as soon as the city repents, before the city was destroyed.
Even more, we want to worship a God who — in the striking words of the prophet in this week’s haftara — participates in Israel’s suffering (see Isaiah 63:8-10); who, in the midrashic extension of this notion, follows Israel into exile; and who, in an even later midrashic extension, suffers with Israel in the camps of the Holocaust.
On these Days of Awe, we want to worship a God who understands what it means to be a human being. Such a God is portrayed in fascinating detail by my teacher, Professor Yochanan Muffs, in his recently published The Personhood of God. It was Dr. Muffs who first drew my attention to what he calls “the true humanity” of God. “God could be worshipped by man since He was so much like him,” Muffs writes. This God who shares with us a rich emotional life, a fully developed personality, and an astonishing vulnerability is the God we can approach during the Selihot prayers and through the liturgy on the Days of Awe.
In retrospect, our ancestors appreciated that God was beyond the grasp of human understanding, but this never inhibited them from describing this God. On the contrary, it liberated them. They reveled in describing God in multiple and often contradictory ways, never worrying whether or not their descriptions were “true.” They were all true for different people at different times, just as they themselves were different people at different times.
It is precisely this treasury of divine images in our tradition that enables us to leave behind the God of Eicha and welcome the God of Selihot.
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