Pesach, Deus Absconditus and Divine Silence

The continuing absence of distinctive Divine Providence in modern times is often seen as the cause for much of secularism. Since the days of the Renaissance man has become more and more skeptical about the frequency of divine intervention. No longer, it is argued, are there enough indications of God’s interference in the national and private affairs of mankind. This viewpoint ultimately led to the collapse of much of religious authority and in many ways undermined the role of religion in man’s life.

When the Israelites left Egypt, divine intervention was most visible. The ten plagues, the splitting of the Red Sea and the many other smaller and larger miracles were amply evident of God’s involvement in man’s affairs. Consequently, our general reading of those years make us believe that anyone living under such miraculous circumstances would have had no option but to be a deeply religious person. 

Rashi, however, in his commentary on the Torah, gives us a totally different version of the events:

“As the result of the sin of the spies, in which they spoke evil about the land of Israel, God’s speech did not seclude itself with Moshe for 38 years.” (Vayikra 1:1)

Whatever the deeper meaning of these words may be, it cannot be denied that this is a most remarkable and far-reaching observation. We are told that most of the time in which the Israelites traveled through the desert, there was no special divine providence. God did not speak to Moshe and the Israelites in His usual way. Consequently, the Israelites had to deal with the question of God’s interference not very differently from the way in which modern man does. Although the miraculous manna (bread) fell, and other, smaller miracles took place, it becomes clear that these events no longer had any real effect on the religious condition of the Israelites. Indeed, they said they had come to loathe the manna, which they refer to as lechem hakelokel, miserable bread (Bamidbar 21:5). They saw these miracles as common events, not much different than the way we view the laws of nature.

It is perhaps this fact that makes Pesach so relevant to our own times: Sitting at the Seder table we often feel we are reading a story that has little in common with our days and lives. We complain that God has become silent and His spoken word is no longer available. How, then, can we believe in His existence, and why should we listen to His words spoken many thousands of years ago? We are today confronted with a Deus Absconditus – an absent God – and no story about God’s overt intervention in history can reach us any longer. God’s silence has made us deaf. So we complain.

And even though we know, as Rashi teaches us, that God did not speak with Moshe and the Israelites for 38 years, we must argue that this is nothing compared to our case. We have not heard from Him for more than two thousand years! So why ask us to contemplate an event of thousands of years ago with which we have nearly nothing in common?

But in hindsight, we may have to radically change our view.  We need to realize that the silence of those 38 years must have been much more frightening than all the Divine silence of our last two thousand years. While we are, to a great extent, able to take care of ourselves, and much more independent, this was not the case with our forefathers in the desert. They encountered the emptiness of desert land. There were no natural resources – food, water, or any other basic elements – to enable even the simplest forms of life. True, we are told that they miraculously had water and food. But once God stopped speaking with them in the middle of the desert, and His thundering silence went on day after day, they no doubt became frightened that they would have nothing to fall back on were God to suddenly decide to stop providing them with water and food. This Godly silence, then, must have been more dreadful than anything we can imagine. Being accustomed to open miracles and then suddenly, overnight, finding oneself in the icy absence of any divine voice, right in the middle of a desert, must have been too much to bear. God’s “indifference” no doubt created an unprecedented, devastatingly traumatic experience (1).

When we understand that the story of the exodus was mainly one of divine silence, and that only occasionally did a word of God enter the human sphere, we then also become conscious of the fact that the story we read on the Seder night is most relevant. While the words of the Haggadah relate the miracles, the “empty spaces” between the words tell of the frightening divine silence of those 38 years. And just as our forefathers must have often wondered what happened to God’s presence in all those years, so do we. But just as they came through, so must we. 

The art is to hear God in His silence, to see His miracles in His “absence.” It is in the balance of these paradoxes that religious life takes place.

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 (1)   The absence of God’s word for all those 38 years throws a radically different light on much  of the Israelites’ upheavals and complaints in the desert, as mentioned in the Torah.