Could G-d's wrath begun?

[Ephraim Ben Noach]

Woe to America as well...Isaiah 5:20!
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/567597/Islamic-State-Raqqa-Syria-Flesh-eating-disease

[Zelhar]

It appears like Leishmaniasis (aka Jericho Fever) which is endemic to the middle east and many other parts of the world.

[muman613]

Hashem, our G-d, is not a wrathful G-d. He prefers a good relationship with is creations. The idea that Hashem get's angry with us is only an allegory, because Hashem does not have 'feelings' as we understand them. When bad things happen it is from Love that he sends them. We perceive them as bad or evil (and they really are to us) but it is our duty as his creation to see the events in the proper light to see the bigger message.

Physical suffering is sent to rectify the wrong done by man, not as a punishment. Sickness and death are a part of life and we must see the hand of G-d in events. I also do not like the expression 'wrath of G-d' although I do understand it.

[muman613]

http://blog.webyeshiva.org/does-god-get-angry/

Last week, we saw the commandment of le-hidamot bi-drachav, to make ourselves similar to Hashem’s ways.  One of those ways is to be erech apayim, long to anger.  Part of learning how to incorporate that trait into our personalities is knowing what Tanach means by referring to Hashem as long to anger, and that has two components: 1) Does Tanach describe Hashem as getting angry, or as showing anger? 2) Where and how does this anger arise, and how does that translate to us?

While anger will take several posts to discuss, a useful starting point is Berachot 7a’s discussion of Hashem’s anger. Michah 6;5 tells us to remember what Bilam tried to do to us, and Hashem’s righteousness with us. The Gemara understood that to mean that Hashem did not “allow” Himself to become angry the whole time of Bilam, because Bilam knew how to exploit Hashem’s anger, as it were.

The Gemara wonders whether Hashem actually becomes angry, and cites Tehillim 7;12, וא-ל זועם בכל יום, Hashem storms with anger each day.  The Gemara says that that anger lasts only a moment, but no one (other than Bilam) knows the time of the anger. Bilam, who did, could have found a way to curse the Jewish people during that moment, but Hashem prevented that by disrupting that routine, and suppressing His anger all that time.

Hashem’s Daily Anger

This is obviously not a piece that we can take literally; we need to understand the point the Gemara is making, and see how it applies elsewhere.  Maharsha notes that a later discussion on that page speaks of idolaters using sunrise as the time to worship the sun, and suggests that it is that act that stimulates Hashem’s wrath.

That train of thought suggests that Hashem’s anger is based in humanity’s starting each day with idolatry, with acts that put them at odds with how Hashem wants the world to run.  This fits, by the way, with Rambam’s comment, as we saw last week, that the words haron af, wrath, in the Torah often refer to idolatry, and kin’ah, jealousy, always does.

Penei Yehoshua and Tselach both wonder at the Gemara’s citing a verse from Tehillim, when many verses in the Torah itself speak of Hashem’s wrath. They answer that it was obvious to everyone that the Torah describes Hashem’s response to specific sins as anger; the novelty of the verse in Tehillim is that there is a set time, every day, when Hashem is described as venting wrath (we’ll discuss why in a moment).

If we combine that insight Maharsha’s point that Hashem is responding to daily sins, we would seem to be learning that Hashem is described as becoming angry about both extraordinary sin, but also by ordinary, everyday sin.

Even before we evaluate the reaction to sin, note that there is a reaction. It is often easy to allow some level of sin to become routinized and not worth noticing, but Hashem’s daily anger, it would seem, is a response to exactly that rote, ordinary, usual way of doing business kind of sin.  I see a lesson here already, that we cannot let colonized sin, sin that isn’t going to be uprooted anytime soon, to dull our sensitivity to it.

Anger Has an Impact

Rashi to Shemot 4;14 cites R. Yehoshu’a b. Korchah from Zevachim 102a, that haron af always has some kind of impact, some kind of punishment attached to it.  In the case of Hashem’s daily za’am, Midrash Tanchuma to Tetsaveh 10 cites R. Shim’on b. Gamliel that ever since the Beit haMikdash was destroyed, there is no day without a curse to it.  When the world is fully redeemed, however, Hashem will return Nature to its original berachot, the original state it was created to be in.

The comment contains two remarkable points, one about the world, one about anger.  It first reminds us that the world we live in, with all its beauty and bounty, is not the world Hashem wanted, it’s the world we “forced” Hashem into making, by sinning in such a way (and continuingly, since this is the results of daily anger we are experiencing) that Hashem could not give us all that we might otherwise get.

This isn’t minor anger, either.  In Avodah Zarah 4a, R. Papa contrasts this verse in Tehillim with Nachum 1;6, לפני זעמו מי יעמוד, before His anger who can stand?  The Gemara eventually answers that Nachum refers to that anger if it were expressed against an individual, and Tehillim towards a community. It is the combined strength of a community (either by virtue of its greater pool of merits, or its ability to spread the pain of the punishment that comes out of the anger) that allows it to survive, but an individual could not. If so, we don’t mean Hashem has a moment of anger where, as it were, He punches a wall to let off steam. It is a moment of anger in which Hashem responds to real sins, but limits the response to whate we can tolerate.

Anger Itself, Not Just Being Long to Anger, As a Kindness

That explains many commentators’ seeing this anger, overall, as a kindness to us.   Tselach argues that all of the 13 Attributes of Hashem are of kindness, and that the kindness here is the brevity of the anger, that Hashem restricts it to a moment, with the rest of the day full of more easily recognized kindness.  Peri Megadim (in his Torah commentary, Tevat Gomeh) says that it is Hashem’s punishing us bit by bit, rather than letting it pile up to the breaking point.

Interestingly, Radak to Yeshayahu 27;10 approvingly quotes his father’s explanation of why some verses refer to Hashem as taking vengeance and having wrath (such as Nachum 1;2) while others refer to Hashem as not having wrath.  Note that the Gemara in Avodah Zarah could easily have been understood as saying that this was a difference between individuals, towards whom Hashem refrains from expressing wrath, and communities.

In addition, Mechilta de-Rabi Yishmael to Beshalach, differentiates the verses from each other by the spiritual status of the Jewish people—when the Jews are acting well, there is no wrath, when they sin, there is.

Despite that, Radak’s father suggested that the wrath God is described as having is only towards Hashem’s enemies, as it were (I hope to clarify who those enemies are in coming weeks).  Towards the Jews, Hashem never allows the scales of justice to build up to the point that there is wrath, by punishing us for our sins little by little. In this view, the Jews’ sufferings are part of Hashem’s kindness, wiping away enough of our sins that it never builds up to wrath.

Imitating Hashem’s Daily Za’am

This already offers several ways in which we might incorporate erech apayim into our own lives, even if we weren’t going to spend two more posts clarifying. It suggests that one element of acting as Hashem is described in Tanach is differentiating between the sins of an individual and the sins of a group, reacting somewhat more openly to the latter, since they are better able to take it.

In addition, we would act differently to people who have not acted wrongly than to those who have. Even if we are not fully expressing our reaction to those who act wrongly, we should act better, in some ways, to those who are, as far as we can tell, fully blameless (otherwise, we’re not being erech apayim, we’re simply ignoring sin).  We would also respond differently towards the wrongs of those with whom we have some kind of continuing relationship and those with whom we do not.

Finally, it would be a kindness on our part to make our well-founded ire (meaning: the other person is actually wrong, not just that we’ve decided we’re upset with them) known to those whom we love, so that our upset not build up to the point that it comes out as wrath. This suggests that the daily za’am referred to in Tehillim is a way to be sure that we not suppress our anger, that we not ignore it, but that we also release it in productive ways, ways that might stimulate those around us to recognize where they are in the wrong.

Be Angry or Show Anger?

One assumption I am making here is that erech apayim is a trait we are meant to incorporate, not just act on. I am assuming we are supposed to be angry about these wrongs, but train ourselves to be arichei apayim, long to express that anger, in some of the ways we’ve reviewed.  Last week, we saw that Rambam rejected anger, and promoted only demonstrating anger.

Rambam said that, but then he also included erech apayim in his list of Attributes we are to emulate. He may have only meant the length to anger part, not the anger itself, or thought that acting angry was enough to qualify as imitating erech apayim.  Sefer haChinuch 611 makes that possibility explicit, arguing that anger is a bad emotion, and that Hashem certainly doesn’t have anger, nor should we.  Yad Ramah to Sanhedrin 105a also denies that Hashem has actual anger, and that the verses that speak of it only mean that Hashem punishes people in a way that would indicate anger in a human being. This is particularly interesting in Yad Ramah, since he opposed other of Rambam’s rationalist moves, but accepts this one.

What isn’t clear is how that translates to us.  In all the other character traits, we also said Hashem doesn’t have those traits, since we don’t think we can describe Hashem. In those other cases, we were told to adopt those traits ourselves. The phrasing wasn’t “just as Hashem is called compassionate, so, too, you act compassionately,” it was “be compassionate.” Why would we change it here?

Possibly, as I suggested before, Rambam and Sefer haChinuch found this trait so dangerous, so problematic, that he could not imagine we would be told to adopt it. At this point, I can only note that it changes erech apayim from all the other ways in which Hashem is described, singling it out.  In coming weeks, I hope to show there is room to believe that we are indeed prohibited from having ka’as, anger, but are allowed and supposed to develop charon af, although we also have to develop length of af, coming to charon af only rarely, and in reactions to situations I hope to lay out.

[Ephraim Ben Noach]

I meant it like the plagues on Egypt.Obama kinda reminds me of the new pharaoh too. Look at the attack on G-d going on in America.....

What about when HaShem wanted to kill all of Israel because of the Golden calf, and Moses talked him out of it?

[muman613]

I meant it like the plagues on Egypt.Obama kinda reminds me of the new pharaoh too. Look at the attack on G-d going on in America.....

What about when HaShem wanted to kill all of Israel because of the Golden calf, and Moses talked him out of it?

Read some of the material I reproduced above. I believe it addresses that question (Hashems 'wrath' is vented against the Jews who sin)...

[muman613]

http://www.kabbalah.torah-code.org/torah/anger_wrath/anger_wrath.shtml
Anger and Wrath
אף וחמה

When something happens to us, we know that with respect to each of us individually and with respect to each of us collectively, there is no other power in the world other than the power of Hashem. To think otherwise would be dualistic. Thus even though we personally understand that each other person has free will, we understand that what happens to us is in essence coming from Hashem through the instrument of another person, group, or country, each of which, with respect to us, is serving as Hashem's agents.

Sometimes bad things happen to us. The Torah's language for a bad thing is evil. Evil, in this sense of the word, is something that we regard as bad for us. If we had to attribute an emotion to a man who acts in a way that intentionally pushes us away, rejecting us, and causes, typically in a rapid way, troubles and evil to us, we would expect to find the man to be hot-headed and we would say that the man is angry and furious.

When we push ourselves away from Hashem, when we separate ourselves from Hashem, even when we do this without realizing that this is in fact what we are doing, then we might perceive our resulting situation as Hashem pushing us away. For when Hashem acts in a way consistent with our separating ourselves from Hashem, then we say that evil has befallen us. When evil comes, the Torah speaks anthropormophically of Hashem's anger.

There are many reasons why we, by no choice of our own, must endure and live through the challenges and suffering associated with an evil that comes to us. However, our topic is not about suffering that we think has unjustly come our way. Our topic is to understand what the Torah means when the Torah associates anger and wrath to Hashem.

Listen to what Moses says to the Israelites before he dies,

I know that after I die, you will become corrupt and turn away from the path that I have prescribed to you. You will eventually be beset with evil, since you will have done evil in God's eyes, angering Him with the work of your hands. (Deuteronomy 31.29)

Moses is teaching here a principle of spiritual reciprocity with regard to evil. If you do evil to Hashem, you will be eventually beset with evil. The evil that we do comes back to us.

The word the Torah uses that is here translated as angering is from the root כעס, which in the Torah is a weaker form of anger.

Listen to what the Torah says using the stronger terms אף וחמה, meaning anger and wrath.

A future generation, consisting of your descendants, who shall rise up after you, along with the stranger who shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of that land, and the sicknesses that the Lord has laid upon it; that the whole land is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that nothing can be planted and nothing can grow -- not even any grass can grow on it. It is like the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath. All nations shall say, Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What does the heat of this great anger mean? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt; For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, something that was not their portion. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book; And the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger and in wrath, באף ובחמה, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day.

The Biblical Hebrew word אף carries the meaning of anger on the one hand and nose on the other. Its syntatic plural אפים not only means nose, but also means face and does not carry the notion of a plural anger. There is a reason that Biblical Hebrew has the same word for nose and anger: when a person is angry, the person "fumes through the nose".

The Biblical Hebrew word חמה also carries dual meanings. Hot and warm on the one hand and fury, wrath, rage or blazing anger on the other. The phrase אף וחמה is typically translated as anger and wrath or anger and fury.

There are many instances in which the Torah anthropormorphically associates the phrase אף וחמה to Hashem. We know that any anthropomorphic terms that may be associated with Hashem must not be taken as literally applying to Him. We must understand them in the sense that the Torah speaks the language of the ordinary man. The emotion of anger when lived through and expressed by an ordinary man, is an existential rejection of and pushing away of that which the anger is against. We push away Hashem when we do not love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our everything. And if we love Hashem, then we will think, speak and act in accordance with the Torah guide for living He gave us. If we do not think, speak and act in accordance with the Torah guide for living He gave us, then we push Hashem away, separating ourselves from Hashem. The worst way to push away Hashem is to act in a way that worships idols. Idols are anything that we put as first ahead of Hashem. Idols can be the idols of various foreign deities. But they can also be the idols of pride and haughtiness, the idol of the lust for money or power etc.

Our rejection of Hashem inevitably causes what we perceive as Hashem's rejection of us. That rejection we understand as Hashem's anger and wrath, which the Zohar tells us are the names for the klipot of Gevurah and Tiferet.

Speaking to Ezekiel about the Israelites Hashem says,

Because you readied yourselves [for sin] more than the nations around you -- you did not follow My decrees, you did not fulfill My Laws; did did not even act according to the laws of the nations around you, ... A third part of you shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of you; and a third part shall fall by the sword around you; and I will scatter a third part to all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them. Thus shall my anger spend itself, and I relieve my fury upon them, and I will be comforted; and they shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it in my zeal, when I have spent my fury in them. And I will make you a desolation, and a reproach among the nations that are around you, in the sight of all that pass by. And it shall be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment to the nations that are around you, when I shall execute judgments in you in anger and in fury and in furious rebukes. I, the Lord, have spoken it. (Ezekiel 5:6 -14)

Hashem speaking to the prophet Mica says regarding the nations,

Your carved idols also I will cut off, and your pillars from your midst; and you shall bow down no more to the work of your hands. And I will pluck up your Asherim from your midst; and I will destroy your cities. And I will execute vengeance in anger and in fury upon the nations, such as they have not heard. (Mica 5: 9-14.)

[Ephraim Ben Noach]

Read some of the material I reproduced above. I believe it addresses that question (Hashems 'wrath' is vented against the Jews who sin)...

I just skimmed through it , I will read it more in depth later.

That's kind of a scary theory....that gives the whole world ammo to blame the Jews for the problems of the world... But the Jonah story is on the same level.

[muman613]

See this for a little more Kabbalistic understanding of the role of Wrath..

http://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/379665/jewish/Of-Blessings-and-Curses.htm

[Zelhar]

If there is an increase of cases it can because allot more people sleep in open spaces on the ground (refugees and such). The sand fly can only hover about half a meter above the ground so people who sleep on beds inside their house are safe.

Allot of Bedouins leave toddlers to sleep with buttocks exposed and everything else covered so they would get stung and develop immunity to it.

I meant it like the plagues on Egypt.Obama kinda reminds me of the new pharaoh too. Look at the attack on G-d going on in America.....

What about when HaShem wanted to kill all of Israel because of the Golden calf, and Moses talked him out of it?

[Debbie Shafer]

I know for a fact that God can be a wrathful God especially to those who ignore is words.  Isaiah 5:20 refers to wrath when people do not carefully observe the distinction between good and evil, destruction soon follows.  No one can decide for anyone else what is really right or wrong.  They may think getting drunk can't hurt them, or extramarital sex isn't really wrong, or money doesn't control them, but its really excusing ourselves from what is right and wrong.  We need to obey God's word as it stands and not question it.There is much suffering coming from the arrogance of man and especially genocidal Islam.   

When you read Ezekiel 39 concerning the war of Gog and Magog,  "Son of man, prophesy against Gog and say.  This is what the sovereign Lord says:  I am against you, Gog, Chief Prince of Meshek  and Tubal I will turn you around and drag you along. I will bring you from the far north, (Russia) and other Islamic nations and send you against the mountains of Israel. Then I will strike your bow from your left hand and make your arrows drop from the right hand.  On the mountains of Israel you will fall, and all your troops and the nations that are with you. I will give you as food to all kinds of carrion birds and to the wild animals.  You will fall in the open field, for I have spoken declares the sovereign Lord.   

God's power will far surpass anything man has ever seen on this earth

7 I will make known my Holy Name among my people Israel  I will not longer let my name be profaned, and the nations will know that  I the Lord am the Holy One of Israel.  Its coming!  I will surely take place declares the Sovereign Lord.  THIS IS THE DAY I HAVE SPOKEN OF.    Everything that has been written shall come to pass.   We are in times of Amazement.

[Yehudayaakov]

When he says wrath he speaks about the racha and for them it's a wrathful G-od coz G-od is first & foremost a vengeful God  who lay his vengeance on every and 1 racha in Israel that harass the Tsadikim

[Yehudayaakov]

yeh there's gona be a wrath & it's just only begin