The Theology of Jealousy

Hosea and Agnes Callard on Sotah

After weaning Lo-ruhamah (No Mercy), she conceived and bore a son. Then He said, “Name him Lo-ammi; i.e.,“Not-My-People.” for you are not My people, and I will not be your God. (Hosea 1:8-9)

I will sow her in the land as My own;
And take Lo-ruhamah (“No Mercy”) back in favor;
And I will say to Lo-ammi (“Not My People”), “You are My people,”
And he will respond, “[You are] my God.” (Hosea 2:25)

“Jealousy is an unattractive emotion, but unlike hate, contempt or spite, it is not a forbidden emotion. If we knew that Pierre had cheated on Natasha, we would find her jealousy intelligible and even reasonable. We would understand. Or, at any rate, we would say, to ourselves and to her, “I understand.” We are very quick to find such “justified” jealousy intelligible—so quick, that the very speed of our response testifies to our disinclination to look into the matter too deeply.” (Agnes Callard, The Other Woman)

It is a mainstay, albeit a challenging one, of the Torah, and especially of the prophets, that God is jealous. Or so it seems. I’ll walk the statement back and say that the Biblical character of God is presented as jealous—which is different from saying that God, metaphysically speaking, is actually jealous. God describes Godself as el kanah, euphemistically translated as “a much impassioned God” (Exodus 20:5). The ban on idolatry is frequently framed not just in terms like “this isn’t good for you,” but also, “this is unfaithful to and hurtful of God.” The Torah uses the expression to lust after other gods, making an analogy between marital infidelity and idolatry. In Hosea, God speaks as a husband oscillating between a desire to divorce and a desire to repair.

From a rationalistic point of view, such as that propounded by Maimonides, idolatry can be an error of thought or perhaps a capitulation to weakness (much like a wound-up person desperately turning to a palm reader on the street), but it is hardly an error of desire. It’s more like an error of reason. Consider the Midrash about Abraham who discovers the oneness of God by meditating on the sun, the moon, and the stars, and realizing there must be one force that moves them all. Is that realization anything like the stirrings of romance? Would such a person, in spite of himself, still desire to bow down to the moon? Possibly, I suppose, but that is hardly the model we have in mind when we think of idolatry in the Torah.

The rationalist neither desires God nor desires other gods. Perhaps the rationalist admires God and seeks to emulate God’s ways, but the Biblical language, which describes the God-human relationship as one of passion, and, often betrayal, is simply missing.

Ironically, the great skeptic Hume might help restore our appreciation for the intensity of Biblical understanding when he writes that “reason is a slave of the passions.” If Hume is right that all reasoning is motivated reasoning, then the question can no longer simply be “Do I have the right reasoning, but am I directing my reasoning to the right ends?” Hume didn’t think this was the question, but we might read the Torah as advocating a position like this: given that great minds can summon up arguments to defend all sorts of morally terrible positions, “How do I protect myself from the temptation, the eros, the lust, to use my rational faculties for malign purposes, to “sell out”? While not a philosophical answer, the Torah might be heard as responding: “Commit to the covenant. This fundamental commitment will anchor you, preventing you from self-justification and self-delusion. The covenant is needed to keep you from becoming unmoored.”

Parasahat Nasso (Numbers 4:21-7:89) describes the Sotah ritual, a procedure that is triggered by a case of marital jealousy in which there are no witnesses to confirm or deny its basis in reality. Philosopher Agnes Callard argues that the heart of jealousy need not correlate to the facts of the case, and that the emotion itself has meaning irrespective of whether it is “reasonable.” Not only do I agree, but I contend that the Bible is deliberately opaque about whether the Sotah ritual favors the jealous person’s “side” or the suspected person’s “side” to make this point. The problem for which the Sotah comes isn’t simply infidelity, but jealousy itself. No detail could make this point more clear than the fact that the Sotah ritual can only occur in cases where we lack witnesses. For Callard, jealousy is a fundamentally private and lonely affair—it’s not the kind of thing which witnesses can take away. It’s about the self’s relationship to itself.

Hosea alludes to the Sotah ritual, implying that God and Israel can go through it, and come out OK on the other side. But this doesn’t seem to be because Israel is not guilty; rather, it seems to be because God is forgiving. I’ll go further: separate from whether Israel “deserves” its punishment, one subtext of Hosea may be that God cannot simply pin God’s disappointment on us; God must, as it were, also look in the mirror. Here language drifts into the uncomfortably anthropomorphic, the incautiously speculative. Nonetheless, let’s say it: God’s jealousy is a problem for God whether or not idolatry is a problem for Israel.

Here, I rely on Callard, again, to help think about jealousy. Jealousy, she argues, is not a desire for what someone else has, but a desire to be the other person. God doesn’t desire our desire for Baal, exactly; rather, God desires, in some sense, to be Baal. That sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense, or risks being mis-read, but here is the point: having a single identity can bring a kind of restlessness, a form of angsty finitude. The desire to be others, to live as others live, and to be seen as others are seen, offers a fantasy of infinitude. Now, classical theologians say God is infinite, but the Biblical God is not described as infinite. The Biblical God is specific, with specific limits. God chooses one people and one story line and one theory of change and runs with it. If God is infinite, such a choice—such a tzimztum—a constriction seems like quite the sacrifice. Even the choice to create the world, say classical theologians, is a form of self-restraint. Why not create hundreds of thousands, and keep destroying them? Why keep to this one? (Indeed, this hypothetical now seriously occupies theorists of the multiverse). Why commit to earth when you might move to Mars tomorrow or live in a Metaverse the next day?

God is jealous, because it is painful to be infinite and yet have to be finite. God is jealous, because God has not fully accepted that the price of admission for creation, for relationship, and for commitment, is tzimtzum, self-effacement. But if God, who is infinite, can do it, then so can and must we. We must see our choice for self-limiting not simply as violence done to us, and our infinite potential, but as the positive realization of this one life that we have. Even an infinite God must become finite to become “the living God.” Only mortals can eat from the tree of knowledge of history. When God took us out of Egyptian bondage, so to speak, God didn’t enter human history, God became the God of history. Previously, God was eternal, and unchanging. But the Biblical God announces a different option: evolution, the ability to develop through time, rather than stand above it.

Why does the Sotah ritual involve the dissolution of God’s name? To teach that relationship requires us to choose our finitude. God dissolves God’s name, as it were, already by creating the world, already by giving the Torah, already by forming relationship with humanity. The dissolution of one’s name is an act of tzimtzum. It is also a kind of talisman, a reminder to us, that jealousy is first and foremost about our relationship to ourselves, to our sense of self, to our sense of possibility and our desire for recognition.

In the long arc of history, what matters most is not being legally right or being factually vindicated, but being righteous. Righteousness is something that God seeks for Godself independent of human error. If even God, k’vyachol (as it were), can so strive, how much the more so should we?

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh