God Suffers With Israel Every Time Israel Suffers

There is a verse in Isaiah that the rabbis could not leave alone. Chapter 63, verse 9: "In all their affliction, He was afflicted." Or, depending on how you read the Hebrew: "In all their affliction, He was not afflicted." The ambiguity is real. The manuscripts divide on it. And the rabbis made the ambiguity into a teaching.

Aggadat Bereshit 72, drawing on Psalm 129 and Isaiah 63, lays out the condition explicitly. When Israel suffers and is doing the will of God, God suffers with them. When Israel suffers but is not doing God's will, the affliction belongs to Israel alone. The covenant is not a blank check. It is a relationship. Mutual suffering requires mutual faithfulness.

The proof the midrash reaches for is Egypt. When the Israelites were enslaved, making bricks from straw and beaten when the quotas fell short, God was present in the suffering. The angel of the divine presence was with them (Isaiah 63:9). The midrash says this angel, who stands before God every day and sees the divine face directly, came down into the mud. God did not watch the slavery from above. God descended into the place where the people were broken. When Moses encountered God at the burning bush, the rabbis read the flame as God showing Moses what the slavery looked like from the inside, precious stones burning with human hands pressed against them (Exodus 24:10).

Jacob had named this angel. His final blessing in (Genesis 48:16) invokes "the angel who redeemed me from all evil." That angel was not a cosmic intermediary handling divine business from a safe distance. It was the one closest to God, sent into the hardest places. The Aggadat Bereshit, compiled in its present form sometime in the early medieval period, treats this as the heart of the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob legacy.

The midrash reads through Isaiah 63:9 in layers. "Through His love" belongs to Abraham, who loved God, and whose love drew the twenty generations before him toward something they had been refusing. "Through His mercy" belongs to Isaac, through whose near-sacrifice God declared "do not lay a hand on the boy" (Genesis 22:12) and established a principle of divine restraint that runs through the whole tradition. "He Himself redeemed them" belongs to Jacob, as Isaiah 48:20 confirms: "The Lord redeemed Jacob."

Then the midrash extends through history in a series of interpretations that read like alternative takes on the same image. God carried Israel in manna. God carried them in clouds. God carried them through the monarchy of David. And God will carry them in the monarchy of the Messiah, all the days of the eternal world, until the verse arrives: "The Lord will reign forever and ever" (Exodus 15:18).

What binds the interpretations together is the word "carried." It appears in Isaiah 63:9 and the midrash will not let it go. To suffer with someone is one thing. To carry them is another. The midrash is making a claim about what divine presence in exile actually means. God does not simply observe. God bears the weight.

This matters because the text immediately adjacent in the collection shows Jacob sending Benjamin to Egypt with nothing but the words "may God Almighty grant you mercy." Jacob cannot control what happens next. He cannot see the outcome. He cannot protect Benjamin. All he has is the name of God and the covenant's history, the same history the midrash is encoding in Isaiah 63. Abraham loved. Isaac was spared. Jacob was redeemed. The pattern is real. You send the child you cannot afford to lose, and you trust that the carrying continues.

The ambiguous verse stays ambiguous on purpose. "He was afflicted" and "He was not afflicted" sit side by side in the manuscript tradition because both are true depending on what Israel is doing. The covenant is not canceled by suffering. But it is activated by faithfulness. The angel of the divine presence came down into Egypt because the people, under everything, still belonged to God. The suffering did not end the story. The carrying did.