Comments (0)Perfect Justice
Parshat Ha’Azinu
September 25, 2009Rabbi Chaim Landau
Special to the Jewish Times
Read the following words of the parshah and you are filled with a sense of dread:
“I lift my hand to heaven and declare
As surely as I live forever
when I sharpen my flashing sword
and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries
and repay those who hate Me ...
Rejoice O Nations with His people.
for He will avenge the blood of His servants;
He will take vengeance on His enemies ...”
Such words historically created a theological principle in Christianity — most notably conceived by Marcion — that the G-d of the Old Testament was a G-d of Vengeance, whereas the G-d of the New Testament was a G-d of Love, and that therefore the former was solely the domain of the Jews while the latter belonged entirely to the Christian followers and believers.
This option was branded a heresy, and it follows that if vengeance is wrong, it could not have been commanded by G-d to anyone, Christians or Jews. What G-d commands is not vengeance, but forgiveness, as Joseph forgave his brothers and as we have most recently asked Him to forgive us.
As Maimonides states, “As long as one nurses a grievance and keeps it in mind, one may come to take revenge. The Torah therefore emphatically warns us not to bear a grudge, so that the impression of the wrong be wholly obliterated and no longer remembered. This is the right principle ...”
Only a G-d that threatens vengeance can be powerful enough to be seen also as a G-d of love, for love is not limitless in its reservoirs — it must, by its very raison d’etre , to survive, be balanced by a healthy dose of divine anger against those who wreak mayhem and havoc on the innocents of this world while creating the immortal lie that they are doing so in the name of G-d.
Go and preach G-d’s endless love of everyone to a village that has been plundered, burned and leveled to the ground, its women raped and sadistically murdered, its men having had their throats slit … and persuade the survivors about G-d’s perfect, non-coercive love. The irony is that, of all peoples, the Jews, especially of the Middle Ages, were the very victims of perpetrated crimes such as these, accused of murdering Christian children to drink their blood, of poisoning wells and spreading every type of plague, and then horribly murdered en masse in the name of a G-d of Love. It is as if we can still hear their cries as we read their elegies during Tish B’Av.
And yet Jews never took, nor sought, vengeance. This was always left to the divine — for there must be a justice for the evil that occurs in this world, but the only power recognizing the manner in which to respond to such wickedness can and must only be G-d’s. The search for perfect justice is not for us here, or now. Only G-d knows what is just in a world of conflicting claims, and Who will establish perfect justice at a time, and in a way, of His choosing.
Vengeance must be the realm of the divine solely, for the world has seen time and time again the ravages of human vengeance, both real and surreal, filling the world with a violence that resembled the generation of the flood whose wickedness filled G-d’s heart with pain. This is a reality we can never fail to remember.
Rabbi Chaim Landau serves Ner Tamid Greenspring Valley Synagogue.