Hide and Seek: On Teaching God to Be a Better Exemplar

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Hide and Seek: On Teaching God to Be a Better Exemplar Jack H Bloom Like my biblical namesake, I have had a lifelong struggle with the God of Abraham who it is reported entered a covenant relationship with my ancestors at Sinai. From time to time, God and I busy ourselves in a sporadically engrossing though all too often tedious game of “hide and seek.” For long periods of time we just ignore each other. As a liberal often skeptical rabbi, I am respectful of others’ traditions and beliefs while holding in my fashion reverence for the formulations about the nature of God that my covenanted people have affirmed down the generations. That covenant, paradoxically both unaltered yet constantly in flux, is at its root, a relationship that has not and cannot be superseded by any other. I am bound to it. Sitting quietly one Sabbath morning in synagogue during the public reading of the Torah,1 I found myself desultorily attending to a number of probably for good reasons, obscure Torah passages, With a start, I was aware that another “go‐around” with God had begun. Disturbed by what I was hearing, I looked to the commentators who adorned the bottom half of the pages of biblical text I held in my hands. Their task now as ever, was to explain and elucidate the textual reading for the understanding of the Jews of whatever era they lived in. My attention was piqued, as I followed some “modern” commentators doing verbal cartwheels to make “difficult” texts consonant with the idea of a benign, perfect divine being, who having created the world loves all its inhabitants, while still maintaining a special, loving covenantal relationship with the people Israel, despite their often being recalcitrant and obtuse. A relationship described retrospectively by Jeremiah with the distortion typical of a long‐married disputatious couple.2 Jewish tradition, text based, takes the words of Holy writ seriously. When I read that a prominent rabbi put into print as an accurate reading of holy writ that. the Torah speaks of God as a parent, a lover, a teacher and an intimate sharer of our hearts.3 I was shocked by the distortion. To the astute reader that is not even close to the whole truth. God is all too often anything but all‐loving. Being in serious denial about the nature of the Deity with whom we are in relationship, commentators, old and new, struggle to make God’s behavior fit an all‐loving procrustean bed. I listened at another time to the obscure story of a man gathering sticks, perhaps some tinder, on the Sabbath who broke what was until then unwritten legislation. Now when the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man picking wood on the Sabbath day. They brought him near, those who found him picking wood, to Moshe and to Aharon, and to the entire community; they put him under guard, for it had not been clarified what should be done to him. YHWH said to Moshe: The man is to be put to death, yes, death, pelt him with stones, the entire community, outside the camp! So they brought him, the entire community, outside the camp; they pelted him with stones, so that he died, as YHWH had commanded Moshe.4 What got God so upset that even after a pause—time to cool the divine anger, time to consider compassion, God summarily invokes a law promulgated after the fact, and demands the public stoning of the unfortunate gatherer by the whole community. The superb Torah Commentary, Etz Hayim,5 used in the congregation I founded, and now attend on Sabbath mornings, exemplifies how even modern erudite commentators perplexed in their own words, by the “apparent” severity of the narrative, let the enraged God off the hook: The wood gatherer, therefore, was not just violating one law but was destroying the dream that Israel would be a people obedient to God’s ways.6 That is a most interesting use of the word “apparent” by the modem spin‐doctor. What happened was not apparently severe; it was cruel beyond any rationale that might mitigate God’s instruction...