For various reasons, we want God to exist, but basically as someone who can come to the rescue– not a deity who demands our heart and soul, who commands obedience, who calls us to the straight and narrow, warns against distractions, claims love for all of creation, and then goes on vacation for centuries at a time.
I read the other day that Israel, surprisingly, is not a country full of religious zealots or even somewhat faithful, practicing Jews. The article drew attention to a distinction made between those who practice their Jewish faith and those who simply identify as being of Jewish descent. The latter was made to sound as if it was the larger of these two groups.
One horrific way of looking at all that’s unfolded since October 7 could be that God doesn’t like this “backsliding,” this selective—in some ways non-committal—assumption of Jewish ethnicity. Maybe the Hamas attack is punishment, or a ghastly wake-up call meted out as a reminder that chosen comes with expectations and responsibilities and tradition.
And maybe this is why it’s hard to believe in God, or at least a God with such a long memory for being wronged. Always testing, harping on continuity, yet non-committal in his/her/its own right, who’s no better or different than Donald Trump, for crying out loud.
Jewish scripture is largely Christianity’s Old Testament. Jeremiah 31 and other passages aside, the Old Testament God can be a vengeful, angry taskmaster, remembering sin to the fourth generation. Maybe, just as “forty days and forty nights” simply means a long time, “fourth generation” simply means a lot of generations.
It’d be tempting, one might think, to just give up on a God who behaves this way. One can hold out for better days for only so long. And who needs a promised land when all it seems to offer is misery and pain and the need for constant vigilance, with “neighbors” who want you gone?
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