The Genesis of Justice (11 page)

Now pray, I have ventured to speak to my Lord:

Perhaps there will be found there only twenty!

He said:

I will not bring ruin, for the sake of the twenty
.

But he said:

Pray let my Lord not be upset that I speak further just this one time:

Perhaps there will be found there only ten!

He said:

I will not bring ruin, for the sake of the ten
.

YHWH went, as soon as he had finished speaking to Avraham, and Avraham returned to his place
.

G
ENESIS
18:17-33

S
everal generations after promising Noah that he would never again destroy the world by flood, God reneged on His promise.
He decided to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by hail and brimstone. To be sure, these two cities are not exactly
the whole world, and hail and brimstone is not quite a flood. But God didn’t seem to get the
principle
behind his promise to Noah. He was relying on a technical distinction that undercut the policy against mass destruction.
Rabbinic commentary recognizes this with a midrash elaborating on Abraham’s argument: “You swore that You would not bring
a flood upon the world again…. A flood of water You won’t bring, but a deluge of fire You would bring? Would you with subtlety
evade Your oath?”
¹
Abraham challenges God, and politely but firmly he tries to set His creator straight. Hence the powerful story of Abraham’s
argument with God.

What gives Abraham the “right” to argue with God and question his intentions? The answer must lie in the unique relationship
between God and His people. The relationship between God and the Jewish people is covenantal—that is, in the nature of a legally
binding contract. As one commentator has put it: “God is transformed from an ‘absolute’ into a ‘constitutional’ monarch. He
is bound, as man is bound, to the conditions of the constitution.”
²
There are certainly examples in contemporary life of parents making contracts with their children: allowance in exchange
for tasks; rewards for good grades. There are even instances in history of slaveholders contracting with slaves: freedom after
x number of years of servitude. But a contract between the Creator and those He created? What a remarkable notion! This theme
of mutually obligatory contract resonates through much of Jewish history, prayer, literature, and even song.

God makes a covenant first with Noah, then with Abraham, and then again with Jacob. Noah never invokes it. Abraham does, reminding
Him of His promise to do justly.
³
Abraham’s grandson Jacob goes even further in a subsequent story, explicitly making his acceptance of God conditional upon
God satisfying His end of the deal: “
If
God be with me,
if
He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and
if
I return safely to my father’s house—
then
God shall be my God.”
⁴
(An earlier variation on my youthful “deal” with God to be more religious in exchange for a Dodger world championship.) Some
commentators (such as Rabbi Abahu) tried to deny the conditional nature of Jacob’s promise. But others (such as Rabbi Yochanan)
interpreted it as it was written: “If all the conditions that God promised me … are fulfilled, then I will keep my vow.”
⁵
The conditions are, in fact, met and Jacob keeps his vow. A model of contractual compliance—at least for a time.

A contract bestows rights on
both
contracting parties. The Jewish people have the right to insist that God keep His side of the bargain forever—or at least
explain why He has not done so. Throughout Jewish history—from the destruction of the Temples, to the Crusades, to the Inquisition,
to the pogroms, and especially to the Holocaust—Jews have been demanding an answer from their contracting partner. It has
rarely been forthcoming, but we persist.

The very word “chutzpah”—which I took as the title for one of my books and which means “boldness,” “assertiveness,” a “willingness
to challenge authority”—was first used in the context of demanding that God keep His side of the covenant. It appears in the
Talmud
⁶
as part of the Aramaic expression
chutzpah k’lapei shemaya
—chutzpah even against heaven. Abraham was the first to demonstrate such chutzpah, but surely not the last. The most famous
postbiblical exemplar of chutzpah against heaven was the eighteenth-century Hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev,
who repeatedly invoked God’s contract in challenging God’s injustice toward his covenantal partners. On one occasion he threatened
to expose God’s promises as “false.” On another he sued God and threatened to refuse to cooperate with plans to keep the Jewish
people in exile. On one Yom Kippur, a simple tailor sought forgiveness from the great rabbi for having talked disrespectfully
to God. The rabbi asked him what he had said, and the tailor told him:

I declared to God: You wish me to repent of my sins, but I have committed only minor offenses: I may have kept leftover cloth,
or I may have eaten in a non-Jewish home, where I worked, without washing my hands.

But you, O Lord, have committed grievous sins: You have taken away babies from their mothers, and mothers from their babies.
Let us be quits: May You forgive me, and I will forgive You.

The great rabbi looked at the tailor and replied: “Why did you let God off so easily?”
⁷
It is this argumentative tradition that Abraham initiated when he challenged God’s justice toward the Sodomites.

Abraham’s argument with God raises one of the most troubling and recurring issues of theology: Can God’s justice be judged
by human beings according to standards of human justice? If not, by whom and by what standards can God’s justice be evaluated?
The alternative is to assume—tautologically—that whatever God does, regardless of how unjust it may seem to us, is by definition
just. Whatever God commands must be done without question or challenge. This would imply that humans should learn about justice
from God’s actions—even if we don’t understand or agree with them. But what are we to learn from the flood, the binding of
Isaac, the Job story, and the Holocaust? We cannot abdicate our own human responsibility to define justice in human terms.
Such an approach is the first step on the road to fundamentalism. The Sodom narrative appears to reject the fundamentalist
approach and to suggest that God has submitted Himself to at least some human judgment through the covenant.

The story begins with a soliloquy in which God explains why He is going to tell Abraham about His plans to destroy the sinning
cities. Abraham’s destiny is to teach the world to “keep the way of God, to do what is right and just.” Abraham understands
his role, but when God announces His plans, Abraham immediately sees a conflict: If he “keeps the way of God,” he will not
“do what is right and just,” because God is Himself planning to do something terribly unjust. So Abraham challenges God in
the terms of His mandate: “The judge of the earth—will He not do what is just?” Abraham’s idea of what is just must necessarily
reflect his own human standards of justice, under which only the guilty are punished. God could easily have responded by saying:
“How dare you challenge My concept of justice? You cannot understand My ways. You cannot judge divine justice by human standards.”

The God of the Book of Job responds in precisely that manner when Job refuses to accept the injustice that God inflicts on
him and his children. It is instructive to contrast the learning God of Abraham with the more certain God of Job. Job’s God
rebukes His challenger, asking rhetorically:

Where were you when I laid the foundations for the earth? … Do you understand the laws which govern the heavens? … Would you
go so far as to undermine My judgment, put Me in the wrong so that you might be right? Do you have strength comparable to
that of God? Can you, like He, produce the thunder’s clap?

In other words, the God of Job pulls rank on His human challenger. His answer is simply a function of His power. To borrow
a wonderful line from a Ring Lardner story: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.” And Job does more than merely shut up. He submits to
God’s bullying tactics: “I can understand nothing,” he apologizes. “It is beyond me. I shall never know.” In bending to God’s
one-upmanship, Job gives up his own ideas of justice, which—on their own merits—are far more persuasive than God’s. Job, after
all, is absolutely innocent, yet God allows Satan to inflict on him and his family the worst sorts of punishment. What kind
of a God would test a just person by deliberately killing his ten children? Even the traditional commentators recognize the
killings were unjust. Accordingly, one of them comes up with an ingenious interpretation under which God did not authorize
the actual killing of Job’s children. He simply authorized Satan to hide them during the test so that Job would believe that
they were dead; God then returned them (and more) after Job passed the test. Others argue that Job was not an actual historical
person, merely a literary construction. After all, he did live in the land of Oz!
^*

But Job—whether actual or fictional—
believed
that God had killed his innocent children and quite properly challenged God’s justice. Job’s arguments are compelling, but
he surrenders them when God appears from out of the whirlwind and invokes His superior power. Job loses the argument not on
the merits, but rather by default. It is not a debate; it is an arm-wrestling contest. Job responds to God’s show of force
by denying his own intellect—“I can understand nothing. It is beyond me. I shall never know.” Job the dissident
⁸
thus becomes Job the fundamentalist. By invoking His power instead of His reason to respond to Job’s entirely legitimate
question, the God of justice becomes the God of power.

It is difficult to imagine a greater injustice than seeing an all-powerful being kill your innocent children and then having
Him rebuke you for questioning the morality of His actions. If the classic definition of chutzpah is to murder your own parents
and then demand mercy because you’re an orphan, then the classic definition of tyranny is to kill a person’s children and
demand that he humbly accept this injustice as fair. The Book of Job endures as a great work despite, not because of, God’s
response in the final chapters. It is the deep human arguments of Job and his friends about the suffering of good people that
have resonated for centuries with those who have witnessed and experienced injustice, and not God’s muscle-flexing and unsatisfying
response. Ultimately God wins the argument with Job not because He is right, but because He is God. This is reminiscent of
what lawyers often say about Supreme Court justices: Their judgments are binding not because they are right; they are right
only because their judgments are binding. We, the readers, learn absolutely nothing about the nature of justice from God’s
peremptory response to Job’s probing questions. The God of Job is about as informative as a drill sergeant who barks, “Do
it because I say so,” or a parent who replies, “Because I’m your parent, that’s why!”

In my view, the God with whom Abraham argues is far more interesting and a much better teacher. He accepts Abraham’s challenge
in Abraham’s own human terms. In doing so, God understands that pulling rank—invoking naked power—is not an effective pedagogical
device. God’s invitation to “reason together”
⁹
is a far better technique, designed to foster a human process for achieving justice, rather than a knee-jerk acceptance of
superior orders. The God who invites Abraham to argue with Him about justice is a God who encourages rational discourse. The
God who rebukes Job for trying to understand an obvious injustice is a God who promotes unthinking fundamentalism. One of
the beauties of the Bible is that even its God speaks in different voices over time.

Biblical commentators have sought to reconcile the reasoning God of Abraham with the peremptory God of Job. One distinction
is that Abraham was party to a covenant with God. Job was not. Job is not identified as a Jew in the Bible. He was, of course,
subject to the Noachide laws, but he was not a beneficiary of the same sort of broadly binding mutual covenant as the one
between God and Abraham. It did not include the right to argue back. Abraham’s covenant bestows a unique bundle of obligations
and rights, including the right to challenge the other Party to keep His promise. Job had no such right. His relationship
with God was that of subject to autocrat. Job must know his place—as a subordinate who dares not question his master’s justice.
Job is rebuked precisely for purporting to argue with God as an equal:

“Should the King be accused of wantonness … ?” “It is sacrilege to ascribe injustice to the Almighty. … ”
¹⁰
“Would you undertake to declare the Most Righteous at fault?”
¹¹
“Who has ever said to Him, ‘You have acted unjustly’?”
¹²

Job, who remains silent in the face of these rebukes, could easily have appealed to precedent, reminding God of what Abraham
had said. Why then did Job not invoke the precedent of Abraham in response to God’s pointed question “Who has ever said to
Him, You have acted unjustly?”
¹³
Perhaps Job took the question to be rhetorical, or maybe he realized that because he did not have a covenant with God, his
relationship to the Almighty was not one of citizen to constitutional monarch; it was of subject to absolute ruler. God engages
in dialogue only with those who are His covenantal partners. With others, like Job, He simply acts, orders, and expects complete
subservience, obedience, and acceptance.

In most religions, the autocratic God of Job prevails over the dialogic God of Abraham, for the simple reason that the endemic
injustice of the real world can never be explained in human terms. I do not think that the awful injustices that have afflicted
innocent human beings over the millennia—from the flood to the Crusades to the plagues to the Holocaust—can be justified even
in divine terms, but that is a claim that can never be substantiated, since we, as humans, are capable of thinking only in
human terms. If the tragedies and cataclysms of the world can never be explained by God in ways understandable to humans,
what’s the use of dialogue with the divine? In the end God will have to say, as He did to Job, You cannot understand my ways.
In other words, God did not answer Job’s question about why the righteous suffer and the unrighteous prosper because there
is no adequate answer. God simply points to the marvels of creation and remains silent about the inadequacy of His justice.
It is easier to create a physical universe than to assure justice. If there were a world to come, He could have referred to
reward and punishment after death. Instead He leaves it to others—particularly Elihu—to make the case for the justice of His
actions. Since God Himself cannot defend the injustice of the world, He must leave that task to others—who
can
argue, as God cannot, that only God understands the apparent injustice of the world. Yet even if we cannot fully understand
apparent injustice, we have an obligation to argue against it, as Abraham, Job, and their intellectual progeny have tried
to do.