Gideon the judge, in the tradition of Abraham, turns to God and says, “Does the Judge of the entire world not do justice?” Gideon the Judge challenges God, challenges the messenger and challenges the message. Because if God is with us, if God is a God of history, if God is the God who took us out of Egypt, then where is God’s involvement in history today? Gideon anticipates Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, which argues that the God of the Jews is not only the God of creation—for us existence is not enough.³⁵ Our God is the God of the exodus, the God who involves himself in history, the God who emerges from the hiddenness and mystery and makes himself known to and through his nation Israel, and who embraces his people. Gideon asks­­: Is it true? I challenge you God. Where are you? You have not fulfilled your mandate. You are not the God of history. “Where are all [your] wonders?”³6 

The divine response seems unclear, enigmatic and troubling; but also powerful, inspiring and deeply directive. God answers Gideon: “Go with this strength of yours and save Israel ... behold, I have sent you.”³⁷ 

What does God mean? I would suggest, and Midrash Tanhuma implies the same, that God meant: Go forth with the power of your question. Go forth with the power of your challenge to the divine: “With the power of your question, go forth and save Israel, for I have sent you, you are my messenger.”³⁸ 

What does this mean? I believe it expresses precisely the same idea which we have discussed here: Gideon, if you have the ability to question, this means you share a common language with God, this means that you understand what is just and what is not. The question itself implies messengership on behalf of the divine.

 

I would like to conclude with a word from the tradition of Jewish mysticism, from the Zohar, the place of light.

R. Isaac Luria, founder of the most influential school of Jewish mysticism, the Lurianic Kabbala, comments on the word “where”—ayeh— in a different context. In the liturgy of Shabbat, we paraphrase the text in Isaiah and say, “Ayeh mekom kevodo?” Where is the place of God’s dignity? Efraim Orbach, in his masterful work, Thoughts and Opinions of the Sages, points out that the words “divine dignity” in biblical literature always speak of God’s involvement in the world.³⁹ The liturgical text therefore means: God, where is the place of your involvement in the world?

This question is the challenge that we have seen running like a thread through the Jewish tradition. Where, ayeh, is the God of Isaiah? Where, ayeh, is the God of Gideon? What does the interrogative word “where” really mean? Luria reveals its meaning by using the interpretive tools of kabbala in the following manner: Ayeh in Hebrew has three letters, alef, yod, hey. The Zohar declares that there are ten levels which unite the world of the divine with the world of man. Each one of these ten levels of divine presence represents another dimension of God in our world. When we perform a commandment, says Luria, we participate in one of these levels of the divine. However, says Luria, we are only able to participate in the bottom seven levels. The human being, trapped in finiteness and mortality, can never reach the highest three levels of divinity in this world.

Ayeh, says Luria, is alef, yod, hey. Alef is the letter that represents the divine crown, the highest level of divinity in the world. Yod represents wisdom, the second highest level. And Hey is intuitive understanding, the third highest level. When the human being cries out to God, ayeh—when he cries: God where are you? God, how does your world function? God, your goodness is so apparent to me that the contradiction between suffering and divine goodness is too much for me to bear. God, I return to you in challenge and in question—when the human being cries ayeh, says Luria, he reaches “the highest.” This is the level of identification of human and divine in the most profound sense possible in our world. Luria, in the tradition of the biblical text, affirms once again that the question is not a contradiction to the spiritual moment, but rather is the highest expression of human reaching for the divine.

There is, suggests R. Kook in a stunning passage, heresy that is faith and faith that is heresy.⁴⁰ Faith that is heresy never really experiences the goodness of God, and consequently never experiences the contradiction between God’s goodness and human suffering. Such faith therefore never asks the question. Heresy that is faith tastes and sees that God is good and thus cries out in a plaintive and powerful cry—God, how could you allow this?

Let us return to the idiomatic phrase, hazara bish’ela, “return in question,” and notice just how dramatically language can distort the spiritual sources of our people. People question in innocence, and yet those who speak for Judaism all too often demand that they stifle the question and accept “the answer,” because faith means hazara bitshuva, returning with the answer. And what an answer they wish for the people to accept: That the reason for the death of innocent children in this world is that we are being punished.

The natural, healthy intuition of the people, when they hear such “religious” arguments again and again, is to reject. And then they reject everything—our sources, our tradition, our people, our God.

Yet in the tradition of the prophets, as in the tradition of the Talmud, when one questions the injustice in the world, one moves towards God. In the sources of our tradition, to return to God means to return in question—and it is the question, not the answer, which is the ultimate expression of spirituality. It is precisely when one is beset by question that one is, in the deepest sense, embracing the divine.

 

I have tried in this brief article to redefine one phrase in the spiritual language of Israel. I have tried to demonstrate that through a return to the sources of Jewish authenticity, we can formulate a language that is more genuine and more true to Jewish history, and that will allow for shared spiritual communion between almost all sectors of modern Israeli society. In creating this language, we tear down old and false walls based on misperceptions, misunderstandings and distortions which have until now divided our public into the official cultural categories of secular and religious.

Through the creation of this language, I hope, a new conversation will be created, a conversation of the spirit which will ultimately unify and revive the eternal people living in its eternal land. 

1. Orot Hakodesh (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1985), vol. 1, p. 135.

2. See also Arpilei Tohar (Jerusalem: Hamachon Al Shem Harav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, 1983), pp. 8, 45, 38-39; also Gershon Scholem, Kabbala and Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 49.

3. Song of Songs, 2:16.

4. Moshe Chayim Luzatto, The Way of God (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1978), I:2.

5. Menahot 43b.

6. Yoma 69b.

7. Deuteronomy 10:17.

8. Jeremiah 32:18.

9. See Isaac Hutner, Pahad Yitzhak (Brooklyn, 1978), volume on Yom Kippur, essay 5, sec. 3, no. 20 for a similar reading of the passage.

10. Daniel 9:4.

11. Rashi, ad locum.

12. Deuteronomy 32:4.

13. Exodus 33:13.

14. Berachot 7a.

15. Exodus 3.

16. Exodus 32.

17. Exodus 33:11.

18. Exodus 33:13. See interpretation of the text suggested in Brachot 7b.

19. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (c. 1200), II:36.

20. I was first pointed to the development of the personality of Moses both as a leader and a prophet in an oral discourse of R. Aharon Lichtenstein.

21. Genesis 18:19.

22. Genesis 18:23.

23. For a development of this strain in the Midrash Tanhuma, see an essay by Chaim Shmuelevitz, entitled “Waters of Noah,” in Sihot Musar (Jerusalem, 1980), sec. 1, essay 4.

24. Isaiah 54:9.

25. Jeremiah 12:1; Habakuk 1:13; Job 11:32; Psalms 89; Malachi 3:13-15; Isaiah 49:14.

26. Psalms 44:12-25.

27. Deuteronomy 31:17-18.

28. The rebbe of Satmar and the author of Em Habanim Smeiha are both people who experienced the Holocaust directly. They are Job, whose worldly suffering defies normal human comprehension. Job’s affirmations, Job’s theologies, Job’s expressions in relation to God post-Holocaust should all be understood to be holy. We, however, are not Job. We are only Job’s brother. The holiness of affirmation, and the holiness of denial which belongs to Job, does not belong to the next generation. What for Job is holy is for his brother obscenity. I add this because I stand in a position of reverence and respect towards the positions of those two men who can, out of a Holocaust, forge religious language. However, I reject categorically the adaptation of that language as spiritually or theologically legitimate for anyone other than those who experienced it themselves. For us, the brothers of Job, to use theology as a response to suffering is, I believe, spiritual obscenity. And it is such obscenity which is unfortunately common theological currency in the religious street in Israel today.

29. Exodus 5:22.

30. Exodus 3, 4.

31. Sanhedrin 111a.

32. Job 13:15.

33. Man, a great Hassidic master said, is the language of God. We are God’s adjectives, God’s adverbs, God’s nouns and maybe even sometimes God’s dangling modifiers. We are God’s language in the world. When I love, when I am able to be truly vulnerable and intimate with another human being, when I am able to share the pain of another and to rejoice in their deep joy, I am acting for God. I become God’s chariot in the world. God’s chariot in kabbalistic metaphor means the vehicle which carries the message and the warmth and the sweetness of the light of the divine throughout the world.

34. Judges 6:12-13.

35. Kuzari I:11.

36. Judges 6:13.

37. Judges 6:14.

38. See Rashi ad locum.

39. Efraim Orbach, Emunot Vede’ot Shel Chazal, (Jerusalem: Magnes Press Jerusalem, 1978), ch. 3, pp. 31-32.

40. Orot Ha’emuna (Jerusalem, Mosad Harav Kook, 1985), p. 25. “There is heresy which is like faith, and faith which is like heresy. How so? A person may believe that the Tora is from heaven, but his understanding of heaven may be so skewed that it allows for not a shred of true faith. And heresy that is like faith? A person may deny that Tora is from heaven, but his denial may be based purely on his having received such a view of heaven as is held by those who are full of meaningless and confused thoughts. He concludes that the Tora must have come from some higher source, and begins to find another basis—in the greatness of the human spirit, from the depths of man’s morality or the heights of his wisdom. Even though he has still not arrived at truth’s center, nonetheless this ‘heresy’ is to be seen as faith, and it approaches the faith of the true believer. And in a generation as revolutionary as this one, it is even to be understood as a high level. And the question of the Tora’s origin is merely one example of that which is true for all the greater and finer points of faith—in the relation between their expressed form and their inner essence, the latter being the desired core of faith.”