"In all their affliction, He was not afflicted" (Isaiah 63:9). The midrash reads this as conditional: if Israel does the will of God in their troubles, then He is afflicted with them — He shares their suffering. If they do not do His will in their troubles, then He is not afflicted with them. The suffering God endures alongside Israel is not automatic. It is the response to a particular kind of faith — the faith that keeps covenant even while suffering under God's own decree.
The proof is Egypt. When Israel was making bricks from straw and the work was brutal, God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush — and in the vision, Moses saw something like a sapphire brick beneath the divine throne (Exodus 24:10). The rabbis read this as a divine memorial: a brick made from the suffering of the enslaved, preserved in the heavenly court so that the suffering would never be forgotten. God had kept a brick from Egypt. He had not looked away.
This theology is the most intimate in Aggadat Bereshit. It does not say God stops the suffering. It says God shares it — enters it, carries it alongside the people who are in it. The condition is covenant fidelity under duress, which is the hardest kind. But the reward, the midrash implies, is that you are never actually alone in the furnace. Wherever Israel was, God was also in it. The suffering was real. The company was real. Both are true at the same time.