Uncertainty, Action, and Faith: Talmudic Theological Musings for the Year(s) of COVID
God is, human lives are lived out in a world of pervasive uncertainty, and a proper Jewish path is to act with hope and trust. This, in a nutshell, is this liberal Jew’s theologically oriented reading of the Babylonian Talmud (known as the “Bavli”) and its companion compilations, the literary and spiritual legacy of the 2nd–6th c. CE rabbis. These rabbis are known in Jewish tradition as “Hazal,” a Hebrew acronym denoting “our sages of blessed memory.” Hazal are our distant ancestors, our teachers, our shapers, our founders; whether we purport to follow, reform, or rebel against tradition, we are inevitably entwined with the legacy of Hazal. My own intellectual and spiritual life has been entwined with Hazal from the time I first fell in love with their literature as a child; for me, there is no better lens than Hazal through which to examine our anxious “olam hafukh” (“upside-down world”; cf. Bava Batra 10b).
God is, but for Hazal, God barely speaks anymore. The Bavli and earlier rabbinic compilations refer to a heavenly “bat kol” (literally, “daughter voice”) and its periodic interjections into human affairs, but the Bavli presents a view that prophecy per se, God’s revealing a message to and through a human messenger, ceased with the biblical prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi (Yoma 9b). One of the ways God now speaks, as it were, is through the revealed books of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible). But the Tanakh is written in human language and requires human interpretation. Language can be ambiguous or underdetermined; interpretation may augment rather than diminish uncertainty about God’s message. Talmudic debate in toto may be understood as a response to religious and epistemological uncertainty: the Bavli has a relentless need to raise questions, juxtapose and harmonize conflicting sources, pursue legal rationales to their ultimate conclusions, test assumptions. At times, Hazal seem to revel in this indeterminacy; the School of R. Ishmael understands Jeremiah 23:29’s like a hammer that shatters rock (NJPS) as a reference to the multiplicity of meanings that emerges when the “rock” (a scriptural verse) is smashed by the “hammer” of interpretation (Shabbat 88b). But. . . is that really what the School of R. Ishmael means? The great medieval commentators Rashi (1040–1105) and Tosafot (12th–13th c.) debate the point, compounding interpretive indeterminacy with interpretive uncertainty.
Now, uncertainty about aspects of God’s own views about the Jewish behavioral mandates known as halakhah is one thing; Hazal’s God takes Godself out of the process of determining how Jews should “do” Jewish (e.g., Bava Metz’ia 59b). But uncertainty about how God works in the world is something else. Is there innocent suffering? No (Deuteronomy); yes (Job). Do or should descendants suffer for the sins of their ancestors? Yes (Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy); no (Jeremiah, Ezekiel). God’s silence and the inevitable indeterminacy of interpretation mean that God is, and/but that God is also ultimately unfathomable. Moving beyond the Tanakh into Jewish history, Hazal ask other questions, at times explicitly, at times not: was the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE a punishment for sin? Why yes, answer Hazal, following the biblical lead about the First Temple’s destruction. The sins that precipitated the two destructions might not be the same, but in both cases, sin was certainly a factor. But did the national and religious disaster of 70 CE cause God to feel vindicated, satisfied that justice was done? No, imply Hazal; in fact, the Bavli portrays God as weeping over the destruction (Berakhot 3a, 59a) and as repressing God’s own profound inner devastation over it behind a façade of cool, calm, and collected divine majesty (Hagigah 5b). The Bavli’s portrayal of God’s “psychological” inner turmoil over the Temple’s destruction attests to Hazal’s ambivalence about the theological idea that Jewish national disaster is divine punishment for sin. Hazal also acknowledge that some individuals die unfairly, before their time and even because of what the Bavli unnervingly portrays as supernatural “bookkeeping” incompetence in the tracking of human lives (Hagigah 4b–5a). Hazal even further trouble their own theological waters by constructing a famous dialogue in which Moses expresses his astonishment to God about a particularly incomprehensible case of innocent suffering and cruel, undeserved death: the bloody end of the saintly, martyred Rabbi Akiva. God’s unambiguous response to Moses is chillingly unsatisfying: “Be quiet. This is my intention”—or, in a paraphrase, “This is how I’m doing it” (Menahot 29b). In sum, God definitely is; but for Hazal, asking God to explain how God works in the world will yield either no answers or conflicting answers or a sense of God’s own sorrow and uncertainty or perhaps even a frightening answer we would rather not hear.
Interpretive uncertainty is only a part of the story. For Hazal, uncertainty is the stage on which all human beings, Jewish and not, act out their lives. The 1st c. CE rival rabbinic schools of thought Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai (“House Hillel” and “House Shammai”) debate whether or not human beings should even have been created (Eruvin 13b). Consider also the touching account of the deathbed uncertainty of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, a key “founding father,” as it were, of rabbinic Judaism. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai’s students found him weeping on his deathbed. Astonished by this, they exclaim: “Light of Israel! . . . why are you crying?” His response is very human, and a profound testament to a life lived in faith, but without certainty: “There are two paths before me: one of the Garden of Eden and other of Gehinnom (Hell), and I do not know along which they will be leading me. Shouldn’t I cry?” (Berakhot 28b). Hazal thus bake religious and existential uncertainty into their way of Torah, as expressed by the deathbed anguish of their and our dying founder, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai.
“God is a nonnegotiable fact of life but is not One Who can or will answer painful “Why?” and “How?” questions about human existence.”
God is; God is a nonnegotiable fact of life but is not One Who can or will answer painful “Why?” and “How?” questions about human existence. Life is lived on a stage of uncertainty, and even a preeminent religious virtuoso like Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai is portrayed as uncertain about what divine verdict will be rendered on his life of piety and scholarship. To ask “Why?” is very human, but no clear answer will ever be forthcoming. Human effort is best directed elsewhere, but where? In tractate Eruvin, Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai ultimately come to an agreement that it would have been better had humanity not been created, but now that humanity exists, people should either “interrogate their deeds” or “examine their deeds.” The former is backward-looking; people should interrogate sins they have already committed in order to emend their ways. The latter is forward-looking: people should examine possible future courses of action, doing good even if doing so may cause them short-term harm and refraining from doing evil even if indulging in it earns them short-term gain. Common to both courses of action is the focus on “deeds”; Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai agree that human beings must focus on what they do in the world. Rather than ask “Why?” people should ask: “How did, should, or do I act?” and “What should, can, or do I do?”
Rabbi Akiva learns a similar lesson about focusing on “What?” and “How?” rather than on “Why?” A Roman military leader named Tineius Rufus draws him into debate with the provocative question: “If your God loves the poor, why does [God] not support them?” (Bava Batra 10a). Tineius Rufus may or may not have existed, and the dialogue between the two almost certainly never took place, but these historical details matter much less for our purposes than the message of the narrative. The narrative takes us through the dialogic steps that lead Rabbi Akiva to an important insight: faced with the reality of human suffering we can’t know why, but what we can know, what we can do, is figure out how to act, and when (now!)
Rabbi Akiva’s theology noticeably evolves as the dialogue proceeds. He is initially portrayed as responding confidently to the Roman’s question with: “So that we may be saved through them from the judgment of Gehinnom (hell).” Implicit in Tineius Rufus’s rhetorical question is the assumption that God does not love the poor; poverty is a divine punishment. Rabbi Akiva does not actually deny this; he tacitly acknowledges that poverty may indeed be a divine punishment of the poor, but points out a “silver lining”: the poor are the divinely-provided means through which other people—their benefactors—can secure their own rescue from an infelicitous afterlife. The Roman rejects this “silver lining.” He responds in turn with a parable that spells out his dark perspective in greater detail: won’t a person who sneaks food and drink to a prisoner in the king’s dungeon earn the king’s wrath for aiding someone whom the king wishes to punish? The Roman’s analogy is clear: the king is God, the prisoner the poor person, and the sneaky provider the one who gives tzedakah to the poor. Rabbi Akiva replies to this parable with his own: won’t a person who sneaks food and drink to the king’s son imprisoned in the king’s own dungeon earn the king’s gratitude and receive a reward? Rabbi Akiva’s analogy is equally clear: the king is God, the prisoner the king’s child and the sneaky provider the one who gives tzedakah to the poor. Rabbi Akiva’s evolving point is that poverty may be a punishment, but the one being punished is not someone for whom the king feels hostility; the one being punished is the king’s own child. The king’s wrath can and will be appeased and his own parental love aroused when he sees the sneaky provider give his child food and drink. By analogy, reasons Rabbi Akiva, God’s wrath against the poor will be appeased and God’s own parental love aroused when God sees one person give tzedakah to another. This generous act of human benevolence will trigger God’s own benevolence toward the benefactor.
Tineius Rufus acknowledges that Rabbi Akiva’s parable may be appropriate for a time in which the Jewish people are doing God’s will, but he points out that his and Rabbi Akiva’s present is not such a time. Although the Roman military leader does not spell out exactly how he knows this, his meaning is clear: he and Rabbi Akiva live after the Second Temple’s destruction, and hence ipso facto in a time in which God does not think the Jewish people are following God’s will. Therefore, he reasons, his own analogy is more apt: the poor person is the king’s prisoner, and the king will be angry at any outside attempt to interfere and ameliorate the punishing deprivation which the king has decreed for the prisoner. God—the king—is angry.
Sensing that Tineius Rufus may have a point, Rabbi Akiva changes his approach. The Roman has undermined his robust, confident affirmation that poverty is a conduit through which benefactors of the poor receive divine salvation. Rabbi Akiva realizes that his parable might reflect the truth of the divine role in human suffering, but not always and not at present; Tineius Rufus’s parable might be a false portrayal of the divine role in human suffering, but not always and, likely, not at present. In the midst of his new theological uncertainty, Rabbi Akiva changes his approach. Instead of trying again with another parable, he quotes Isaiah 58:7: It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home (NJPS). He asks: “When [does one] take the wretched poor into your home? Now! And it says: It is to share your bread with the hungry.” What is Rabbi Akiva doing? Over the course of his dialogue with the Roman, he has come to realize that there can be no certain, confident answer to a “Why?” question (“Why are there poor? Why doesn’t God Godself take care of them?”). The only possible certainty lies in answers to questions of “How?” and “When?” to act. And the answer to “When?” is clearly “Now.”
God is, human lives are lived out in a world of pervasive uncertainty, and a proper Jewish path is to act with hope and trust. Hazal understand that God’s way of working in the world is mysterious and baffling, but they are confident that God warmly approves of compassionate human acts of solidarity. We thus act for other human beings in the world not in spite of God, but with the hope and trust that we are in fact acting as God would have us act. In acting for other human beings, we not only create bonds with them, but also with God.
This does not mean that there is no room for prayer. Prayer complements action. Bavli tractate Ta’anit (and the earlier Ta’anit tractates from the land of Israel) deal in large part with public prayer and fasting for God’s mercy in times of drought. M. Ta’anit 2:1 describes a moving and robust order of prayer. But even in the Ta’anit tractates, prayer (and fasting) do not stand alone. Ta’anit’s prayer leader points out to the suffering community how the wicked people of Nineveh (in the biblical book of Jonah) were spared from disaster because of their good deeds, not because of their fasting and sackcloth (citing Jonah 3:10). Hazal understand the communal distribution of tzedakah to be a concrete manifestation of the called-for “good deeds.” Societal calamity must be met with acts of social solidarity. Delaying the distribution of ready to eat food to the poor overnight after a fast day is tantamount to murder (Sanhedrin 35a). Hazal assure us that engaging in acts of social solidarity with our needy neighbors at a time of crisis is what God wants of us.
“God is, human lives are lived out in a world of pervasive uncertainty, and a proper Jewish path is to act with hope and trust. Hope, trust, and confidence are all components of faith.”
This confidence finally brings us to the end of the sentence with which this essay begins: God is, human lives are lived out in a world of pervasive uncertainty, and a proper Jewish path is to act with hope and trust. Hope, trust, and confidence are all components of faith. Hope is the scarlet thread that runs from the beginning of Genesis through the end of Second Chronicles. Human history begins with the exile from Eden and the Hebrew Bible ends with King Cyrus’s decree that the Babylonian exiles are permitted to return to the land of Israel. In between these two points are many cycles of righteous and unrighteous behavior, settlement and flourishing in, and decline and exile from, the land of Israel. The choice to end the Hebrew Bible with Cyrus’s decree is a choice to end this sacred anthology with hope: the hope that the people Israel can always start again, that disaster and destruction can be overcome. The hope that new beginnings may have happier endings and the realization that human beings’ dignity and fate is always to rise, fall, and rise again.
Hazal hope and trust in their silent God. Rabbi Akiva famously laughs on seeing a fox emerge from the destroyed Holy of Holies on the site of the destroyed Jerusalem Temple. He explains his laughter to his sad, angry, and incredulous weeping colleagues: if the biblical prophecies of destruction have been fulfilled, won’t the prophecies of restoration also be fulfilled?! (Makkot 24b). Rabbi Akiva does not know for certain there will be a restoration; he hopes and trusts this will be the case. Makkot 24b’s Rabbi Akiva is Bava Batra 10a’s Rabbi Akiva: the sage who hopes and trusts is the very same sage who urges immediate righteous action on behalf of needy others in the present without thought of divine reward. His hope and trust are therefore not a fatalistic, helpless shrug of the shoulders. His hope and trust are a confident faith in the truth of two propositions: (1) God wishes us to act righteously and swiftly on behalf of others in this world; and (2) what is right and good will ultimately prevail. Hazal are unclear about how (1) and (2) are linked. There is no cause and effect relationship between (1) and (2) in the sources we have examined in this short essay (or in others besides), and Hazal wisely refrain from positing one. Lived human experience also fails to disclose such a relationship. But both (1) and (2) are true. There is a gap, a tension between them, but not a lifeless void like the cold silence of deep space. We manage the gap and tension between (1) and (2) with hope and trust, the nuts and bolts of our faith.
