“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Ha'azinu: The Poetics of Forgetting

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” - Niels Bohr

I might have reduced them to naught,
Made their memory cease among humankind,
But for fear of the taunts of the foe,
Their enemies who might misjudge
And say, “Our own hand has prevailed;
None of this was wrought by the Lord!” (Deuteronomy 32:26-27)

And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well? (Jonah 4:11)

In one telling, he Jewish people are spared by God not because we are truly forgiven, but because God doesn’t want other nations drawing the wrong conclusion from our punishment. The Jewish people must endure not because of justice, but to prevent the greater evil: the arrogance of the voyeuristic God-deniers who would delight in our downfall. God’s hands are tied, so to speak, by the reality of onlookers. In “frum speak,” God cannot destroy us because of maaris ayin (the optics). While this frame is pessimistic, and even absurd, it’s also practical. The reasons for sparing and pardoning can be plainly consequentialist. The goal is a better world, and that’s not always the same as a more principled one.

If we look at a number of moments of apparent forgiveness in the Torah we’ll find that the arguments in favor are ulterior—the goal is to move on, to build. In the case of Nineveh, God spares the city not because God is optimistic that it will become a good and just city, but because of the children. On one reading, the children are innocent and thus God’s argument for sparing the city is grounded in a resistance to collective punishment. But that can’t be right, given that the children are not spared in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah. Rather, in my imagined reading, the children represent “onlookers” who will take a certain lesson from God’s actions. God needs to create a world suitable for children and that one must tilt towards mercy. Moreover, children require practicality. It’s easy to opine about first principles, but kids won’t wait around for us to solve fundamental questions. They demand to be fed and given attention. While theologians can debate the merits of forgiveness vs strict justice, the children are pulling at the hems. God is basically saying to Jonah—and this is a Midrashic construction, not a straight reading of the text—I concede that you are right on first principles, but I have babies to take care of. We can extrapolate that the babies are a kind of metaphor—all of humanity is one big baby. In petitioning God on Yom Kippur, we ask to be pardoned by Avinu Malkeinu, not because we deserve forgiveness, but because we are babies. There is a pro-natalist argument for looking the other way: the world needs to continue and too much obsession with what’s wrong with it will lead it to be destroyed.

Pro-natalism, here, doesn’t mean the proliferation of children but the broader affirmation that life is worth saving. Pro-natalism, moreover, is the belief not that life is worth saving on principle, but rather in practice. Existence precedes essence, to restate the famous line from Sartre.

The innocence angle is the wrong lens. Innocence is neutral and neutrality doesn’t tip the weight towards life. The babies need to be saved because they represent natality, the idea that something new can happen even though we know the past. “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

AI has proven its computational prowess relative to us, but its creativity wanes in comparison. One hypothesis as to why we are still better at writing poems and songs than AI is that we are better at forgetting and thus better at not learning from the past. Our failure to learn is also the source of our ability to generate novelty. Those who hold onto the past too tightly, as current AI models do, can’t unlearn and thus grow or leap. The God who overlooks our failures is a God who demonstrates creativity. The God who pardons us and lets go of the assumption that we will continue to fail at the same things, like dogs returning to their vomit, is not a God who is computationally correct, but a God who is poetically brilliant.

The Torah, which references itself as a poem in this week’s Haazinu, offers us a moral instruction: We can’t live a faultless life but we can live a poetic one. By returning to our beginner’s mind and allowing ourselves to be like babies we can forget what we have learned and this forgetting proves to be a path forward.

Of course, we ask to be remembered for life and remembered for sweetness—but the crucial point is that poetic memory requires forgetting—a log of all things demonstrates no filter and thus no meaning.

I would argue that Job inverts the story of Jonah. Instead of God forgiving us, it is Job who must forgive God. Job’s second set of children clearly don’t replace his first. But, no matter. The fact that they are children means Job must set aside his anger at God and remain steadfast for their sake. He himself is thus spared of anguish and melancholy by virtue of being called to parenthood.

The Jewish refrain naaseh v’nishma, “we will do and then understand” says the same thing. Understanding will never lead to action, but action can engender understanding. In the case of Job, Jonah, Deuteronomy, and Yom Kippur, the summons is less to understanding, as in endless talk-therapy, than in being able to live another year. Our defense is intellectually modest, but viscerally unassailable. “God, the children are watching you, how do you want them to see you?” In personifying God in this way we also remind ourselves that we are teachers for the next generation. Do we want to be right or do we want to transmit something actionable, uplifting, and enduring?

Shabbat Shalom and G’mar Chatima Tova,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh