Binah Appointed Satan Plaintiff and God Filed His Own Suit

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The Bench That Would Not Rule Without a Plaintiff

The court of the rakia (רקיע), the firmament, opens the way a king's court opens on earth. A roll. A docket. An order of speaking nobody skips. At the head of the hall sits Binah (בינה), Understanding, who knows every answer the session will produce and will not say one of them aloud.

"Bring Me a plaintiff," Binah said. "Then bring Me witnesses."

Angels at the rail shifted where they stood. Understanding needs no informant. The hall itself had been laid out by that same Understanding. But nothing moved in that room on knowledge alone. Someone had to file the charge. Someone else had to stand and prove it. Truth came in through the door like everybody else or it did not come in.

Satan Sworn In and the Eyes Entered on the Roll

The one they call Satan came up the aisle and took the plaintiff's place without arguing. He is not the court's enemy. He is its officer, the accuser who carries the charge sheet up from below and reads out what is on it in a level voice. Binah put the case against the human race in his hands and told him to open it.

Then the witnesses were entered, and they were the eyes of God, which range over the hidden and the open alike, over the theft at noon in the market and the thing done at three in the morning behind a bolted door. In that court the timbers of a house are competent to testify. A man sins alone in a sealed room and the beams over his head take the stand.

The Man Who Waited for the Dark

The adulterer had done his arithmetic. He waited for night and recited the usual calculation. "No eye will behold me. Not an eye below and not an eye above." Others said it out loud, deep in their planning, and the words went onto the record: "Who sees us, and who knows of us?" God is at the apex of heaven, they said. Look how high the stars are. Clouds cover for Him and He does not look down.

The court answered with the strangest sentence in its books. God, who dwells in secret, took the man's face and set it on the child.

The boy was born into a house where nobody suspected anything, and the face that came up out of that cradle belonged to a man four streets over. Forty days the shaping goes on inside her, and after that the divine hand is left over half-finished work. A painter was once commissioned for the king's portrait, and before the face was done the king died and another took the throne, and the painter stood there with a loaded brush and no idea whose likeness to finish. The Shekhinah (the Divine Presence), the Presence, works under that pressure.

They hid their valuables from the chief architect of the province, who had drawn the plans for every hiding place in it. "Is it from Me that you are hiding yourselves?" God said. "Is it not I who made the hearts?" He had built them chamber inside chamber, cavity upon cavity, heart and kidney, and into those chambers they packed the one lie the court hears most, that He does not see.

The Angels Came Asking for the Date

The ministering angels pressed in at the rail. A session needs a date.

"When is Rosh Hashanah?" they asked. "When is Yom Kippur?"

The Holy One turned it back on them. "Why are you asking Me? Come, I and you together, and we will go down to the court below."

So the whole entourage went down. The judge, the officers, the plaintiff with his file, all of them outside a room where men with a calendar and two witnesses settled which day the year would be weighed. Before Sinai the times had been His alone, the appointed times of the Lord. After Sinai the wording changed toward the defendants: that you shall proclaim them. The accused now fix the date of their own trial, and heaven waits on the announcement.

Midnight Came by Vote of the Council

One session ran late over Egypt.

When the record says the Lord struck, He had not sat alone. He sat above the council in judgment, they took up the case of the firstborn of Egypt, and the decree left the court on high with an hour attached.

Then midnight arrived, and it arrived exactly, and from the throne room to the millstone there was a body in every house that had been a son.

Three Times the Judge Filed Against His Own

He sued Israel three times, and each time the nations of the world filled the gallery.

"Come now, and let us reason together," He said the first time. The gallery elbowed one another. "How can these argue a case against their own Creator? Now He finishes them." The Holy One saw them enjoying it and turned the whole suit over in His hand. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." The nations sat with their mouths open. "Is that a reply? Is that a rebuke? He came in here to amuse Himself with His children."

The second time He called the mountains in to hear the suit, and the gallery settled back, certain of a burning. He opened by reminding Israel what Balak king of Moab had plotted against them, and the indictment turned into a defense while they watched.

The third time the writ named Judah, and the punishment of Jacob according to his ways, and the gallery leaned forward. The evidence He produced was that Jacob, in the womb, had grabbed his brother by the heel.

A woman once brought a complaint against her son before a judge. She sat in the back while the docket ran and the sentences came down all morning. If she named what her boy had done, this judge would hang him. So she let every other case go first. When the hall emptied he asked what the offense was. "When he was in my belly," she said, "he kicked me." The judge waited. "And has he done anything to you since?" "No." "Then go home. That is no offense at all."

"Testify against Me," He had told them at the start, "and take a reward for it." The gallery emptied. Satan stayed on his feet at the plaintiff's table with the charge sheet still open, and nobody told him to sit down.