Rabbi David Wolpe has a beautiful musing entitled “Testing God’s Faith in Us,” about the litany of biblical threats (including suffering and death) in last week’s parsha for ignoring the commandments, which ends with one that (in light of the extreme harshness of the preceding ones) “comes as a surprise:”
“The Lord will send you back to Egypt” (Deut. 28:68). Why is that the final threat, the culminating catastrophe?
We often wonder if we have faith in God. Far less often do we wonder if God still has faith in us. For the Jewish people, God’s act of faith was liberating us from Egypt. God reckoned us worth the experiment of freedom, the promise of a heritage, a land and a promise.
To return to Egypt means that God has lost faith. We have betrayed our promise. There is no more terrifying possibility. As the new year approaches, more powerful in our lives than wondering whether we can have faith in God is asking the Torah’s question: Can we live so that God still has faith in us?
It reminds me of the prayer one is supposed to say before reciting the Psalms — “that You may be patient with us and wait until we can return to You” — and Anne Lieberman’s beautiful post about it.
Shabbat Shalom.