Divine Judgment and Divine Magnanimity during the Days of Awe

Rosh Hashanah, according to ancient tradition, is the day that God sits in judgment over all of His creatures, determining who shall live and who shall die. Thus the liturgy comprises both praise for God’s might and splendor in His role as judge, and appeals to His mercy and compassion. Surveying a number of midrashic sources, Akiva Mattenson notes a tendency in rabbinic thought to equate God’s might with His mercy. One prooftext, for instance, is Numbers 14:17, in which Moses introduces a plea for forgiveness with the words “And now let the strength of my Lord grow great.” In the rabbinic view, Mattenson explains,

what constitutes divine strength, what makes God unique and incomparable, is a capacity for compassion. This compassion sits in an uncomfortable tension with the rage that sets God against the enemies of Israel and the stern judgment that calls for unmitigated punishment. Yet it is precisely this tension that marks divine compassion as a [form of] strength. For it is only in mightily subduing a predilection for unmitigated judgment that God’s compassion emerges victorious. This is the meaning of the striking phrase found in one midrash, “For you subdue [kovesh] with compassion your quality of judgment.” [The Hebrew verb here is generally used to denote literal conquest or subjugation.]

There is struggle and conquest involved in the victory of compassion over divine judgment. The phrase calls to mind a teaching found in Pirkei Avot 4:1: “Who is mighty? The one who subdues [kovesh] his impulse, as it is said, ‘One slow to anger is better than a mighty person and one who rules his spirit than the conqueror of a city’ (Proverbs 15:16).” Just as human might emerges in the difficult . . . conquest of our impulse toward wickedness, divine might emerges in the difficult . . . conquest of God’s impulse toward judgment and anger. . . .

This notion that God is locked in a fierce struggle with His own tendency toward [giving sin its proper punishment], and is striving mightily to act compassionately with His creatures, comes to the fore in a beautiful text from the talmudic tractate of Brakhot, [which states that God regularly recites the following prayer]: “May it be My will that My compassion subdue my anger, and My compassion prevail over My [other] qualities, and that I behave with My children with My quality of compassion, and that I don’t hold them strictly to the letter of the law.”

Critically, God’s will for compassion rather than anger or judgment is couched in the language of prayer. . . . God’s prayer for compassion signals the degree to which victory against judgment and anger is not a foregone conclusion and the prevailing of compassion is something that will require effort and struggle.

Read more at Lehrhaus

More about: Judaism, Midrash, Religion & Holidays, Rosh Hashanah, Theology

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society