“God is a life, and not merely a
substance. And all that lives is destined for
something [...] and is subject to suffering and
becoming.”
~F.W.J. Schelling
In today’s secondary literature it is customary to
describe the 20th century as an era of a
(supposedly modernistic) theological turn, as the
“turn” was mostly expressed in the teachings of
post-barthian theologians such as Juergen Moltmann,
Eberhard Juengel and so, in a more primitive form, in
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This hypothetical turn is
characterized with the “discovery” and the divine
pathos or emotion; God’s capacity for suffering as a
being-that-suffers and as an archetype of sickness. In
Moltmann, one among many in the relatively new field
of Holocaust Theology, the God identifies with the
human and gets emotionally affected by His creation,
which enables the common suffering of God and the
Assembly of Israel in the Shoah. In Bonhoeffer, the
god redeems the man through His own weakness, through
the mutual empathy between man and God and not through
the messianic-monarchial power.
Against this customary opinion of the secondary
literature, there is a long history for the theme of
pathos, emotion or pain in God both in Christianity
and Judaism, and not only from heresies. I won’t get
into the issue of divine suffering in Christianity
(both because it is not the subject of the article and
because it is ridiculous to engage with viewpoints
that paint Christianity as a non-paschic religion) and
the subject was privileged to have detailed and
enlightening commentaries mainly in the field of
catholic-christian theological literature on the
mystery of the pascha, including Von Balthazar’s
wonderful book, Mysterium Paschale.
In this article I will refer to the divine “Pathos” in
its Zoharic-Rabbinic name: Ratzon (“Desire”), or in
Aramaic: Re’uta/Ra’ava. Both in Rabbinic literature
and in Jewish liturgy the word “Ratzon” describes the
empathy of the Holy One toward Israel, and His
“desire” to hear their prayers and accept their
requests.
Tefilat Mincha: Hour of
Desire
We will begin from the liturgy of Mincha shel Chol, in
which there is a call for the arousal of desire in the
Holy One:
O Hear our voice our God, O merciful father have
mercy on us, and accept with mercy and desire our
prayer, for You are a God who hears prayers and
beggings, and from Your presence, our King, do not
leave us empty. Pardon us and respond to us and hear
our prayer.
We will begin
from the ending: in this prayer there is a call for an
answer from God. The Ratzon here is the emotion that
motivates the Holy One to surrender Himself into a
dialogue with Israel in which He “hears” and
“responds”. The mercies of God, which are named here,
are the love of God with which He surrenders Himself
to the world and proves it in His acting for its
redemption.:
Here is
described a reciprocal relationship, in which God on
the one hand provides for the world, sustains it and
redeems it (as we know), but also on the other hand
man acts upon God too, salvages God and sustains Him.
Man and God are two components in a dialogue in which
they are both immersed in each other and in the
language of the Zohar: “Itbasmu” (“get sweeten” or
“get intoxicated”) in each other. As entities which
are torn between themselves and their pairing, which
is expressed in the powerful emotion bonding them one
to the other, the Holy One and the Shechina bear
sufferings which complete each other. The Ratzon of
the Holy One, if so, is the emotion binding Him to the
engagement with the world, just as the Ratzon of the
praying person is to fulfill the word of the lover.
The dialogical relation, in which the Holy People “Goy
Kadosh” surrenders itself to the Holy One and in
accordance with which the Holy One surrenders Himself
to the One People in return, is expressed in the
entirety of Rabbinic literature, be it in Piyyutical
Liturgy (for example, the dialogical piyyutim of
Yisrael Najara, or “Dodi Yarad L’Gano” by Chaim
HaKohen of Aleppo, which is sung each night in Tikkun
Chatzot) and be it in the Rabbinic canon itself; for
instance, the famous passage in Berachot 6a where the
Holy One is described as putting a tefilin on which it
is written: “And who is like your people Israel—One
People”, in response to the gesture of the people of
Israel who put tefilin on which the Shema Prayer is
written. Hence, the Holy One doesn’t sanctify Himself
in putting the tefilin, but rather His people, His
spirit, which is His Shechina.
Ra’ava D’Ra’avin: The
Matter of the Forehead in the Idra Raba
In a famous passage in the Idra Raba in the Zohar
3:129a, the forehead of Ze’eir Anpin (the Holy One) is
associated with the Ratzon (“Ra’ava D’Ra’avin”, the
desire of all desires) in which there are no
judgements at all and in which exists only absolute
love of the Holy One to Israel and infinite
responsibility to their prayers. The basis for this
association is the passage from scripture “And it was
forever on his forehead for Ratzon” (Exodus 28:38).
According to this part of the Idra Raba, in the time
of Mincha of Shabbat there the forhead of Ze’eir Apin
is revealed and His desire is opened toward creation;
hence, the Holy One is discovered as ready to be
surrendered to His beloved and to His Shechina, and to
have a part of Himself given to her.
Judaism and Christianity
In Christianity there is an accepted position that God
showed His immense love for the world and for humanity
in sacrificing His only-begotten son, Yeshu, to
salvage the world and erase the sins of mankind. Thus
is written in the Gospel of John 3: “For God so loved
the world that he gave his one and only Son, that
whoever believes in him shall not perish but have
eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the
world to condemn the world, but to save the world
through him.”
As I claim here, the position of Judaism is not
contradictory with the position of Christianity about
the sacrifice of the begotten-one or about the total
subjection of the lover to the beloved. Many
interpreters have shown the identity between the
signifier called “Yeshu” and the signifier of
“HaShechina” (the two also equal each other in
gematria), and really in Rabbinic literature it is
customary to describe the Assembly of Israel, so as to
the Torah, as the daughter of the Holy One. Also in
the Tikkunim (daf 45a), a canonical Rabbinic text, the
Shechina is described as a “sacrifice” (“Korbana” or
“Ola”) whose sacrifice as the only-begotten daughter
of the Holy One is empowering the mechanism of
communion and redemption:
As she [Shechinta] is the sacrifice of Kudsha Berich
Hu, as the shechina is certainly His sacrifice, and
for that reason they amend prayer with sacrifice.
There is more to be explicated on this subject.
On the Author: Nasr bar
Hurmizd is a Jewish apostate to Manicheanism and
an independent researcher of the Zohar.
