Who's Afraid of the Big Bad God?

“I’m afraid of the wolf…” The child nestles against me, hands over his eyes, trembling. I try to apply the principles of positive parenting that I have learned: “Well, you know, the wolf we talk about in this story is not representative of the real wolf… This one is a wicked wolf… The real wolf is a good and very gentle animal… And he reigns over the whole forest, over the other animals, with kindness.” The child looks at me, incredulous… I too find it hard to believe myself….

“The Big Bad God”: from fear to terror

The destroying breath

It is true that there is good reason to be afraid of God in the Torah and the Talmud. The threat of His wrath is almost always present in a verbal or nominal form. One finds nearly ten groups of words to designate it, which appear nearly 450 times across the whole of the Bible. Like the wicked wolf of the children’s story, God destroys with a breath that one hears in Hebrew through words the majority of which end with the [f] sound: “Ketsef” / “wrath,” “Anaf” / “to anger,” “zaaf” / “fury.” “Pfffff….” here he is heating up and preparing to destroy our house of straw. “Vé’hara af Ado-naï bakhem,” repeated morning and evening in the prayer considered the most important, the Shema, shows us the “nose” of God (“af”) heating up if one dares to stray and to prostrate oneself before other gods. One must of course imagine the dramaturgy bound up with the liturgical reading of the passage, which, with the “téamim,” the cantillation, dramatizes the passage with a crescendo to imitate this wrath and to sing the fury of God. Let us recall that one of the traditions of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is not to sing this passage, but to recite it in a low voice… so as not to “rile the beast” (and this is also the case in the Sephardic tradition throughout the period of the “selikhot”¹ that precedes it).

For it is indeed a threat of destruction that rages behind this divine wrath. Immediately afterward, in the prayer of the “Shema,” it is said that if one were to stray from faith in God, “He would close the heavens and there would be no more rain and the earth would no longer give its harvest. And you would disappear quickly from the good land that God gives you.” The fear, indeed the terror felt before the divine Being, is that of the annihilation of the surface of the earth. Whether it be because He decides to “close the floodgates of the sky” by refusing rain, or to open them and unleash the deluge, God Almighty has this power of having the natural elements obey Him and, according to His will, of using them against us. There is good reason to be afraid… Besides, if one delves into this register, one can consider that the whole history of the Bible is founded on man’s fear in the face of transcendence.

“Mister Wolf, are you there?”

Everything begins with Adam and Eve who, after original sin and after consuming the fruit of the tree of knowledge, have their eyes “unsealed” and perceive that they are naked. There appears the first fear of Man before God. The couple hides immediately when it hears God drawing near. And it is God Almighty, omniscient, who plays the wolf with the first man by asking him “Where are you?”: “Ayéka?” The effect on man is immediate; it amplifies the feeling of fear tenfold. What is worse than someone one does not see who says to us: “Where are you?” when one knows that he sees us…? Hannibal Lecter could not have done better to make his victim’s hair stand on end… The result: the first occurrence of the word “to fear,” “vayira,” by Adam, who literally “no longer knows where to put himself” in order to hide from God: “I heard your voice in the garden; I was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid myself.” (Genesis 3:9). Same technique for the encounter with Cain after the murder of Abel. “Hé Hevel Ah’ih’a?” God asks Cain where his brother is… This systematic question of “Where?” is not without recalling the wolf’s cry “Wooo” of this God who knows everything, who sees everything, and who poses false questions, which engenders a visceral fear in the human being. Terror, fear, “Pah’ad” in Hebrew, even comes to be born of a God who can be murderous, since he is capable of annihilating whole swaths of humanity. Proof of this: the episode of the Deluge, the extermination of whole cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, or again Babel. All epidemics are imputed to him. As soon as there is leprosy, cholera, famine, it is God who manifests himself against the people, to chastise the sinning people.

This understanding of the divinity refers directly to the justification of the Christian “renewal” deemed necessary in order to recycle the “jealous” God of the Old Testament and “convert” Him into a “God of Love.” Jesus, HE, is not a wolf, but on the contrary the bearer of an infinite goodness… since he brings the messianic good news. By plunging humanity into a post-apocalyptic temporality and by bringing forth the messiah who is endlessly reincarnated, Christians circumvent “the wolf” and his wickedness, preferring to him the solution of divine peace, borne by a Jesus who came to save humanity and who has himself crucified to expiate all the sins of humanity. This will not prevent the massacres that will soon follow, of more than a hundred thousand people during the crusades in the name of God, naturally… Who else could demand it?

These considerations of a murderous, perverse, and almost psychopathic God of the Old Testament, of the “Old Covenant,” who is seen as “archaic” since they present a God with primal instincts who kills His creature as he pleases, would amount to an erroneous and simplistic vision. This would be to misunderstand not only the philosophy of Judaism, but also the Hebrew language, since naturally the Hebrew words present semantic subtleties that must be underscored.

The White Wolf…

“Whitewashing” the wolf… The invention of Satan

How does the Jewish tradition manage not to fall into the caricature of a God “eater” of men, who would resemble that Cronos, god of Greek mythology, who took pleasure in devouring his own children? It was necessary to “whitewash” the wolf and to find for him an equal onto whom to cast the responsibility for the murderous violence. It is thus that “Satan” was born, who, at the outset, is only an “enemy,” a “contradictor,” an “accuser” before becoming the fallen angel who is at the origin of Evil (Mishna). Whether he be named Azazel, Mastema, Asmodeus, or Belial in the post-biblical literature, he becomes, little by little, “the” Satan, with an almost “Zoroastrian” will to a doubling of power. Here he is, then, our wicked wolf! God had nothing to do with it; it is the Wicked One, the Evil One, the Devil, Lucifer, who must be incriminated!…. Here he is defying God in the Book of Job, responsible for the forces of darkness and, climbing the ranks, becoming an important character. He is presented as being demonic in the book of Enoch (8.1-2). Whereas divine action unifies, he “divides” (the French word diable indeed has for its origin the Latin word diabolus, itself borrowed from the Greek diabolos, which refers to division). Here he is incarnating the principle of the inclination toward Evil that the Bible designates as the “Yetser Hara” and that is contained in every human being. This is why he succeeds so well in “seducing” and in pushing toward Evil. Conversely, the post-biblical literature designates him as the tempting serpent who is responsible for original sin. He is even made into an original scapegoat, since it is toward him that all the sins of the people are to be sent in the form of a goat sent into the desert on the day of Yom Kippur: “Seïr HaMishtaléa’h”². One always tries to coax the big beast… Evil can thus be found in the form of monsters such as the Leviathan or Behemoth, which can be seen as two incarnations of the terrible wolf who is there to eat men and, incidentally, little children… Besides, does not the letter “Shin,” which is in the root of Satan, mean “tooth”? “Chhhhhh”: one hears him hiss in demonic fashion to destroy our homes… Things now seem clearer. We have him, then, our diabolical wolf!

Yet is he of divine essence, in Judaism? Does Satan possess half of the universe, like the forces of Good and Evil waging a fight to the death, on equal footing, in the Zoroastrian tradition or in Star Wars? Judaism is far more complex in its approach to Evil as forming part of Creation, Satan included. God remains THE “boss” of Satan, and the latter may well try to revolt, he will not win his case and will remain at the right hand of the Almighty God who remains ONE. Even in the Book of Job, where Satan goes so far as to seduce God with the idea of “testing” Job’s faith by making him know the greatest misfortunes, from the death of his children to the greatest material destitution, it is God who agrees to “play the game.”

At the end of the Passover Seder, to conclude the ritual, one sings a nursery rhyme that recounts the cycle of life and is titled “One Kid Goat,” doubtless linked to the paschal lamb. Originally, it is sung in Aramaic, “Had Gadia,” but it is found adapted into Hebrew and then into the vernacular languages. At the outset, it is a father who has bought a kid goat for two coins. And here is set off an infernal cycle on the theme of “who eats whom?” with, successively, ever more powerful actors of the material, human, and spiritual world pursuing one another by swallowing one another. The cat will eat the kid goat, but the dog will bite the cat. The stick comes along and strikes the dog. But the fire burns the stick. The water comes to put out the fire. The ox comes to lap up the water and the butcher to kill the ox. It is the end of the chain that interests us most particularly. For the angel of death (our dear Satan) comes to kill the butcher. There then arrives the container of the angel of death, God, who makes him die… The Holy One, Blessed be He, will chase Satan from the heavens, taking from him his celestial power (Isaiah 14.15, Ezekiel 28.16-17). So? Who’s the boss? God becomes once again the first source of fear and terror.

Unless there is another breath, other “teeth” (the letter “shin”) lurking in the dark… Those of “Ich,” in Hebrew meaning “man”… For after all, the trigger is still the father who bought the kid goat. It is perhaps because the father chose to buy the animal, preventing it from eating the grass, that for which it was created, that the cycle of violence is unleashed… Man is a wolf to man…

One often forgets the third son of Adam and Eve, Seth, which makes of our humanity the descendants of a murderer. For if one follows the order of things, the first “wolf” to kill… is indeed Cain. Besides, far from being traumatized by the false question of this omniscient God — “Where is your brother?” — he answers him brazenly: “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?” In other words: “Since You know everything, You should have specified that we are keepers of one another and seen to it that I not kill my brother.” In short, Cain answers him that it is His fault. And the Eternal, taken aback by this “hutzpah” (this nerve), poses to him the same question he will pose to Eve: “Ma Assita”: “What have you done?” This question posed is rhetorical, since God “fears” the answer. It is not only an interrogation as to the reason why the perpetrator committed the fault; it is also an acknowledgment of powerlessness… Man, to be sure, is a wolf to man, but he is also one to God, who realizes that His creature is not at all “tov meod,” “eminently good,” as He had been able to consider it at the moment of its creation. He even goes so far as to offer protection to Cain after having cursed him: “Therefore whoever kills Cain shall be punished sevenfold” (Genesis 4:16). One thus finds some fifteen words in the Bible designating the violence of the world, and almost all serve to designate the troubles produced by men. The term “hamas,” for example, which one finds more than sixty times in the Bible, is never linked to divine action, but always to that of men. It recurs often in relation to the word “Ra,” like the “Yetser Hara” cited above, designating the evil inclination, wickedness.

Man allows God to experience various emotional states linked to anger since, from his creation, man disobeys. Almost as if he had been created for that. From then on, the roles are reversed, and it is man, this “Ich,” who takes back his breath to blow on the “house” of God, on his paradise, on his creation, on his creatures, to annihilate them. Manitou³ distinguished, in this sense, two complementary fears: that of man before God, “Yirat Elohim,” to which corresponds that of God toward man, “Yirat Shamayim.” The first fear, that of man before God, is that of committing a fault, and the second is that of God, who fears doing harm to his world. It is, moreover, for this reason that he chose to “withdraw” from the world on the sixth day, and to “concentrate” his power in order to allow the other to exist, the human to exist. This phenomenon, called “Tsimtsoum,” is interpreted by Manitou as this “fear” of not leaving room for the other, the divine power being “Ein Sof”: infinite. One sees how God holds back his creating and destroying breath — “tsss tsss” — in the consonances of “Tsimtsoum.” “Ich” (man) then takes up all the room with his destroying “Chhhhhh” and, with a voracious appetite, decides to absorb, to eat, to colonize space and to play the wolf… In this interpretation, God knows how to contain himself, man does not… Yet it is indeed God who created man free by placing within him the “Yetser Hara.” Would God, then, have created His creature in order to fear it? Would man pray in order to reassure God of his human goodness and of the assurance that he will follow the rules? To find a lead toward an answer to this question of “Who fears whom?”, let us examine the word “fear” in Hebrew.

Fear and Trembling…

“Lupus in fabula”

In Italy, by the expression “Lupus in fabula” one designates the famous wolf of the fable. A belief that one finds in Pliny holds that whoever sees the wolf first is deprived of his voice. This moment that leaves one speechless in the Bible and that arouses fear and trembling is the instant of the divine revelation on Mount Sinai. Besides, in French, the word “trembler” (to tremble) comes from the Latin “tremere,” which also means to fear. “All the people see the voices” (Exodus 20:14); speechless, we might add, so fascinated is it by what it sees. The commentator Rashi explains the exceptional character of the episode: “They saw what is normally heard, a thing impossible in another place (Mekhilta).” This exceptional moment, when the two principal senses of the human being, sight and hearing, are conflated, is a moment of singular trance. The people will “see” God physically. This theophany is the first of all humanity and the only revelation made to a people in its entirety (generally there is always an intermediary who recounts the apparition). The people’s reaction is fear: “the people, at this sight, trembled and stood at a distance.” Fear is an emotion linked to the survival of the species and one that activates defense strategies in the individual before a danger. The fears are of three orders and are known in English as the three “F”s by researchers in neuroscience: immobilization (“freeze”) before the danger, flight (“fly”), and combat (“fight”). What is interesting here is that the people choose the first two strategies: immobilization (“the people trembled”) and flight (“stood at a distance”). Of course, there was no question of combat with God, which would have been lost in advance. Yet it is astonishing that the people can feel fear and have two opposite behaviors at once. Indeed, one cannot both immobilize oneself trembling and depart. One cannot be at once motionless and in movement. It is here that the question of the stakes of fear between God and Man plays out.

For the wolf of the fable to arouse a fear, the learning of the emotion “fear” was necessary, the memorization of the word “fear” and of its sensation was necessary, and then a process of recognition was necessary. The first time the child hears the word “wolf,” it is not connoted negatively or positively. It is the behavior observed at the utterance of the word “wolf” that will condition the emotion. It is the behavioral pantomime accompanying the evocation of the term “wolf” that will create this “anchoring” in the child’s brain: wolf as a source of “fear.” For me, this anchoring is what the people experience during the Revelation. The two reactions “immobility” / “setting in motion” are in fact the two aspects of this anchoring from a neuroscientific point of view. According to the research of Andreas Lüthi and his collaborators from Basel, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Stanford, and Harvard, one discovers in the journal Nature the organization of the nerve circuits that coordinate the defense reactions, and in particular the immobility reaction and the flight reaction. An external sensory stimulus evoking the presence of a danger for man will first of all reach the thalamus. Then the repercussion of the effect will be taken in charge by two parallel pathways: the thalamo-amygdalar pathway (the short route) and the thalamo-cortico-amygdalar pathway (the long route). The first, linked to the amygdala, is a subcortical pathway that does not benefit from cognition. That is to say, the activation of the amygdala, by means of its central nucleus, gives rise to reflexive emotional reactions even before perceptual integration takes place at the intellectual level. Hence the people’s first reaction, immobility, for the felt sense “fear” at the level of the primary sensory cortex provoked a physical “impression” that is the “bodily” phase of the anchoring. Then the associative cortex will give a representation of the object in order to encode it with the help of the explicit memory afforded by the hippocampus. The individual’s reaction will then be conditioned to the estimation of the danger, whose context and substance will be archived thanks to the hippocampus. The second phase of the people’s reaction: “movement,” which presupposes having understood the importance of the moment experienced by memorizing it, by archiving it, and by allowing the divine Revelation to enter into a psychic experience. It is the second phase of the anchoring: to associate with the felt sense of a sensory stimulus a psychic conceptualization that will allow a behavioral conditioning. It is what happens with the wolf and the overplayed feeling of fear, which can give rise to a real fear. It is what happens with the Revelation, which plays not only on fear, but on a confusion of the senses of hearing and sight that is the very essence of Judaism.

To “see the voices” of God for the people while hearing it hammered home that these voices are but one comes down to having a collective consciousness of the unicity of the diversity of the Jewish people. The plural of the word “voices” has, moreover, been justified by certain commentators by the fact that God addressed each of the members of this people in his own language, at his own level of comprehension according to ages, social, cultural, intellectual levels, so that everyone (animals included) would understand the same thing.

The word “fear,” “Yira” in Hebrew, can also be translated as “vision,” since the verb “to see” has the same consonantal root. It is here the word that is employed: “Vayare Haam vayanou ou, vayaamedou merah’ok.” Literally, “And the people see, and they trembled, and they stood far off.” Rashi explains to us that the people’s reaction was to “shudder” and to set themselves in motion to draw back “the length of their camp” (Shabbat 88b). And the ministering angels arrived and helped them to come back, as it is written: “The angels of Tsevakoth made them move, made them move” (Tehilim 68, 13). The word “Tsevakoth” refers here to one of the names of God as Merciful. These angels, who go to “recover” the children of Israel who flee, will “make them move” again and again. This makes me think of that blindfolded child whom one turns and turns about on himself until he loses control of his sense of direction. Here, however, the Tradition says that the angels made the children of Israel move until they put them into a certain order, that of the letters of the Torah, so that each letter would correspond to a person of the people of Israel. The idea that comes into my head would be that of a gigantic Rubik’s Cube that the angels would have manipulated in every direction until arriving at the right combination. “Fear,” “dread,” is here linked not to the “sight” of God, but to the “VISION” of the divine plan, and the consciousness of the role to play. We are the letters of the divine book… It is what is presented as the “Tikkoun Olam”: literally the “repair of the world,” which is man’s share in bringing the divine Creation to completion. God considers man as a “partner” in his image and, as a good “leader,” he shares his vision. The state of “trance” of the people, with a “vision saturated at the sonic level,” accompanied by tremblings, by movements, comes to anchor the word “Yira” directly tied to the mental image of the revelation. Each time the notion of “Yira” is used, it is not to a blind submission to God out of fear that one will have to refer, but to the sharing of the “Vision” of the divine plan in which man has his place.

Not Even Afraid…

In fact, man has never, in principle, been afraid of God, nor God of man. From his creation, man disobeys, and God, by his questioning of Eve, “Ma zoth assit” (“What have you done?” Genesis 3:13), can be as much in despair over his creature as in admiration… It is the “hutzpah” (the nerve) of man that pleases God, amused before this creature that absolutely wants, too, to “do” its share of transforming action in creation. For the people accepted the Torah on Mount Sinai with a “Naassé Venichmah,” which means “We will do and we will listen.” The whole stake for God will be to remind man to listen first, to understand next, and that action can wait. To remember that the sense of sight, which is a far more developed sense than hearing, was one day saturated with listening by “the voices” of God. It is in this that the most important prayer is the “Shema,” which means “Listen.” It is said upon rising and upon retiring. “Listen, Israel, Ado-naï is our God, Ado-naï is ONE.” Here too, a duality between the order given to Israel as a singular entity (“Listen” and not “Listen, all of you”) and the people’s reply in the plural (“our God”). This listening to the unicity of the plural is the same that was contained in the unique comprehension of the multiple voices of God during the episode of the Revelation. We are not in the order of seeing, but in listening, in the patience of the time of active listening.

How could there be a principle of fear in Judaism, when there is not even a profession of faith? One knows the Christian “credo” or the Muslim “shahada” that attests the faith of the “believer,” but nothing of the sort in Judaism. The only time one will find “Ani Maamin” in the Talmud, that is to say “I believe,” it is at once to see appended to it the announcement of the coming of the Messiah, but absolutely not faith in God. The Jewish believer has other things to say to God than to remind Him that he believes in Him. He must attend to the work that He has left him… Besides, another very important prayer, the “Amida,” repeated three times a day, is always done standing, legs well straight, in a low voice, directly into the “ear” of God with far less submission than the Christian kneeling position or the Muslim prostration. This “hutzpah,” this nerve, can go as far as to “put God back in his place” by reminding him: “HaTorah lo bashamayim hi”: “the Torah is no longer in heaven.” In short, “don’t worry, I’ve got this,” which provokes in the Almighty great peals of laughter with the following remark: “Nishuni banay”: “My children have vanquished me” (Baba Metzia 59a-b). After all, has he not always encouraged us not to be afraid, with the expression “Al tirah” (“Be not afraid”), throughout the Torah? Maimonides makes of it one of the commandments of the Torah, as important as the “fear” of God (Sefer hamitswoth, lo ta’assé 58). When Isaac leaves his home without knowing where to go, God is there and encourages him, “Al tirah” (Gen. 26:24). When Jacob fears seeing his son Joseph again after twenty years of separation, God reiterates “Al tirah” (Gen. 46:3). Moses, reassuring the children of Israel pursued by the Egyptian chariots: “Al tiraou” (Ex. 14:13). At the very end of the prayer of the “Amida” is pronounced this verse “Al tirah mi pachad pitom,” to remind us not to be afraid of a sudden terror or of a destruction when it comes (Proverbs 3:25). Let us also recall the last sentence of the prayer of “Adon Olam,” attributed to Solomon Ibn Gabirol, which closes the office, “Ado-nai li velo yira”: “The Eternal is with me, I will not be afraid.” Psalm (118:6). And then, finally, to end with this very beautiful text of Rabbi Nahman of Breslov: “kol ha’olam koulo guesher tsar m’od, veha’ikar lo lefahed, lo lefahed kelal”: “the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not to be afraid!” And our wolf in all this? The “un-anchoring” of the terror that he inspires will come about in the times to come… “Then the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf, the lion cub, and the ram shall live together, and a young child shall lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6)

Perhaps he will even resemble him, this young child, who nestled against me and who was so afraid at the very beginning of my article… He has fallen asleep… We shall play the wolf again tomorrow…

Notes