Arthur Waskow

The Madness of God

The more deeply we expereince ourselves as part of God and God as part of us, the more deeply we have to face a painful issue: What in ourselves is crazy and cruel? What aspect of the God Who fills heaven and earth is cruel and crazy? The more fully we feel the world as God wrapped in robes of God, the more we feel that the Holocaust was then a part of God. How could this be? How could we live with such a sense of ourselves and God?

We refuse to live with a God Who is mad.

We refuse to live with a God Who is not mad and yet creates a world in which the Holocaust can happen.

How do we live with this primal contradiction?

There is a Hassidic tale:

The Prime Minister says to the King: "The grain supply for next year is contaminated. Eating it will make our people mad. But there is just enough healthy grain stored from this year for the two of us to keep alive next year, and not go crazy. Shall we eat this healthy grain?"

The King replies: "We must not isolate ourselves from our people by saving the healthy grain for ourselves. We must share their pain. We too must eat the grain that drives people mad, but we must mark our foreheads so that when I look at you and you at me, we shall remember that we are both mad."

Read God for the king; the world and humankind for the prime minister

This means: Imagine a God Who is sometimes mad, yet preserves just enough sanity to seek an end to this madness. Seeks desperately, imploringly, for us to love each other so as to make the world - to make God - sane again. Seeks after each outbreak of madness to scream, "See! Hear! Sh'ma! Stop me before I kill again! Only you can do it!"

During the moments of sanity, when we recall the meaning of the marks upon each others foreheads, we can learn from the moments of madness. ...

... why bother with God language at all? Why not simply say that we humans struggle our way toward decency, or don't? Because God language preserves the sense that we are one, One. That our madness is always self destructive because it is our own vital s that we are tearing at. That just as there is no "away" to throw our garbage, there is no "other" to oppress or murder. ....

The mark upon God's forehead reminds us that the All is really one, connected, and that it is madness to forget this.

This mark is also the mark that God put on Cain's forehead after he murdered Abel. Then others, seeing Cain face to face, could see the mark and recall that he was mad, that he had become a murderer because he had failed to see the Unity. ...

The Book of Job is Cain's mark upon the Godhead.

For Job speaks of a God sublimely mad, violently mad, Who explains that Madness to a human being. A God Who deliberately sends evil upon a decent human being - and then explains to that suffering human that there is no way to explain. A God who takes the trouble to explain that God cannot be explained, does not need or want to be explained. This God is clearly one Who woke up that morning to notice on the Godhead's forehead the Mark of Cain....

What God appeals to is not proof, not reason, not justification, but Mystery.

And then not only Mystery: God invokes not images of justice or mercy or community, but images of birth and death, earth and cosmos. Images of the spiral of transformative time, in which what is true and just at one moment is no longer true and just at another.

Godwrestling Round 2 pp. 284-286