Getting angry at God as an act of faith
“If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.”
Imagine the spiritual torture that led a man to etch these words into a prison cell wall at the Mauthausen concentration camp, later discovered and recounted by survivor Joseph Drexel.
We can hear the inmate oscillating, teetering between two positions. On the one hand, he has witnessed and endured collective mass trauma and unimaginable suffering. His apparently prior assumption that there is a God in this world is no longer a given. But on the other hand, if he is to maintain that God exists, he can no longer conceive of that deity as a benevolent and just God, as he had before. This is a God with whom he can be—indeed, must be– angry. This is a God who — if he exists — must be confronted and even held accountable. The inmate oscillates between two poles: either he will abandon his belief in a God altogether, or else he will engage him in vexation and protest.
Often, we are taught that piety allows no place for protest. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; his ways are unfathomable, but, surely, always just. In the end, it’s all for the best, even if we can’t see it at the moment.
But the psychologist of religion Julie Exline notes how helpful it can be for devout patients suffering from cancer and chronic pain to experience and express anger toward God. Protest responses are not simply behavioral expressions of anger. The capacity for protest reflects assertiveness, as the person feels entitled to speak honestly rather than suppressing their experience. It reflects autonomy, as the person brings their own moral judgment and emotions into the relationship. And it reflects engagement, keeping an open avenue of connection, expecting that God remains a meaningful partner in dialogue.
The author of Lamentations understood this well. By my reading, Lamentations is not a collection of poems unloading the burden of grief and suffering. Rather, its five poems detail an ongoing conversation between the author — Jeremiah, according to tradition — and the survivors of Jerusalem, in the person of Daughter Zion. Jeremiah works with Daughter Zion to help her assimilate what has happened to her, much as a pastor or mentor might. The conversations between the two are those of therapist and patient. And in each chapter, Jeremiah as pastoral mentor engages a different part of the community, each with its own struggle.
In chapter 2, Jeremiah makes no mention of Daughter Zion’s sins, because she believes she is blameless. As Jeremiah notes in his eponymous book, residents of Jerusalem believed that the Lord loved them, his city and his temple. Clinging to this comforting belief, they refuse to entertain the possibility that it was the Lord who destroyed Jerusalem. Surely, it was the Babylonians, and against His will. In the opening verses of Lamentations 2, Jeremiah shatters their assumptive world, insisting that it was God, who through 27 verbs of destruction, was directly responsible for their suffering. But the prophet knows that with her presumptions shattered, Daughter Zion will find herself, much like the prisoner of Mauthausen, on the precipice of apostasy.
Jeremiah knows that the only way to prevent her from abandoning faith entirely is for him to suggest to her to take her protest to God himself:
Pour out your heart like water
before the presence of the Lord!
Lift your hands to him
on account of the lives of your children,
who faint for hunger
at the head of every street.
“Pouring out” the heart is not entreaty, or plea. Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel, likewise “pours out” her words before the Lord in the Tabernacle on account of her barrenness, but explains to Eli the high priest that her words are words of bitterness. Indeed, Jeremiah himself says earlier in the discussion with Daughter Zion that God is angry and has no pity for her. Jeremiah wants her to stay connected, and the only realistic emotional avenue through which to do that is to encourage her to share her vexation with God Himself.
Daughter Zion takes up the counsel with vigor:
Look, O Lord, and consider!
To whom have you done this?
Should women eat their offspring,
the children they have borne?
Should priest and prophet be killed
in the sanctuary of the Lord?
The young and the old are lying
on the ground in the streets;
my young women and my young men
have fallen by the sword;
in the day of your anger you have killed them,
slaughtering without mercy!
Her words contain no plea, only accusation.
Every year on Tisha B’Av we read Lamentations. We often imagine that its purpose is to teach us how to mourn. But in Lamentations 2, Jeremiah had a different concern. He taught Daughter Zion that if God’s ways seem unbearable, tell Him so. Sometimes the deepest act of faith is not to justify God, but to refuse to stop talking to Him.
