Does God expect us to listen?

Do we need to listen to God at all? Does He even care if we don’t, so long as the message we receive is one that originated from Him in the first place? These questions may not be as frighteningly radical as they initially appear. Deuteronomy 7:12 states:

“And it shall come to pass, if only you listen to these laws—and keep and do them—that the Lord your God shall keep with you the covenant and the love which he swore to your fathers”.

 This is Moses speaking; his audience is the Children of Israel. But what are these laws to which they must listen? The previous verse explains: they are the laws that Moses is in the process of teaching them. Moses is not the author of these laws. They come from God and Moses has been the conduit through which they came down from their heavenly source. So why does Moses present them as “” the laws that I am teaching you today” and not as “the laws that God commanded you at Mount Sinai”?

We can answer this question by posing another: are the Children of Israel more likely to listen to Moses than to God? This is very likely so, because we have it on good authority that they do not listen to God.

A mishnah (Avot 5:6) teaches how the desert nation tested God 10 times in the desert, citing a Torah verse (Bemidbar 14:22) that refers to 

“… all those people who have seen My glory, and My miracles, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness; they have tested me now these ten times, and have not listened to My voice”.

 What are the 10 tests? The Babylonian Talmud (Arachin 15a-b) offers a quasi-official list. In short, the Children of Israel:

(i) asked Moses, before crossing the Reed Sea, whether he had taken them out to the desert to die because there were no graves in Egypt;

(ii) worried that, since they had crossed the Reed Sea safely, their Egyptian pursuers would cross safely too, so God displayed them, dead, on the sea shore;

(iii) complained that they could not drink the water at Marah because it was bitter;

(iv) complained that there was no water to drink when they camped at Rephidim;

(v) left manna for the following day, despite Moses telling them not to do so;

(vi) went out on the Sabbath to gather manna even though Moses told them not to do so since there wouldn’t be any to collect;

(vii) complained that they would rather have died in Egypt, where they had enjoyed plenty of food, in preference to dying of hunger in the desert;

(viii) complained about the manna, which was not as pleasurable to them as the fish, melons, leeks, garlic etc that they enjoyed in Egypt;

(ix) demanded a replacement for Moses, who had not yet rejoined them after the Giving of the Torah, and then accepted the Golden Calf;

(x) believed the false testimony of the Ten Spies who persuaded them that it would be impossible for them to capture the Promised Land.

Rambam’s list, accepted by the Bartenura and Tosefot Yom Tov, is a little different (Rabbi Yaakov Emden questions why the Arachin list should need changing), but the substance is the same. One thing is missing from every version of this list. God Himself mentions this in this mishnah, where He says: “…and [they] did not listen to My voice.”

Why did God not include His people’s refusal to listen to Him as a test and give the number as eleven? Rabbi Shmuel de Uçeda (Midrash Shmuel) considers that their failure to do so is indeed a test, but he does not go on to suggest why God does not apparently count it as a test along with the others.

A possible explanation is that the omission of this test from the list of tests is deliberate and that its absence is designed to teach us something important for our own lives. We all know that active disobedience, ingratitude and non-cooperation are negative traits that have a seriously damaging quality to them. Our own of experience of family and community life demonstrates this on a regular basis. In contrast, a mere refusal to listen may well cause annoyance but it is of quite a different order.

That may be why God is giving us a lesson in best practice to adopt when dealing with others. He is showing us that, when others do not listen to us, we should emulate His example. We should not treat other people’s refusal to listen to us as being a test or tribulation. Rather, we should be patient and understanding, if necessarily seeking out other, more effective, means of getting our message across to those who have demonstrated an initial resistance or refusal to accept what we are trying to tell them.