Parashat Shelah: Fighting the impulse to blame God
The impulse to punish God for the sufferings of human beings is an ancient one. After the dispiriting report of the spies, the Israelites contemplate stoning Aaron and Moses out of fury.
By DAVID WOLPEMICHELANGELO’S ‘Creation of Adam’ – God as pure thought or reason?(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The famed French writer Alexander Dumas, author of such classics as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo, tells what happened when, as a child, he lost his father:I remained thoughtful for a while. Though such a child, and unable to reason, I understood nonetheless that something final had happened in my life… I reached the small rooms where arms were kept; I took down a single-barreled gun which belonged to my father, and which had often been promised to me when I grew up. Then, armed with the gun, I went upstairs. On the first floor I saw my mother. She was coming out of the death chamber; she was in tears.“Where are you going?” she asked…“I’m going to the sky… don’t stop me.”“And what are you going to do in the sky, my poor child?”“I’m going to kill God, who killed father.”The impulse to punish God for the sufferings of human beings is an ancient one. After the dispiriting report of the spies, the Israelites contemplate stoning Aaron and Moses out of fury (Numbers 14:10). The verse continues, “When the glory of the Lord appeared in the Tent of Meeting.” In the Talmud (Sotah 35a) Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba says, “This teaches that they took stones and threw them at the sky as if to throw them at God.”Although the impulse of Dumas (and perhaps of the Israelites) seems childish, the idea of chutzpah k’lapei ma’alah (brazenness toward heaven) has strung itself throughout the Jewish tradition.In the time of the destruction and the exile, the Rabbis were not slow to accuse God of injustice. In this they followed biblical precedent. Not only did Abraham famously question God’s fairness: “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice? (Gen. 18:25)” but Moses and the prophets and the psalmist followed suit: “Why do You hide Your face, ignoring our affliction and distress? (Ps. 44:24).”The rabbis understood that the human expression of anguish may sound blasphemous, but it was part of the covenant: as God expresses dissatisfaction with the people, the people express dissatisfaction with God.
This brashness arises from the Jewish intimacy with God. Although transcendent and unknowable, God is also intimate. The Yiddish appellation Tattenu, literally “our daddy” is an indication of the closeness many Jews felt to the Kadosh Baruch Hu, the God who, as Buber put it, can never be expressed but only addressed. In the context of closeness, every emotion finds its place – even anger.Despite a long history of suffering, however, and for all the anguish that Jews have felt toward God, anger is far from the principal impulse. Indeed, there is a sort of reverse image midrash that teaches our tradition’s deepest dimension of Divine-human relationship. For it was not stones that were thrown toward heaven at a critical moment in history.“The Sages taught: When the Temple was destroyed for the first time, many groups of young priests gathered together with the Temple keys in their hands. And they ascended to the roof of the Sanctuary and said before God: Master of the Universe, since we did not merit to be faithful treasurers, and the Temple is being destroyed, let the Temple keys be handed to You. And they threw them upward, and a kind of palm of a hand emerged and received the keys from them.” (Ta’anit 29a)As my father observed to me about this midrash, the Priests did not throw the Torah toward the sky. The Torah we keep; we remain the custodians of the tradition. The keys to the Temple God holds until we are ready again. The keys are not thrown in anger; they are thrown with confidence in God’s safekeeping.The Priests do not blame God, but themselves. Despite some midrashim that ask how God could allow the destruction to happen, at this critical instant, they believe God will hold the keys until we are ready and worthy. At the most catastrophic moment in history what we threw toward heaven was not a reflection of anger or despair, but of trust.The writer is Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and author of David: The Divided Heart. On Twitter: @rabbiwolpe.
