Notes on God's Violence

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Catherine Madsen

Heschel is immune to irony -- serenely, magnificently immune -- but human psychology, surely, is not. How does God help the poor by reducing their oppressors to the same state of terror and impotence in which the poor already live? How does he hope to make people good by inflicting evil on them?

"The prophet," says Heschel, "is a man who feels fiercely" [15] -- yet ferocity of feeling, even on behalf of the poor, is not in itself a remedy. Were the prophets -- was God -- incapable of finding a remedy? Was feeling their only resource? Had God exhausted his repertoire of commandments, did he find himself with only this impotent rage, this extravagance of accusation? The feminist -- or at least the pragmatically female--sensibility is mystified: why didn't the prophets just act?

Alice Miller, the psychotherapist who has written so much against violent methods of childrearing, has found that one person may make the difference in convincing an abused child that he or she is not fated to perpetuate that violence as an adult. If you have one "enlightened witness" [16] -- one person who shows you, however briefly, that another mode of life is possible -- you will turn toward that mode of life and not hurt your own children.

Does God not have that one witness?

Perhaps the point is not to purge the metaphors of violence to protect our children (though there would be some protective effect in not persuading our children that God's violence is good). To the extent that God is our metaphor--our brain child--perhaps the point is to establish so direct, so mutual, a relation with him that his gift can be finally given. Not to censor the violence but to relieve it: to give God an inner life.

Isaiah 43:12: "You are my witnesses, says the Lord, and I am God." The surrounding passage is one of triumph, mutual honor, restoration: splendid promises, magnificent verbal music. A classic Jewish commentary glosses the verse with a pinprick of doubt: "When you are my witnesses, I am God, but when you are not my witnesses, I am, as it were, not God." [17]

Elaine Scarry sees God's violence as having two functions in the Bible: from God's point of view it is punishment, but from the point of view of the people (who must, after all, contend with an invisible God) it is verification:

Although an occasion of wounding is often described... as a scene of disobedience and punishment, it is in many ways more comprehensible and accurate to regard it as a scene of doubt, for it is a failure of belief that continually reoccasions the infliction of hurt. Unable to apprehend God with conviction, [the people] will -- after the arrival of the plague or the disease-ridden quail or the fire or the sword or the storm--apprehend him in the intensity of the pain in their own bodies, or in the visible alteration of the bodies of their fellows or in the bodies ... of their enemies. The vocabulary of punishment describes the event only from the divine perspective.... Moments in which the people have performed an immoral act (other than doubting) and where the idiom of punishment may therefore seem appropriate, must be seen within the frame of the many other moments where the infliction of hurt is explicitly presented as a "sign" of God's realness and therefore a solution to the problem of his unreality, his fictiveness. [18]