Thus the narrative of justice, so demonstrably false here on earth, can be continued in a world whose existence no one can disprove. Hence the leap of faith, without which traditional religion becomes impossible.
Judaism, which is based on a covenant between God and His people, could not easily endure without a world to come in which God could keep His promises out of the view of humankind. In the mortal world, God’s promises—long life, defeat of enemies—are repeatedly broken. As the tenth-century sage Saadia Gaon put it hopefully, if not somewhat desperately: “In this world we see the godless prosper and the faithful suffer. There must, therefore, be another world in which all will be recompensed in justice and righteousness.” A contemporary evangelist made the same point in a recent television appearance concerning the murder of innocent children. The Reverend Robert Schuller insisted that there has to be an afterlife with eternal justice. 23 This is a common religious reaction to inexplicable tragedy. A variation on this theme is presented by a prominent Conservative rabbi, speaking in the political language of our times: “The world to come is a form of protest against a wretched status quo in which poverty, illness, and wars crush the human body and soul.” 24
A poignant Yiddish story by the nineteenth-century writer I. L. Peretz illuminates the need for an afterlife in a wretched world of poverty and oppression. A man named Bontsha has lived the most horrible of lives—poverty, sickness, parental abuse—but never complained, either to God or to his fellow man. His death goes unnoticed on earth. The board marking his grave is blown away. In heaven, however, his arrival is greeted with great ceremony. Even the prosecuting angel can find nothing bad to say about him. The divine Judge pronounces His decree for Bontsha:
There in that other world, no one understood you. … There in that other world, that world of lies, your silence was never rewarded, but here in Paradise is the world of truth, here in Paradise you will be rewarded. … For you there is not only one little portion of Paradise, one little share. No, for you there is everything! Whatever you want! Everything is yours!
Bontsha smiles for the first time and speaks: “Well then, what I would like, Your Excellency, is to have, every morning for breakfast, a hot roll with fresh butter.” 25
This Yiddish story is an elaboration of the New Testament’s promise “The meek shall inherit the earth” and the rich will have difficulty making it into heaven. The scales will be balanced, the playing field leveled, and justice achieved. Those who were despised on earth for their virtues shall flourish in the world to come. That is the leap of faith the Abrahamic religions can offer to offset the obvious injustice of this cruel world.
But not all the sages have been prepared to make the leap of faith from the injustice of this world to the perfection of the next. Rabbi Judah Low, the great scholar of Prague, took a more rationalist view in the sixteenth century: “A foundation of religion cannot be something that is not discernible to experience.” That is why, he surmised, the Torah “avoided the hereafter.” Other commentators have suggested that the generation of Jews who left Egypt were not ready to accept an afterlife, perhaps because they had suffered so much from the Egyptian obsession with the world to come. So the oral tradition “discovered” it when the Jews were ready for it.
A midrash, written after rabbinic Judaism accepted the afterlife, has Jacob and Esau debating this issue in the context of Esau’s selling of his birthright:
Esau: “Is there a future world? Or will the dead be called back to life? If it were so, why hath not Adam returned? Hast thou heard that Noah, through whom the world was raised anew, hath reappeared? Yea, Abraham, the friend of God, more beloved of Him than any man, hath he come to life again?”
Jacob: “If thou art of opinion that there is no future world, and that the dead do not rise to new life, then why dost thou want thy birthright? Sell it to me, now, while it is yet possible to do so. Once the Torah is revealed, it cannot be done. Verily, there is a future world, in which the righteous receive their reward. I tell thee this, lest thou say later I deceived thee.” 26
The discovery of an afterlife, which neatly solves all the problems of theodicy, made it unnecessary for God to continue to threaten or promise consequences in relation to future generations. Punishing and rewarding future generations may be necessary in a world that includes no intimation of an afterlife, because sometimes it is simply not enough to threaten the life of a sinner, especially when he is old and near death. 27 More severe punishment may be needed. A God who can threaten eternal damnation and promise eternal salvation does not need to threaten a sinner’s children or promise reward for the descendants of the righteous.
In one sense, threats and promises to be carried out against future generations are the functional equivalent of threats and promises to be carried out in the hereafter: Both are unseen by the sinner or saint; both provide answers to those who see sinners rewarded and saints punished in their lifetimes. In a world in which punishment and reward are bestowed on future generations, it is possible to believe in divine justice—at least for a while—despite the obvious empirical evidence to the contrary. Maybe this sinner has not been punished, but his descendants will surely be punished for him—if not in the first or second generation, then sometime in the future. Similarly, in a world in which punishment and reward are bestowed on the sinners themselves, but in the invisible hereafter, it is possible to believe, despite evidence that in this world sinners are often rewarded and saints punished. Maybe he has gotten away with it here, but just wait until he reaches the pearly gates. Both the indeterminate future rewards and punishments for descendants here on earth and the promise of salvation and purgatory in the hereafter share an invisibility to the generation witnessing injustice, and invisibility permits faith to overcome empirical doubt.
If “justice must be seen to be done”—as a legal principle pronounces—then both God and man fail in the never-ending quest for justice, because justice is too rarely seen here on earth. If justice may be achieved in the next world or in the next generation, then we can continue to have faith in its eventual accomplishment. To turn a phrase, therefore, justice must not be seen to be done, else it will rarely be done, because it is so rarely seen. The Book of Proverbs categorically assures its believers to “be sure of this: the wicked will not go unpunished, but those who are righteous will go free.” 28 But no one with eyes, ears, and mind can be sure of that, since they experience its opposite every day. Either the assurance is false (as Ecclesiastes concludes); or it is a reference to future generations (as the Ten Commandments suggest); or it is a promise about the world to come (as Maimonides assures us). There is no other possibility. Nor can the answer ever be known with certainty. It will always be a matter of faith, not of proof.
It is no accident, therefore, that as the Abrahamic religions move from exclusive reliance on punishment and reward in this world to a belief in the hereafter, there is a parallel movement away from punishing and rewarding descendants for the sins and good deeds of those who are personally responsible. Eventually Judaism is able to accept the important principle of individual accountability precisely because it comes to believe in a world to come in which all scores are personally settled by God. I don’t know whether or not there is a hereafter—no one does. But I must commend its creator—divine or human—for solving the puzzle of how a just and intervening God can permit so much injustice in this world. 29
Regardless of how strongly some people may believe in punishment and reward after death, no society has ever been willing to rely exclusively on this leap of faith to deter earthly misconduct. Every society imposes earthly punishment on criminals, in addition to the purgatory threatened by religion. (No one, it seems, is willing to take Pascal’s wager to the point of leaving it to God alone to punish all sin.) Earthly punishments require earthly rules. It is to these rules, and the influence of the Genesis stories on them, that we now turn.
1. Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary defines theodicy as the “defense of
God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.” A variant on this question is, why are good deeds so often punished and bad ones rewarded?
2. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII, Part 8.
3. The problem of why good people are punished and bad people rewarded has multiple aspects. There is the problem of theodicy, which asks the question How can God, who is deemed responsible for all good and evil, bestow both with such apparent unfairness? But there is also the human analogy to divine theodicy: Why do human beings in administering justice (broadly defined to include not only legal, but political, social, and economic justice as well) produce so much unfairness? The latter is included in the former, since God is thought to control human as well as natural injustice, but the former is not necessarily included in the latter, since humans do not exert much control over natural disasters.
4. “The naturalistic fallacy states that it is ‘logically impossible for any set of statements of the kind usually called descriptive to entail a statement of the kind usually called evaluative’ ” (John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977], p. 132). See generally, Moore, George Edward, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
5. See p. 189 supra.
6. Leviticus 26.
7. Deuteronomy 28.
8. See also Deuteronomy 17: 20 (“so that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he and his children, in the midst of Israel”).
9. Leviticus 26.
10. Deuteronomy 28.
11. Commentators suggest that there are a handful of veiled allusions to the hereafter in the Pentateuch, but they are there only if you are looking very hard for them, and even so, the question persists: Why did God hide them in veiled allusion, rather than make them clear for all to see?
12. Ginzberg, vol. 2, p. 227.
13. Maimonides addresses this issue directly, arguing that the earthly rewards and punishments cataloged in the Bible do occur, but they “are not the final reward [or] the last penalty” (Twersky at p. 82, emphasis added).
14. For example, God commands the destruction of the nation of Amalek throughout the generations for the crimes of one generation.
15. The former may reflect divine justice, while the latter imposes limits on human justice. Rashi distinguishes between minor children and mature children who stand on their own. The halakah also distinguishes the age at which a parent ceases to be responsible for his children’s crimes and sins. According to some commentators, thirteen is the age of responsibility to human courts, whereas twenty is the age for the heavenly court.
16. It can be argued that the German people—certainly those who lived in West Germany—were collectively rewarded by the Marshall Plan.
17. See generally, Elon, Menachem, ed., The Principles of Jewish Law. (Jerusalem: Encyclopedia Judaica, 1975).
18. Rabbi Milton Steinberg has written a moving novel about this episode entitled As a Driven Leaf (Northvale, N.J.: J. Aronson, 1987).
19. Rabbi Akiba elaborated on this view elsewhere: God “grants ease to the wicked and rewards them for the few good deeds which they have performed in this world in order to punish them in the future world.” Similarly, he punishes the righteous in this world for their few wrongs in order to “lavish bliss” upon them in the world to come (Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1, p. 257). Pretty clever! That explains all the injustices we see in this world.
20. Numerous commentators have tried heroically to rationalize David’s invocation of this variant on the naturalist fallacy. Let me offer the following interpretation. David himself witnessed God’s injustice against an innocent child—his own. God kills the offspring of his illicit liaison with Bathsheba, thus demonstrating that the offspring of the unrighteous are punished, despite God’s promise in Deuteronomy that children will not be put to death for the sins of fathers (24:16). Now that David has grown old and has become righteous, he has seen his children rewarded. He is making an observation about his own checkered life. See Psalms 44, 73, 79, and 82 for somewhat different perspectives.
21. Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1, p. 216.
22. Twersky at p. 82.
23. Larry King Live, March 22, 1999.
24. Harold, Schulweis, For Those Who Can’t Believe (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 183.
25. Peretz, I. L., “Bontsha the Silent,” in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1990), pp. 223-30.
26. Ginzberg, p. 320.
27. See Dershowitz, Just Revenge. (New York: Warner, 1999).
28. 11: 21; see also 12:17, 26: 27.
29. Talmudic and Midrashic efforts to impose an afterlife on the stories of Genesis are understandable theologically, but they do an injustice to the power of these stories whose poignancy derives, in significant part, from the injustice of life and the finality of death. To understand Genesis as it was written requires the reader to accept the weltanschauung of its time, rather than to impose, postfacto, a concept—the afterlife—which came to be accepted only in subsequent books.
CHAPTER 14
Where Do the Ten Commandments Come From?
The narratives of injustice that typify the Book of Genesis not only raise the most profound questions about justice in this world and the next, they also foreshadow many of the specific rules that follow in the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
When viewed against the background of the narrative of Genesis, the revelation at Sinai is not the dramatic break with the past that some traditional commentators attribute to it. For Maimonides, prior to Sinai there were no binding laws. But if the Book of Genesis tells the story of the developing legal system—ad hoc rules, common law, statutes, and so on—then Sinai does not represent so dramatic a break with the past. It is a culmination of a process begun in the Garden of Eden and continued with Cain, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Dina, Tamar, Joseph, and the other actors in the opening narratives of the Bible.
Familiarity with these narratives is a prerequisite to understanding the more formal codes of law revealed at Sinai, since these laws are a reaction to the anarchy of the narratives. Many of the laws make explicit or implicit references to narratives, and commentators often tie them together.
To the extent that Sinai does not represent as much of a dramatic break with the past as a culmination of a long process of development, it reflects not only the history of the law, but its historiography as well. We tend to look back at great moments, such as the Magna Carta and the American Constitution, as if they were dramatic breaks with the past. Careful study, however, often discloses that they were actually the inevitable and predictable culminations of developments over time. Because historians crave landmarks and watersheds, they often exaggerate the significance of dramatic singular events that are the culminations of a long, gradual process of adumbration. Magna Carta, for example, summarized and codified developments that were already recognized as part of the common law. Once we had Magna Carta, it became less important to focus on the prior Year Books in order to extract from them the principles that would come to be codified in the great charter.
This is not to trivialize the dramatic moments historians count as significant. It is to understand that these moments do not arise out of nothingness. In history there is never a tabula rasa. We always write on a tableau on which much has already been written, erased, and rewritten—even if the tableau is oral.
Many traditional commentators disagree, arguing that the Ten Commandments and the other rules emerged full-blown from the revelation at Sinai. The reluctance of some traditional commentators to acknowledge the close association between the early narratives and the subsequent rules reflects a theological dogma. If the revelation of Sinai is to retain its centrality, it is essential that the laws revealed at Sinai emerge fully formed from the mountaintop. To see these laws foreshadowed in earlier stories—even stories about God—is to diminish the drama of Sinai.
Even the most tradit
ional of commentators are forced to trace some of the rules to Genesis. For example, Maimonides, who most stridently makes the case for the centrality of the revelation at Sinai, must acknowledge that the Jewish prohibition against eating the sinew of the thigh vein derives from the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel of God and straining the hollow of his thigh, since the narrative explicitly makes the connection: “Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sinew … unto this day, because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh.” 1 This particular association between narrative and rule is largely symbolic 2 and has little to do with justice. The association between other narratives and rules of justice is far clearer. 3
Virtually all of the substantive and procedural rules that are decreed in the subsequent law books of the Pentateuch flow from the stories of Genesis. Each of the Ten Commandments can be traced to at least one of the earlier narratives. The more specific rules—positive and negative, substantive and procedural—often have sources in the stories as well. At the very least, they have roots in the common problems addressed in both the narratives and the rules.
The Genesis of Justice Page 22