The Angry God

I’m teaching a course about Israel and the world, especially the communities that make up the Diaspora. That’s not a word I especially treasure. It carries with it an undercurrent of negativism that does not match my feelings about my homeland. If exile means lunch at Utica Square, I don’t consider that a disabling experience. I like the onion strings on the menu at Wild Fork. If that’s the nature of exile, I’d call myself agnostic.

But I can’t deny that the Torah feels differently. The locus classicus for a statement about exile is the very last part of Deuteronomy 28. It’s the part of Deuteronomy we’ve just read in the Synagogue. After a very long catalog of punishments for disobedience, the Torah caps its litany with the threat of displacement. If the Israelites persist in angering their God, Adonai will uproot them from the Promised Land and disperse them among the nations of the world. Not only that, but he will plague them with harm, and haunt their dreams with terror and anxiety. At night they will wish for dawn to break. By day, they will long for the quiet of the night.

My fellow learners reacted strongly to this material. Like me, they treasure their lives in this country. Nothing is perfect (Sauron and Voldemort especially), but they do not experience “exile” as exile. Instead it’s a matter of geographic happenstance. I carefully explained that the Torah is not unitary. In the weeks ahead, we will look at old sources that do not see exile as exile at all, but a place of possibility where God may be found.

Their other concern was far more significant: what’s the deal with the God of Deuteronomy? The anger of the text set their teeth on edge. Why is this God so terrifyingly punitive? Will he really bring on a famine so catsstrophic that we will be forced to devour our infants and their afterbirth? And if our God behaves that way, why in the world should we bother to worship Him? That might be the essential question of the High Holidays.

The answer, or course, is in the nature of our Judaism. For those of us educated in the modern world, Judaism is an evolving civilization. We should expect that the most ancient sources of our religion will bear the imprint of the world that produced them. The gods of Olympus are brutal and capricious. The same with the deities of Mesopotamia. It would be odd if our first covenant with Adonai did not manifest some of the very same qualities.

But we are not held prisoner by the literature of antiquity. The God of the rabbis who inherited the Torah is a different God, gentle and forgiving. They imagine a God who does not punish eternally, but rewards the righteous with everlasting life. Their prooftexts lie in the Torah itself, which they turn inside out to yield new propositions.

And one of those prooftexts is Deuteronomy 28. The next time you hold that book in your hand, take a look at the last verse in the chapter. Within the framework of Biblical religion there are two separate covenants that succeed one another. The first was at Sinai, the second in Moab. I’m willing to say that we are living in the third, and that it continues to shape our lives in Tulsa and elsewhere.

The God of that covenant loves me deeply, and would not ever require that I devour my young. Just the opposite: Isaac lives. He was never sacrificed at the summit of Moriah. Some things about the Torah never change.