Perhaps God should atone, too.

A rabbi's insights as we approach Yom Kippur, a period of atonement and the holiest day for Jews.

A Jewish man prays at the Western Wall in Jerusalem (photo: Francesco Alberti/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Rabbi Jeremy Rosen.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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We are approaching a period of atonement, the holiest Jewish day, Yom Kippur.

And sometimes I wonder who should be atoning.

I hope you do not mind my fanciful thinking amidst the pain we have experienced this past year. It may sound blasphemous. But perhaps God should be atoning (metaphorically of course) as much as we atone to God for our shortcomings.

The rabbis envisage God suffering with us in exile, even if exile is because of our inadequacies and limitations. And the Talmud has God praying to Himself that his quality of mercy should override that of justice.

Yet if we think about it, God (or as some might say, “the universe”) made us with all our faults and capacities for evil, just as much as for good. As the Talmud also says, humans were not created to be angels. The Torah was not given to ministering angels.

If you take the position that God controls everything on earth, every blade of grass, every action, then if we are suffering, what is God doing about it? Of course, however you understand the idea of God, one thing is certain that God is not a human being and therefore to ascribe human characteristics to God simply does not make sense. Even if we do it all the time.

Rather, God (or the idea of God) offers us a template for living a good life within the context of a spiritual dimension, as well as a physical one. When we look at the physical world, we see this constant turmoil and conflict between good and bad, and struggle to deal with it. But when we think of God in spiritual terms, we think of a relationship. Between us and life and a way of dealing with it. As best we can. 

We know that life is going to bring us pain and ultimately death. That there will be happy and sad moments, good and bad, and we have to navigate these rapids while still preserving a sense of goodness.

But it is hard when we seem destined to suffer out of all proportion to the rest of the world, time after time. Have we been chosen to suffer? And each time we think we may have transcended hatred, it comes back to bite us harder and harder. Can we, should we, challenge God? After all, the Biblical “Book of Job” is a critique of God and how God allows bad things to happen to good people.

There is a well-known story: “The Court Assembled to Judge God in Auschwitz.” A story attributed to several different sources and locations and maybe myths, but powerful nevertheless. It was assembled to judge God for what was happening around them at that moment of humanity’s utter shame. They found God guilty for what was happening to the Jewish People. But having done that, they all got up and went to pray the afternoon prayer.

And yes, unbelievably, some of them lived. We have seen how some people survived the Holocaust and abandoned Judaism and religion completely, while others became much more committed and thank God every day for their survival. Was it their faith, their physical natures, or just accident that enabled them to survive? 

This time last year, we Jews had no idea what was about to hit us, both in Israel and across the vast Diaspora. When I think of all those mothers bereaved of sons and daughters, those who lost husbands and wives, children now orphans, I cannot imagine the pain they are enduring. Somehow or another, most of them will survive and of course they will need our help both financially and emotionally.

We have carried on with our lives, for better or for worse, as if nothing was going to change. Yet I certainly have not lived through a year as painful and sometimes depressing, not just because of the evil perpetrated and the loss of life, but because of the ongoing crescendo of hate from supposedly moral, educated people.

And still, I should not be surprised. Very little has changed over thousands of years either in terms of violence, hatred, or our capacity for self-destruction. We should not be surprised with the fact that some 80 years after the Holocaust, this rational hatred has returned. At the same time, we should be grateful for the fact that we have more tools to defend ourselves now than we ever did before.

I can derive both pain and comfort from the great Jewish prophets. Consider the first chapter of the “Book of Isaiah” — how passionately he condemns the abuses of the kingdoms of Judea; politically, socially, and religiously corrupt. He compares them to the men of Sodom and Gomorrah. Whether kings or priestly religious leadership, many of them were rotten to the core, as he predicted the awful collapse and destruction at the hands first of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians.

And yet, within another chapter, he is dreaming of a perfect world of justice, truth, and beating swords into ploughshares with no more warfare — comforting us with visions of a better world and a second chance.

Or, read the” Book of Lamentations” that Jeremiah is said to have composed after the hell of the Babylonian massacres and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The agony, the questions, how have we deserved this? 

Israel in so many ways is reminiscent of both the first and the second Jewish Commonwealths. A conflict of opposing values and worldviews. Constant in-fighting. And simultaneously, an existential threat from the outside.

I do not think we can expect conversions to different ways of thinking in the contentious world in which we live. Left will not speak to Right. Marxists will not become capitalists (until they grow older). Secular will not speak to religious. Religious will not speak to each other. Each one lives in a cultural and electronic bubble in which they reinforce their own preconceptions, priorities, and ambitions.

We are living in a world without trust. We do not trust governments; we do not trust institutions. I have no idea where this is going to lead.

But the one thing I do know is that for all the crises before October the 7th and since, the one common and remarkable factor that binds us is a shared solidarity when the crisis strikes. That we can, on occasion, pull together. The root of this solidarity is loyalty, to put it simply. Either you are for the Jewish People’s survival or you are against us.

That does not mean to say that we cannot criticize; that we cannot complain about corruption, dishonesty, failed policies, missed opportunities, wherever it comes from. It is no different to a parent having a delinquent child and trying to help them change. Yet, in the end, if you cannot, you have to be there in a supportive role and let that child make its own mistakes and hope that in the end something good will come out of it.

The world goes on according to its own system and rules, says the Talmud. But there is hope and faith. We, the Jewish People, have survived and will continue to do so because however much we have failed, our traditions give us purpose — and a mission.

We cannot speak for God. The idea of God is essentially the realization that there is some other force, energy, or simply reason for what happens on earth. And much is beyond ourselves.

God works as God works. What we know is that we must speak and atone for ourselves, and find solace where we can. Many of us will pray and hope with extra motivation and passion this year, to ourselves, and that the Almighty will be kinder in 5785, this freshly new Jewish year.

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