I know I'm going to hate Simchat Torah this year, maybe even more than last year.
Simchat Torah, ostensibly the happiest day of the Jewish calendar, will never be the same. I remember last year going to the massive dancing at 770 Eastern Parkway, World Chabad Headquarters, and being sickened by what I saw. There were thousands of young rabbinical students dancing as if 1200 Jews had not been massacred just hours earlier.
To be fair, the reports at the time were incomplete.
But I had heard it all in a series of nonstop WhatsApp messages from my daughter, who was in Ashkelon with her husband, being bombarded by missiles, and from my son Mendy, who left shul to get to his army unit. He has been in multiple theaters of war ever since.
Simchat Torah became not a celebration but an abomination. We were taking swigs of whisky while hundreds of Jewish women were being gang-raped, babies burned, and soldiers and civilians decapitated.
But while we mortal humans can be forgiven for our ignorance, God cannot be forgiven for His.
What was God doing as the residents of Beeri were being BBQ'd alive? Why was the Almighty passive as Shani Louk was paraded unconscious and naked — and then decapitated?
Questioning divine justice
Last January, I flew Shani's parents, Ricarda and Nissim, to New York to dedicate a Torah to my mother on her first yahrtzeit and to Shani.
Shani deserves the Torah dedicated to her memory, But does God deserve it? Doesn't the Torah say, "Do not murder," and why does God not feel constrained to abide by his own Commandments?
Four young Golani soldiers were just slaughtered while having dinner two days ago at their base in Binyamina. Is the celestial thirst for Jewish blood insatiable? Can it not be quenched after 2000 years of being spilled?
Every morning I awaken rush to read the news in Israel. I will not reveal where my two IDF soldier sons are serving. But I read and tremble. What I'm really looking for is to see whether any soldiers died during the night, God forbid. How in God's name are parents supposed to live like this? Honestly, I'm losing my mind.
I keep all of the commandments of the Torah, but these days, I put on my Tefillin and Tzitzis and keep Shabbos not so much to observe God's commandments as much as to shame Him into keeping the same.
I go to the news sites not as a father but as a Jew. Not as a parent of a soldier who may have been harmed God forbid by as a member of an eternal nation who has a covenant with a God that we have always kept, even while being tortured and killed for it, and which He seems to have abrogated.
Inevitably, I read that one, two, three, or four, or sometimes 14 soldiers have died in the night. I get sick to my stomach, my day is ruined, my mental health shot, my nerves racked. Then, I put on my Tefillin for the morning prayers.
Does a God who watches so much Jewish suffering for so many millennia and is seemingly passive deserve to be praised?
What was He thinking when he implanted a seemingly mystical and irrational hatred of the Jews in the breasts of billions of non-Jews?
Oh yes, the faithful will say. Look, we're still here. We have survived as a nation. Doesn't that prove what the Passover Haggadah says, "In every generation, our enemies seek to annihilate us? But the Almighty saves us from their hands." The six million might have something to say about that, not to mention the victims of the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Khmelnytskyi pogroms, destruction of the First and Second Temples, and on and on.
Losing half your number every two hundred or so years hardly counts as survival.
But aside from that, is this some kind of sick game that God is playing with us? "In every generation, they seek to annihilate us … but God saves us." Why does He let them seek to kill us in the first place? Does he let the Swedes face imminent annihilation only to rescue them? Do the Australians, the Thai, or the French face the same fate? So why are we thanking God for saving us from extermination when it seems that He made it our fate to forever vacillate between certain impending destruction and last-minute redemption? This yo-yo existence is a recipe for Jewish mental calamity.
God is supposed to be our protector. When tragedy strikes, our first impulse is often to defend God rather than rail and thunder against the injustice of it all.
But God's first role is not supposed to be our consoler-in-chief. Rather, He's supposed to be our guardian-in-chief. Isn't that what "Our Father who art in Heaven" means? Doesn't a father protect his children from death rather than comfort the survivors after the loss of half his family? If God could split the Red Sea, then He could have had one Hamas snitch tell Mossad that 3,000 animals were about to cross over from Gaza and mow down hundreds of innocent Jews on October 7th with machine guns whose only crime was to dance at a rave, hurting no one. And if he could revive the dead with Elisha, then He could preserve the life of the children in Beeri whose blood I personally saw congealed over the walls and floors of their destroyed homes.
Why God is silent and seemingly absent in the face of so much suffering is the real question of October 7th. And it's a question that should perplex us as we down single malt whisky to numb our senses and gain some perverse sense of joy this coming Simchat Torah. The victim's only crime was to be born a Jew. Does God not promise to protect the innocent? "The Lord will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul" (Psalm 121).
The babies who were murdered were so sweet and innocent. Does God not promise to guard the defenseless? "The Lord is the keeper of little ones: I was humbled, and he delivered me" (Psalm 116:6).
Judaism gave rise to the defiant man of faith, the man or woman who, like our patriarch Jacob, fights with angels and celestial beings and defeats them. In fact, that is the exact definition of the word Israel: he who fights God and is victorious. A Jew is a child of Abraham, who went so far as to accuse God of injustice when the Almighty sought the destruction of both the righteous and the wicked in Sodom and Gomorrah. We, Jews, are disciples of Moses, who thundered to God that he wished his name be taken out of God's holy Torah if the Creator would proceed with His stated intention of wiping out the Jewish nation after the sin of the Golden Calf. Like King David, who declares in Psalms, "I shall not die for I shall live," the Jewish nation has achieved immortality through an impudent insubordination in the face of historical inevitability, daring to defy fate, forge an audacious destiny and challenge God in the face of seeming divine miscarriages of justice.
Our role in life should not be to offer empty platitudes about how innocent children are in heaven and how they are better off. God, if that isn't the stupidest, most insensitive thing I've ever heard. A child's place is not at God's footstool in heaven but being tucked into an earthly bed by his or her parents after a scrumptious family dinner.
We have a right to demand from God that He abide by the same values and rules that He commanded us to uphold.
Challenging God in the face of suffering is not blasphemous. Rather, it is the ultimate sign of faith. It means we believe that God controls the world, human fate, and destiny, and He has unlimited power to make the world a happier place.
So many of us are searching for a reason why people suffer. We want to redeem tragedy by giving it meaning. Suffering ennobles the spirit, we say. It makes us more mature. It helps us focus on what's important in life.
Actually, suffering has few redeeming qualities, and any attempts to infuse it with rich significance are deeply misguided. Suffering destroys our optimism and mangles our character. The more we explain suffering, the more sanctuary we grant it in our lives.
Now that we Jews have repented of our smaller sins - theft, gossip, even adultery - on Yom Kippur, it is time for God to repent of his enormous sins, like allowing mass rape and murder on what was once Judaism's most joyous day.