God Becomes a Merciful Parent

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Text and the City | Ki Tisa 2014

Three years ago, when Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mom” came out, my friend Dasee Berkowitz and I wrote a counter-piece about “The Spiritual Life of Parents”. It was an aspirational piece, to say the least. This week, as I was trying to recover from a high-strung parenting miscalculation involving a pinched piece of gum, a clenched fist and a busy school parking lot, I saw that Chua has a new book out. I decided to go back and read what we had written and see if I’ve been able to fulfill some of those aspirations, three years and with a third daughter now in the equation.

I mercifully gave myself a passing grade. But I was also reminded that this week’s Torah portion can be read as God confronting his own Parenthood, with a special recipe for maintaining one’s parenting hidden within:

Ki Tisa: The Sin of the Golden Calf. After the great wedding at Sinai, the Israelites have been adulterous (with a cow, no less). God wants to annul the marriage, offering to Moses that He destroy the Jewish people and restart the project with Moses as the new Abraham. Moses heroically confronts God and reframes the covenant: This is not just a Sinai marriage, he reminds God. It is also a covenant you made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – and their offspring. The Jewish project is not an opt-in faith community, but a born-into People, with God as the parent. You can divorce your wife – but you cannot divorce your kids, claims Moses, and God submits. Or as Rabbi Meir puts it in the Talmud: בין כך ובין כך קרויים אתם בנים – “No matter what you do, you are forever called my children” (Kiddushin 36a).

Yet given the tendency of these children to test and anger their parent, given their affinity for rebellion, their ignoring and blocking out their parents pleas, their messiness and their premature desire for autonomy and independence… how will the parent master their emotions, manage love, patience and discipline in the child’s long journey to maturity?

It is here that God reveals to Moses the 13 attributes of Mercy:

And God passed before his face And called out: God, God, Showing-mercy, showing-favor, Long-suffering in anger, Abundant in loyalty and faithfulness, Keeping loyalty to the thousandth generation, Shouldering iniquity, rebellion and sin, And clearing - not clearing the guilty – (rather) calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons and upon sons’ sons, to the third and fourth generation! (Exodus 34:6-7)

וַיַּעֲבֹר ה' עַל פָּנָיו וַיִּקְרָא: ה' ה' אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָו‍ֹן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה לֹא יְנַקֶּה פֹּקֵד עֲו‍ֹן אָבוֹת עַל בָּנִים וְעַל בְּנֵי בָנִים עַל שִׁלֵּשִׁים וְעַל רִבֵּעִים. (שמות לד:ו-ז)

Reading these passages in recent years, reciting them again and again on Yom Kippur, I’ve come to realize that God is asking Moses – and his descendants – to remind God of who He really is, or who He aspires to be. The Midrash has long since turned this list from a theological plea into an ethical creed: “Just as God is called showing-of-mercy – you too strive to be showing-of-mercy” (see Maimonides Deot 1:6). God’s thirteen attributes are our aspirational list to follow in God’s paths in our encounter with every person (indeed, Moshe Cordovero’s Palm of Deborah goes through each Divine attribute and translates it into a quality in interpersonal relations).

For me, God’s thirteen attributes of mercy are a powerful guide to Parenthood – not just God’s, but my own. I recite them to remind myself to be merciful, compassionate, slow to anger, truthful, abundant in loyalty… The real trick is to figure out which qualities to use at which moment: when “shouldering mistakes and iniquities” is best – and when “not clearing the guilty” is required (in hindsight, the incident with the gum and the clenched fist seems to have been the first). It is an ongoing internal rollercoaster – and it is undoubtedly the most rewarding one at that. And I am at my best when I remember that my struggle to be there for my child in the best way is the same struggle as being in the world in God’s image. I just might sometimes need a Moses to remind me of them.

As Dasee and I wrote in that piece three years ago:

During an average day of parenting we encounter our entire emotional range: from love and compassion to worry, impatience and even anger. Our kids know how to get under our skin - often because they present a mirror of our own behavior.  Viewing our parenting encounters as opportunities for inner growth can turn an emotionally messy day into a source of self-understanding and self-improvement.  This is not just psychologically sound – it is spiritual work in itself. As we use our daily encounters to become better parents, we find ourselves walking in the ways of the Divine.

Shabbat Shalom,

Mishael

P.S. If the ending of those verses sounds harsh, know that Rabbinic liturgical tradition cut the list short, dropping the stuff about “calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons,” thus leaving only the “13 Attributes of Mercy”. Even more chutzpadik, in prayer to this day we recite the list only until the word “clearing” ונקה, turning the verses’ question mark into an exclamation point: “Keeping loyalty to the thousandth generation, bearing iniquity, rebellion and sin, and clearing!”

Yet – not to end on too optimistic a note – here’s a different interpretation to those verses:

“Calling-to-account the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons” – why? Why should one person have to suffer on account of the sins of another? Perhaps the intent here is that God calls-to-account upon the parents the sins which they performed in educating their children. For the children’s sins are because of the iniquities of the parents – and it is the parents who are held responsible. (Iturei Torah pg. 269)

On Idolatry: What is Our Golden Calf?

Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman Fellowships | Text and the City | Ki Tisa 2013

The principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause of judgment, is idolatry.  The idolater is likewise a murderer. Do you inquire whom he has slain? If it contributes ought to the aggravation of the indictment, no stranger nor personal enemy, but his own self. By what snares? Those of his error. By what weapon? The offence done to God. By how many blows? As many as are his idolatries.
[“On Idolatry”, Tertullian, 2^nd Century Church father, Carthage] 

This week’s Parasha, Ki Tisa, with its Golden Calf and broken tablets, tells the tale of the biggest mistake the Jewish people ever made. Not too long after the wedding at Sinai is over, God finds his new wife, Israel, in bed with an adulterer –and a cow no less… In one of the fieriest moments in the Torah, Moses, having come down the mountain and broken the tablets, takes the hoofed object of the betrayal, melts it down, and forces the Jewish people to drink its molten gold. Through this scene, and many others, the Torah identifies its most serious enemy: Idolatry.
As a child I could never understand the draw of idolatry. Judging from the stories told in kindergarten, it seemed quite stupid. Why would people be drawn to worshipping “stones and trees”? If even Abraham could see that the statues in his father’s store were powerless – how could the rest of the world be so stupid? The idea that we, crazy Jews, were the only ones who saw the light on this issue was in itself suspicious. Years later I read that the rabbis agreed with me to some extent: “The desire to worship idols has passed from this world – it has now been given to all transgressions” they say in Sanhedrin 75a. Many pagans in late antiquity might agree (see “Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?”). In the post-pagan world, where idolatry became the shared enemy of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you might expect idolatry to stop acting as a useful category altogether.
Unsurprisingly, idolatry never died. The history of Idolatry is fascinating and ever relevant, for while it is no longer about idols and statuettes, it is every bit about defining what God and religion mean. Changing conceptions of God create different ideas about what is idolatry. Or to put it differently - the notion of the alien, or false, god, shapes the concept of God. As Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit put it in their monograph, “Idolatry” –
The prohibition against idolatry is the thick wall that constitutes the city of God, leaving the strange gods outside and marking the community of the faithful. [However] the location of that dividing wall is not fixed, rather opposing conceptions of idolatry define the outskirts of the city of God differently. It is essential for the self-definitions of non-pagans to share the general concept of idolatry, but they do not share a specific definition of what is idolatry and what is wrong with it. [Idolatry, pg. 236]
It is by knowing what idolatry is that we know what Judaism is, what a relationship with God is. It is by knowing what the act of “slaying one’s own self” as Tertullian describes it, that one knows what it is to live a meaningful life. Which leads me to the question I’ll be pondering this Shabbat: What are today’s idolatries? What is it that we would identify today as “the principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world”? What is our golden calf?
In the 19^th and 20^th century, idolatry was alive and well. Marx saw idolatry in fetishism, the fetishizing of money and price. The religious literature of the 1950’s saw idolatry in totalitarianism and fascism, the 1960’s saw idolatry in the military-industrial complex or mainstream bourgeois culture. For others it is liberalism and political correctness which is the great idolatry, and fetishizing of equality while losing the compass of the sacred. Common to all of these is the identification of group-think of various kinds as idolatry. What kind of God does this make for then? Obviously, the God of individual autonomous thought… (how American!)
Who today are contenders for the crown of idolatry? The destruction of the environment (or its conservation?), our addiction to consumerism or careerism? Our loss of sacredness, deification of the individual (or of the community?)? Or simply a life “lived without meaning”?
Some prophets have identified that “the principal crime of the human race” can be found in religion itself. If this is a cry against any kind of organized religion in the name of science – count me out. But if it a cry against fundamentalism and religiously-sanctioned-violence – I’m in. If we are not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, I would frame this in the following Jewish terms: the greatest idolatry of our times is the taking of God’s name in vain to justify un-godly actions, a hillul hashem.
I am sure there are others that I missed. There are more idols out there to identify. However – regardless of definition – it is the category of idolatry that I want to hold on to:that internal criticism that I might be deifying something that is not. If we are to live the life of service to our values, we must identify what the idolatrous golden calves which distract us are. We must identify them in order to melt them down in the fire of our passions, to bring upon us a better world.

כל המודה בעבודה זרה--כפר בכל התורה כולה, ובכל הנביאים, ובכל מה שנצטוו הנביאים, מאדם עד סוף העולם:  שנאמר "מן היום אשר ציווה ה', והלאה—לדורותיכם". וכל הכופר בעבודה זרה, מודה בכל התורה כולה; והיא עיקר כל המצוות, כולן.

רמבם הל' עבודה זרה ב:ז