“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.
For the sake of the description of the dialogical
relationship between man and
God I’ll use a description written far better than
mine the Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, AKA "Pope" Benedict XVI:
The cycle of being-becoming has
two manners: the power of the gods to maintain the
world, but also the gift of
man, who provides for the gods with the shapes of
the world. This leads to the
idea that man was made, in fact, to provide for and
sustain the gods and to be
an essential link in the circular chain of the
universe.
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, Yeshua, 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 “Yeshua” 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: Gur Dimei is an Israeli
“Frankist Incel”, sha”tzposter
and an independent researcher of the Zohar.
