By Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman,
author and speaker on Jewish ritual, prayer, and spirituality, is a professor of liturgy at the Hebrew Union College in Manhattan.

Sometimes prayers stick in our throats. I think particularly of the words that accompany k’riya, the act of tearing a garment when a loved one dies: “Baruch dayan ha’emet,” we say, “Blessed is the judge of truth” — the idea being that even death makes moral sense from the perspective of an altogether righteous God who justly decrees it. We say this easily for someone who dies in ripe old age, but what about a child cut off by accident or disease?

The idea goes back to the Mishna’s instruction to praise God for bad, not just for good. That rule was a polemic against dualists who solved the problem of evil by positing two deities, a good one who supplies us with blessings and an evil one who rains tragedy upon us. The Jewish commitment to monotheism forced the rabbis to maintain (hard as it may be to understand) that one single God is somehow behind everything we experience, even the indescribably horrible.

So the idea of blessing God in moments of trauma is old.

But the specific wording “Baruch dayan ha’emet” is not. It is mentioned by 13th-century Jacob ben Asher in connection with our parsha’s description of God as “the Rock whose work is perfect; all his ways are just.” That very verse, which introduces the core of our funeral service, is called tziduk hadin, which translates roughly as “justifying God’s decision to bring about someone’s death.” Following the Mishna, we say a blessing when someone dies, and following the view of God as a “Rock whose work is perfect; all his ways are just,” we make that blessing Baruch dayan ha’emet.

We are not the first generation to shudder at the death of innocents. Our earthly life, says the Mishna, is a mere antechamber to the world to come. So Rashi glosses our verse by explaining that God does reward the righteous — but only in that future world, not in the pitifully unimportant world of the here and now, where, indeed, they may suffer. Similarly, evildoers may find pleasure in this world, but will be punished in the hereafter. Given this perception, we can indeed praise God as “a Judge of truth,” even at the death of infants, who (we may imagine) arrive at their ultimate world of reward sooner than the rest of us.

Still, when I try to say Baruch dayan ha’emet for victims, say, of Hurricane Katrina, or innocents mangled to death by terrorist bombs, the words ring hollow. Yet I do want to say a blessing at such times, just as the Mishna instructs. So I wonder if I can say something else. Baruch dayan ha’emet, after all, is just a relatively late custom of medieval people who had no doubt about a world to come so could welcome even a child’s death as a shortcut to inheriting the future (and only) world that matters.

I like substituting the words of our verse itself, “Baruch hatsur tamim po’alo,” “Blessed is the Rock whose work is perfect.” We need to explain how God’s work (when some people die young) can be perfect and why “Rock” is a better image of God than “Judge.”

God’s work is perfect, says our verse, because kol d’rachav mishpat, “All his ways are just.” But that can be read more literally, as, “taken as a whole [kol], his ways are just.” God’s perfection is evident only in the “allness” (the kol) of creation, with its unfailingly perfect pattern of life and death, growth and decay, interdependence of life forms, and evolution toward ever higher levels of existence.

As to “Judge” (dayan), I have trouble imagining God as a micromanaging deity who oversees each and every life like a global puppeteer pulling strings in a cosmic “Punch and Judy” show. By contrast, I welcome the image of God as a “Rock” to whom we cling when we are desperate. Ibn Ezra thinks of a rock we hold onto in a storm.

Perfect justice describes God as a Judge who set the rules for the universe as a whole but does not micromanage detail. As a Rock, however, God visits merciful support on each and every life within that whole. When we fall victim to universal laws that God the Judge cannot change, God the Rock suffers with us, sobbing through misery we share.

We are made like God. It would be nice to fly through the world like Superman, righting injustices everywhere but, like God, we are restrained by universal laws. Still, we can comfort those we cannot save, holding hands with them in their pain.

The secret of life is this: to look for God as a Rock, not a Judge, and then to emulate God as rocks, not judges, in other people’s struggles.