Should God Atone too?
We are approaching a period of atonement. And sometimes, I wonder who should be atoning.
Jeremy Rosen
I hope you don’t mind my fanciful thinking – in the pain we have experienced this past year. It may sound blasphemous. But perhaps God should be atoning ( metaphorically of course) as much as we atone to God for our shortcomings. The rabbis envisage God suffering with us in exile, even if exile is because of our inadequacies and limitations. And the Talmud has God praying to Himself that his quality of mercy should override that of justice. Yet if we think about it, it’s God (or as some might say the universe) who made us with all our faults and capacities for evil, just as much as for good. As the Talmud also says, humans were not created to be angels. The Torah was not given to ministering angels.
If you take the position that God controls everything on earth, every blade of grass, every action, then if we are suffering, what is God doing about it? Of course, however you understand the idea of God, one thing is certain that God is not a human being and therefore to ascribe human characteristics to God simply does not make sense. Even if we do it all the time. What God ( or the idea of God) does, is to present to us a template for living a good life within the context of a spiritual dimension as well as a physical one. When we look at the physical world, we see this constant turmoil and conflict between good and bad, and struggle to deal with it. But when we think of God in spiritual terms, we think of a relationship. Between us and life and a way of dealing with it. As best we can.
We know that life is going to bring us pain and, ultimately, death. That there will be happy and sad moments, good and bad, and we have to navigate these rapids while still preserving a sense of goodness. But it is hard when we seem destined to suffer out of all proportion to the rest of the world, time after time. Have we been chosen to suffer? And each time we think we may have transcended hatred; it comes back to bite us harder and harder? Can we, should we challenge God? After all the Biblical Book of Job is a critique of God and how God allows bad things to happen to good people.
There is a well-known story of The Court Assembled to Judge God in Auschwitz. A story attributed to several different sources and locations and maybe myths, but powerful, nevertheless. It was assembled to judge God for what was happening around them at that moment of humanity’s utter shame. They found God guilty for what was happening to the Jewish people. But having done that, they all got up and went to pray the afternoon prayer. And yes, unbelievably, some of them lived. We have seen how some people survived the Holocaust and abandoned Judaism and religion completely. While others became much more committed and thank God every day for their survival. Was it their faith, their physical natures, or just accident that enabled them to survive?
This time last year we had no idea what we were going to go through whether in Israel or the diaspora. When I think of all those mothers bereaved of sons, those who lost husbands, children now orphans, I can’t imagine the pain they’re going through. Somehow or other most of them will survive and of course they will need our help both financially and emotionally. We have carried on our lives, for better or for worse, as if nothing was going to change. Yet I certainly have not lived through a year as painful and sometimes depressing, not just because of the evil perpetrated and the loss of life, but because of the ongoing crescendo of hate from supposedly moral, educated people.
Yet I should not be surprised. Very little has changed over thousands of years either in terms of violence hatred, or our capacity for self-destruction. We should not be surprised with the fact that some 80 years after the Holocaust that rational hatred has returned. Yet we should be grateful for the fact that we have more tools to defend ourselves now than we ever did before.
I can derive both pain and comfort from the great Prophets. Consider the 1st chapter of the Book of Isaiah, how passionately he condemns the abuses of the kingdoms of Judea, politically, socially and religiously corrupt. He compares them to the men of Sodom and Gomorrah. Whether kings, priestly religious leadership, many of them were rotten to the core. As he predicted the awful collapse and destruction, at the hands first of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians. And yet within a chapter he is dreaming of a perfect world of justice, truth and beating swords into ploughshares with no more warfare. And comforting us with visions of a better world and a second chance. Or read the Book of Lamentations that Jeremiah is said to have composed after the hell of the Babylonian massacres and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The agony, the questions, how have we deserved this?
Israel in so many ways is reminiscent of both the first and the second Commonwealths. A conflict of opposing values and world views. Constant in-fighting. And at the same time an existential threat from the outside. I don’t think we can expect conversions to different ways of thinking in the contentious world in which we live. Left will not speak to Right. Marxists will not become capitalists ( until they grow older). Secular will not speak to religious. Religious will not speak to each other. Each one lives in a cultural and electronic bubble in which they reinforce their own preconceptions priorities and ambitions. We are living in a world without trust. We don’t trust governments; we don’t trust institutions. I have no idea where this is going to lead.
But the one thing I do know is that for all the crises before October the 7th and since, the one common and remarkable factor that binds us is a shared solidarity when the crisis strikes. That we can on occasion pull together . The root of this solidarity is loyalty to put it simply. Either you’re for our survival or you’re against us. That doesn’t mean to say that we can’t criticize that we can’t complain about corruption, dishonesty, failed policies, missed opportunities, wherever it comes from. It’s no different to a parent having a delinquent child and you try to change it. Yet in the end if you can’t, you have to be there in a supportive role and let that child make its own mistakes and hope that in the end something good will come out of it.
The world goes on according to its own system and rules, says the Talmud. But there is hope and faith. We have survived and will because however much we have failed, our traditions give us purpose, and a mission. We cannot speak for God. The idea of God is essentially the realization that there is some other force, energy or simply reason for what happens on earth and much is beyond ourselves.
God works as God works. What we know is that we must speak and atone for ourselves, and find solace where we can. Many of us will pray and hope with extra motivation and passion this year, to ourselves, and that the Almighty will be kinder in 5785.
Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.
