Perhaps the most beautiful text which could be brought to bear at this juncture comes from Exodus, when Moses, having reluctantly accepted his divine mission, attempts to intercede on the people’s behalf at Pharaoh’s court. He succeeds only in making the plight of the people worse than before. And he turns to God and he complains: “Why have you made it worse for this people?” God, you sent me to make it better, and now they suffer more. And Moses continues: “You have surely not delivered your people.”²⁹ 

Interpreters of the biblical text ask the obvious question: We need only to go back to the preceding passages to see that God has clearly mapped out his intentions to Moses.³⁰ There, God explains to Moses that the people will go through a short period of suffering which will purify them, and ultimately, after that suffering takes place, they will be redeemed. Does Moses not remember the divine plan? Did he forget what God told him in the previous two chapters?

The Talmud takes Moses to task for this and suggests that when he turned to God and said, “Why have you made it worse for this people?” he sinned.³¹ But I would suggest that Moses knew precisely what he was doing, and that if indeed he sinned, it was mindful sinning. It was the sin of a leader, the very quality which made Moses who he was, and which caused him to be chosen as the shepherd of the Jewish people.

Moses knew very well that the divine plan involves suffering for the people. But Moses also knew that to be a leader and to be a human being, one can never allow theology to deaden one’s sensitivity to human pain. God himself told Moses that there would be a divine purpose behind the suffering he would witness. And yet Moses, as a human being created in the divine image, understands that his only response to this suffering must be to cry out—to challenge and to question God. “God, why have you made it worse for this people?”

To do otherwise, to allow theology to silence his cry, would be to lessen God in the world. Moses knew, perhaps, that he would be punished for his challenge. He knew that in some sense it was sinful. But it was a mindful, chosen sin which embraced God—and so God responded to Moses by reaffirming his leadership of the Jewish people. Moses taught us that questioning the edict of suffering is not only an option, not merely a right, but an assertion of our essential humanity and of the divine image that resides within.

 

The human question in the face of a brutal world is not only an expression of a human right, not only a divine imperative. It is also an expression of deep intimacy with God. If I were to stop someone I barely know on the street and challenge him with great intensity and depth, I would probably evoke a hostile reaction. If, however, I confront someone I deeply love, with whom I am in a close spiritual relationship, then the response will be very different. Questioning is a right which emerges from intimacy. Questioning in such a relationship is an expression of commitment, of relationship and intimacy. So it was with Abraham, with Moses, whose relationship with God was on such a level of intimacy that they were able to question his ways not as hostile opponents, not from the “outside,” but as those who are deeply “within.”

Paradoxically, the more deeply I learn of that relationship between God and moral law, the deeper I am intimate, the deeper my intimacy with God runs, and the more I have a right to challenge. For the God who is the source of loyalty, the God whom I experience in a relationship as a moral God, is a God whom I can challenge when evil seems to erase morality. It is the knowledge of God’s existence and the experience of the depth of God’s goodness which together create the right to question. That is the sense of the book of Job when Job cries out: “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him. But I will argue my ways before him.”³² Job is intimate with God. A function of that intimacy is Job’s right as well as his existential necessity to argue the ways—again that same word, “ways”—of God in the world. Job demands an explanation of these ways as his right as a human being who is deeply involved with God.

 In the Passover Seder, the Jews are represented as four sons: The wise son, the wicked son, the simple son and the one who has forgotten how to question. The lowest level is the fourth son, the one who has lost the art of questioning. The wise and the wicked sons both question, challenging the ritual of the evening. A careful reading would seem to indicate that their questions are identical. Both pose essentially the same question to the participants at the Seder: “What is the meaning of the Seder ritual for you?” There are those who have tried, based on the language of the text, to argue that in fact the wise son and the wicked son are asking different things, but I would suggest that in fact the simple reading of the text is the correct one. The wise son and the wicked son ask precisely the same question. If so, why is one son wise and the other wicked? The difference is that the wise son asks from within, as a function of relationship, of commitment and intimacy. The wicked son is the armchair philosopher who asks from outside, who is unwilling to involve himself in a relationship with the deepest issues of living, who sits cynically critiquing from the safe distance of dispassionate and non-intimate existence.

To be wise is not to arrive at a place of no questions. A place of no questions is the lowest level, the place of the fourth son, the son who does not even know how to ask. To be wise is to know how to question from a place of deep relationship.

 

The Jewish mandate which demands that the human being enter into partnership with God in the task of perfecting the world emerges, paradoxically, not out of answers but out of questions. The fact that the human being can question and that God accepts the human question implies a covenantal partnership between the human being and God. Both the human being and God share an understanding of the good. And thus God can turn to the human being and say: I invite you, nay, I demand that you be my partner, my co-creator in the perfection of the world. I began the process of creation, I established the moral fabric of the world. It is up to you to take that cloth and to weave it fully. It is up to you to complete the tapestry, it is up to you to create a world in which good, love, justice and human dignity flourish and are affirmed.

It is true that God very often seems silent in response to our question. Yet Jewish consciousness, expressed through Jewish text and tradition, affirms that God accepts the validity of the question. And in accepting the validity of the question, God says: I empower you as a human being, whom I created in my image, to act with me and for me on the stage of history.³³ 

In the book of Judges, a messenger of God comes to Gideon. Gideon lives in a time in which Israel has suffered greatly at the hand of the Midianite nation. And the messenger of God says to Gideon: “God is with you, hero of valor.” And Gideon responds: “You tell me that God is with us? Then why is all this...” He can’t even give it a name. Why has all this suffering, why has all this pain defined our lives for so many years? Why are men killed? Why are children orphaned? And the text goes on: “And where are all of his great wonders which our fathers told us, saying God took us out of the land of Egypt. And now, God has abandoned us.”³⁴