God Weeps into the Sea and Prays for Mercy

Rav Katina was walking a road when the ground groaned under him.

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He had stopped, as it happened, at the doorway of a necromancer, one of the men who made a living calling up the dead for a fee. Katina had no use for him. He said it out loud, half to himself, the way a man does when he wants a fraud to overhear. "Does the necromancer know what this earthquake is?"

A voice came back at him from inside the house.

The Voice at the Necromancer's Door

"Katina, Katina. Why should I not know?"

Then it told him, and it was not what a fraud would have invented.

"When the Holy One remembers His children, who dwell in suffering among the nations of the world, He lets fall two tears into the Great Sea. His voice is heard from one end of the world to the other. That is the earthquake."

Two. Not a flood of them. Two, counted, aimed at the largest body of water there is, and the sound of the fall runs the whole length of creation and comes up through the soles of a man standing in a doorway he had no business standing in.

Katina went on his way with that. He had asked a cheap question and been handed the mechanism of the world.

What the Study House Made of the Shaking

He did not repeat the answer as his own. When the sages took the question up, Katina gave a different account. The Holy One strikes His palms together, and the earth answers. Rabbi Nathan said it is a sigh. Others said He kicks the firmament, the way a man treading grapes drives his weight down. Rav Aha bar Yaakov said He presses His feet under the Throne of Glory, the way someone braces against a wall to keep from breaking something.

Four grown men, arguing over whether God claps, sighs, kicks, or braces. Not one of them proposed that the shaking was nothing.

Ishmael Went In With the Incense

The other man who got close enough to hear it was a priest, and he went in through the front.

Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha entered the innermost chamber to burn the incense, on the one day and in the one room where that is done. He came out and told what was in there, which nobody had asked him to do.

Akatriel Yah, the Lord of Hosts, seated on a throne high and lifted up.

And the throne spoke to him. "Ishmael, My son. Bless Me."

Bless Me, Ishmael My Son

A man stands in the Holy of Holies holding a censer, and the One on the throne asks him for a blessing. There is no procedure for this. Ishmael had no text to fall back on. He had a mouth and a few seconds.

What he said was this. "May it be Your will that Your mercy overcome Your anger. May Your mercy roll over Your attributes. May You act toward Your children with the attribute of mercy, and enter for them within the line of the law."

He asked God to go easy on his people, standing inside the room where the verdict lives, using the only leverage a small man ever has, which is being asked.

And He nodded His head.

That was the whole answer. No fire, no voice from between the cherubim, nothing Ishmael could have written down and had witnessed. A movement of the head. He told it afterward so that nobody would ever again treat the blessing of an ordinary person as a light thing.

The Prayer Heaven Says for Itself

Ishmael's words were not new in that room. Rav taught that the Holy One prays, and that this is what He prays, in His own mouth, about Himself. May it be My will that My mercy overcome My anger, that My mercy roll over My attributes, that I act toward My children with the attribute of mercy and enter for them within the line of the law.

The proof was one letter in Isaiah. God speaks of bringing them to His holy mountain and making them joyful in His house of prayer. Not their house of prayer. His.

So the priest with the censer had not invented a blessing. Standing in front of the throne, he had said out loud the sentence the throne had been saying to itself. And the head moved.

Somewhere below, the sea took another two.