ABSTRACT

A God who suffers, one might protest, is not the God that devout Jews have worshiped through the ages, the God to whom they have turned repeatedly in their own suffering. Yet, biblical and post-biblical sources are replete with expressions of God’s sharing in the torment of Israel. In the celebrated language of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the uniqueness of prophetic theology is linked to divine pathos, symbolically portrayed in the image of the father partaking of the affliction of the son. The participation of God in Israel’s agony, according to Heschel, transforms the latter as the suffering serves not only as chastisement for transgressions but bears the birth pangs of salvation for Israel and the nations of the world.2 This is surely no small matter, but the suffering of God affirmed in this notion of pathos is, as Heschel himself notes, always a relative state in contrast to the passion that denotes the personal and private suffering that occurs within the life of the deity.3 Heschel’s use of the term “pathos” as opposed to “passion” is meant to convey that in the biblical sources God’s suffering is a correlative phenomenon, for it is always in response to the suffering of the other.4