I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have become a bit of a family joke that helps us understand a complex relationship with praying to God particularly around exam time. This iconic lyric from Into My Arms carries the vital message that even if one person believes that God listens and intervenes and another person might not, and that uncertainty is OK in the context of love and care between people and community. Accepting that this diversity is written into our Jewish texts is part of how we may contemplate the messages and meaning of Eikev.
Ve-haya ekev tishme’un et ha-mishpatim ha-eleh, u-shmartem va-asitem otam, ve-shamar Adonai eloheicha lecha et ha-brit ve-et ha-chesed asher nishba la-avoteicha.
And if you do obey these rules and observe them carefully, the ETERNAL your God will maintain faithfully for you the covenant made on oath with your fathers (Deuteronomy 7:12)
A conditional relationship with the divine that is based on reward and punishment is difficult if not impossible to accept. It is particularly impossible after the Shoah to believe trials and tribulations, disease and death, environmental crisis, and conception (or struggle with conception) is a reward or punishment for our actions.
Barukh tihyeh mikkol ha’amim; lo yihyeh vekha aqar va’aqarah uvivhemtekha.
You shall be blessed above all other peoples: there shall be no sterile male or female among you or among your livestock.(Deuteronomy 7:14)
There are of course alternative models in Torah for the relationship between humans and God. When Jacob wrestles with the Angel, his relationship with the divine is one of agency and equality. It is dialogic (having those qualities of a conversation). This is a theme that runs consistently through Torah of humans arguing, discussing and negotiating with God and God responding to this conversation.
So how did this idea of a punishing God become so prominent?
The documentary hypothesis is one of many possible answers. This is the theory that the Torah was compiled from different sources over a period of 400 to 500 years and each source has specific linguistic characteristics that tie it to a period of the development of the Jewish religion.
In this framework, Deuteronomy is thought to have originated during the reign of King Josiah 640-609 BCE in order to validate his cultic reform.
Some historians question whether an ancient document was really found and suggest it had been produced to serve Josiah’s purposes. Others tie it to documents that may have survived from an earlier reform—that of Josiah’s great-grandfather Hizkiyahu (727–698 BCE), whose efforts were negated by the subsequent misdeeds of his son Menashe (698–642 BCE). (Jewish Women’s Archive)
The idea that the scroll was produced creates the framework to consider why a punishing God rather than a God that negotiates is theologically useful:
some scholars suggest that this narrative segment is the literary creation of a postexilic writer seeking to explain the exile, rather than a report (or justification) of events during the monarchy. Indeed, Huldah’s rather generic prophetic oracle deals with the inevitability of divine punishment of Judah, not the hope promised by Josiah’s cultic reform. (Jewish Women’s Archive)
In 1968 Frank Moore Cross develops something called the double redaction theory which helps understand the context of how this moment emerges. In 1943 Martin Noth argued that between Deuteronomy and 2 Kings is one theological history telling the story of Israel’s downfall. But Cross suggests that this redaction happens in two phases, the first phase is during the reign of King Josiah to support his reforms which consolidate his power and Jerusalem as the centre. The second phase is after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, as part of the theological sense making of catastrophe.
In the historic milieu of a people grappling with the destruction of their temple the idea of a punishing God is more reassuring than a God that does not care about human suffering or the unbearable thought that suffering is random and uncontrollable.
The documentary hypothesis highlights that there is not a singular model of human and divine interaction and that all models are contextual. This paves the way for us to consider what other models are suggested by Eikev.
In The Arc of Becoming: Process Theology and Jewish Spiritual Direction Barbara, Eve Breitman elaborates on process theology:
The notion that God is not only in active relationship with human beings, but that God needs people, so God may grow and evolve, is at the very heart of Jewish textual traditions.
This is grounded in the same principles articulated in the Peskita de Rab Kahana 102b as Breitman quotes:
So, you are My witnesses, says the Lord, and I am God” (Isaiah 43.12). Rabbi Simeon ben Yoḥai taught, “If you are ‘my witnesses,’ I am God, and if you are not my witnesses, I am not, as it were, God.”
While this is an alternative formulation of the relationship between human and God it does not resolve the question how do we explain catastrophe? If the idea of a God that punishes is historically created to help us understand and make order from the random acts of destruction that we have witnessed, then what is the relationship with God that we need today to help us make sense of the tragedies that we witness?
Perhaps Nick Cave was right, that what is the key to sense making is that we each make sense in our own way. Perhaps the key word is darling. A term of endearment. And that this is the challenge, to see difference with endearment. To look at others who see a different answer in the diversity written into our Jewish texts and look upon them lovingly as witnesses who are also co creating the divine.
Jennifer Verson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.