The various reactions to adversity which we have discussed thus far are all based on the assumption that there is an almighty and all-powerful God who, for one reason or another, has decided to let His people undergo suffering and persecution. Such suffering and persecution may be accepted as just and deserved by the sufferers. Or, as some of the poems seem to indicate, they may give rise to a questioning of God's absolute justice, if not indeed to an outcry against God's intolerable silence.

But what if redemption is delayed, and if the exile is prolonged, because God Himself is, as it were, in exile and enslaved? What if, instead of conceiving of a punishing God and a suffering Israel, one were to think of God and Israel as fellow-sufferers, both in need of redemption?

Of course, such a thought must appear strange and far-fetched to modern Jews, brought up in the Maimonidean tradition which emphatically denies the applicability, in any literal sense, of anthropomorphism and anthropopathy to the Deity. Moreover, conditioned as he is by the need to define himself vis à vis Christianity, the modernJew, particularly in the Western world, is liable to recoil from any suggestion that Judaism, too, knows about a ‘suffering God.'

Yet the classical sources of Judaism, both biblical and Rabbinical, come to us from a period when the God of lsrael had not yet been identified with the God of the philosophers, and when the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem had not yet been merged. Thus there is no a priori impossibility for such a concept to have arisen within Judaism; and there are enough passages in Rabbinic literature to show that there were Rabbis who did indeed espouse it. Even so, those Rabbis were well aware of the daring nature of such a thought, and they themselves gave utterance to it only because they believed that they had Scriptural warrant for doing so.

One of the key passages in the Bible which supplied the Rabbis with such a warrant is Isaiah 63 :9. The way in which that verse is actually written would offer no support to any notion about a suffering God.