The Rock! - His deeds are perfect,
Yea, all His ways are just;
A faithful God, never false,
True and upright is He.
(Deuteronomy 32:4)
Moses’ swan song begins with a ringing declaration of God’s justice - "all His ways are just…true and upright is He." The message is even stronger if the words used in the last phrase are translated in their more usual sense - "righteous and moral (straightforward, honest) is He." Moses begins his song this way because he wants to claim that God’s choice of the People Israel as His own, God’s punishing the Israelites for their sins, and God’s taking vengeance on Israel’s enemies are all part of a divine plan that is just and morally right. In beginning his song this way, though, he articulates what is a fundamental assumption of the Bible and later Rabbinic literature - namely, that God is moral, indeed a paradigm for our human moral aspirations, and God not only models morality, but demands it of us.
This is certainly how we generally understand God as Jews today and have done so since the very beginning of our history as a people. If Abraham could not assume that God is just, then his argument with God against destroying Sodom and Gomorrah if a minimum of righteous people live there would make no sense. After all, Abraham’s entire argument is based on his assumption that he can appeal to God’s morality: "Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?... Far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?" (Genesis 18:23, 25). Moreover, in a number of the Torah’s laws, God’s morality - and His call to us to be moral - is evident. So, for example, consider the following:
You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan. If you do mistreat them, I will heed their outcry as soon as they cry out to Me, and My anger shall blaze forth and I will put you to the sword, and your own wives and shall become widows and your children orphans.
If you lend money to My people, to the poor among you, do not act toward them as a creditor; exact no interest from them. If you take your neighbor’s garment in pledge, you must return it to him before the sun sets; it is his only clothing, the sole covering for his skin. In what else shall he sleep? Therefore, if he cries out to Me, I will pay heed, for I am compassionate.
(Exodus 22:21-26)
Similarly, Job’s dismay about his suffering derives from his inability to understand how a moral God could inflict unjust punishment. Without the assumption that God is moral in the first place, the entire Book of Job would make no sense. After all, most of the gods of the ancient world were not described as moral; they were simply amoral - and sometimes capricious and immoral - forces in one’s life, and one did what one could to protect oneself from them. Thus Odysseus, for example, seeks to protect himself from Poseidon’s wrath, but he never expects that he can appeal to Poseidon to calm the sea’s turbulence that endangers him and his crew by appealing to Poseidon’s morality, by pointing out to Poseidon that he, Odysseus, had done nothing wrong. In these sections of the Bible and in many more, Moses’ declaration of God’s impeccable morality is either expressly stated or assumed.
And yet. The Bible itself records a number of cases that raise acute questions about God’s morality. Undoubtedly the most famous of these - and in some ways, the hardest to understand - is God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac (Genesis 22). That, though, is not the only instance of this. Here are some other cases:
- God’s hardening of Pharoah’s heart and subsequent punishment for what Pharoah does in that state (Exodus 12).
- The permission to enslave Gentiles (Leviticus 25:35-46).
- The vicarious punishment inflicted on Moses (Deuteronomy 4:20-22).
- The fate of the seven Canaanite nations (Deuteronomy 20:10-18; see also Exodus 34:11-16; Deuteronomy 7:1-6).
- The incident of Saul’s mercy and God’s anger for that mercy (I Samuel 15).
What emerges from the Bible, then, is not the neat, clean assertion of God’s perfect morality, but rather the conviction that God is moral and that we need to be moral too despite the fact that sometimes there is evidence to the contrary or at least events that are morally and theologically inscrutable. This is a much harder position to take - and a much more sophisticated one - for it affirms belief in a good God while at the same time recognizing that sometimes the moral result that we would expect from life and from God does not happen. This counterevidence for God’s morality - or at least these incidents where God’s morality is called into question - mean that our faith in God as moral and as demanding morality of us is exactly that - faith. It is not blind faith against all evidence, for after all we also experience plenty of incidents in life in which morality matters, in which both the good and the bad get their due and character counts. The Jewish assertion of faith is that such manifestations of the import of morality are dominant and should shape our lives despite some evidence to the contrary.
So we may well think that Moses’ claim that God’s "deeds are perfect" and "all His acts are just" is too definitive a statement of the facts, one lacking in nuance, but we are not alone in thinking that, for the Bible itself and the Rabbis thereafter note cases where life is not as simple as that. For me, and, I would imagine for many other Jews as well, it is frankly reassuring to know that our tradition does not call upon us to believe blindly against all evidence, that it indeed records the conflicting evidence to the beliefs that it would have us hold, but that it nevertheless is able to guide us to see that big picture and to affirm what our tradition and most of our experience reveal to be important in life. May we all be stimulated by our vision of God and our commitment to Judaism to ask hard moral questions and to seek to repair those situations that are not moral born out of our faith that ultimately morality is inherent in the nature of God and what God wants of us.
Shabbat shalom v’hag same’ah.
Readers of this commentary may be interested in a further discussion of the relationships between Judaism and morality in the following:
- Elliot N. Dorff, For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2007), esp. ch. 6, "The Relationship of Jewish Law to Morality and Theology."
- Elliot N. Dorff, The Way Into Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World) (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005), ch. 3, "Religion and Ethics."
- Elliot N. Dorff and Arthur Rosett, A Living Tree: The Roots and Growth of Jewish Law (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 110-123, 249-257