Rabbi Margaret Jacobi

A few years ago, I was invited to talk to a Christian group about Jewish approaches to Scripture. They bravely suggested that I speak to them about the difficulties Jews have with the ways that Christians interpret scripture. First on my list was the charge: ‘The Old Testament God is an angry God, the New Testament God is a God of love.’

There are two problems with this. First and foremost, the Hebrew Bible is full of references to a God of love and kindness. God’s attributes are described in the Book of Exodus, in words we proclaim on Yom Kippur: ‘God, the Eternal God, is a compassionate and merciful God, long in patience, and great in kindness and truth.’ We are commanded to love God, in the Shema. We are commanded to love our neighbour. And, most challenging of all, we are commanded to love the stranger. The prophets, too, emphasised the love of God, most notably in the beautiful words of Hosea: ‘ I will betroth you to me for ever. I will betroth you to me in justice and righteousness; I will betroth you to me in love and faithfulness and you shall know the Eternal One.’

The second problem I have with the statement is that anger is not always wrong and nor is it incompatible with love. Yes, God is sometimes depicted as angry in the Hebrew Bible. But God’s anger often springs from compassion. In this week’s Sidra, there is a clear example: ‘You shall not afflict an widow, or orphan. If you afflict them in any way, and they cry out in distress to me, I shall certainly hear their cry. And my anger will be kindled against you, and I will kill you by the sword, and your wives will be widows and your children orphans.’

Yes, God is angry, and it is not comfortable to read of God threatening to kill by the sword. But God is angry because God cares about the widow and the orphan, the most vulnerable people in society, who are easily oppressed and victimised, with no one to care for them. The force of God’s concern needed to be emphasised, for it was too easy to think that orphans and widows didn’t matter. In our time, too, it is easy to ignore those without voices in society and be indifferent to their exploitation and oppression. But when we see the weakest members of society being oppressed, we should be angry. We should, as Isaiah commands, raise our voice like a Shofar, in protest against injustice.

Anger and love are often two sides of the same coin. It has rightly been said that the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. Love is passionate. As it says in Song of Songs, ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; For love is strong as death, passion is hard as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a blazing flame.’ Love is passionate and strong, not calmly indifferent. When we really care about a wrong, we become angry about it. In becoming angry, we summon our energy to right the wrong, to act in order to end the injustice.

This is not to say that anger is not dangerous. If it gets out of control, it can indeed be dangerous and destructive. If it clouds our judgement or leads to violence, then it must be contained. There are certainly times in our Torah when anger becomes destructive. Pinchas, for example, slaughtered many people because he was angry on God’s behalf, and the rabbis explain that for this reason he was not thought suitable to lead the Jewish people. But to lead a life without anger is to lead a life without passion, a life of indifference.

Our ancestors did not believe in an indifferent God. The God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of anger and love, a God who cares passionately about the orphan and the widow, the poor and the needy. May we, too, who are created in God’s image, be passionate in our concern and care for those who have no-one to care for them.

Recent Commentaries