Is it so wrong to agree with God?

In this week’s Torah reading we see God’s anger with the Children of Israel. At Exodus 32:7-10 He vents his anger against these ungrateful people who at the first time of crisis turned to a molten calf and pronounced it to be their god. He tells Moses to step aside, telling him: “I will annihilate them and make you a great nation”. Moses prays for God to forgive them, adding: “If not, erase me now from your book that you have written” (Exodus 32:32).   Moses’ prayers succeed. God forgives the people and the trek from Egyptian slavery to freedom in Israel is back on the tracks.

But supposing Moses had not prayed for the people’s forgiveness? What if he said to God: “You are a just and all-knowing God and, though You are slow to anger, You have shown us that there are limits even for Your patience with us. Do destroy these people and set me up as a nation. I will do my best to make it great”?

Moses could justify this position by pointing to the limits God had set upon His own patience, referring to the two mishnayot (Avot 5:2 and 5:3) in which He demonstrates His unwillingness to wait forever for mere mortals to do His bidding. He could also point to the maxim (Avot 5:9) that conceding the truth is one of the seven signs of a chacham, a person who is wise: the people had deserted God, so they deserved punishment, while he, Moses, had not.

Yet precedent supports the position Moses took when he decided to stick with his people and take on God, in all His anger. A tradition teaches that Noah—a righteous man with impeccable credentials in an age of unmitigated evil—was faulted for agreeing to save himself and his immediate family, as God commanded, instead of praying for the salvation of the entire human race (Zohar 1:67b). The Torah also gives a precedent for arguing against God in a somewhat analogous situation, when Abraham (Genesis 18:23-32) pleads for the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah to be spared, despite their iniquities, if only a handful of good people live among them.

The last word goes to Pirkei Avot though. Moses, despite his upbringing and distance from mainstream Jewish culture, felt himself to be very much a man of his people. He loved them and identified deeply with them and with their cause. Hillel teaches (Avot 2:5)  אַל תִּפְרוֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר: do not separate yourself from the community. Moses’ stance of “if they go, I go” is very much in keeping with that teaching.

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Dissociating from the collective: what is Hillel's real position?

Why should we go back to synagogue? This is the question posed by Rabbi Yosie Levine in his opinion piece for yesterday's Jerusalem Post. This piece asks, quite reasonably, why people should wish to return to synagogue prayer even when it is safe to do so once the threat of the coronavirus has finally abated. The rabbi, who gives various answers, also invokes the authority of Avot when he writes:

The notion of community serves as the animating force behind the project of building the mishkan. In describing its construction, the Torah tells us that God said, “And they shall make for Me a sanctuary so that I may dwell within them” (Exodus 25:8). Rabbi Moshe Alshich (1508-1593) notes that, conspicuously, the verse does not read “and I shall dwell within it.” It’s not the edifice that brings holiness into this world. It’s the people. An institution absent its adherents is no institution at all. It’s by virtue of coming together as a community that we bring holiness into our lives. That’s why even the sage Hillel, who was tolerant of virtually everyone, had no tolerance for those who dissociated from the collective (Pirkei Avot 2:4) [in many siddur editions the citation is 2:5].

Hillel certainly teaches that a person should not separate him- or herself from the tzibbur, the congregation. Avot does not however provide evidence that Hillel failed to tolerate those who do dissociate themselves from the collective. Since in the previous perek of Avot Hillel urges people to follow the path taught by Aaron the Priest, to "love peace and pursue peace", we might more reasonably expect him to adopt a position of keeping the dialogue going and even being initially quite conciliatory in the hope of getting the dissociating party back on board.

Another point on which we might reflect is that, where the collective is split between those who return to synagogual worship and those who prefer the outside option, people are damned if they do and damned if they don't since whichever side they follow will require them turning their backs on the other side.