The first time I performed a funeral in America, I was twenty-five years old. A couple in their early fifties had finally had their first child. The baby was born prematurely and died two weeks later. At the cemetery I read, for the first time as a rabbi, the text of the Jewish response to the open grave. It reads as follows: “He is the Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice.”¹²

When I went home that day, the phrase resounded in my mind and troubled me deeply. What did that sentence mean? Was the Jewish response to quash the question? Did we not have the right before an open grave to shout that it is unfair that babies should die, that it should not be that way? Late that night I pored over the text, trying to understand its deepest, most hidden recesses. Does the text allow us an approach to God in moments of suffering, other than in mere affirmation of divine justice?

Let us re-approach this text, that declares that all God’s ways are justice. Is there a hidden echo in it, is there a deeper layer of meaning that can be uncovered by a closer reading?

Who is the speaker? The speaker is Moses, the context is Moses’ farewell oration to the Jewish people. In fact, this is not the first but the second time in the biblical text that Moses refers to “God’s ways.” The first time is when Moses stands before God after the sin of the golden calf, seeking atonement for the Jewish people. And God responds in the affirmative. God is willing to embrace his people once more, despite their deed. But for Moses this is not enough. Moses demands of God, in a cry which resounds throughout the centuries: “God, show me your ways.”¹³ 

What is Moses asking for? What does Moses want from God, above and beyond forgiveness for the Jewish people? With audacity and courage, the rabbis of the Talmud interpret the text: Moses says to God—“The righteous suffer, the wicked prosper.”¹⁴ God, your world is not fair. God, do you not know about the widows, do you not know about the orphans? Don’t you know about the wells of tears shed by your children every day?

To understand the drama, the impact and the theological force of the text, we need to step back and look at an earlier conversation that takes place between God and Moses at the burning bush, and at a later exchange which is intended to parallel it. There are two dimensions to these conversations which relate to our issue.

First. God says to Moses: I want you to take responsibility for the children of Israel. Initially Moses doesn’t even understand that he is talking to God. Then, realizing he is looking in the face of divine revelation, he hides his face, unable to look directly at the face of God. He also tries very hard to refuse God’s demand that he take responsibility for the Jewish people.¹⁵ Much later in Exodus, a second conversation, an intended literary return to the first, takes place. In the second conversation, both roles are reversed. This time, it is Moses who says to God: God, you take responsibility for the children of Israel. And God attempts to say no. But Moses insists. If you will not take responsibility, says Moses, erase me from your book. God responds by affirming his love and responsibility for the Jewish people.¹⁶

Second. In the course of this later interaction, Moses hears God say to him the following words: “Now, let go of me.” The rabbis seize on this peculiarity and ask: What does God mean, “Let go of me”? Was Moses holding on to God’s sleeve? Yes, respond the rabbis, Moses literally seizes the divine garment, looks at God “face to face”¹⁷ and demands an answer to his request to “show me your ways.” God, he demands, why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?¹⁸ 

Moses is a prophet, the ultimate prophet. Prophecy according to Maimonides is the ultimate level of human perfection.¹⁹ What the text in Exodus suggests is that Moses at this moment is at the apex of his prophecy. Moses has emerged. He is no longer the prophetic novice we meet at the beginning of the book. He is now at the height of his prophetic powers.²⁰ Accordingly, this moment is the zenith of attainable human spiritual enlightenment in the history of the world. In the language of the kabbalists, it is “the highest.” And at this moment what does Moses choose to do? Does he embrace God with clear theological proofs of divine perfection? Does he, in ecstasy, move to a higher level of meditation? No. At the highest level of human spirituality, Moses poses a question to God. And that question is understood by Jewish consciousness not as a movement away from God but as the quintessential movement towards God. The question becomes the embrace. The question itself, the challenge per se, becomes the most powerful expression of human, Jewish, spirituality.

Let us return to the text we recite before an open grave: “God’s ways are justice.”

On one level, Moses, parting with the Jewish people as they are about to enter Canaan without him, is affirming that God’s ways are just. His statement is an embrace of the divine, a nullification of the possibility of human understanding. On another level, there resonates challenge and question. Moses, again using the expression “God’s ways,” echoes his previous usage of the same word: “God, show me your ways”—God, I demand that you explain how your world operates. The dialectic unity of the embrace and the challenge generates the core harmony of the Jewish worldview and way of life.

We can now turn our attention to the other crucial term, “justice”—the term which the biblical narrative associates with Abraham, the first Jew. Indeed, Abraham is the first Jew, as God says, because “I know that Abraham represents the attribute of justice and that he will transmit justice to his children.”²¹ Yet where in the biblical text do we see Abraham associated with the attribute of justice? In only one place: Four verses later, God informs Abraham that he is going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorra.²² Abraham does not respond to this by affirming divine justice. Instead, Abraham stands at the potential open grave of thousands of people, albeit wicked people, and says to God: “Will you who are judge of the entire world not do justice?” Abraham challenges God. Abraham questions. Abraham is unable to see suffering and simply affirm divine justice. Abraham demands to understand, demands an answer to his question. Abraham becomes the first Jew because he embodies justice. He manifests justice by challenging God.

The Zohar suggests that Abraham had competition for the job of the first Jew from Noah. According to this tradition, when God stood poised to destroy the world, Noah responded by building an ark; God had commanded him to do it, but God was also waiting to hear Noah’s cry of protest.²³ God was waiting to hear Noah’s question, his challenge of the divine. God was waiting for Noah to oppose the divine because only when a human being opposes apparent injustice, whatever its source may be, even if its source be God, is he truly identifying with the divine. Noah is silent, compliant, obedient, and therefore fails to transmute himself into the person who would be the prototypical Jew. The prophet Isaiah, understanding and bearing witness to this moment, names the devastating flood “the waters of Noah.”²⁴ Noah is guilty. Noah is culpable, because Noah was silent.

Thus in Moses’ phrase, “[God] is the rock; his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice,” one finds both the embrace and the challenge. Not by accident was this phrase adopted by the Jewish community as the text recited before the open grave. It is in this moment that we embrace God, even as the deepest divinity in our human soul demands that we challenge and that we question. And it is this moment that defines the essence of the Jewish spirit.

And the theme of this passage is echoed in countless sources in the biblical texts. Jeremiah, Habakuk, Job, David, Malachi, Isaiah—all challenge, all question, all cry out against the injustice which seems to define the world in which we live.²⁵ All prophets live the dialectic of embrace and challenge. All return to God in question. All are hozrim bish’ela—those who return in question.