On Jewish History After a Year of Severe Decrees

As the High Holydays beckon, questions about the horrors and tragedies that have engulfed so many individuals and the nation as a whole over the past year impose themselves with unbearable intensity. Into this maelstrom steps the weekly Torah reading of Ki Tavo, with its stark formulation of the terms and consequences of Jewish obedience to or defiance of the covenant: “If you obey the Lord your God, to observe faithfully all His commandments … the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. All these blessings shall come upon you … But if you do not obey the Lord your God to observe faithfully all His commandments … all these curses shall come upon you and take effect” (Deuteronomy 28:1-2, 15).

In essence, these verses posit a unique set of causative forces governing the fortunes of God’s chosen people. Obedience to the covenant yields blessings while its opposite brings curses.

For many, such a straightforward and binary understanding of ups and downs in Jewish history might be hard to abide even in better times, let alone in the wake of atrocities by evildoers that continue to stupefy in their cruelty and ghoulish depravity. It may therefore prove helpful to canvass resources in Jewish thought and literature that can provide fresh angles of approach to the conundrum. Needless to say, no single one, nor even all in their ensemble, offer some simple solution, but they can give us a broader range of models on which to draw or, at the least, provide an empathetic embrace across the ages that can encourage or console.

One conceptual framework, a stance that can be called historical agnosticism, is promoted with unusual vigor by the fourteenth-century thinker Joseph ibn Kaspi, who insists on the futility of any effort to unravel God’s designs in history: “Can there be such lunacy (shigayon); I mean, that it should occur to us to determine and know a reason and cause for these actions of God?” In his reading of it, the Bible itself yields ample instruction in the inscrutability of Jewish history: “Who can give a cause or reason for the variation in all of our exile and subjugation, until he gives a cause for our subjugation lasting four hundred years in Egypt; and then, in the time of the Judges, eight years at the hands of the King of Aram (Judges 3:8) … Who will give reason for all these vicissitudes?” Rather than confidently identifying such vicissitudes’ causes, Ibn Kaspi urges humility: “Who will believe that he has arrived at knowledge of the reason and the cause that are before God?”

Another medieval rabbi, Aaron Aboulrabi, poignantly protests his inability to reconcile the promise of blessing that loyalty to the covenant is meant to confer with Jewish suffering in his day. Commenting on a verse (Deuteronomy 4:29) that promises that even those who lapse into idolatry will find God should they seek “with all your heart and all your soul,” Aboulrabi issues an agonized cri de coeur:

Woe to the ear that hears [this]. Behold, we have sought Him though in our hands there is no idolatry but rather anguish and sufferings all our days simply to hold fast to our faith, and He is as a deaf one Who hears not and dumb one Who opens not His mouth (cf. Psalms 38:14). Nor can one allege [our failure to seek God] “with all heart and soul” since, in light of the many evil calamities we suffer, it is indisputable that we are seeking with our heart and our soul. Indeed, we have not forborne to elevate and exalt His holy Torah to the point that “we are slain all day long” (Psalms 44:23). With great bitterness of spirit, an aching heart, and streaming tears have I written these [words] here.

The devotion of Jews—up to and including being “slain all day long” (the verse ends with the now famous phrase “as sheep to be slaughtered”) on behalf of God and Torah—is unstinting. Yet their boundless dedication is “rewarded” by anguish and suffering. While he concludes on a pious note (“The Rock! — His deeds are perfect”; Deuteronomy 32:4) Aboulrabi, in effect, rues what he casts as a divine departure from fulfillment of the terms of the covenant.

Explaining why the Jewish polity came to ruin in ancient times, Moses Maimonides, the greatest of Jewish thinkers, makes a point that proves highly salient in light of some of the recurrent clashes over hot-button issues in the Israeli public square. “We lost our kingdom and destroyed our sanctuary,” explains Maimonides (in his Letter on Astrology), because Jews believed that the nation’s fate lay in the stars. This zealous addiction to delusional belief led Jews to neglect what was truly needful: “the study of warfare or the conquest of lands.” For the nation to flourish, the Torah requires a combination of observance of the commandments and rational initiatives, including the cultivation and exercise of military might. In light of this teaching, one wonders what words of scorn Maimonides might heap on some of the confusions of mind attested in so much Israeli religious discourse, such as the claim of his Sephardic successor, former chief rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, that Israel’s defense against murderous Islamists depends not on the acumen of Israeli military leaders or heroic, self-sacrificing feats performed by IDF soldiers but on the studies of yeshiva students.

Even as different people may follow diverse paths as they seek a key to Jewish history’s ups and downs, all can join in the hope that the coming year will see, in the language of the High Holyday liturgy, a “passing of the severe decree” — all the more that the current period of personal and national introspection will call forth an abundance of physical healing and psychic restoration after a year of calamities that will forever remain etched in Jewish historical memory.