I received the following query about God in a letter last week:
“Our family made aliyah several years ago. We religiously follow your columns in The Jerusalem Post, and I am reaching out to you now. Several of my children were called to military service after October 7; one of them has been in Gaza for over seven weeks. I am not functioning well, and I am getting therapy to try and help me. Since the war started, I have not been able to set foot in shul or talk with God. I ask, ‘How can our God allow this on His holy land? Is God punishing us for something terrible that we did?’
“I know you lost your son Ari in battle, and I am seeking your advice. How do you continue to live and keep your faith? I am paralyzed with fear, and I have already given up on much of my own faith. If something should happen to my kids, I don’t know how I could keep on living. I hope you can share with me how I might be able to keep going on with life.”
AS THE death toll mounts, more of us – across the religious spectrum – are asking these same questions, in one form or another. We want to believe that life is not haphazard or random, and that God is watching over us and guarding us. We want to believe that God is indeed an all-powerful, “good” God, who rewards moral behavior and punishes the wicked. Can we somehow reconcile these beliefs with the terrible onslaught on our nation by a thoroughly evil menace, one that daily robs us of heroic angels in green who offer their beautiful lives in our defense?
Let me begin by declaring that I do not have the answer to these questions; in truth, no mortal does – and those who pretend to be prophetic or all-knowing are the last ones I would trust. If I could provide a definitive response, then I would be sitting up there, and He would be sitting down here.
This age-old quandary has frustrated the greatest minds of our history, who have failed to come up with an answer that is completely satisfying. Indeed, the bottom line may well be the statement by Rabbi Yanai in Ethics of the Fathers (4:19): “It is not in our [mortal] hands to fathom either the serenity of the wicked or the suffering of the righteous.”
Yet, having said that, I do have some reactions to this plea for spiritual clarity.
First, I believe that we have the right – if not the obligation – to share our feelings, and even our complaints, with the Almighty.
Abraham did it when he questioned the divine decision to destroy Sodom, and God responded at length to Abraham’s plea.
Moses did it as well, when, after witnessing Egypt’s brutal enslavement of the Israelites, he beseeched God to “show me Your glory,” a “code word” for Moses’ desire to know if there is indeed justice in the universe, and if so, how does that work. Several of the prophets, as well, challenged God to make His ways clear and understood. In his very first prophecy, the prophet Habakkuk says:
“How long, oh God, will I cry out, and You will not hear?! How long will I scream to You about the violence [hamas in Hebrew] and You will not save?”(Habakkuk 1:1).
In responding to the question as to why the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel were initially unable to have children, the midrash answers succinctly: “God desires the prayers and the conversations of the righteous.” In other words, crisis and calamity are often the most effective prods for pushing us to have a conversation with God and expressing our deepest feelings.
Some would approach this issue by focusing on the actions of the perpetrators who carried out the massacre and who instilled and incited a violent hatred of Jews in their population. They might also cast some of the blame on our own officers and officials, who were derelict in their duty to prepare the defenses and protect the borders.
After all, human beings are endowed with freedom of choice, are they not? And when those choices turn out to be disastrous, there is a heavy price to pay. But while we are indeed meant to be responsible partners with God and act in tandem to create a sane and civil world, it would be wrong – and ultimately, unsatisfying – to hold man completely accountable for times of tragedy and remove God totally from the equation. An indifferent or incapable god creates more problems than he solves, for who would worship a “semi-powerful” deity? The point of friction between our own ability to wreak havoc, and God’s intervention to control the situation, is among the most inexplicable of puzzles.
I suggest that perhaps we may be looking in the wrong direction and asking the wrong questions.
Instead of focusing solely on the crisis at hand, we might want to back away for a moment and see the bigger picture. Along with asking “How will we survive this challenge?” we should ask “How did we survive all the other challenges we experienced until now?” Our very existence goes against every logical, rational theory of history. How could we possibly have endured the hostility of the mightiest empires of the ages and outlasted them? How could we, a mild-mannered, army-less population of students and scholars, have faced the most brutal conquerors determined to destroy us, and frustrated their efforts time and again? How did we emerge from the ashes of time and renew ourselves in our own land?
Is the answer not, in a word, “God”? Yes, we experienced horrific suffering along the way – we said Kaddish as often as we said Kiddush – but, as the partisans of the Shoah triumphantly sang, “We are here!”
IN LAST week’s Torah reading, Jacob and his long-lost son Joseph are finally reunited. In their emotional first meeting, they embraced each other. The Torah records that Joseph, as we would expect, cried his eyes out. But Jacob did not. What was he doing, instead? Say the rabbis, “he was reciting the Shema,” the prayer that declares the oneness of God. Why would he do such a strange thing?
I suggest that when his beloved child was taken away from him, Jacob became angry with God – so angry that for more than two decades he could not communicate with the Almighty. “How could God do this to me?” Jacob lamented. He reasoned that there must be two Gods – one benevolent, one cruel.
But when Joseph was returned to him, Jacob understood that there is only Hashem ehad, one God; the same God who exists in the times of our distress is the God who is with us in the times of our deliverance. God will not desert us so long as we do not desert God.
While we may be unsure as to why we have crises, we are certain that we will somehow overcome them.
Let us have faith that the one God who has saved us from every peril in the past will strengthen and support us now as we fight to rid Israel and the entire world of the evil we confront, and that we will emerge triumphant and together as one people.
The writer is director of the Jewish Outreach Center of Ra’anana. Write him at jocmtv@netvision.net.il