There have always been “believing” Jews for whom the dialectic questional embrace is simply too difficult, and who prefer simple answers to traditional Jewish truths. The text they most often cite is Deuteronomy 31:17-18, where God says: “On that day my anger will burn against them, I will forsake them, I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured and many evils and troubles shall befall them.” This passage suggests to these religious theorists that suffering is necessarily a result of divine punishment of human misdeeds. And indeed, the text does suggest that there is a possibility of suffering in the world resulting from punishment.

Yet the passage in no way declares that all or even most human suffering can be explained as punishment: The key phrase is “I will hide my face from them.” Suffering ensues as a result of an eclipse of the divine presence. And God’s presence does become hidden in response to sin. But does this mean that the only reason for divine hiddenness is human sin?

Could it be that sometimes God’s face is eclipsed for reasons completely unrelated to sin? Could it be that God’s hiddenness is often not explainable in categories of sin and punishment?

King David, in fact, declares just such an understanding of divine hiddenness. In Psalms he clearly addresses the Deuteronomy text. David is describing the existential reality of the people to God: “You have given us like sheep to be eaten, you have sold your people for no great gain. You have not put high their prices. You make us a taunt for our neighbors, a scorn and derision to those around us. You make us a byword among the nations, a shaking of the head among the peoples. Their confusion is before me all the day, the shame of my face has covered me.” David is describing a reality in which the Jewish people suffer greatly. He then turns and says to God: God, I refuse to accept that our suffering is punishment for our sins, for God, we have not sinned: “Have we forgotten the name of our God or stretched our hands to a strange God? Had this been true would God not have searched us out? For does God not know the secrets of the heart? We have been killed for you, God, all through the day, we’ve been considered as sheep for the slaughter.”

David says to God: We are suffering, but we are innocent. Nothing we have done has earned the suffering. And David goes on to say: “Awake! Why do you sleep, God of Israel?” And finally, in the key phrase of the text he asks: “Why do you hide your face from us?”²⁶ The hiding of the face, says David, in a direct allusion to the Deuteronomy text,²⁷ is not a result of our sinfulness.

How does David know this? How can David reinterpret the simple meaning of the text in Deuteronomy? I believe the answer is simple. David knew his reality. David felt in the depth of his spiritual being that he had not sinned in a way to engender such torment, that the Jewish people are not culpable to the extent of their suffering. And therefore David, trusting his spiritual intuition, affirms the innocence of his people. David refuses to violate the integrity of his spiritual intuition with easy theodicies. Instead, David shakes God and screams out: “Awake God! How can you sleep when your people suffer?” Clearly, this understanding of Deuteronomy is not limited to David. All of the prophets who cry out for divine justice, who demand answers to questions, affirm the legitimacy of the question.

If in fact the Deuteronomy text meant to tell us that all suffering is punishment for sin, there would be no place for the prophetic outcry, the prophetic question. Clearly, the prophet assumes, as a function of his deepest understanding of his and his people’s spiritual reality, that suffering is often unrelated to punishment. And, therefore, the only human response to suffering is to cry out, to challenge God; and through the challenge to affirm the reality of God in the world.

 

All too often, in the public discourse of modern Israel, we hear of bus accidents in which children are killed being ascribed by religious figures to divine punishment. This cannot but lead people to reject, for in their deepest spiritual intuition they understand that twenty-eight children in Petah Tikva were not killed because God was punishing their parents for not keeping the Sabbath.

Unfortunately, this inability to trust intuitive, human questions, as well as the urge to suggest theological answers to the unanswerable, characterizes the entire spectrum of the contemporary Israeli religious community. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the response to the Holocaust.

There are two common responses to the Holocaust, both of which assume the “punishment thesis.” The first response, given most powerful expression in the works of R. Yoel Teitelbaum, the late hasidic rebbe of Satmar, suggests that the Holocaust is punishment for the sin of Zionism. On the other end of the spectrum of belief is a book written in 1944 by a former Satmar hasid, which suggests the opposite thesis: The Holocaust is punishment for European Jewry’s failure to respond to the divine clarion call of Zionism. European Jewry ignored God’s outstretched arm beckoning them to return to the land of Israel. The two positions, the anti-Zionist Satmar position and the pro-Zionist position of Em Habanim Smeiha—which, incidentally, is a standard text in religious Zionist schools—advance an identical argument concerning divine judgment. Both assume knowledge of God’s ways in the world. Both suggest that the Holocaust is punishment for sin. They disagree only as to the nature of the sin.²⁸

In the same vein, there is a seminar given in a prominent institution of learning in Jerusalem. In this seminar, one of the sessions covers patterns in Jewish history. The lecturer, at the crescendo of his presentation, says: “If one understands the deepest patterns of Jewish history, one understands that the Holocaust is not a challenge to our understanding of God. If the Holocaust had not happened it would challenge our understanding of God.” He then explains to the shocked audience that the pattern of Jewish history is the correlation between the suffering of the people and the sinfulness of the people. If the people sin, the people suffer. If the people in post-emancipation Germany abandoned God en masse, then the people must suffer. If they had not suffered, then the pattern of Jewish history would be violated and faith would be challenged. Thus he reaches the logical but obscene conclusion: Had the Holocaust not happened, it would challenge faith in our time.

In this anecdote as well, we see the presentation of religiosity as a proffering of answers. There are no questions that have no answers. We have explanations for everything. For babies dying, for distended stomachs, for bus accidents, and even for the Holocaust. Again, one whose intuition is repelled by the nature of these answers, who cries out in question, is taught that he has moved away from God. Once one understands oneself as having moved away from God, away from a religious orientation, then one needs to find oneself someplace else; one needs to orient oneself differently. Secular Israel presents a secular view of reality, with all that implies—morally, existentially and politically. Without question, one who is repelled by the easy theodicies suggested by the religious community cannot easily be open to the other messages of that same community, be those messages political, moral or existential. The result is the unnecessary bifurcation of Israel into two camps: The ostensibly religious, the ostensibly secular. If we were able to reform our language, to understand that questioning is the ultimate expression of spirituality, we would open ourselves up to creation of a community that includes all of Israel.

Theology, whether it be Zionist theology or hasidic anti-Zionist theology, can be used as an opiate which allows us to live in a state of insensitivity to human suffering and human pain. And indeed, this is what religion, in the hands of many of its practitioners, becomes: A tool for the systematic denial of the existence of injustice; rather than what God intends it to be—a tool for the systematic questioning of injustice.