Supplications to the God of Israel

The origin of the Jewish people is found in a single tome (the Torah scroll), containing five separate books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In other disciplines, it is referred to as the Pentateuch, the Old Testament, the Bible, the Septaugint and the Five Books of Moses. It exists in at least two different forms of the Hebrew language: the Samaritan Torah and the Masoretic Torah. While those two documents contain thousands of technical differences, they essentially tell the same story, differing principally in the site for the establishment of God’s Temple and the Holy Land.

No other historical source exists or confirms the history of the Jewish (Israelite) people from the birth of Abraham through the death of Moses.  Some historians have actually cast doubt on whether that epoch ever occurred.

That history, as recounted in the Torah given at Mount Sinai, is nevertheless critical because it identifies and gives definition to the relationship between the Jew and the God of Israel. While the Samaritans claim an earlier transcription of their Torah, the Masoretic text (the Torah used by Jews today) was originally delivered by Ezra the Scribe to the site of the Second Temple, in the late Fifth Century BCE.

Who Wrote the Torah?

The authorship of the Torah is one of the greatest puzzlements of biblical Jewish history. Depending on one’s commitment to tradition, there are a number of different theories ranging from: 1. written by the finger of God,  2. dictated by Moses, 3. divinely inspired, transcribed from multiple recorded texts or 4. authored by four independent authors and assembled into a single tome. Whatever the authentic origin, from the time of the Second Temple it became Judaism’s sacred text and the source of the mutual covenants between God and the Jewish people.

The Torah’s Relationship Between God and the Jews

Traditionally, Judaism holds the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (the patriarchs) as the national God of the Israelite people, who delivered them from slavery in Egypt and gave them the Torah at Mount Sinai. God is understood as the absolute one, indivisible, and that incomparable being who is the ultimate cause of all existence. God is the only one we may serve and praise. There are no intermediaries between Jews and God. He is the source of morality and has the power to intervene in the world. He is a God that can be experienced but not necessarily understood because He is utterly unlike humankind.

Some recent Jewish thinkers have rejected the idea of a personal God and have sometimes pictured God as an ethical idea or a force or process in the world. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, conceived God, not as a person, but rather a force within the universe that is to be experienced – thus, abstract, not incarnate and intangible.

A dichotomy exists in those religions that allude to God as the father. In Judaism, reference to God as the father, as in “Avinu Malkeinu” (our Father our King), addresses God as our Creator and our Monarch, who has continuing authority over our lives and to whom we ask for mercy and loving kindness. In no way does it suggest that we are his genetic lineal descendants. To do so would be to create multiple gods in violation of our commitment to one God, as expressed in the First and Second of the Ten Commandments.

However, the concept of God, the father, in Christianity, is totally different. In that instance, the perception is that God personally intervened with Mary in the conception and birth of Jesus and, thus, Jesus is the son of God and His coequal. It is difficult to understand how that notion can coexist with monotheism.

Human existence is part of the creative and artistic work product of God. It is axiomatic that a Creator reserves to itself the right to alter or destroy its creation. That judgment is not governed by any universal standard, but is generally exercised when the Creator deems that its creation is unworthy, requires alteration, is dangerous, or no longer serves the purpose for which it was created. In that regard, it is essential to be mindful that the power to create is the power to modify and/or the power to destroy.

Who is the God of the Jews

Jews know God by how He describes himself in the Torah and by God’s responses to events that occurred during biblical times. In a large part of the expatriate (diaspora) Jewish community, the love of the Torah, Jewish history and Jewish culture are acquired by birth, rather than in-depth study. Yet, that love alone nurtures organizational giving and declarations of undying fidelity.

The God of the Torah was both candid and direct. However,His candor frequently struck terror in the hearts of his Jewish people, often causing them to refer to themselves as “God-fearing” rather than “God-loving”.  Study of the Torah reveals that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a jealous and vengeful God, a God to be feared. How do we know that? God himself told us so. In Deuteronomy 32(35), God says, “to me belongeth  vengeance”. In Exodus 34 (14), God warns, “thou shalt worship no other God: for the Lord, whose name is jealous is a jealous God.” Exodus 20 (5) combines a warning on both jealousy and vengeance by declaring, “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”

The Origin of the Jewish People

God did not choose the Jewish people. He designed them out of a unique and unlikely source: Abraham, a 75-year-old man and Sarah, his barren 65-year-old wife. Abraham was 100 years old and his wife 90 years old when their child, Isaac, was born, with the help of God’s intervention. Incidentally, that did not make Isaac the son of God.

An accepted notion for God’s design of the Israelite people was to create a nation that would disseminate the civil laws of God’s Torah throughout the world and thus avoid a civilization meandering into depravity.

God’s Covenant with the People of Israel

The biblical covenant between God and the people of Israel was simple. The people were obliged to acknowledge that there was only one God, the God of Israel, and they couldhave no other gods. Jews were required to follow God’s explicit directions, as they appeared in the Torah and as delivered by those chosen by God, like Moses, to communicate them. The Jewish people were to be a “light unto the nations,” teaching the Ten Commandments and God’s civilizing laws to a world that lacked moral structure and order. For those services and others, God would give to his people the land of Canaan, protect them from their enemies and provide amply for them.

God likely knew that jealousy and vengeance were traits and characteristics not admired by the humanity which he created. Nevertheless, if the bond between them were to endure, God requires discipline and total compliance from the Israelite people. Like a general with his troops in the field, if the relationship becomes too personal, the general loses his authority to command. Even where God describes a more benevolent attitude toward the people of Israel, as in Exodus 34 (6-7), He concludes with a vengeful threat, “I am Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children’s children unto the third and fourth generation”.

Except for persons selected by God to perform specific tasks, there appears to be no personal relationship between God and individual community members. The Torah demonstrates a number of examples of the impersonal nature of that thesis:

• For the simple act of tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve, new to the world, without the benefit of childhood’s maturing lessons of compliance, are thrown out of the Garden of Eden to fend for themselves in a finite life.
• God chooses Noah to preserve some of the living elements of the world and proceeds to destroy the remainder because of what God views and appraises as wickedness. Was everybody in the world, with the exception of Noah and his family, wicked? Did God select from his vengeance those of his creations that were not wicked? Is wholesale elimination of God’s created creatures the inalienable right of the Creator?
• Abraham learned of God’s intention to destroy the cities of Saddam and Gomorrah and confronted God with the possibility that there were righteous people within the city whose lives should not be forfeited with the wicked. God acknowledges the fairness of Moses’ proposal, but the text informs that only Moses’ nephew, Lot, his wife and his two daughters left the site alive.
• The Hebrew spies who determined that it was unwise to invade Canaan were condemned to die before Israel retook the Holy Land. Those who favored the invasion remained alive to enjoy the fruits of the conquest. Were not both groups equally honest, although different in their recommendations? What was the justification for the disparity in the treatment of the Hebrew spies who recommended for and those who recommended  against the invasion?
• Since when is an oral challenge to leadership a capital offense? In Numbers 16 (1-7), Korah, a leader and activist, lodged a challenge against Moses’ leadership. God then drops Korah and 250 of his followers into a fiery sinkhole because they questioned Moses’ leadership (Numbers 16 (32)). Because many of the Israelite people were upset at the treatment of Korah and the others, they, themselves, fell into jeopardy. A plague beset and consumed 14,700 of them.
• While curiosity can be a fatal disorder for cats, it does not necessarily follow that the life of Lot’s wife should be forfeited for a moment of curiosity (she disobeyed the order not to look back at the destruction of Saddam and Gomorrah).
• The two eldest sons of Aaron were Nadab and Abihu. In the hierarchy of biblical Judaism, few could be of the rank that they enjoyed.  However, because of some administrative problem, described as bringing the wrong fire into the tabernacle, they were both struck dead by God in front of the eyes of their father (Leviticus 10 (2)).

The most significant civil document in the history of mankind is The Ten Commandments. Among those Commandments, we are instructed by God not to kill and not to steal. And yet, God, in Deuteronomy 20 (16-17), instructs us:“but the cities of these people which the Lord thy God does give thee for an inheritance thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth but thou shalt utterly destroy them namely, the Hittites and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” Israelites were instructed to confront these tribes, who were occupying their own lands peaceably, and ruthlessly kill the men, women, children and animals, and possess and occupy their land. How could this act not be murder and theft in violation of God’s own Ten Commandments?  If “My commander ordered me to do that” were a proper defense, why did Israel hang Adolph Eichmann?

God’s Silence

Malachi, who lived in the Fifth Century BCE, was the last of the biblical Prophets. He describes God as being provoked by the Israelite people whom God has recently freed from Babylon and returned to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. His prophecy demonstrates a people who have such an indifferent attitude to God as to sacrifice animals that are blind or lame. Worse, perhaps, were the priests that allowed and supported such irreverent behavior. Malachi reports God’s anger at the Israelites who do not tithe for the upkeep and maintenance of the Temple. He advises that God is offended by many of the Israelites who have divorced their Jewish wives in order to establish relationships with Gentile women, and who have engaged in multiple other transgressions. Malachi’s prophecy describes a God who is so provoked by Israel’s lack of respect and compliance with God’s statutes and appreciation of God’s efforts on their behalf, that He is about to turn His face from them.

With the exception of the false Prophets of Israel, God’s voice was not subsequently heard, nor did his aid appear in the tragedies that have befallen his people: 1. the destruction of the Second Temple; 2. the forced removal of the Jews from their homeland by the Romans to serve as slaves and servants on the European continent; 3. the massacre of thousands of Jews during the Crusades; the Spanish Inquisition, where nearly half of the Jews were forcibly converted to Catholicism, and many, thereafter, burned at the stake as heretics; 4. 2000 years of landless wandering as classless people moving from country to country in advance of the pogroms; and 5. the ruthless murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime in the 1940s.

In all the foregoing tragedies, it does not appear that the good, the moral, the God-fearing and the faultless were exempt from the tragic events that occurred to the rest of the Jewish community. God’s relationship with the Nation of Israel is that of a Creator/Created. While sometimes God appears to have affection for His designed people, He is often wrought with them and appears to reserve the right to discipline, amend or abandon his creation.

There is no evidence of even a quasi-personal relationship with any Israelites, outside of individuals God personally selected to perform services for Him or those He chose to punish.

Personal (One on One) Communication with God

The Why

It makes perfect sense to want to communicate with the authority that has total control over your existence and your fortunes. That is especially true if He will possibly punish you, your children and grandchildren to the fourth generation for your sins and transgressions.

 In some faiths, such as Christianity, because of the unlikelihood of accessing the Creator, intermediaries such as saints are used. In those Christian disciplines where Jesus and God are not one in the same, Jesus is, notably, the intermediary of choice. Whether motivated by fear, request, appreciation, love or merely a desire to keep on the good side of the Creator, human efforts to initiate communication are infinite.

The How and the Odds of Contact

Prayer is the most popular medium used by people who wish to communicate with their God. Consider that in addition to individual personal communications, the Jewish religion and many other faiths require formal prayer multiple times a day. Consider that there are 6.8 billion people in the world, many of whom might be seeking access during the same 24-hour period, and you can calculate the likelihood of God receiving a given prayer, even if the Creator were receptive to receipt of individual supplications.

How People Pray

An act of prayer can be as simple as a spontaneous and wordless reaching out to one’s Creator to communicate praise, thankfulness, a request or even relief from distress. However, most religions of today provide a ritualized act that requires exact dates, strict timing and sequence of defined words and actions. Prayer books and hymnals sanctify the words of others as if those words give special access and meaning to the domain of the Creator.

Different cultures have unique ways of expressing their prayers. Native Americans dance, Sufies whirl, Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate themselves, Jews shukkle (sway back and forth and bow) and Quakers maintain strict silence. One might ask, with tongue-in-cheek, which style is more effective to get their prayers to the highest plateau.

In religions such as Judaism and Catholicism, other considerations directly impair the possible efficacy of prayers. Orthodox Jews utter prepared prayers with such speed that one can hardly distinguish one word from the other. In many cases, the person uttering the prayer is not familiar with biblical Hebrew and, therefore is unable to adequately identify what was communicated. In Christendom, especially within the Catholic Church, Latin is frequently used to exalt the deity. Today, Latin is not the lingua franca of Western civilization, and few, even in the clergy, can provide an exact interpretation of the substance of the prayer.

What conclusions can the person offering the prayer make when there is no response to his or her prayers? Some might include:

• The Creator, armed with its august power to hear and internalize all prayers, will consider the merits of the petitioner and of his or her request and will render a divine judgment in due time.
• The Creator is so bored and troubled by the repetition and delivery of the pre-prepared mantra-like prayers that He has lost interest.
• The petitioner who utters the prayers is so unworthy that he does not deserve a response.
• People are simply works of art in the hands of the Creator for which there is no moral responsibility to reply.
• The Creator existed at the moment of creation but has since died or left. His creation and the repetitious mechanisms of his creation still exist and function, even in his absence.

With great trepidation, every Jew, indeed every thinking human being, confronts the question of his or her role in human existence. Was he or she uniquely and purposely selected or simply randomly produced? Two main theories do daily battle in the arena of constructive thought:

Creationism: That is the concept that God created the earth and everything within it. As part of that process, He created the design, the mechanism and the intricacies by which all living things can regenerate themselves in kind for successive generations. However, there has been no credible contact with God in over 2500 years (the date of the last biblical Prophets) during which the world has continued to function. His absence tends to raise such troubling questions as: Is God dead? Did God turn his face away from the people of Israel? Was there ever really a God?

Evolution: The theory of evolution describes genetic changes in the characteristic of a species over several generations and relies on the process of “natural selection.” Natural selection is a change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Initially, as relates to the animal world, it purports to justify the march from an inanimate substance to the one cell amoeba and ultimately to the human, whose brain accounts for the creation of nuclear science, electronic communication, airflight, modern medicine and more.

Many question the meaning and origin of “natural selection”. Did “natural selection” appear on the scene out of nothing (ex nihilo) or is it sourced in a creative entity? Who programmed  “natural selection” to avoid a random response, such as, where a mama and papa lion give birth to a giraffe?

The Good

There are a few things that lift the step or heighten the spirits more than hope. When human intervention appears fruitless, there is always God. The military express it best when they observe that, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” It is that hope, accompanied by prayer that God will intervene to see us through, that often gives us the strength to endure. Prayer is the vehicle that summons hope. Even in the absence of divine intercession, the hope alone is frequently sufficient tether to subsist until the ultimate resolution, or until the person formulates his own answer to the problem.

Prayer begs the question of whether we live in a world that God designed and created or whether we choose to design and create our own God and our own world. Those who leave the realm of reality to create their own God are destined to live in a paper world of their own design. In that paper world, it takes only one spark of adversity to set that world aflame.

The Bad

There is an old adage that tells us that “God helps those who help themselves.” It is a quaint way of telling us that each person must pursue personal needs and wants through their own maximum effort. There are those who have prayed for something, or some outcome, and conclude that it is now in God’s hands. Assured that God will do what is requested of Him, they abandon constructive or positive efforts on behalf of the goal, and nothing moves forward.

Conclusion

The Hebrew nation was not created as a pet rock or puppy dog to serve as the outlet for the affections of the Creator. It was created out of the need to provide a service. Like Moses, who failed to comply with a single order of the Creator in the summoning of water, and thus was not permitted to enter the Holy Land, the people became subject to the Creator’s discipline.

Yet, there appears on the pages of the Torah a unique relationship between God and the Hebrew nation. Only in fantasies, like Pygmalion, does the Creator generate personal affection for his creation. That should not be confused with God’s creative pride in his design and utility of the Hebrew nation. However, when the Hebrew people strayed from their assigned path, God’s vengeance was swift and uncompromising, ending in 2000 years of painful and tragic wandering of the earth, followed by the slaughter of six million of its people. It was hardly a testimonial to affection.

The relationship between the Creator and the people of Israel, is one that is with that nation and rarely, if ever, with individual members of that community. The exception exists in those circumstances where God selects an individual to perform specific tasks or, as in the case of the Prophets, to deliver a message to the nation.

The Torah places the personal affairs of individual Israelites in the community domain. Violations of Torah laws and obligations are determined and resolved by that individual’s peers. He or she is adjudicated within the community, and is either acquitted or sentenced to expulsion, fine, or even stoning.

Reward or punishment does not come in the “afterlife” or the “world to come,” because there is no afterlife or world to come. The God of Israel, the God of the Torah, never described or suggested another world to come or the existence of life after death. The world to come and afterlife are part of the creative imagination of Rabbinical Judaism. It is a concept that Christianity adopted with great vigor and enlarged with unusual enthusiasm.

If, there is no afterlife or world to come, then good deeds, an exalted life of charity, righteousness, kindness and beneficence must, assuredly, be awarded to a person in his or her own lifetime. If that were so, then:

• Those who conducted their lives with honesty, kindness, charity, fairness and consideration would all be healthy, wealthy and wise.
• Those who are evil, cruel, depraved, selfish or immoral would all be poor, infirmed, unhappy and otherwise desperate.

Apparently, there is no reward for a righteous life in heaven or on earth. Yet there are those, armed with that knowledge who nevertheless live exemplary lives which reach out through the void in search of the presence of God.

Douglas Kaplan