God Was Afflicted When Israel Was Afflicted

The verse from (Isaiah 63:9) says something almost unbearable if you take it seriously: "In all of their afflictions, He was afflicted." Not that God witnessed Israel's suffering. Not that He remembered it, or counted it, or eventually avenged it. That He was afflicted by it. That the slavery in Egypt entered Him.

R. Eliezer b. Yossi, whose teaching is preserved in the Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael -- a tannaitic midrash compiled in the second and third centuries by the school of Rabbi Ishmael -- stops at this verse and does not let it rest in vagueness. He pulls it apart. He asks what it commits us to. And what he finds there is a theology of divine solidarity that runs through the entire relationship between God and Israel.

The Problem With Knowing in Advance

The verse from (Isaiah 63:8) compounds the difficulty. "And He said: Surely, they are My people, children who will not lie." But they did lie. They did rebel. They built the golden calf. They wept for Egypt. They said they wished they had died before leaving. God knew this would happen -- He knows everything before it happens. So what does it mean when He says "Surely, they are My people, children who will not lie"?

R. Eliezer b. Yossi takes the word "Surely" -- the Hebrew word akh, which signals both certainty and qualification -- as a key. God is not saying they will never lie. He already knows they will. The "Surely" marks a decision: He will save them not as people who are destined to remain faithful, but as people who, through repentance, are not destined to be faithless forever. The certainty is not about their present conduct. It is about their ultimate return.

This is a reading that holds both truths at once. The people will lie. The people will return. God saves them across the full arc, not at any frozen point along it.

What the Psalms Say About Being Deceived

The Mekhilta's argument draws on (Psalms 78:36-37): "And they deceived Him with their mouths, and with their tongues they lied to Him, and their hearts were not constant with Him, and they were not faithful to His covenant." And then, immediately, (Psalms 78:38): "But He, being merciful, will forgive transgression."

The pairing is deliberate. The deceiving and the forgiving sit side by side, verse and verse, with nothing softening the deception. They lied. They were unfaithful. Their hearts were elsewhere. And He forgave. Not because they deserved it. Not because the record was corrected. But because God, described here as "merciful," carries forgiveness as an attribute that operates even across infidelity.

The teaching of R. Eliezer b. Yossi does not sentimentalize this. It is not that their sin was minor. It is that God's mercy is larger than their sin. The Psalm states the deception explicitly so that the forgiveness that follows cannot be read as ignoring a small offense. It is mercy operating in full knowledge of what it is covering.

Why God Shares the Suffering

Return to (Isaiah 63:9): "In all of their afflictions, He was afflicted." The rabbis debated this verse sharply. One school read it as saying that whenever Israel goes into exile, the divine presence goes with them -- not as observer, but as participant. This idea runs through many of the Mekhilta's 1,517 texts and surfaces in multiple forms across the tradition.

The implications are significant. If God is afflicted when Israel is afflicted, then the slavery in Egypt was not merely a human catastrophe that God permitted for reasons of cosmic necessity. It was a shared experience. The cry that went up from the brick pits (Exodus 2:23) reached God not as information but as pain already known from inside. When He says in (Exodus 3:7) "I have surely seen the affliction of My people" -- the word "surely" again -- the Mekhilta reads it as: this is not news to Me. I have been in it with them.

Isaiah and the Grammar of Solidarity

The prophet Isaiah was writing in the eighth century BCE, but his verse points backward to Egypt and forward to every exile that would follow. The structure he names -- affliction shared between God and Israel -- becomes a theological category that the rabbis of the Mekhilta apply to every period of national suffering.

The verse from (Isaiah 6:10) adds another layer: "The heart of this people has become fat, and its ears have become heavy." Spiritual dullness. The inability to hear or respond. And yet the same verse, in R. Eliezer b. Yossi's reading, ends with "if he repents, he will be healed." The heaviness of heart is not the final word. Neither is the affliction.

What the Mekhilta preserves in this teaching is a picture of God who is neither indifferent nor overwhelmed. He saves across the full arc of a people's history -- knowing in advance they will lie, suffering when they suffer, forgiving across infidelity, and holding the possibility of return open even when the present moment shows nothing but fat hearts and heavy ears. The theology of solidarity in this single verse from Isaiah is one of the most demanding in the entire tradition. It does not allow God to be safely distant from what happens to His people.