What God Does Every Afternoon Since the Temple Burned

The Talmud, in Tractate Avodah Zarah compiled in the sixth century CE, schedules God's day. The first three hours: Torah study. The second three: judging the world, then stepping down from the throne of judgment to the throne of mercy when the verdict looks too harsh. The third three: sustaining all living things, from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice. And the fourth quarter, from the ninth hour to the twelfth, the last light of the afternoon?

God plays with Leviathan.

The proof text is (Psalms 104:26): "There is Leviathan, whom You have formed to sport with." The Talmud in Avodah Zarah 3b takes this literally. God made the great sea beast not to be feared, not to be slain, not as a symbol of chaos held in check. God made Leviathan to play with, the way a craftsman makes something for the pure pleasure of it.

The Leviathan of Jewish tradition was created as a pair, male and female. But God killed the female before the pair could multiply, because a sea full of Leviathans would have destroyed the world. The flesh of the female was salted and preserved, reserved for the feast of the righteous in the World to Come. The male was left alone. And so every afternoon, God comes to play with the one surviving Leviathan, the last of its kind, in the deep.

There is something in this image that the Talmud does not explain and does not need to. The divine companion of the afternoon is a solitary creature. Even in cosmic company, it is the last of something that used to be two.

Then the sages add a complication. Rav Aha raised his voice and said: since the day the Temple was destroyed, God no longer makes sport. The afternoon schedule has changed. The verse he cited was from (Isaiah 42:14): "I have long time held My peace, I have been still, and refrained Myself; now will I cry like a travailing woman, gasping and panting at once." This is not the image of a God at play. This is a God in mourning.

So the question follows immediately: what does God do now during that last quarter of the day? The answer: God sits and teaches Torah to schoolchildren. The verse given is (Isaiah 28:9): "To whom shall one teach knowledge? To those weaned from the milk, drawn from the breasts." The schoolchildren are the new afternoon. Where there was once play with the sea beast, there is now instruction for the very young.

Before the Temple fell, the angel Metatron taught the children while God played with Leviathan. Since the Temple fell, God has taken the lesson himself. The destruction redistributed the divine afternoon.

The aggadic tradition is unafraid of the implications. God grieves. The schedule of heaven bends to what has happened on earth. The Talmud cites (Psalms 137:5-6): "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." God has not forgotten. The Leviathan still waits in the deep. The afternoon still arrives. But what was once play has become something else, and the world will not be fully restored until the feast that was prepared from the beginning, when the salted flesh of the female Leviathan is set on the table and the righteous sit down to eat.