After the introduction to his song in Haazinu, Moses turns to his central theme, the acts of God in history, beginning with a poetic declaration:
The rock - His work is perfect
For all his ways are just;
A God of faith without iniquity
Righteous and fair is he.
This is an axiom of prophetic faith. God is just. It is human beings who act unjustly. To this day, this verse is part of tzidduk ha-din, "accepting the justice" of the bad things that happen to us. It is a central part of the funeral service. Despite our sense of loss, we forego our anger at what may seem like the cruelty of fate.
There is, however, one ancient rabbinic interpretation of part of this verse that deserves reflection in its own right. It opens the way to one of the most far-reaching and revolutionary of all Jewish ideas. On the phrase, "A God of faith", Sifre (a compendium of commentaries on Bamidbar and Devarim dating back to the Mishnaic period) states:
"A God of faith" - He who had faith in the universe and created it.
Creation was an act of faith on the part of God.
When we use the word "faith" in a religious context we naturally assume that the word refers to our faith in God. Understandably so, for it is we who are finite in our understanding, whether of the universe or the full perspective of history. It is we who must make the leap from the known to the unknowable, from the visible to the invisible, from what we see and infer to what lies beyond.
Using the philosophical categories of the West, which come to us from ancient Greece, it makes no sense at all to speak of an act of faith on the part of God. God is, in terms of these categories, omniscient and omnipotent, all-knowing and all-powerful. He is the unmoved mover, the first cause, necessary being, the unchanging essence of reality. These propositions are surely true. Yet this is not God as we meet Him in the pages of Tanach, the Hebrew Bible. Instead this is God as a philosophical abstraction, detached from the human drama. If the Torah teaches us anything it is that God is not detached from the human drama. He is intimately, even passionately, involved in it. There is a difference between the God of the philosophers and the God of the prophets; between - as Yehudah Halevi put it - the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham, even though they are the same God, whose parallel lines meet in infinity.
God as we encounter him in the Torah takes a risk, monumental in its implications. He creates one being, homo sapiens, capable of being itself creative; He creates, that is to say, a being in His own image. This one act alters the whole nature of the universe. For there is now a being capable of language, thought, reflection, imagination and choice: the one being capable of conceiving the idea of God, but also, given the very nature of freedom and the human imagination, the one being capable of rebelling against God. The implication is the most far reaching in all of creation, for it means that there is now one form of life that can choose between obedience and disobedience, good and evil, turning nature to good ends or, God forbid, destroying it altogether.
Human freedom, the result of language and self-consciousness, is the great unknown and unknowable within the otherwise orderly processes of nature mapped by science. There can never be a science of freedom, for the very concept is a contradiction in terms. Science is about causes, freedom about purposes. Science explains phenomena in terms of other phenomena that preceded them. Free action, by contrast, is explicable only in terms of the future we intend to bring about, not any past event, historical, biochemical or neuro-physiological. To be sure, there are many influences on human behaviour, some genetic, others cultural, environmental, social, economic and political. But they are influences, not causes in the sense in which that term is used in the natural sciences.
For almost every act we do, we could have chosen otherwise (the qualification 'almost' is necessary, for there are some acts - from reflex movements to unwilling behaviour under threat of death - that are not free in such a way as to render their agent responsible for them; Jewish law calls such behaviour ones, i.e. action under coercion). Time and again in the course of civilization, human freedom has been called into question. There were some who believed in astrology: the fault lay not in us but in our stars. Philosophers like Spinoza and scientists like Comte believed that since we are physical beings in the material world, we are a form of matter, and all matter is governed by laws of cause and effect. The most recent form of determinism comes from neo-Darwinians. Human action is genetically determined. As one of the most extreme proponents of this view puts it, human beings are a gene's way of producing another gene. There were even figures within Judaism itself - the medieval philosopher Hasdai Crescas is the most famous example - who held that freewill was an illusion and that the only operative principle in human affairs is Divine providence (this view was, according to Josephus, held by the sectarians of the Second Temple period known as the Essenes). Maimonides, however, was emphatic in ruling out these views:
Free will is bestowed on every human being. If one desires to turn toward the good way and be righteous, he has the power to do so. If one wishes to turn toward the evil way and be wicked, he is at liberty to do so . . . Every human being may become righteous like Moses our teacher, or wicked like Jeroboam; wise or foolish, merciful or cruel, niggardly or generous, and so with all other qualities . . . This doctrine is an important principle, the pillar of the Law and the commandments, as it is said, "See I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil," and again it is written, "Behold, I set before you this day a blessing a curse." This means that the power is in your hands, and whatever a man desires to do among the things that human beings do, he can do, whether they are good or evil . . . If God had decreed that a person should be either righteous or wicked, or if there were some force inherent in his nature which irresistibly drew him to a particular course . . . what room would there be for the whole of the Torah? By what right or justice could God punish the wicked or reward the righteous? "Shall not the Judge of all the earth act justly?"
Some consequences of this view are obvious. It means that we are responsible for what we do. Judaism is an ethic of responsibility. It also means that we are capable of recognizing and acknowledging our mistakes and choosing to act differently in the future. Hence the concept of teshuvah. This is turn entails that the future need not be like the past. With this realization a new concept was born: history as the arena of human development and growth. As the late J. H. Plumb pointed out, Jews were the first people to attach significance to, and see meaning in, history.
But there is another far more paradoxical consequence. God, by entering the human situation, enters time, and thus uncertainty, and thus risk. The granting of freedom to humanity was an immense act of self-limitation on the part of God - what the exponents of Lurianic kabbalah called tzimtzum. The nature of this drama is made clear at almost the beginning of biblical time:
Then the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it." Now Cain said to his brother - and while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.
Here the entire paradox of the Divine-human encounter is present in its pristine form. God knew that Cain was jealous of Abel and planned to kill him. That is why He speaks to him and warns him. Yet Cain does not listen. The murder takes place. How did God let it happen? To which the answer can only be: a grant of freedom to X by a superior power, which is suspended every time X acts in a way of which the superior power disapproves, is not a grant of freedom. This is a logical proposition true in all possible worlds. God does not abandon the world. He speaks to mankind; He teaches us how to behave; He instructs us in the ways of justice and equity, mercy and compassion. But if mankind closes its ears and refuses to listen, there is nothing God can do, short of taking away its freedom, the very thing He granted in creating mankind.
Hence creation involves risk. For us that is true of all acts of creation. Every technology can be misused. Every form of art can become idolatry. For God it is true of only one act of creation, namely the making of humanity. That is why here alone in the Torah's account of creation, we find not a simple "Let there be" but a deliberative prologue, "Let us make man in our image, in our own likeness . . ."
The creation of mankind was anything but straightforward. Homo sapiens (neo-Darwinianism notwithstanding) is not simply an evolutionary variant of other forms of life. The use of language, the future tense, an ability to recall the remote past, self-consciousness and deliberative rationality - the things that make homo sapiens unique - are qualitative leaps, not quantitive developments. A lump of metal and a car may be composed of the same elements but they are not the same thing, or the same kind of thing. That we share many elements of our DNA with the primates does not mean that man is simply a 'naked ape' or a 'gene-producing machine.' This is a fallacy, intelligible, even at a superficial level plausible, but a fallacy none the less. Because we can conceive intentions and act on them, no purely causal explanation of human behaviour will ever be adequate. We are dust of the earth, but there is within us the breath of God.
In creating mankind God was therefore taking the risk that one of His creations might turn against its Creator. Faith means the courage to take a risk. An extraordinary passage in the Babylonian Talmud explains this precisely:
R. Judah said in the name of Rav: When the Holy One blessed be he wished to create man, he first created a company of ministering angels and said to them, Is it your desire that we make man in our image? They answered, Sovereign of the universe, what will be his deeds? Such and such will be his deeds, he replied [He showed them the course of human history]. They thereupon exclaimed, Sovereign of the universe, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you think of him (Psalm 8:5)? At this, He stretched out his finger and consumed them with fire. The same thing happened with a second company of angels. The third company said to him, Sovereign of the universe, what did it avail the former angels when they spoke to you? The whole world is yours; do whatever you wish. God then created mankind. When it came to the age of the Flood and of the division [of tongues, i.e. the Tower of Babel] whose deeds were corrupt they said to him, Sovereign of the universe, did not the first angels speak correctly? God replied: Even to old age I am the same, and even to grey hairs I will forebear (Isaiah 46:4).
The central question of faith is not "Does God exist?" but "Given that God exists, how does man exist?" The angels had reason on their side. Knowing in advance the course of human history, the predominance of war over peace, corruption over justice, cruelty over compassion, what reason could there be for introducing so wayward a creature as man into the universe?
To this, Judaism proposes a surpassingly beautiful answer. God has faith in man. To be sure, that faith is often abused, not to say betrayed. Yet God has infinite patience. "Even to grey hairs I will forebear." Though human beings inflict suffering on one another, God does not give up on his creation. We are here because of an act of supreme love on the part of the author of being. However corrupt we are, He does not relinquish the faith that we will change. However lost, He does not cease to believe that one day we will find our way back to him. For in his Torah, He has given us the map, the code, the guide, the way. Even a handful of righteous individuals justifies His faith in humanity.
One of the cruellest of all misrepresentations of Judaism is the claim that it is not a religion of love (tragically, this claim was made by those who should have known that the two great commands of love, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might" [Deut. 6:5] and "You shall love your neighbour as yourself" [Lev. 19: 18] come from the Mosaic books). Judaism is a faith suffused with love; but infinitely transcending man's love of God is God's love of mankind, for which (in the necessarily human language, which is the only language we can know) He suffers every time human beings wrong one another, and yet which He is prepared to suffer rather than take from mankind the unique gift of freedom He bestowed on them, which is necessarily freedom to do wrong as well as freedom to do right.
According to Judaism, the classic questions of Western theology are precisely wrong, indeed upside down - for the Torah is not man's book of God, but God's book of mankind. More than we search for God, God searches for us, asking us, as He did to Adam and Eve, "Where are you?" In its simple way, the comment of the Sifre is as profound as theology gets. Creation, even God's creation when it involves endowing a creature with the capacity to act in freedom, involves risk and therefore faith. "God of faith" means, "He who had faith in the universe and created it." I know of no lovelier account of the (often unlovely) human condition. We are here because someone wanted us to be. We are free because the Master of all made space for our freedom. We are at home in the universe to the extent that we make of our universe a home for God.
The Risk God Takes
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After the introduction to his song in Haazinu, Moses turns to his central theme, the acts of God in history, beginning with a poetic declaration:
This is an axiom of prophetic faith. God is just. It is human beings who act unjustly. To this day, this verse is part of tzidduk ha-din, "accepting the justice" of the bad things that happen to us. It is a central part of the funeral service. Despite our sense of loss, we forego our anger at what may seem like the cruelty of fate.
There is, however, one ancient rabbinic interpretation of part of this verse that deserves reflection in its own right. It opens the way to one of the most far-reaching and revolutionary of all Jewish ideas. On the phrase, "A God of faith", Sifre (a compendium of commentaries on Bamidbar and Devarim dating back to the Mishnaic period) states:
Creation was an act of faith on the part of God.
When we use the word "faith" in a religious context we naturally assume that the word refers to our faith in God. Understandably so, for it is we who are finite in our understanding, whether of the universe or the full perspective of history. It is we who must make the leap from the known to the unknowable, from the visible to the invisible, from what we see and infer to what lies beyond.
Using the philosophical categories of the West, which come to us from ancient Greece, it makes no sense at all to speak of an act of faith on the part of God. God is, in terms of these categories, omniscient and omnipotent, all-knowing and all-powerful. He is the unmoved mover, the first cause, necessary being, the unchanging essence of reality. These propositions are surely true. Yet this is not God as we meet Him in the pages of Tanach, the Hebrew Bible. Instead this is God as a philosophical abstraction, detached from the human drama. If the Torah teaches us anything it is that God is not detached from the human drama. He is intimately, even passionately, involved in it. There is a difference between the God of the philosophers and the God of the prophets; between - as Yehudah Halevi put it - the God of Aristotle and the God of Abraham, even though they are the same God, whose parallel lines meet in infinity.
God as we encounter him in the Torah takes a risk, monumental in its implications. He creates one being, homo sapiens, capable of being itself creative; He creates, that is to say, a being in His own image. This one act alters the whole nature of the universe. For there is now a being capable of language, thought, reflection, imagination and choice: the one being capable of conceiving the idea of God, but also, given the very nature of freedom and the human imagination, the one being capable of rebelling against God. The implication is the most far reaching in all of creation, for it means that there is now one form of life that can choose between obedience and disobedience, good and evil, turning nature to good ends or, God forbid, destroying it altogether.
Human freedom, the result of language and self-consciousness, is the great unknown and unknowable within the otherwise orderly processes of nature mapped by science. There can never be a science of freedom, for the very concept is a contradiction in terms. Science is about causes, freedom about purposes. Science explains phenomena in terms of other phenomena that preceded them. Free action, by contrast, is explicable only in terms of the future we intend to bring about, not any past event, historical, biochemical or neuro-physiological. To be sure, there are many influences on human behaviour, some genetic, others cultural, environmental, social, economic and political. But they are influences, not causes in the sense in which that term is used in the natural sciences.
For almost every act we do, we could have chosen otherwise (the qualification 'almost' is necessary, for there are some acts - from reflex movements to unwilling behaviour under threat of death - that are not free in such a way as to render their agent responsible for them; Jewish law calls such behaviour ones, i.e. action under coercion). Time and again in the course of civilization, human freedom has been called into question. There were some who believed in astrology: the fault lay not in us but in our stars. Philosophers like Spinoza and scientists like Comte believed that since we are physical beings in the material world, we are a form of matter, and all matter is governed by laws of cause and effect. The most recent form of determinism comes from neo-Darwinians. Human action is genetically determined. As one of the most extreme proponents of this view puts it, human beings are a gene's way of producing another gene. There were even figures within Judaism itself - the medieval philosopher Hasdai Crescas is the most famous example - who held that freewill was an illusion and that the only operative principle in human affairs is Divine providence (this view was, according to Josephus, held by the sectarians of the Second Temple period known as the Essenes). Maimonides, however, was emphatic in ruling out these views:
Some consequences of this view are obvious. It means that we are responsible for what we do. Judaism is an ethic of responsibility. It also means that we are capable of recognizing and acknowledging our mistakes and choosing to act differently in the future. Hence the concept of teshuvah. This is turn entails that the future need not be like the past. With this realization a new concept was born: history as the arena of human development and growth. As the late J. H. Plumb pointed out, Jews were the first people to attach significance to, and see meaning in, history.
But there is another far more paradoxical consequence. God, by entering the human situation, enters time, and thus uncertainty, and thus risk. The granting of freedom to humanity was an immense act of self-limitation on the part of God - what the exponents of Lurianic kabbalah called tzimtzum. The nature of this drama is made clear at almost the beginning of biblical time:
Here the entire paradox of the Divine-human encounter is present in its pristine form. God knew that Cain was jealous of Abel and planned to kill him. That is why He speaks to him and warns him. Yet Cain does not listen. The murder takes place. How did God let it happen? To which the answer can only be: a grant of freedom to X by a superior power, which is suspended every time X acts in a way of which the superior power disapproves, is not a grant of freedom. This is a logical proposition true in all possible worlds. God does not abandon the world. He speaks to mankind; He teaches us how to behave; He instructs us in the ways of justice and equity, mercy and compassion. But if mankind closes its ears and refuses to listen, there is nothing God can do, short of taking away its freedom, the very thing He granted in creating mankind.
Hence creation involves risk. For us that is true of all acts of creation. Every technology can be misused. Every form of art can become idolatry. For God it is true of only one act of creation, namely the making of humanity. That is why here alone in the Torah's account of creation, we find not a simple "Let there be" but a deliberative prologue, "Let us make man in our image, in our own likeness . . ."
The creation of mankind was anything but straightforward. Homo sapiens (neo-Darwinianism notwithstanding) is not simply an evolutionary variant of other forms of life. The use of language, the future tense, an ability to recall the remote past, self-consciousness and deliberative rationality - the things that make homo sapiens unique - are qualitative leaps, not quantitive developments. A lump of metal and a car may be composed of the same elements but they are not the same thing, or the same kind of thing. That we share many elements of our DNA with the primates does not mean that man is simply a 'naked ape' or a 'gene-producing machine.' This is a fallacy, intelligible, even at a superficial level plausible, but a fallacy none the less. Because we can conceive intentions and act on them, no purely causal explanation of human behaviour will ever be adequate. We are dust of the earth, but there is within us the breath of God.
In creating mankind God was therefore taking the risk that one of His creations might turn against its Creator. Faith means the courage to take a risk. An extraordinary passage in the Babylonian Talmud explains this precisely:
The central question of faith is not "Does God exist?" but "Given that God exists, how does man exist?" The angels had reason on their side. Knowing in advance the course of human history, the predominance of war over peace, corruption over justice, cruelty over compassion, what reason could there be for introducing so wayward a creature as man into the universe?
To this, Judaism proposes a surpassingly beautiful answer. God has faith in man. To be sure, that faith is often abused, not to say betrayed. Yet God has infinite patience. "Even to grey hairs I will forebear." Though human beings inflict suffering on one another, God does not give up on his creation. We are here because of an act of supreme love on the part of the author of being. However corrupt we are, He does not relinquish the faith that we will change. However lost, He does not cease to believe that one day we will find our way back to him. For in his Torah, He has given us the map, the code, the guide, the way. Even a handful of righteous individuals justifies His faith in humanity.
One of the cruellest of all misrepresentations of Judaism is the claim that it is not a religion of love (tragically, this claim was made by those who should have known that the two great commands of love, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might" [Deut. 6:5] and "You shall love your neighbour as yourself" [Lev. 19: 18] come from the Mosaic books). Judaism is a faith suffused with love; but infinitely transcending man's love of God is God's love of mankind, for which (in the necessarily human language, which is the only language we can know) He suffers every time human beings wrong one another, and yet which He is prepared to suffer rather than take from mankind the unique gift of freedom He bestowed on them, which is necessarily freedom to do wrong as well as freedom to do right.
According to Judaism, the classic questions of Western theology are precisely wrong, indeed upside down - for the Torah is not man's book of God, but God's book of mankind. More than we search for God, God searches for us, asking us, as He did to Adam and Eve, "Where are you?" In its simple way, the comment of the Sifre is as profound as theology gets. Creation, even God's creation when it involves endowing a creature with the capacity to act in freedom, involves risk and therefore faith. "God of faith" means, "He who had faith in the universe and created it." I know of no lovelier account of the (often unlovely) human condition. We are here because someone wanted us to be. We are free because the Master of all made space for our freedom. We are at home in the universe to the extent that we make of our universe a home for God.
Maurice was a visionary philanthropist. Vivienne was a woman of the deepest humility.
Together, they were a unique partnership of dedication and grace, for whom living was giving.
Coming Soon
More on Ha’azinu
The Inheritance that Belongs to Everyone
The Spirituality of Song
The Arc of the Moral Universe
The Leader’s Call to Responsibility
Let My Teaching Drop as Rain
Emotional Intelligence
Moses the Man
Vengeance