📟 רחמים

Non Jews insist on confining their relationship with God to the boundaries of unquestioning submission, and then resent us for refusing to do the same Throughout Tanach, the greatest figures stand before the Divine and push back against what God does or decrees Avraham with Sodom Moshe with the destruction of Israel Chana with her barrenness And Job, himself a non-Jew, fills chapter after chapter with the raw challenge of his suffering and demand for a Divine answer The gentile ideal, by contrast, is often to follow God blindly, "like a child," on the assumption that this is the highest form of faith one is capable of Within that framework, any challenge is read as distrust What is missed is that the deepest love and the highest worship are found in the effort to understand The path to that understanding runs through questions, through argument, through anger and often, through pain This is why man's genuine search for God remains, to me, the most beautiful thing in the world, regardless of the religion in which it eventually settles The desire to know Him, and the efforts expended in that desire, is itself the most precious offering one can make God wants our hearts and souls Part of offering them is the freedom to be angry with Him, to wrestle with Him, to demand an accounting None of this cancels the deeper recognition that everything comes from Him, and that what He does is, ultimately, for the good But in the same vein, the faith that everything comes from God does not absolve us of our obligation to understand Him