Pleading With God

    Even if we intellectually accept that The Eternal has no human attributes, nor, as per Maimonides, “[is the Eternal] affected by physical phenomena and that that there is no comparison whatsoever to [the Eternal]” we are still stuck (or blessed?) with the language of the Torah which is filled with physical attributes used to describe the Divine.

   Sometimes the language is easy to see as metaphorical. In this week’s Parashah, Vaetchanan, we read one of the seven times in Torah that “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” the Eternal brought is out of our slavery in Egypt. Unless Chagall is drawing a blue wind forming itself through a misty manifestation of divine will into half-imagined mighty fingers, it is pretty easy to understand how this can be accepted as symbolic language. Yet the language of some passages makes a literal and anthropomorphic God much harder to set aside.

   “Vaetchanan” translates as “and I pleaded.” Vaetchanan comes from the same root ‘chet-nun-nun’ as “to show mercy,” but in the reflexive hithpael form becomes “to plead or beg for mercy.” The image is the easily-imagined dialogue between a man in anguish seeking a boon and a sovereign, possibly even a tyrant, denying a faithful and trusted servant what seems like a just reward for a life of service.

    I pleaded with the Eternal at that time, saying, “O Eternal God, You who let Your servant see the first works of Your greatness and Your mighty hand, You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal! Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon.” But the Eternal was wrathful with me on your account and would not listen to me. The Eternal said to me, “Enough! Never speak to Me of this matter again!”

   This doesn’t feel like metaphor. It is all too easy to recognize us within Moses’ plea. “Please. This one thing for which I have worked so hard. Let me see it to completion. I beg you.”

   As a once-upon-a-time corporate project manager, we were told in the project management department of a large corporation that, “the job of a project manager is to own the outcome of the project.” No excuses, just honour the golden triangle of time, cost, and scope and deliver the outcome. Moses, the greatest of all prophets and an early adopter of project management methodology owned “Project Promised Land” with every bit of his being. He argued with management (God) and the primary stakeholders (Am Yisrael) while hiring directors (elders) to manage work products all while fighting off hostile takeovers (Amalek, et al) and competing project managers from the other corporate office that wanted his job (Korach.) The timeframe of his project was the amount of time it would take the generation that left with him from Egypt to die off, and the scope was to teach an entire new generation the legends and values of their ancestors in addition to an entirely new religion and then have those values, morals, ethics and their legal underpinnings go into production when they entered into the “go live” phase, settling in Eretz Yisrael.

   And then the Eternal informs Moses that he doesn’t get to take the project through to “go live.” Can anyone blame Moses for not only pleading with God, but as well recounting (with a wee bit of justifiable martyrdom) to the people of Israel the unfairness of this judgment? Notice the universality—he even blames others instead of accepting his own role in the punishment. Nevertheless, what is the longest work project we have ever undertaken, only to see another take the final step? How did we react?

   All this leads back to the use of anthropomorphisms (human attributes to describe that which has none.) My temptation has always been to immediately challenge all whenever they are uttered and list the potential symbolic meanings of the voice, hand, back, will, love, etc of the Eternal. But again, this one feels different. I do not believe that these verses from Vaetchanan reflect a historical dialogue in the way that a live microphone captures a dialogue which is then transcribed. But rather than being symbolic, Moses’ plea to the Eternal is real—as real as any moment any of us have ever had when life did not go as our personal sense of justice suggested it should go. At these moments we do indeed cry out to the universe saying, “Please let it be as I want it to be!” knowing full well that the answer we are probably going to receive is “no.” As did Moses, we may even blame others for the thwarting of our plans. When our will does not come to pass, and we are forced to move on in a different direction—perhaps a direction we had never imagined or even a direction that causes shame from all the people we told about our original intentions—that “no” begins to feel quickly like, “Enough! Never speak to Me of this matter again.”

   We may not be able to describe God, and we certainly have the responsibility as Jews to interpret the symbolic attributes of God and even argue about the nature of God, but we as well have a Torah that recognizes that the Eternal oftentimes is the dialogue we have with life where our plans are not promises accepted by the universe. Moses’ plea and indeed eventual acceptance of his disappointment may teach us more about the divine then a clear description ever could.