The Protest Theology exchange, part 3: How early rabbis humanized God

” target=”_blank”>Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism. Parts 1 and 2 can be found ” target=”_blank”>here.

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Dear Professor Weiss, 

I’d like to dedicate the last round of this exchange to the potentially enlightening aspects of the idea of God being morally imperfect, a view which you attribute to many late-rabbinic thinkers. In the introduction to your book you write the following words:

Unlike  the  image  of  God  presented throughout most of the Bible, this late rabbinic God is not the ultimate moral sovereign. Rather than imitating God’s own actions, the rules of ethical conduct now emerge through dialogues between God and various biblical heroes.  In  addition,  while  these  texts  imply  a  profound  lesson  about  divine morality and the possibility of change, they also point, in accordance with the thinking of the late religious humanist David Hartman, to human dignity and empowerment.

I’d like to ask you to elaborate a bit on this point, and perhaps to share with our readers a couple of examples of illuminating critical depictions of God’s morality. How do these undogmatic queries about God’s goodness highlight “human dignity and empowerment?”

I’d like to thank you again for the interesting book and for doing this exchange.

Shmuel

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Dear Shmuel,

First, thank you for giving me this platform to present some of my thoughts on rabbinic thought. And, now, to answer your question:

Pious Irreverence posits that some sages in the late rabbinic period took the early rabbinic theology that humanized God to its extreme: they did not automatically assume a morally perfect deity. While fundamentally good, God, like His human creations, does not always make the correct ethical choice. Hence, the act of protest was not deemed a futile expression but one that, in the imagined biblical period at least, could propel God to recognize His ethical shortcomings. Indeed, the widespread motif of divine moral concessions, particularly in the midrashim of Tanḥuma-Yelammedenu, suggests that scholars ought to consider modifying and nuancing their assumption that the sages always imagined God to be morally perfect. For example, in the first half of the twentieth century, Arthur Marmorstein argued that the tannaim (early rabbis) adamantly defended the existence of an ethically infallible God to counter the Marcionite heresy that viewed the Hebrew Bible's God as ruthless and unjust. Here, Marmorstein does not consider the possibility that this rigid Jewish attitude may have waned over time. Similarly, David Weiss Halivni asserts that the rabbis never consciously set their own sense of morality above a straightforward reading of a “difficult” biblical law since that would have implied that God’s morality was in error—and the “Perfect Law Giver” could never err.

However, as some late rabbinic passages show God acquiescing to many moral critiques, they present a radically different conception of God from the rabbinic texts adduced by Marmorstein and Halivni. Constructing a “human” God who is not morally perfect, these images sharply contrast with the unchanging and morally infallible God championed by much of ancient Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, and medieval Jewish philosophy. In some aggadot, although God is concerned with and committed to justice and morality, He also recognizes His limitations and fallibility. Most radically, in some of these aggadot, God is willing to reform His methods of governing the world after receiving human input. Consider the following two examples:

Rejection of Intergenerational Punishment

The earliest biblical discussion of the theology intergenerational punishment is found in the Decalogue (Exodus 20:5-6) where God announces that God would “punish the sins of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations.” This doctrine was used as a motivating and even threatening device to exhort Israel into complying with the prohibition of idolatry. The awful consequences of sin: not only will sinners suffer for their transgressions, but their progeny will be punished as well.

Ancient Jewish interpreters of the Bible struggled with the obvious moral problem: how could the divine Torah in Exodus 20 endorse a theology that punishes an innocent person for the sins of another? How does this punitive doctrine fit with God's attributes of mercy and kindness?

To solve the dilemma, one Midrash from the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu (see Numbers Rabbah 19:33) presents an impassioned face-to-face confrontation between Moses and God.  After prefacing his remarks with the submissive phrase “Master of the World,” Moses boldly asks, “Shall they [the righteous people] take [punishment] from the sins of the parents?” After providing a few biblical cases where righteous children are born to wicked men, Moses rhetorically asks, “Is it appropriate that righteous people shall receive lashes for the sins of their parents?” After hearing Moses’s critique, God concedes and the theology is subsequently nullified. God declares, “You have taught Me something [למדתני] and By your life, I will nullify My decree [אני מבטל דברי] and establish your word.”

Peace before Genocidal War

A second example: The laws of Israelite warfare are found in Deuteronomy 20, which begins: “When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace (v. 10).” In this passage, God commands Israel to first seek peace before engaging in warfare. On a straightforward reading, God’s decree is completely unprovoked and uncontroversial.

One Tanhuma-Yelammedenu text, however, provides the “true” backstory that generated the law. It posits that the legal dictum requiring that peace should be sought before engaging in a genocidal war against Israel’s enemies only came about as a response to a moral critique brought by Moses. Specifically, when God commanded Moses to wage a genocidal war against Sihon’s nation (Deut. 2:24), Moses defied that order, declaring “I do not know who has sinned and who has not sinned [איני יודע מי חטא ומי לא חטא]. Instead, I will come to them in peace.” Unlike the case of trans-generational punishment, Moses confronts God not only through words but through an act of defiance.  Moses justifies this daring act by acknowledging the religious standing and legitimacy of his own moral sensibilities. The midrash presents the confrontation as a clash between Moses’s ethics and God's ethics. Rejecting God's command, Moses seeks peace with Sihon's kingdom, claiming that not all of them are evil. He wishes to avoid a war that would inevitably cause the death of the innocent (among Israel’s enemies!) along with the guilty. In a striking response, God concedes to Moses’s ethical sensibilities, and ratifies this less militant approach into law (Deut. 20:10), declaring: “By your life, just as you have said, so will I do [חייך כשם שאמרת כך אני אעשה].”    

This late Midrash has Moses specifically challenge one problematic element of religious war: the rule of ḥerem (annihilation). Moses’s moral concern is not in fighting any war, but in fighting an unnecessary war of genocide that requires the killing of every man, woman and child. Driven by his moral conscience, Moses rejects this form of battle. Indeed, God's subsequent concession serves to validate Moses’s qualified critique of genocidal war. According to this rabbinic text, God – only with the help of Moses – amends the older ḥerem theology of Deuteronomy 20:17 with a new rule (cited in Deut. 20:10) requiring that the Israelites first seek a peaceful solution. In short, before Moses’s “transgression,” God preferred war to peace; but now – after Moses’s defiant critique – God prefers peace to war in conflicts between Israel and her enemies.

These Midrashic teachings — and there are many more like them — depict dramatic confrontations between Moses and God that appear nowhere in Scripture. In them, the ethical intuition of the human voice, as epitomized by Moses, emerges triumphant (when given the consent of God). These texts are theologically striking, for in them God is taught the moral principle of individual responsibility; in these texts, God needs human assistance to reach the pinnacle of moral behavior.