God Carried Israel Like a Father and Later Dropped the Sky

The tenderest image in the whole book of Deuteronomy is hidden inside a short speech Moses gives to a generation that has never seen slavery. He is trying to explain why they should trust God in a land they have not yet walked into. He reaches for an analogy, and the analogy he chooses is almost embarrassing in its intimacy. In the wilderness, you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way you went until you came to this place (Deuteronomy 1:31).

A father carrying a son. Not a shepherd carrying a lamb. Not a king carrying a scepter. A father. Carrying. The Hebrew verb nasa means to lift, to bear, to pick up. It is the verb for carrying a load on your back. Moses is telling a generation in their twenties and thirties that God had spent the whole of their childhood lifting them the way he watched their own fathers lift them across streams and up hills when their legs gave out. It is a domestic image dropped into a book of law, and it is one of the only times in the Torah that God is described with the tenderness of a parent who is not angry.

The rabbis who compiled the Yalkut Shimoni in thirteenth-century Germany noticed that this image did not sit alone. At Yalkut Shimoni on the Prophets 1026:11, they put Moses's fatherhood line directly beside another line, written eight hundred years later by a prophet who had watched the same God pick up the same child and throw him across the sky. The second line is from Lamentations, and it belongs to Jeremiah. How the Lord in His anger has beclouded the daughter of Zion. He has cast down from heaven to earth the majesty of Israel (Lamentations 2:1).

The verb this time is hishlikh. To throw down. To hurl. The same God who had carried the child now throws him. And the arc of the throw is terrifying in its scale. From heaven to earth. The child has not fallen. The child has been flung. Whatever altitude God had carried Israel to during the wilderness years, that altitude is being used now as the distance of the drop.

The Yalkut does not explain the pairing. It just puts the two verses on the same page in the same column and lets the reader feel the motion. Carried. Then dropped. By the same hand.

This is the hardest moment in the theology of the destruction of the First Temple, and the rabbis were too honest to soften it. They could have written a midrash in which the catastrophe of 586 BCE was handed off to a lesser power, a delegated angel, a mere enemy. They refused. The rabbis who wrote Lamentations Rabbah, the Palestinian midrash on Lamentations probably compiled in the fifth century, insist on the first-person subject of the Hebrew verb. He cast down. Not they. Not the Babylonians. Not even the angel of destruction. The father himself. The same father Moses had described with such specific tenderness.

The fall is also specifically from heaven to earth. That is not a geographical description. It is a theological coordinate. The rabbis read that phrase as a statement about status. Israel had been, in Moses's Deuteronomy, carried in God's arms, which is to say lifted into the upper world, brought close to the realm where God's own light lives. Jeremiah is saying that on the day the First Temple burned, the child who had been held that high was released from that high. He did not fall gently to the ground. He was thrown to the ground, and the ground met him with the full force of a drop from heaven.

The rabbinic imagination cannot let the image sit without pushing on it. Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews, his seven-volume synthesis of rabbinic tradition published between 1909 and 1938, collects a cycle of midrashim in which the father and son analogy is extended almost to the breaking point. In one tradition, the patriarchs see what is coming and rise from their graves at Machpelah. Abraham goes up before the throne and reminds God of the binding of Isaac. Isaac himself stands on the altar in his mind a second time. Jacob weeps for the grandchildren he is about to lose. The patriarchs plead, as intercessors, for the grandchildren whose father, they understand, is about to let them fall. And God answers in the voice of a parent who has made the hardest decision a parent can make, and they go back to their graves with nothing to say.

In another tradition, Rachel leaves her tomb on the road to Bethlehem and walks all the way up to the throne room in heaven to plead for her children (Jeremiah 31:14 and 31:15). Her argument is the one argument even God cannot reject. She reminds Him that she, a human woman, had once yielded her rightful place as a bride to her sister Leah rather than see Leah humiliated. If a mother on earth can make room inside her own marriage for a rival sister, surely the Father in heaven can make room in His own covenant for a rebellious child. The midrash has God answering Rachel, after a long silence, that He will one day gather the children back. But the day is not today. Today is the day of the throw.

That is the stance the Yalkut wants you to hold. The Father who had carried Israel through the wilderness in Deuteronomy is the same Father who lets them fall from heaven to earth in Lamentations. Nothing in either verse is a lie. Both are sentences spoken by prophets. Both are spoken about the same covenant. And the rabbis, who had every reason to soften this, did not soften it. They put the two verses next to each other and turned the page.

It is the last in the Yalkut's short sequence of Moses said, Jeremiah said pairs at Yalkut 1026, and it might be the most personal of them. The other pairs are about law and land and the big communal events. This one is about carrying. A father carrying a son. That is the image Moses chose, out of every possible analogy in the Hebrew language, to describe how God had loved the generation that came out of Egypt. And the Yalkut is saying, in the silence between the verses, that the same arms that had carried Israel through forty years of desert were the arms that finally had to let go.

Jeremiah stood in the streets of the burning city and watched the letting go happen. He wrote down what he saw in a single sentence. From heaven to earth. Nothing in the Hebrew lets you read it any other way.