Guest Drasha - Leon Wieseltier

By Leon Wieseltier

"It was the practice in all the communities of Israel to recite the Justification of the Judgement in the presence of a dying individual, at the moment of death", wrote Nahmanides in the thirteenth century, in his monograph on the laws and the customs of dying and mourning; and later authorities added  a second recitation of  the tsidduk ha-din to the liturgy  of the funeral, and established a small body of law regarding the circumstances of its proper utterance. Indeed, a legend is recorded in Sefer Hasidim, the commonplace book of the Pietists of Ashkenaz in the twelfth and thirteenth century, about the death of Moses, according to which he was challenged about the justice of his own early death, "since all your ancestors lived longer than you", and he replied: ha-tsur tamim pa'alo, "He is the Rock, his work is perfect". That is, when Moses sang this passage of his song of farewell in this week's parsha, he was himself availing himself of the rabbinical formula of acceptance and uttering the tsidduk ha-din, the Justification of the Judgement, about his own death.

This medieval legend is typical of the rabbinical technique of anachronism, whereby the rabbis projected their own imperatives backward into time and thereby established a unified and divinely sanctioned tradition. But in fact the practice of reciting this verse for the purpose of justifying death and destruction is an ancient one. It was devised in the second century, during the Hadrianic persecutions, by  the Galilean tanna Hananiah ben Teradyon, whose martyrdom we briefly if intensely recalled a few days ago near the end of musaf on Yom Kippur. The narrative of Hananiah's martydom is given in a variety of rabbinical sources, including in the midrash on this week's parsha in Sifrei, the midrash that was redacted a hundred years after the events that it describes and embellishes. Hananiah was arrested for the crime of teaching the Torah publicly, which was a capital crime in the period of  the Bar Kochba rebellion:

When they seized R. Hananiah ben Teradyon, they sentenced him to be burned wrapped in his Torah scroll. When they told him, "It has been decreed that you will be burned at the stake in your scroll", he replied: "He is the Rock, His work is perfect." When they told his wife, "It has been decreed that your husband will be burned with his scroll and that you will be executed [for not preventing him from committing this crime], she replied [by citing the remainder of the verse], " A God of truth and without iniquity: just and right is He". When they told his daughter, "It has been decreed that your father will be burned with his scroll and that your mother will be executed and that you will be sent to work in a brothel", she replied [by reciting this verse from Jeremiah]:"Great in counsel and mighty in work: for thine eyes are open upon all the ways of the son of men: to give every one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings."

The rabbis in the Talmud admired this innovation greatly: the gemara records this encomium by Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi: "How great are these righteous ones, who had the presence of mind to recall the three verses that justify the judgement at exactly the moment that the judgement had to be justified". But how could these cruel fates be justified? The rabbis work hard to establish the sin that was the cause of this terrible punishment. The consensus seems to be that Hananiyah ben Teradyon had not merely taught the Torah in public, but more particularly had "pronounced the Tetragrammaton in public", which is of course a grave offense. Many years ago Saul Lieberman provided a fuller and even more chilling account of Hananiyah's provocation. He was acting not merely pedagogically, Lieberman showed, but also ideologically: when the Roman seized him, Hananiyah was demonstrating how to pronounce the name of God at the moment of  kiddush ha-Shem, the Sanctification of the Name. In other words, he was giving a class in Jewish martyrdom. Thus Hananiyah sanctified the name by giving instruction in the Sanctification of the Name: a chillingly perfect martyrdom.

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 So how does the Justification of the Judgement work? Essentially, it is an inference from creator to creation. We discern the qualities of the maker in the qualities of what has been made; and since the qualities of the maker in this case are qualities of perfection, we may be confident that qualities of perfection may be attributed also to what He has made. The authorship of the world provides us with the assurance that we seek about it.

This helps to explain the name that is given to God in the tsidduk ha-din: tsur, or "Rock". Why a rock? Early in The Guide of the Perplexed, in his survey of the proper allegorical interpretation of the scriptural expressions for God,  Maimonides clarifies the meaning of the metaphor of the rock.
Tsur, the Rock, he says, is a term that refers not only to the stony substance, but also to the quarry from which it is hewn; and he gives a number of Biblical examples. This sense of  "quarry" gives philosophical direction:
"in its derivation from this meaning the term was used figuratively to denote the root and principle of everything", for "the nature of a quarry ought to be present in what is hewn from it." (This relationship is made especially clear in the medieval Hebrew translation of Maimonides, in which the word  makor means both "quarry" and "source".)

 So, then, the nature of God ought to be present in what He has made. But in what sense? What is the divine perfection that we find in the world that permits us to justify our experience of the world? In the discussion in the midrashic and medieval traditions, I have found two conceptions of  the perfection of God's creation, and it is these two conceptions that I want to put before you this morning. The first is a conception of moral perfection, the second is a conception of aesthetic or technical perfection. The first is based on the notion of God the judge, the second is based on the notion of God the artificer. The first provides a justification of  adversity that is stronger, but is surrounded by philosophical and existential obstacles; the second provides a justification of adversity that is easier to accept, but is weaker. I put these two theories of  justification before you today not only because they are begged by this week's parsha, but also because they are begged by our circumstances. In these dark days, we need all the theories of justification that we can find.

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Both these theories of justification are given in the midrash in Sifrei. Let us begin with the moral theory. It is the more familiar one, especially in Tishrei:

"He is the Rock, his work is perfect": The works of all creatures are perfect before him : the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished...."For all His ways are judgement": on the morrow [of their death] He sits with each individual and metes out what each individual deserves. "A faithful God": Just as he rewards a perfectly righteous individual in the next world for every good deed that he performed in this world, He rewards a perfectly wicked individual in this world for the odd good deed that he performed in this world; and just as He punishes a perfectly wicked individual in the next world for all the transgressions that he committed in this world, so He punishes a perfectly righteous individual in this world for the odd transgression that he committed in this world. "Without iniquity": When an individual dies, all his deeds are brought before him and specified, and God says ti him: this is what you did on this or that particular day - do you accept this? And the individual affirms that he does, and God tells him to sign the ledger...and the individual justifies the judgement and declares: I have been properly judged..."

This, as I say, is the familiar eschatology of this season, the cosmic system of reward and punishment that we have just finished fasting for, and for which we soon beat the willow branches furiously across the floor of this shul. And this justification is beset by all the problems with which we are familiar. It is a little too tidy to make help us in the most hurtful and perplexing situations. It seems to conclude (like the optimistic British poet in the eighteenth century) that whatever is, is right. It invites doubt or it invites complacence. It cannot explain the suffering of  the innocent and the suffering of children.

But the midrash in Sifrei also interprets the words of this verse to reveal a completely different dimension of God's creation. This interpretation is a form of  justification, but it is not exactly a theodicy. It begins with the rather startling suggestion that the word tsur  denotes not a rock but an artist, a tsayar, and it proceeds from there:

"He is the Rock": He is the artist who draws and designs the world prior to making it...."His ways are perfect": His actions are perfect for all the creatures of the world and there is no reason to regard any of  the qualities that He has manifested with even any skepticism at all. For there is not a single creature who can say: How much better it would be if I had three eyes or  three hands or three legs, or if I walked on my head, or if my face was in the back of my head. And therefore the verse says that "all His ways are judgment": He sits with each one in judgment and provides him with what is right for him. "A faithful God": for He had faith in the world......"And without iniquity": For He did not create mankind to be wicked but to be righteous."

Which is to say, He prepared mankind for the ends of mankind. This justification of the judgement speaks not about justice, but about justesse; not about God's virtue, but about God's wisdom. Everything in this world is considered good not in the ethical sense, but in the sense that it is fit for its purpose, appropriate to its goal. (It is worth noting that the Hebrew root for "art" and "faith" is the same.) The consoling fact about this world is that it has a chance. It should be considered not from the standpoint of its ending, but from the standpoint of its beginning. Its creatures are equipped for what they must do to act upon their essences. They are perfectly designed for their essences: that is their perfection. The means for their fulfillments have been bestowed upon them. Whether or not we can intuit the truth of this world, we can intuit its meaning. Whether or not we can see our rewards in this world, we can see our duties in this world. In this world we must imagine ourselves not always before a tribunal, but always before the world itself, which awaits our agency. This justification of the judgment does not say: what is, is right. It says: what is may be righted.

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This second theory of justification, the aesthetic-technical reason for the acceptance of the order of things,  had a long career in Jewish philosophy. Maimonides, in the Guide, speaks in a number of places of  "the artistic management" of the world. But it is Yehuda Halevi, in the third part of the Kuzari, who promotes the idea of the artistic management of the world into the very substance of  tsidduk ha-din:

The pious man is so deeply convinced of the "justice of God's judgment", that he finds in this belief protection and help from the miseries and troubles of this world. For he is convinced of the justice of Him who created the living creatures, sustains and guides them with a wisdom our intellect cannot grasp in detail, but only in a general way, when it beholds perfection in the most wonderful structure of animals; these reveal the intention of an all-wise God and the will of an omniscient all-powerful Being, who endowed small and great with all the necessary internal and external senses, the limbs, and the organs corresponding to their instincts. He gave to the hare and the stag the means of flight and their timid nature, to the lion its ferocity and the instruments of for delaceration. He who considers the formation and use of the limbs, and their relation to the animal instinct, sees in them so just a proportion and so perfect an arrangement, that no doubt or uncertainty can remain in his soul concerning the justice of the Creator. And if the tempter, instinctive judgment, upbraids the injustice to the hare or to the fly that falls prey to the lion and the wolf or to the spider, reason refutes and reprimands it as follows: How can I charge a wise being with injustice, since his justice is beyond question for me and he has no need of injustice? If the lion's pursuit of the hare, and the spider's of the fly were mere accidents, I should charge the accident; I see, however, that this wise, just, and purposeful Being equipped the lion with the means of hunting: ferocity and strength, teeth and claws, and the spider with cunning, with the art of weaving webs without having learnt to do so, and with the instruments required; He has consequently appointed the fly as its prey just as many fishes serve other fishes for food. Can I say aught but that there is a wisdom which I am unable to grasp , and that I must submit to "the Rock whose work is perfect".

So let us paraphrase Yehuda Halevi this morning, and accept the order of things in our time and our place, in this way: The wise, just, and purposeful Being equipped man not only with the means to take life, but also with the means to defend  life; not only with the means to take freedom, but also with the means to defend freedom; not only with the means to to destroy, but also with the means to build; not only with the means to hate, but also with the means to love. Only in this way, I think, and here perhaps I speak only for myself - only in this way can we behold the pit of slaughter in lower Manhattan and believe in the world and say: ha-tsur tamim pa'alo, "He is the Rock, his work is perfect".

--- Leon Wieseltier