Israel Was Jealous of Every Nation Except on Passover Eve

The honest complaint runs through the heart of Psalm 42 like a wire under current. "I am jealous and aggrieved when I see the tranquility of the nations." The rabbis of the Midrash Tehillim, working in late antique Palestine, did not soften this into theology. They left it raw. They gave it to the whole assembly of Israel as a direct accusation aimed at God: you let them prosper. You let them rest. You let them build their cities and raise their children. And you keep turning us over like earth under a plow.

The jealousy in Midrash Tehillim 42:4 is not a sin the rabbis hurry past. They write it plainly. They let Israel say it. And then they show what Israel did with that jealousy, which is the more interesting part of the story.

They prayed. Not despite the jealousy but through it. "I am angry," Israel says in this passage, "but what do you care? And I direct my supplication to God." The prayer does not wait for the anger to pass. The prayer is made of the anger. This is a tradition that has always understood that you do not need to be at peace to speak to God. You need only to be honest.

The Midrash then turns toward memory as the antidote to bitterness. "I remember you from the land of Jordan." Not because memory makes the present bearable, but because memory makes the present legible. Israel had crossed the Jordan. Against every expectation, with the armies of Aram and the reproaches of the nations pressing in from every side, they had crossed. Joshua rose early in the morning and the people moved from Shittim (Joshua 3), and the river parted, and they crossed. The Midrash names this specifically. It names Shittim, the place of an earlier transgression. God had performed miracles even then, even while Israel was stumbling. The memory is not of a flawless people rewarded for virtue. It is of a stubborn God who kept showing up despite everything.

Then comes the harder memory, the one Israel quotes against itself. "The Lord is not able," they had said in the wilderness (Numbers 14). "Where is His strength?" They had doubted. They had despaired. They had built a case against divine power using their own suffering as evidence. And the midrash does not argue with this. It lets God answer through Isaiah: "The Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save, neither His ear heavy that it cannot hear, but your iniquities have separated between you and your God" (Isaiah 59:1).

This is not a comfortable answer. It is an honest one. The Midrash is not exonerating God. It is saying that the relationship between Israel and God is the most consequential and most painful relationship in the world, and that it operates on terms neither party fully controls.

The passage closes on the memory of Passover. God puts the case simply: "I commanded them to slaughter the Passover lamb on the night of the exodus from Egypt. They slaughtered it and were saved." The act of obedience, performed in terror, in a country still bristling with power that had not yet fully released them, produced salvation. Not because obedience earns rescue. But because in that act, Israel stopped waiting for God to act first.

That is the asymmetry the Midrash is reaching for. In this world, the passage says, God pursues Israel, urging return. But in the future, Israel will pursue God, urging fulfillment. The jealousy of the nations is not the last word. The jealousy is the beginning of the prayer. The prayer is the beginning of the relationship. And the relationship is the thing that has always, eventually, split the sea.