The Feeling God
“Speak this word to them: ‘Let my eyes overflow with tears night and day without ceasing; for the Virgin Daughter, my people, has suffered a grievous wound, a crushing blow.’” Jeremiah 14:17 NIV
Without ceasing – Theology has a deep, intrinsic problem. The Bible doesn’t have this problem because the Bible isn’t theology. Theology is the study about God. It attempts to construct a rational, consistent exposition of God, His attributes, plan and purposes. The Bible is theological fodder for this mix. But the Bible doesn’t always fit the assumptions implicit in theology because theology is often much more dependent on philosophical categories than it is on lived experience. The Bible is a record of lived experience, of the interactions of men and women with the divine in history, poetry, story, song, and visions. It doesn’t pay attention to theological implications nor does it care too much about philosophical categories. That’s not always the case, for example, Ecclesiastes is basically an empiricist’s view of life. But by and large, biblical texts are not explicitly theological texts. They can be forced to be so, but only by squeezing life out of them.
Thus, theology has a problem with the Bible. The Bible is much too human. If God is really the God of the theologians, especially the Western Christian theologians, then He is first and foremost transcendent. He is removed from human sorts of things. Thomas Aquinas laid out this fundamental view of God in his via negativa. What God is, Man is not. Thus, God is eternal, Man is temporal; God is perfect, Man is imperfect; God is holy, Man is sinful; God is immutable, Man is constantly subject to change. And all of this implies something else. God is impassible. What does that mean? It means that God, as the only perfect being, is not subject to emotion. Theologically, God does not feel. He cannot feel because if He did, He would not be perfect (perfection is the state in which nothing can be added or subtracted, and emotions are constantly changing, therefore a perfect being can’t have them). Good for a logical theology. Terrible when it comes to the Bible. You see, in the Bible God feels all the time. He is way too human. So, theology has to fix this problem, and theologians do this by introducing the idea of anthropomorphism. The Bible speaks about God “feeling” just so we will be comforted, but it’s not really language that we can ascribe to Him. It’s only for our benefit.
Fortunately, some Sages and rabbis didn’t pay any attention to the requirements of philosophical theology. They just read the text (how they read is another issue, remember?).
“Rabbi Tanhuma the Great preached as follows: ‘And do you speak to them thus: Let my eyes run with tears, day and night let them not cease’ (Jeremiah 14:17)—now the text was not explicit as to whether it was the prophet who said ‘let my eyes run with tears’ or not. But since it goes on to say ‘day and night let them not cease,’ and since flesh and blood cannot cry day and night, we must conclude that the verse speaks of the weeping of the Holy and Blessed One, who alone does not sleep.’”[1]
As you can see, Rabbi Tanhuma is not afraid to assert that God feels—deeply. He probably didn’t read Aquinas, nor Aristotle who was the philosopher behind Aquinas. But he read his Tanakh and what it said about God is what he accepted about God. He wasn’t a theologian. He was a disciple. There’s a difference.
Topical Index: impassibility, emotion, anthropomorphism, theology, Jeremiah 14:17
[1] Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, p. 117.
