The Sceptic Blog

1: It feels almost impossible that just three weeks ago we were in the middle of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – intensifying our prayers that God would write us into the book of life this year.

2: As it happens, I led a discussion in shul on Yom Kippur afternoon this year on the theme of the Book of Jonah and the concept of collective punishment. I focused in particular on the sailors who were put in danger because of Jonah embarking on their ship and on the inhabitants of Nineveh.

3: I drew on the commentaries of Rashi and the Malbim in relation to the sailors, and on the Midrash Pirkei d’Rebbe Eliezer in relation to the King of Nineveh and its inhabitants. In particular, the sailors go to particularly impressive lengths to avoid exposing Jonah to danger until they are absolutely sure that keeping him on board would expose them all to undeserved and serious risks and that expelling him would not add to his own danger. And the King of Nineveh (a reincarnation of Pharoah, according to the Midrash) shows his lack of understanding of moral principle by staging a repentance program that inflicts suffering on children and animals (demonstrating a lack of true moral understanding as a result of which, according to the Midrash, the “salvation” of Nineveh was only ephemeral).

4: I tried to develop some thoughts about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocent bystanders out of these incidents: but I had not prepared sufficiently carefully for my thoughts to be properly articulated and I failed in the discussion to express them coherently.

5: Unhappily, since then we have all had the need to think more deeply about the Jewish attitude to the death of innocents, whether as targeted victims or as “collateral” deaths. And I think I now know what I should have said on Yom Kippur afternoon.

6: The starting point is that Abraham established in his debate with God at Sodom that is axiomatic to Jewish theology that God does not permit the deliberate killing of the innocent with the guilty. The episode of the sacrifice of Isaac can be understood as God’s final challenge to Abraham, seeing if he was prepared to challenge God by saying, in effect, “yes, if You command me to kill an innocent child I will do that, but after that I will no longer believe that you are a God worth following”. My understanding is that if God had not prevented Abraham from complying with the command to kill Isaac, Abraham would have ceased to see God as espousing values of decency and justice and would, so to speak, have abandoned the religion. (I have discussed this elsewhere (https://thescepticblog.com/2014/09/ – and What If God’s A Christian, Chapter 46 – https://www.danielgreenberg.co.uk/product/what-if-gods-a-christian/), and I am told that a similar thesis is found in respectable orthodox Jewish sources.)

7: We are therefore required to emulate the sailors in the book of Jonah to do everything we possibly can to avoid punishing a person for things for which they are not responsible.

8: But sometimes entirely innocent people will suffer, and may even die, as a result of circumstances over which they have no control and for which they bear no responsibility of any kind. There will be all kinds of reasons for this: innocents will sometimes be targeted deliberately, carelessly or otherwise wrongly; or they may be used by murderers or others as human shields; and there are so many other dreadful circumstances in which innocent adults or children die every day all around the world as victims of natural or human events over which they have no control and for which they have no shred of responsibility.

9: How do I continue to reconcile this with a just God? At what point should we consider, like Abraham at the akeida, walking away from our faith on the grounds that it no longer appears to make any sense or to produce anything useful?

10: The critical point here is my belief in life after death. One of the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion is that this world is a physical corridor to a spiritual existence. The purpose of this world is to use its opportunities – and in particular the opportunities for kindness and sensitivity that arise from our interactions with each other – for me to build something in my essence that will survive after my physical death.

11: This is what Rabbinic literature generally refers to as The World To Come – Olom Habo. Critically, in Jewish theology, almost everyone who dies receives a place in the World to Come. Put another way, virtually everyone, irrespective of religion, race or any other characteristic, acquires spiritual merit in myriad ways every day, and that merit becomes their spiritual identity after death. The Talmud lists some classes of person who are thought not to survive into the next world – and the common denomination is the kind of arrogance and depravity that leads them to deny the value of moral or spiritual behaviour. “Ordinary” failings of the kind that amount simply to giving in to normal human temptations do not according to Rabbinic tradition debar a person from acquiring the spiritual merit that amounts to a place in the World to Come.

12: In essence, everybody remotely “normal” receives a life after death, however shallow and flawed their life may have appeared to them to be, in the way that most of us tend to think of our own lives. I have discussed elsewhere how I suspect that the failings we are most shamed of may turn out to be dismissed by the “Recording Angel” as merely human and irrelevant to the final spiritual reckoning, while many of our greatest merits may turn out to be things we thought too commonplace to be worth noticing.

13: And it is fundamental Jewish doctrine that nobody and nothing can take my World To Come away from me. We have not even the vaguest inkling of an idea why God permits wicked people to murder and destroy: but we have a clear faith that their victims rise straight to the World To Come and enter a phase of eternal spiritual life that the rest of us will reach in God’s own inscrutable time.

14: On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we are not really asking for physical life at all: we all know how fragile all human life is and how uncertain it is for any person whether they will survive physically for another day or not, let alone for another year or not. In so far as we are asking to be kept alive at all it is “l’maanchoh – for God’s own sake” in the sense that through self-improvement, introspection and kindness (teshuvah, tefiloh u’tzedoko) we will prepare ourselves for eventual death and what comes beyond it. Yom Kippur is more about the unimportance of physical death than the importance of preserving physical life.

15: (None of this is in any sense a theological excuse for murderers. The Talmud has a lengthy passage in Tractate Rosh Hashanah about the treatment of murderers who argue in the afterlife that they must have been “doing God’s will” or otherwise it couldn’t have happened – the bottom line is that the fact that God “wants” something to happen, whatever that means, does not relieve the perpetrator from the spiritual consequences of the moral decision to be the person who makes that thing happen. And those who murder and destroy out of arrogant belief in their own righteousness, or in the righteousness of their own religious or other ideology, fall within the classes of person who according to the Talmud lack the spiritual qualities to endure after death.)

16: Nor does any of this purport to make sense of any of the madness in the world today.

17: But it does mean that I can – just – remain a committed practising Jew despite the innocent lives that are lost or blighted in so many places around the world everyday.

18: Like us all, I am praying for peace for everyone everywhere as soon as possible; and hoping against hope that the decent human instincts and values that are an emanation of the Divine in whose image we were all created will prevail. And for those innocents who lose their lives every day in so many places around the world, I join the collective and continuous Jewish prayer that they all should be “bound in eternal life”.