Climbing the Hill Again

Jericho had fallen, and Ai looked easy. The scouts told Joshua he would not even need the whole army. Send two or three thousand men, they said. Do not trouble the rest.

The men of Ai came out and Israel ran. Thirty-six Israelites died on the slope.

The Book of Joshua tells us why. A man named Achan had taken forbidden spoil from Jericho and hidden it under his tent, and God had withdrawn His protection from Israel. Those soldiers walked into the battle without knowing that.

Achan sinned, and Achan survived. Thirty-six other men had done nothing wrong, and their wives were told that their husbands died because of something a stranger buried under his floor.

This raises difficult questions. How can bad things happen to innocent people? And can one person be punished for someone else’s sins?

The Torah portion of Ki Tavo raises the same difficulty on a far larger scale. The long catalog of curses that will come upon Israel if the covenant is abandoned is almost unbearable to read. Scattered among the nations. No rest for the sole of your foot. Dread in the morning and dread at night. Anyone who knows Jewish history, both ancient and modern, knows what that looks like. Were the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust being punished for something?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks answered that question by going back to Ai.

He built on Gersonides, the fourteenth-century commentator who noticed the problem in Joshua 7 and drew a distinction out of it. There is catastrophe that God brings, and there is catastrophe that comes when God steps back, and the two do not work the same way. When God acts directly, as He did at Sodom, only the guilty fall. When God withdraws His providence, everyone present is exposed to accident and chance. The innocent are struck down, and the guilty man, who may not even be on the battlefield, walks away unharmed. Abarbanel makes the same point in his commentary to that chapter.

Exile, Rabbi Sacks argued, is God hiding His face. Jews lived at the mercy of kings, neighbors and crowds. The Torah names the condition plainly:

Maimonides described exile as a condition of being left to chance. What follows is that the horrors of exile were not verdicts handed down on the people who suffered them. They were what human beings do when nothing restrains them. Rabbi Sacks put it as directly as it can be put: “The question raised by Auschwitz is not ‘Where was God?’ but ‘Where was man? Where was humanity?'”

He was careful to add that this is not a modern theology invented to make the Holocaust bearable. The poets who wrote elegies after the Crusades and the blood libels reached for Isaac at the altar, for Job, for the suffering servant in Isaiah, all the places in the Bible where suffering has nothing to do with sin. They had seen too much of it to call it punishment.

Now look again at where Gersonides found his case.

Ai was not exile. Ai happened inside the land, under Joshua, during the conquest itself, around the time that Israel gathered at Mount Ebal to seal the covenant in the land God had promised them. This is Israel at the height of its covenantal life, and thirty-six innocent men still died outside a small town while the guilty man went home to his tent.

So the covenant was never a promise of safety. Living here has never meant that no innocent Jew would fall, and after October 7 that is not an abstract claim to anyone in this country. In the weeks that followed, some people reached for explanations about sin and punishment. There is nothing new in that. Job’s friends sat with him for seven days and then spent the rest of the book insisting he must have done something, because they could not imagine a just God allowing this otherwise. They were wrong, and at the end of the book God says so to their faces. Gersonides, Abarbanel and Rabbi Sacks all answer them the same way. It is the wrong question. Men planned that morning and men carried it out, and the question is where man was.

Something did change when we came home, though, and Ai shows exactly what.

When those thirty-six men died, Israel buried them, dealt with what had gone wrong, and went back up the hill and took the city. There was a response, and it was Israel’s own. For nineteen centuries afterward there was no response available. Jews were murdered in the Rhineland, in Spain, in Ukraine, in Poland, and no Jewish army came, because there was no Jewish army to come. On October 7 our people were murdered and an army came. Later than it should have, and too late for those who died waiting for it. But it came.

Rabbi Sacks never claimed to have solved the question of why good people suffer. He wrote that no answer resolves all doubt, that the Talmud records God answering every question Moses asked except this one.

What Rabbi Sacks gives us is not an answer but a way of asking. Not what did they do to deserve this, because Job’s friends already tried that and God rejected it. The question is what men did, and what we do now.

Israel buried the thirty-six, faced what had gone wrong, and went back up the hill. The hiding of the face has never been permanent. It is the part of the story that comes before we rise.