Can We Handle the Truth?

Can We Handle the Truth?
Dan Levin
In Aaron Sorkin’s famous play and movie, A Few Good Men, a murder trial pits a young, inexperienced lawyer, Daniel Kaffee against Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, the commanding officer of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise, rails against the Colonel Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson, and says, “I want answers!”
“You want answers?” thunders back the colonel. “I want the truth!” Kaffee yells back, to which Jessep barks: “You can't handle the truth!”
Parashat Bo presents us with truths that are almost impossible for us to handle. The first plagues are almost comical—we can imagine the rivers of blood, and the stench from the dead fish and dead frogs. We can almost laugh as we imagine the Egyptians scratching and itching from the lice.
But the last plague, the death of the firstborn, is as terrifying as it is confounding. Its brutality seems almost incomprehensible. The anguish it imposed tears at the heart, the agony is palpable. The text expresses the pain emphatically, “because there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead” (Exodus 12:30).
How are we to feel in the case of such a punishment? How are we to live in partnership with a God that can impose such horror? How are we to handle this truth?
On the one hand, God’s act brings a sense of justice. It was Pharaoh’s father who imposed grievous suffering on the Israelites in demanding that they cast their children into the river. It was only when such suffering was visited on his son and his house that he relented in the face of God’s wrath. And so perhaps God’s judgment was simply repaying what Egypt was owed (see The Interpreter's Bible, vol. 1 [Nashville, TN, Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1952] pp. 836, 853).
But at the same time, we cannot rejoice in the suffering of the Egyptians. At the Pesach seder, we spill some of our wine from our cups for each of the plagues imposed on the Egyptians. A full cup is a symbol of complete joy, and we cannot celebrate with complete joy knowing the suffering wreaked on Egypt by God’s judgment on Pharaoh’s hardened heart.
I recently was speaking with someone who, while having spent the better part of his adult life studying Jewish history, felt he could not, in good conscience, join a synagogue. It wasn't the money, but what it would mean to join that stopped him. He said that since he was a little boy in cheder that he could not understand the rampant suffering of so many innocent men, women, and children in the world. “Where was God?” he asked, when Jewish children were slaughtered by the millions, and in the countless horrors that have confronted our people and so many peoples across the centuries.
It is a question with which we all wrestle. God seems to act in this week’s parashah with deliberate ferocity, and yet fails to act when we seem to need God most.
The Rabbis in the midrash wrestle with this too. In the famous compilation of midrash called P’sikta D’Rav Kahana, Rabbi Levi, living under Roman oppression, teaches that “with the very means by which God punished the former, so will God punish the latter.” He saw in each of the plagues a foreshadowing of how God would redeem us from the tyranny of Rome. In their suffering and their agony, they cried out for God to visit a suffering on their adversary that would result in their redemption.
There are times in our own experience of suffering that we wish God would act just as God is said to have acted for our ancestors. There are even among us those who believe that it is up to us to take up the sword and act on God’s behalf in vengeance. We look at the suffering of our adversaries and feel their suffering is somehow justified, given the anguish we were made to experience.
But the Torah teaches us to have a sense of humility in justice, especially as it pertains to matters of life and death. The text teaches us this week: “In the middle of the night the Eternal struck down all the (male) first-born of in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:29). In an earlier part of the chapter in P’sikta D’Rav Kahana, the Rabbis reflect on this passage. When, exactly, is the middle of the night? Only God can know for sure the precise moment that is bachatzi halailah, “in the middle of the night.” And, as God alone can know that precise moment for sure, so only God is equipped to mete out a judgment such as this.
In matters of judgment, the Torah teaches that we must cultivate a measure of humility—a humility that Pharaoh rejected. His arrogance in judgment led not only to his own personal tragedy, but also to a calamity for the entire people of Egypt. We need to appreciate that there are some truths that we may never be able to handle. It is the cultivation of humility that ultimately leads us to a better sense of our humanity, and a better sense of our place in our relationship with others and with God.
Rabbi Dan Levin is the senior rabbi at Temple Beth El of Boca Raton, Florida.