love (of the righteous) to mankind, or rather to Israel. But we must not
confuse it with the Chastisement of Love often mentioned in the Talmud,
though this idea also seems calculated to account for the suffering of the
righteous. Here the love is not on the side of the sufferer, but proceeds
from him who inflicts this suffering. “Him,” says R. Huna, “in whom God
delights he crushes with suffering.” As a proof of this theory the words
of Is. liii. 10 are given, which are interpreted to mean: him whom the
Lord delights in He puts to grief. Another passage, by the same authority,
is to the effect that where there is no sufficient cause for punishment
(the man being entirely free from sin), we have to regard his suffering as
a chastisement of love, for it is said: “Whom the Lord loveth He
correcteth” (Proverbs iii. 11).(179) To what purpose He corrects him may,
perhaps, be seen from the following passage: “R. Eleazar ben Jacob says:
If a man is visited by affliction he has to be thankful to God for it: for
suffering draws man to, and reconciles him with God, as it is said: For
whom God loveth he correcteth.”(180)
It is in conformity with such a high conception that affliction, far from
being dreaded, becomes almost a desirable end, and we hear many Rabbis
exclaim, “Beloved is suffering,” for by it fatherly love is shown to man
by God; by it man obtains purification and atonement, by it Israel came in
possession of the best gifts, such as the Torah, the Holy Land, and
eternal life.(181) And so also the sufferer, far from being considered as
a man with a suspected past, becomes an object of veneration, on whom the
glory of God rests, and he brings salvation to the world if he bears his
affliction with joyful submission to the will of God.(182) Continuous
prosperity is by no means to be longed after, for, as R. Ishmael taught,
“He who has passed forty days without meeting adversity has already
received his (share of the) world (to come) in this life.”(183) Nay, the
standing rule is that the really righteous suffer, whilst the wicked are
supposed to be in a prosperous state. Thus, R. Jannai said, “We (average
people) enjoy neither the prosperity of the wicked nor the afflictions of
the righteous,”(184) whilst his contemporary, Rab, declared that he who
experiences no affliction and persecution does not belong to them (the
Jews).(185)
2. The second main view on Retribution is that recorded by the Rabbis as
in direct opposition to that of R. Ammi. It is that there is suffering as
well as death without sin and transgression. We may now just as well infer
that there is prosperity and happiness without preceding merits. And this
is, indeed, the view held by R. Meir. For in contradiction to the view
cited above, R. Meir declares that the request of Moses to have explained
to him the mysterious ways of Providence was _not_ granted, and the answer
he received was, “And I will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy” (Exod.
xxxiii. 19), which means to say, even though he to whom the mercy is shown
be unworthy of it. The old question arises how such a procedure is to be
reconciled with the justice and omnipotence of God. The commentaries try
to evade the difficulty by suggesting some of the views given above, as
that the real reward and punishment are only in the world to come, or that
the affliction of the righteous is only chastisement of love, and so on.
From the passages I am about to quote, however, one gains the impression
that some Rabbis rather thought that this great problem will indeed not
bear discussion or solution at all. Thus we have the legend: “The angels
said to God, why have you punished Adam with death? He answered, On
account of his having transgressed my commandment (with regard to the
eating of the tree of knowledge). But why had Moses and Aaron to die? The
reply given to them is the words, Eccl. ix. 2: ‘All things come alike to
all; there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked, to the good
and to the clean and to the unclean.’ ”(186) Another legend records, “When
Moses ascended to heaven, God showed him also the great men of futurity.
R. Akiba was sitting and interpreting the law in a most wonderful way.
Moses said to God: Thou hast shown me his worth, show me also his reward;
on which he is bidden to look back. There he perceives him dying the most
cruel of deaths, and his flesh being sold by weight. Moses now asks: Is
this the reward of such a life? whereupon God answers him: Be silent; this
I have determined.”(187)
It is impossible not to think of the fine lines of the German poet:—
Warum schleppt sich blutend, elend,
Unter Kreuzlast der Gerechte,
Während glücklich als ein Sieger
Trabt auf hohem Ross der Schlechte?
Also fragen wir beständig,
Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll
Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler—
Aber ist das eine Antwort?
Still, one might perhaps suggest that these passages when examined a
little closer, not only contain a rebuke to man’s importunity in wanting
to intrude into the secrets of God, but also hint at the possibility that
even God’s omnipotence is submitted to a certain law—though designed by
His own holy will—which He could not alter without detriment to the whole
creation. Indeed, in one of the mystical accounts of the martyrdom of R.
Akiba and other great Rabbis, God is represented as asking the sufferers
to accept His hard decree without protest, unless they wish Him to destroy
the whole world. In another place again, we read of a certain renowned
Rabbi, who lived in great poverty, that once in a dream he asked the
divine Shechinah how long he would have still to endure this bitter
privation? The answer given to him was: “My son, will it please you that I
destroy the world for your sake?”(188) It is only in this light that we
shall be able to understand such passages in the Rabbinic literature as
that God almost suffers Himself when He has to inflict punishment either
on the individual or on whole communities. Thus God is represented as
mourning for seven days (as in the case when one loses a child) before He
brought the deluge on the world; He bemoans the fall of Israel and the
destruction of the Temple, and the Shechinah laments even when the
criminal suffers his just punishment. And it is not by rebelling against
these laws that He tries to redeem His suffering. He himself has recourse
to prayer, and says: “May it be my will that my mercy conquer my wrath,
that my love over‐rule my strict justice, so that I may treat my children
with love.”(189) If now man is equal to God, he has nevertheless, or
rather on that account, to submit to the law of God without any outlook
for reward or punishment; or, as Antigonos expressed it, “Be not as slaves
that minister to the Lord with a view to receive recompense.”(190)
Certainly it would be hazardous to maintain that Antigonos’s saying was a
consequence of this doctrine; but, at any rate, we see a clear tendency to
keep the thought of reward (in spite of the prominent part it holds in the
Bible) out of view. Still more clearly is it seen when, with reference to
Ps. cxii., “Blessed is the man ... that delighteth greatly in his
commandments,” Rabbi Eleazar remarks that the meaning is that the man
desires only to do His commandments, but he does not want the rewards
connected with them.(191) This is the more remarkable, as the whole
contents of this psalm are nothing else than a long series of promises of
various rewards, so that the explanation of Rabbi Eleazar is in almost
direct contradiction to the simple meaning of the words. On the other
hand, also, every complaint about suffering must cease. Not only is
affliction no direct chastisement by God in the way of revenge; but even
when it would seem to us that we suffer innocently, we have no right to
murmur, as God himself is also suffering, and, as the Talmud expresses it,
“It is enough for the slave to be in the position of his master.”(192)
This thought of the compassion—in its strictest sense of fellow‐
suffering—of God with His creatures becomes a new motive for avoiding sin.
“Woe to the wicked,” exclaims a Rabbi, “who by their bad actions turn the
mercy of God into strict justice.”(193) And the later mystics explain
distinctly that the great crime of sin consists in causing pain, so to
speak, to the Shechinah. One of them compared it with the slave who abuses
the goodness of his master so far as to buy with his money arms to wound
him. But, on the other hand, it becomes, rather inconsistently, also a new
source of comfort; for, in the end, God will have to redeem Himself from
this suffering, which cannot be accomplished so long as Israel is still
under punishment.(194) Most interesting is the noble prayer by a Rabbi of
a very late mystical school: “O God, speedily bring about the redemption.
I am not in the least thinking of what I may gain by it. I am willing to
be condemned to all tortures in hell, if only the Shechinah will cease to
suffer.”(195)
If we were now to ask for the attitude of the Synagogue towards these two
main views, we should have to answer that—as already hinted at the opening
of this paper—it never decided for the one or the other. R. David Rocca
Martino dared even to write a whole book in Defence of Adam proving that
he committed no sin in eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge against
the literal sense of the Scriptures, which were also taken by the Rabbis
literally.(196) By this he destroyed the prospects of many a theodicy, but
it is not known to me that he was severely rebuked for it. It has been
said by a great writer that the best theology is that which is not
consistent, and this advantage the theology of the Synagogue possesses to
its utmost extent. It accepted with R. Ammi the stern principle of divine
retribution, in as far as it makes man feel the responsibility of his
actions, and makes suffering a discipline. But it never allowed this
principle to be carried so far as to deny the sufferer our sympathy, and
by a series of conscious and unconscious modifications, he passed from the
state of a sinner into the zenith of the saint and the perfectly righteous
man. But, on the other hand, the Synagogue also gave entrance to the very
opposite view which, abandoning every attempt to account for suffering,
bids man do his duty without any hope of reward, even as God also does
His. Hence the remarkable phenomenon in the works of later Jewish
moralists, that, whilst they never weary of the most detailed accounts of
the punishments awaiting the sinner and the rewards in store for the
righteous, they warn us most emphatically that our actions must not be
guided by these unworthy considerations, and that our only motive should
be the love of God and submission to His holy will.
Nor must it be thought that the views of the Rabbis are so widely
divergent from those enunciated in the Bible. The germ of almost all the
later ideas is already to be found in the Scriptures. It only needed the
process of time to bring into prominence those features which proved at a
later period most acceptable. Indeed, it would seem that there is also a
sort of domestication of religious ideas. On their first association with
man there is a certain rude violence about them which, when left to the
management of untutored minds, would certainly do great harm. But, let
only this association last for centuries, during which these ideas have to
be subdued by practical use, and they will, in due time, lose their former
roughness, will become theologically workable, and turn out the greatest
blessing to inconsistent humanity.
IX. THE LAW AND RECENT CRITICISM(197)
Professor Toy’s work, _Judaism and Christianity_, gives an admirable
conspectus of the results of the modern critical school in their bearing
on the genesis of Christianity. The author takes various important
doctrines of Christianity, traces them back to their origin in
Israelitism, pursues their course through their various phases in Judaism,
until they reach their final development in the teaching of Jesus and His
disciples, which, in the author’s judgment, is the consummation of that
which the prophets and their successors had to give to the world. Laying
so much stress as Professor Toy does on the saying, “By their fruits shall
ye know them,” he ought also, perhaps, to have told us what, in the course
of time, has become of these several doctrines. For when, for instance,
with regard to the doctrine of original sin, he remarks that “in certain
systems of Christian theology the human race is involved in the
condemnation of the first man” (p. 185, n. 1); or that, in the New
Testament, “the demand for a mediating power between God and humanity is
pushed to the farthest point which thought can occupy consistently with
the maintenance of the absoluteness of the one Supreme Deity” (p. 121), he
is rather evading a difficulty than answering it. Such elaboration would,
however, have been outside the scope of Professor Toy’s book, which claims
only to be a sketch of the progress of thought from the Old Testament to
the New. For his own solution of the indicated difficulty, Toy, to judge
from his liberal standpoint, would probably refer us to Dr. Hatch’s
Hibbert lectures; the issue of such an appeal must, I imagine, remain for
long doubtful and disputed.
A delightful characteristic of Toy’s book is its transparent clearness and
sobriety, which will make it interesting reading, even to those who are
acquainted with the writer’s authorities in their original sources. Almost
entirely new, as well as most suggestive, is the justice which Toy does to
the law in recognising it as a factor for good in the history of religion.
In this point Toy is not only up to his date, but beyond it. It is true
that even the Pharisees have made some advance in the estimation of the
liberal school. They are no longer condemned _en masse_ as so many
hypocrites. It is even admitted that there were a few honest men among
them, such as Rabban Gamaliel, the teacher of Paul, or R. Akiba, the
patriot of Bethar. We are now too polite to be personal. But with regard
to the law, on the other hand, there is at present a markedly opposite
tendency. The general idea seems to be that, as the doctrine of the
resurrection of Christ must be loosely interpreted in a spiritual sense,
it must logically have been preceded by a universal spiritual death, and
the germs of the disease which brought this death about are to be sought
for in the law. Hence the strained efforts to discover in the law the
source of all religious evil,—cant, hypocrisy, formalism, externalism,
transcendentalism, and as many “isms” more, of bad reputation.
It was probably with this current representation of the law in view that
Toy, when speaking of the Levitical legislation, and of its fixing “men’s
minds on ceremonial details which, in some cases, it put into the same
category and on the same level with moral duties,” asks the question:
“Would there not thence result a dimming of the moral sense and a
confusion of moral distinctions? The ethical attitude of a man who could
regard a failure in the routine of sacrifice as not less blameworthy than
an act of theft cannot be called a lofty one” (p. 186). The answer which
he gives is more favourable than such a leading question would induce us
to expect. He tells us that, “in point of fact, the result was different”
(_ibid_). “The Levitical law is not to be looked on as a mere extension
and organisation of the ritual.... Its ritual was, in great part, the
organised expression of the consciousness of sin” (p. 226). Of the law in
general Toy says that it had “larger consequences than its mere details
would suggest,” for it “cultivated the moral sense of the people into
results above its mechanical prescriptions,” and “it developed the sense
of sin, as Paul points out” (Gal. iii. 19), “and therewith a freer
feeling, which brought the soul into more immediate contact with God” (p.
227); whilst in another place he reminds us “that much of the law is
moral, and that no one could fail to see a spiritual significance beneath
its letter” (p. 245), and he even admits that “the great legal schools
which grew up in the second century, if we may judge by the sayings of the
teachers which have come down to us, did not fail to discriminate between
the outward and the inward, the ceremonial and the moral” (p. 186).
These and similar passages will suffice to show that Toy’s estimate of the
law is a very different one from that of Smend and his school. However, it
must not be supposed that he is not on the look‐out for the germs of the
disease. He must find these germs somewhere, or else the progress, which
his book is intended to illustrate, would be difficult to detect. And thus
he repeats the old accusations, though not without modification.
Professor Toy’s objections may, perhaps, be summed up in the passage in
which he represents the Jewish law as “an attempt to define all the
beliefs and acts of life” (p. 239), or as “the embodiment of devotion to a
fixed rule of belief and conduct” (p. 237). Toy does not entirely condemn
this system, and even speaks of it as a “lofty attempt” (p. 239); but, on
the whole, he considers that it must have resulted in bad theology, as
well as in doubtful conduct. Without following Professor Toy over the
whole area of his investigations, which would require a volume for itself,
I will only take the opportunity of making a few general remarks upon the
nature and character of this legal system, which seems to hold the key to
the spiritual history of Judaism.
First, as to its theology, Toy’s description of the law as an attempt to
define all the _beliefs_ of life—an assertion which is also made by
Schürer—is not wholly accurate. For such an attempt was never made by
Judaism. The few dogmas which Judaism possesses, such as the Existence of
God, Providence, Reward, and Punishment—without which no revealed religion
is conceivable—can hardly be called a creed in the modern sense of the
term, which implies something external and foreign to man’s own knowledge,
and received only in deference to the weight of authority. To the Jew of
the Christian era, these simpler dogmas were so self‐evident that it would
have cost him the greatest effort _not_ to believe them. Hence the fact
that, whilst there have come down to us so many controverted points
between the Sadducees and Pharisees with regard to certain juristic and
ritual questions, we know of only one of an essentially dogmatic
character, viz. the dispute concerning the Resurrection.
It is thus difficult to imagine to what Professor Toy can be alluding when
he speaks of the “interest they (the Jews) threw into the discussion and
determination of minutiæ of faith” (p. 241). Discussions upon _minutiæ_ of
faith are only to be read in the works of the later schoolmen (as Saadiah,
Maimonides and their followers), in which such subtle problems as _Creatio
ex nihilo_, the origin of evil, predestination, free will and similar
subjects are examined; but this period is very distant from that with
which Toy is concerned. The older schools and the so‐called houses of
Shammai and Hillel, most of whose members were the contemporaries of the
Apostles, show very little predilection for such _minutiæ_. Their
discussions and differences of opinion about ritual matters are very
numerous, scattered as they are over the whole of the ancient Rabbinic
literature, but I can only remember two of a metaphysical character, or
touching upon the _minutiæ_ of faith. The one, dealing with the efficacy
of certain sacrifices, discusses whether it only extends to the remission
of the pending punishment for sins, or also includes their purification
and washing away; the other considers the question whether it would not
have been better for man not to have been created.(198) But this latter
controversy, which is said to have lasted for two years and a half, by no
means led to any big metaphysical or theological system, but only to the
practical advice that, as we have been created, we ought to be watchful
over our conduct. It is, indeed, a noteworthy feature of Judaism that
theological speculations have never resulted in the formulation of any
imposing or universal doctrine, but usually in divers ceremonial
practices. To give one illustration: according to Professor Toy (p. 210)
the conclusion which the author of 1 Tim. ii. 11‐14 draws from the fact
that woman was the immediate agent of the introduction of sin was the
subordination of her sex. The Rabbis also noticed the same fact, and in
their less abstract language speak of woman as having brought death and
grief into the world; but the conclusion which they drew was that since
woman had extinguished the “light of the world,” she ought to atone for it
by lighting the candles for the Sabbath.(199) Nor is Toy quite correct
when he maintains that the conception of the Memra as Creator and Lord,
etc., and as “representative of the immediate divine activity,” did not
keep its hold on Jewish thought, having been discarded in the later
literature (p. 104). For the Shechinah of the Talmud, the _Metatron_(200)
of the Gaonic‐mystical literature, the Active Intelligence of the
philosophical schools, as well as the Ten Sephiroth(201) (Emanations) of
the Cabbalists, all owe their existence to the same theosophic scruples
and subtleties in which the Logos of Philo and the Memra(202) of the
Targums originated. Thus, they always kept—though under various
forms—their hold on the Jewish mind. Judaism was always broad enough to
accommodate itself to these formulæ, which for the one may mean the most
holy mysteries, and for the other empty and meaningless catchwords. The
objection—in fact, the active opposition—of the Synagogue began when these
possible or impossible explanations of the universe tended to transgress
the bounds of abstract speculation, and, passing over into real concrete
beings, to be worshipped as such. An instance from comparatively modern
times might be found in one of the vagaries of the followers of the
Pseudo‐Messiah, Shabbethai Tsebi. For many generations the controversy had
raged among the Cabbalists, whether the first of the above‐mentioned Ten
Emanations (called by some _Original Adam_, by others, _Crown_(203)) is to
be considered as a part of the Deity or as something separate, and so to
speak, having a reality in itself. The danger of establishing a Being near
the Deity, having an existence of its own and invested with divine
attributes, could not have escaped the thoughtful, and there are indeed
some indications to this effect. The Synagogue as such, however, remained
during the whole controversy strictly neutral, and allowed these
theosophists to fight in the air as much as they liked. But the moment
that the sect of Shabbethai Tsebi identified the incarnate Original Adam
with their leader, and worshipped him as a sort of God‐Messiah, the
Synagogue at once took up a hostile attitude against those who separated
God from His world, and, declaring Shabbethai Tsebi and his followers to
be apostates, excluded them from Judaism for ever.