What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes away early.
Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;
I have killed them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
(Hosea 6:4-6, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
God’s disdain for empty ritual echoes throughout the Hebrew Bible.
“For the prophet, life, worship, and justice are intertwined,” a marginal note in the Anabaptist Community Bible explains. “When they are separated or in opposition, ritual becomes abhorrent to God.” The note appears near a warning delivered through Isaiah (1:14): “I hate your new moons and your festivals. They’ve become a burden I’m tired of bearing.” (Though I generally quote from the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, I like the Common English Bible’s particularly blunt rendering of this verse.)
Amos passes on a similar message (5:23-24): “Take away from me the noise of your songs,” the Lord tells the people of Israel. Instead, God advises, they should “let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an overflowing stream.” Similarly, Micah asks (6:8), “What does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”
If you do these things, God promised, your community will thrive—but, as the Hebrew Bible recounts, the people of ancient Israel had frequent difficulties holding up their end of the covenant, with disastrous consequences. (Not that we have any room today to judge them on that front, based on the evidence of the world around us.) “The LORD has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land,” Hosea declares (4:1). “There is no faithfulness or loyalty and no knowledge of God in the land.”
Interestingly, the “loyalty” of Hosea 4:1 and “steadfast love” of 6:6 both refer to the same Hebrew word.
Hesed describes the condition of a relationship—sometimes between two people, but more often between God and humanity. It has layers of meaning that don’t translate neatly into a single word; when one says “loyalty,” or “trust” as Robert Alter does in his recent translation, one loses the nuances of love that shape this relationship. As he was completing the first English-language translation of the Bible in the sixteenth century, Myles Coverdale coined the term “lovingkindness” in an attempt to convey hesed’s complexity. That neologism remains popular today, although “steadfast love” has become a common colloquial alternative.
God had endless hesed for the people of Israel, no matter how many times they fell short of reciprocating. They tried, but their hesed had the quality of a morning cloud, quick to evaporate. Look at how differently that admonition from Hosea reads when we say “trust” or “loyalty” instead of “love.” And yet each version gets at some aspect of why people throughout history have faltered in their adherence to the sacred covenant. We find it difficult to believe in the reality of God’s promise, too impatient for the blessed community to emerge into being, and abandon God to embrace this world’s offers of easy comfort and security—sometimes making little compromises here and there, sometimes rushing in for the quick score. But we don’t just stop showing God our hesed; we stop showing it to each other as well. And as we do, society unwinds, giving way to depravity and ruin.
Jesus echoed Hosea’s message in a key moment of his ministry.
During one of his public sermons, a scribe asked Jesus to identify the greatest of the commandments, and he replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. But beyond that, Jesus added, you should also “love your neighbor as yourself.” The scribe affirmed this response, and described the commandments Jesus had named as “much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (Mark 12:29-33)
Loving with all your heart and soul, your mind and strength: now that unpacks the richness of hesed, to my mind. The Greek verb for “love” in this passage, agapan, reflects the intensity of this love; the New Testament uses the same verb to describe Jesus’s self-sacrificing love for humanity. Jesus called on us to show God the same steadfast devotion God showed us. God would give everything for you; you should give everything for God. But God would also give everything for your neighbor; therefore, you should give everything for your neighbor as well.
And God wants this from us, more than the rote performance of ceremonial tributes. When they sought to reestablish “primitive Christianity,” and the covenant that gives it life, Quakers took that advice to an extreme, eliminating virtually all outward ritual from their meetings for worship. Instead, they strove for their lives to give testimony to the strength of their hesed, as we ourselves strive today.
(Jennifer M. Matheny’s Hesed, the Seed of the Biblical Story helped clarify this message in my own mind. If you have a somewhat academic bent for theology, I highly recommend it.)
Thank you for bringing attention to this wonderful Hebrew word, “Hesed.” As you know in the English we usually put a dot (dagesh) beneath the H to indicate the letter Chet and its rather guttural sound, however, for simplicity (and because I do not know how to type in a dagesh beneath), I will use your spelling.
Hesed is one of my favorite words. Jewish thought/experience/perceptions of God are coded right there in the language. So many insights and layers of meaning.
My Rabbi taught me to translate Hesed as “undeserved favor, grace.” I truly love that. How many times has the Holy One extended grace, undeserved favor, to me in a situation! I am grateful and humbled.
If you are ever interested, we can discuss more on the following ideas below in the next paragraph… If not, just scroll past it!
Hesed (or Chesed) is also the 4th Sefirah of the Tree of Life from the Kabbalah. It aligns with the right shoulder, and is balanced by Gevurah, Strength, which aligns at the left shoulder. The Sefirot (plural of Sefirah) are “attributes of God” which teach us how pure energy (from the Divine) moves to come into physical form; how emanation (of God) comes into physical form in this world, travelling through 10 attributes of God, outside, yet within us. (Created in the image of God).
Thank you to my dear, blessed Quaker, Grandma Ferne, for raising me with such a simple and direct inner foundation, so when I come to teachings of thousands of years of tradition of Jewish thought I have somewhere to hang the complexities in the matrix of my brain with forthright meaning.
A post script to my comment. The final piece of transformation of enrgy to physicality is “action.” Isn’t that interesting. In other words, we are co-creators with God in this physical world by doing our part – the action. This concept involves the Kabbalistic creative premise of creating this world through the 4 Worlds: Emanation (Atzilut), Intellect, Thought (B’riyah), Emotions, Feelings (Yetzirah) and Action, Doing (Assiyah). Everything starts as an emanation of God, then goes through the process to become physical. Example, the inspiration for a poem is coming to you. You think it through, (this is thin energy, easily forgotten unless Spirit reminds you). Next, emotions and how you feel about it attach to it. This is the power plant to move it into an action – you write it down, sing it, say it, speak it… you put an action to it. This poem does not exist in this world until you put an action to it. As an inspiration, thoughts and feelings, it is as if the poem doesn’t exist here. Once an action is put to it, then it belongs to this world and others can access it. This is also the Tree of Life, and 10 Sefirot – energy to physicality. Thank you to my Grandmother and all the Quaker Community for “holding the Light” in actions in this world and not just theology. As Grandma used to tell me, “Show me your works and I will believe that you have faith.”Fl