My portion, Va-Ethanan, is about Moses retelling the people of Israel the story of
the Exodus. He says that he is not allowed to go into the promised land, and that
Joshua will lead them there. He tells them if they follow the commands of God, other
nations will look up to them; but he also says that God will destroy them,
if they worship other gods or make graven images, because he is a jealous God,
a consuming fire.
The idea that God is kanah or a jealous God seemed weird to me because I had always heard that you could not describe God. To me saying that God is jealous is making him seem human which God is not.
Margaret helped me look up the Hebrew word kanah in a concordance to see what the word meant in other passages. A concordance is a book that lists every word in the Bible and where it is found. The reason we looked it up was to find if the word kanah means the same thing in other passages. We found that in most of the other places that kanah did mean jealous. (In one passage kanah was translated as impassioned.)
I think that jealousy means wanting something that someone else has. Usually it is something that you don't need. I think that if there was less jealousy there would be less war and less hatred. One reason that I don't like to think of God as jealous is because I think of jealousy in a negative way.
I got the name of four biblical scholars from the book Learn Torah With ... and e-mailed them my questions about God being jealous. I got four answers from them.
Rabbi David Wolpe thought that it means that God does not feel jealous, but that he acts in a way that humans understand by the term "jealous".
Rabbi Kerry Olitsky said that the word translates better as possessive, instead of jealous. He explained that we can't describe God but we try to anyway. He said some Rabbis think that you shouldn't describe God at all.
Professor Jo Milgrom said that "the only way we can relate to God is within the limits of our own humanness and within the limits of human language".
The last person was Joel Grishaver who(m) many of you may know from the Jewish retreat. When I emailed him he sent me more questions about being jealous. We had a back and forth email conversation. Finally he told me that Jews think the relationship between God and us is like a marriage. He then went on to say that he had three possible answers to my question about God being jealous.
I think that God can't be actually be jealous because he isn't human and being jealous is a human feeling. Jealousy is a more primitive feeling. I don't usually think of God as having primitive feelings that make him more human. Another reason is that God is too immense and powerful to be described in human terms.
However, thinking God is jealous makes Jews feel more important because God is jealous to get them and keep them. That makes Jews feel more wanted and more powerful. Thinking of God as a jealous God made the Jews more obedient and loyal because they thought he would destroy them.
After getting the answer from scholars, I agreed with David Wolpe, Jo Milgrom and Joel Grishaver that people used the best word they could even though what God feels is different from human jealousy.
But I also agree with the Rabbi's who say you shouldn't describe God at all. You can't describe God because we only have human words to describe with and God is not human or animal. God is just God.
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Updated 01/24/98 (rge)