The Holy God
and His Stiff-Necked People
Our block is an example of America as it should be. We have Jews and Catholics and WASPs and whites and blacks and some great big extended families from India and Indonesia. The grown-ups all exchange friendly greetings, and the kids ride bikes up and down the street and draw on the sidewalks with chalk. If everybody behaved themselves in their dealings with strangers like the people on our block, the world would be a much nicer place than it is. But, to the best of my knowledge, we are the only Gentiles in the neighborhood whose social lives involve buying rabbinically supervised birthday cakes. While it is in the nature of Christianity to stretch itself around other cultures—to claim as its own the best of Greek philosophy or pagan architecture or African music—it is central to the nature of Judaism, at least as it is understood and lived by the Orthodox, to resist outside influence, stick together, and remain largely distinct from the surrounding cultures.
It is no accident that our neighbors dress, speak, act, and eat differently from most of America. To understand why this is so—in fact, to understand most anything about the Orthodox—you have to look to history, because history is where Jews themselves look to understand their identity and their calling. A central theme of the story of the Jews, from the moment God singled out Abraham and promised to make of him a great nation, is holiness. At Mount Sinai God said to the children of Abraham, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2b). The word “holy,” kodesh in Hebrew, is tricky. We tend to use it, rather vaguely, to mean extra-good, super-spiritual, or even just really, really nice. The original meaning of kodesh is actually “separate” or “set apart.” When God tells his people that he is holy, he means that he is different—nothing remotely like the gods of the Egyptians or the Canaanites. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” he tells them. “And my ways are not your ways. I am utterly unlike anything you have experienced or could imagine” (Isa. 55:8, paraphrase). If you try to understand the nature of God and decide to worship him by doing what the Egyptians and the Canaanites and everyone else does—creating and bowing down to images—you will get it wrong. No images. Nothing in the world, nothing that can be represented in matter, can adequately communicate God’s essence.
Holiness is not only strange; it is dangerous. If you see God, you die. If you touch the mountain where the presence of God has entered our universe, you die. If you panic because Moses, who is the only person who seems to have any idea what is going on, has been up the mountain for forty days, and you need something that you can understand and touch and control, and you pool all your gold and make an image of a calf and worship that, then lots and lots of you die.
So when God says, “I am holy,” he doesn’t mean “I am nice.” And when he says, “You shall be holy,” he doesn’t mean “You ought to be nice too.”He means that, although his people can never imagine or understand him, they are to be like him. This is the outrageous job that God gives to the Jews: the job of making manifest in their lives the holiness, purity, absolute justice, mercy, and goodness of God. It is not a job they can begin to do if they care, even a little, about being normal, fitting in, going with the flow. To be holy means precisely to be different: set apart, proudly weird, bizarrely countercultural, and defiantly unlike the business-as-usual world all around them. That is the task that our neighbors have inherited, and they give themselves to it heart and soul.
Throughout the Bible God rails at his people again and again for being stiff-necked—stubborn, disobedient, unbiddable. He threatens them with dreadful consequences, and in the short term the consequences of their stubbornness and disobedience are indeed quite dreadful. But I imagine that when God calls his people “stiff-necked,” he feels rather the way I do when I yell at my daughter to get her nose out of that book right now and come down to dinner or else: secretly proud and delighted that she is a hopeless bookworm like her old ma. Stubbornness can be inconvenient and exasperating, but it can also be a very useful quality—and it is a quality that God knows his people will need. It’s not easy being different, and the stiff necks of the Israelites will, in the long run, be the key to their holiness and to their very survival as a people.
Before the Israelites crossed the Jordan to take possession of the Promised Land, Moses warned them of the temptations ahead. “When you have your own land,” he told them, “life will be a lot easier and more secure than it has been in the wilderness. When that happens, when you feel that you can finally relax and enjoy life, don’t forget. Don’t forget who you were and where you came from. Don’t forget who got you out; don’t forget who gave you all this; and don’t forget what he has commanded you to do. Stick together and remind each other. Put reminders everywhere—on your doorposts and on your hands and on your foreheads—so that never for a minute will you be able to forget. And don’t get too comfortable with your new neighbors. Don’t marry them; don’t adopt their culture; above all, don’t worship their gods. There is only one God for you, and you must never forget him even for a minute. Raise your children in a world that revolves around remembrance and identity and obedience. It won’t be easy, and it will be even harder for your children, who will grow up with ease and stability and comfort. They will fret and complain: ‘But why do we have to keep all these rules? Why can’t we just be like everybody else?’You will sit them down and tell them, ‘Listen, kids,we were slaves. It was horrible, worse than you’ll ever know. It was the LORD who set us free and brought us here. We owe everything to him, and these are his rules, and we are going to keep them.’”
I imagine some version of this ancient conversation, the script of which appears in Deuteronomy 6, takes place on our block most days. “I don’t care what other people do. We aren’t other people. You are not having ice cream, because we had chicken for dinner. You are not riding your bike, because it’s Shabbos. You’re not wearing that, because it’s not tznius. We are Jews, and these are the rules that Hashem gave us, and that’s final.”
A life lived in single-hearted dedication to a high calling, and in rejection of all distractions from that calling, is not an easy one. Many of us, at times when life was tense and the future insecure, have made great resolutions. “If the tests come back from the lab negative,” we tell ourselves, “I will never take anything for granted again. I’ll quit smoking and go to Church every week and be more patient with the kids. I’ll be a different person.”When the danger is past, we launch into our new lives full of energy and excitement and gratitude, but after a while we get accustomed to feeling safe. Our acute awareness of how precious and precarious life is grows dimmer, and our old bad-tempered, lazy habits creep back.
This is what happens to us, and it’s what happens to the Israelites when they reach the Promised Land. They begin the struggle to stay faithful and obedient and to make manifest in their national life the vision of God’s holiness they had been given. There are good times—conquest and stability and blessings. But sooner or later they go and do pretty much everything they were warned not to do. Before you know it, the people are demanding a king, “like other nations,”when the whole point is that they are supposed to be unlike other nations. God, rather ruefully, gives them Saul—a good-looking kid from an unremarkable family. At first he is humble and obedient and grateful, and he remembers where he came from and who made him king. God blesses him: his mind is clear, his enemies fall before him, and Israel is at peace. But eventually he begins to listen to the voice that hisses in his heart, “Says who? I’m the king; I’m in charge here, and I make my own decisions.”He then begins a tragic slide into a wilderness of paranoia, sleeplessness, and rage. Saul’s story is the human story, the story of Adam and Eve, the story of all of us when we brush off, in irritation, the notion that we are not, in fact, the final authorities on our own lives and deeds. And Saul’s dark fate is a foreshadowing of the darkness in Israel’s future.
The darkness is still some way off, though. After Saul comes David, the man after God’s own heart. His story, up to a certain point, is the same as Saul’s: he begins with humility and courage but soon gets so used to the power and privilege of kingship that he abuses them shockingly and betrays both God and his own nature. But David sees what he has done, takes responsibility, and begs God to create a clean heart and renew a right spirit in him. He gives us a powerful language of repentance and humility that is as immediate as it is ancient, and his example is as crucial for Christians’ understanding of holiness as it is for Jews’. David’s story is the story of the hope that lies beyond darkness.
David’s son Solomon asks for and receives from God such wisdom that his fame spreads throughout the nations; during his reign the Temple is built and Israel reaches the height of its power, wealth, and prestige. By now the wilderness years are a long time in the past, and it seems that nothing can threaten Israel, that she will go from strength to strength. To consolidate Israel’s supremacy and security, Solomon does what all kings do: he makes allegiances with neighboring kings by marrying their daughters. And in his old age, as wise as he is, his love for his foreign wives turns his heart from exclusive love of God. He drifts so far from the way of holiness into the normal patterns of international politics and diplomacy that he builds shrines to his wives’ gods. Solomon’s state-sponsored idolatry is a final and fatal violation of the holiness by which Israel stands or falls. So she falls. After Solomon’s death the nation splits into two rival kingdoms, and they begin a long descent into chaos, idolatry, corruption, materialism, injustice—becoming more and more like everybody else and less and less like the Holy One.
The prophets, scorching or imploring or bitter, break their hearts trying to get the people to see themselves as God sees them, to understand what they are doing to themselves, and to turn and be healed. But few people listen, and things go from bad to worse. Eventually the northern kingdom is conquered by Assyria, and ten tribes are swallowed up and lost to history. The southern kingdom hangs on longer, but their worship of God is a shallow, ceremonial affair—a far cry from the holiness to which they are called—and is not enough to sustain a society that is increasingly corrupt, materialistic, and hollow. A couple of kings walk in the footsteps of David, making sincere attempts to stop the rot and turn their people back to holiness. But their reforms die with them. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon sees his chance; he attacks Jerusalem, destroys the Temple, and ravages the land. The survivors are left to starve in the ruins while the Babylonians take the elite—those who know how to build granaries and write poems and compose music and design irrigation systems—back home with them as slaves.
The exiles are far from home, their society devastated, their covenant with God (it must have seemed) finally ruptured. The only sensible thing for them to do is make the best of it: settle down, learn the local customs, learn to think of this foreign land as home, marry Babylonians, worship the local gods, blend in, and try to forget. Some of them probably do. But many refuse to do the sensible thing. They refuse to assimilate, to put the past behind them, to blend into the background—just as our neighbors refuse to give up their odd traditions and their odd clothes and disappear into the melting pot of American culture. The stiff-necked Jews cling stubbornly to their identity and keep alive the memory of the Law, even though they seem to have lost forever the blessings of land and nationhood that the Law was supposed to bring. They remember and are sustained by the words of the prophets, who spoke of the purifying fire of God’s anger and also of his enduring love and faithfulness.
They remember and they do not give up hope. When, in one of the strangest reversals of fortune in all of history, Cyrus of Persia conquers the Babylonian Empire and decides to send the captives back to their own land, the Jews in Babylon have no doubt that, whatever Cyrus thinks his motives are, he is actually a tool in the hand of a God whom he does not know: the God of Israel, the Holy God who called them to be holy like him. The exiles’ return to their home is not easy; their old enemies are not happy to see them back and do everything they can to stop their regaining control of the region. But having overcome all the odds of history, they are not going to let a few hostile armies stop them. Working under enormous pressure, they rebuild the walls and the Temple.
A greater challenge than that of restoring Jerusalem is rebuilding their culture, rededicating themselves to being the holy nation it was their God-given destiny to be. Instead of the magisterial promises and warnings of Moses or the anguish and exultation of the prophets, this time they have as their guide the tireless, vehement harangues of Nehemiah.
Nehemiah is one of my favorite people in the Bible. He has one of the stiffest necks of all time, and he is determined, absolutely determined with every fiber of his being, that Israel is not going to mess up again. Nobody, but nobody, is going to break the Law on his watch. And it’s always his watch. He patrols the city, the book of the Law of Moses in hand.He snoops; he bullies; he pokes his nose into people’s lives and businesses and bedrooms. Where he finds that things are not being done according to the Law, he sets things straight—immediately and forcefully. He comes across people bringing goods in and out of the city for trade on the Sabbath. He writes:
Then I remonstrated with the nobles of Judah and said to them, “What is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the sabbath day? Did not your ancestors act in this way, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? Yet you bring more wrath on Israel by profaning the Sabbath. . . . If you do so again, I will lay hands on you.” From that time on they did not come on the sabbath. . . . Remember this also in my favor, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love. (Neh. 13:17–18, 21b, 22b)
No sooner has Nehemiah pushed Israel into proper compliance with Sabbath law than he comes across another problem: one that makes him even angrier. Some of the settlers married women from the surrounding nations and had children who did not even speak Hebrew. With the mortar hardly dry on the Temple, they were already slipping back into laziness, leaving the high and hard calling of kodesh, of being different. This time Nehemiah really loses it.
And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take an oath in the name of God, saying, “You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves. Did not King Solomon of Israel sin on account of such women? Among the many nations there was no king like him . . . ; nevertheless, foreign women made even him to sin. Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?” (Neh. 13:25–27)
This goes deeply against the grain of contemporary America, where we are inclined to admire the courage and creativity needed to build families and communities and traditions out of diverse cultural materials. But my Orthodox neighbors are wholeheartedly on Nehemiah’s side. They have not forgotten what Solomon’s love for his foreign princesses did to Israel, and they regard intermarriage as a betrayal of their calling, as well as a serious threat to the survival of Judaism.
“Thus I cleansed them from everything foreign,” Nehemiah says. “Remember me, O my God, for good” (Neh. 13:30a, 31b). I love the way Nehemiah reports proudly back to God. He must have gotten on everybody’s nerves and made a lot of enemies, but he never for a second doubted that he was doing the right thing: acting in the best interests of the people whom he was cursing and threatening and beating.
I am sure that God does indeed remember Nehemiah. History certainly does. The Judaism that Nehemiah legislated and bullied and nagged into place held and is still holding. Against all logic and reason, and in defiance of all the horrors of history, Jews have survived and remembered who they are, where they came from, and to whom they owe their allegiance. They have remembered and obeyed not just when things went well—when they had cisterns and vineyards and olive groves—but also when they had nothing, when the Temple was destroyed again, when they were driven into exile, when their villages were burnt by laughing Cossacks, when they were locked in ghettos and starved, when they were hoarded into cattle trucks and gas chambers.
All this—the persecution and violence and hatred and suffering—would have ended if only they had been willing to stop being so stubbornly different and just blend in. But their necks are very, very stiff, and once they turned to God, they did not turn away again. And here they are, on my block, in their funny hats and long skirts and wigs, peppering their conversations with strange, guttural foreign words, totally ignoring all the normal things that everybody else does—Christmas shopping, American Idol, tank tops, pepperoni pizza with extra cheese—stubbornly and cheerfully weird and countercultural and holy, not the least bit like other people. And a constant reminder to me that the ways of the Holy God are not like our ways.