God dreams. We believe in a God who dreams of a world of goodness, of oneness. The transaction between divine dreams and human reality is the drama of the Bible. God creates humanity — fashioned in the divine image — to share the dream. But human beings betray God’s dreams, and fill the world with violence and murder. God despairs of having created humanity and decides to wash the world clean, when one human being catches God’s eye — one good man. So God saves Noah and his family, along with a set of earth’s animals, to begin the world again. And again, humanity disappoints God. We defile God’s world and once more, God’s dream is betrayed. This time, God pursued a different strategy — God takes a partner. Having failed to create the good man, having failed to choose the good man, God endeavors to teach goodness, beginning with one family, one man — Abraham. Through Abraham, God would reach humanity’s heart and share the divine dream.
The Torah’s most radical idea: God needs us. God enlists us as partners. To share the dream of a world of goodness, God establishes a Covenant with us. Partnership is a unique relationship. A partner must disclose himself. God wonders:
“Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? …
I have singled him out that he may instruct his children to keep the way of the Lord to do what is just and right.”
(Gen. 18:17–19)
When God decries the evil of Sodom,
“Abraham came forward and said,
Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?
…Far be it from You to do such a thing — to bring death upon the innocent together with the guilty, so that good and evil are the one in the same. Far be it from You!
Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?…
I venture to speak to my Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.”
Gen. 18:23–25, 27)
This is the epitome of chutzpah. The human being dresses God down in no unsubtle terms. Far be it from You! The original Hebrew hallilah lecha is actually much more earthy. The connotation is closer to my grandmother’s Yiddish curse, Shonda! Herpah! “Shame on You! You’re better than that!” Abraham gives voice to his utter disappointment in God’s betrayal of their shared ideal of justice: How could You, God, blur the moral distinction between good and evil, between innocence and guilt? Is that the world You designed? Shame on You! You’re better than that!
Even more remarkable, God accepts it. God relents. But the Bible isn’t finished. The Bible wants to play out the drama. So Abraham continues bargaining. Fifty becomes forty-five. Forty-five slips to forty; forty to thirty; thirty to twenty; twenty to ten. And only then does Abraham stop. Ten, it seems is the minimum quorum for cultivating moral personality. The story has a quality of the absurd, the ridiculous. What kind of God is this? What religious universe is being described by this story? A God who accepts human rebuke is a God more committed to teaching an ideal of justice than in maintaining a divine prerogative of authority. Faithfulness to the divine dream takes priority over deference before God’s majesty. Nothing, it seems, is more sacred than justice, not even God’s own authority. This is a celebration of chutzpah, of covenantal audacity.
How radical is this? Contrast it with another Biblical character. Job loses his children, his wealth, and his health. Out of his agony, he accuses God and despairs of God’s justice in the world:
“He destroys the blameless and the guilty!
The earth is handed over to the wicked. He covers the eyes of its judges!
If it is not He, then who?”
(Job 9:22–24)
Job experiences the amoral world that Abraham so feared and despised — a world without moral distinctions, a world of undeserved suffering and meaningless destruction. At the tale’s end, God responds to Job out of the tempest. Displaying the full magnitude of divine power, God rebukes Job:
Stunned into submission, Job surrenders:
“I know that You can do everything, that nothing is impossible for you…
I therefore recant and relent being but dust and ashes.”
(Job 42:2–6)
Only two passages in the Hebrew Bible describe the human being as “dust and ashes” — the stories of Abraham and Job. In the story of Abraham, the phrase is ironic. It comes just as Abraham is about to score his moral victory against God. In Job, the same expression is the resigned confession of moral surrender. Job is so overwhelmed, he doesn’t recognize the logical inconsistency of God’s answer. Job questioned God’s justice. God responded by demonstrating immeasurable power. But that power so humbles Job, he ceases to question. Job concludes that he and God live in different moral worlds. To question divine morality is futile. He recants and relents and resigns. He surrenders his faith in God’s morality.
Two Biblical characters; two religious personalities; two different universes. What is the difference between them? Why does the Bible offer us these two portraits?
Abraham challenges God and God relents. Job challenges; his challenge and his spirits are crushed. The name “Job” is not Hebrew. In the most ancient Near Eastern languages, “Job” means “Everyman.” He is John Doe, the cipher for the common human experience. Everyman meets God in nature. Nature displays power and majesty, but no morality. Nature knows no justice. Cancer, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunami, destroy indiscriminately. In the face of nature’s moral indifference, wisdom dictates an attitude of acceptance. At most, we might aspire to gain some control over nature through science.
Abraham is different. He is covenanted. He meets God in their shared vision of justice. His is the task of bringing divine justice into the world. Abraham is invited to expect more, to demand more of God, of life, of the world. For Abraham, surrender is a sin. To accept the world as it is — to declare “what is, is what is meant to be” — is blasphemy. It is to surrender his role as partner with the divine in bringing oneness back into the world. The unrelenting insistence on justice — even if it means challenging God — marks Abraham as a singular religious hero. Our hero. It is chutzpah at its finest. It is the essence of the Jewish soul.
