Selichot

After the Golden Calf, Moses refuses to lead Israel unless YHWH remains with the people, and presses further: teach me Your ways. God deflects with a tautology—“I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious”—and only afterwards reveals the divine attributes (Exodus 34:6–7), compassion and grace, faithfulness for a thousand generations, but punishment for sin to the fourth. The list is not a catalogue of divine qualities but an explanation of how YHWH is willing to limit the divine power to engage directly and intimately with the people out of love.

YHWH is a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin… yet “he surely does not erase punishment” (Exod. 34:6–7). To make sense of this seeming contradiction, the Talmud offers a midrashic reinterpretation, and in selichot the verse is truncated. But could this attribute—one of God’s Thirteen—have been misunderstood all along?

Ezekiel challenges the divine (in)justice of intergenerational punishment, even though it appears in the Decalogue.

As part of the selichot prayer service, the rabbis cut the biblical phrase וְנַקֵּה לֹא יְנַקֶּה “[YHWH] does not remit punishment” to read only וְנַקֵּה, which yields the opposite meaning, “[YHWH] remits punishment.” Although this edit is surprising, the rabbis are responding to a serious tension in the biblical text: Is YHWH a merciful God who pardons, or a vengeful God who will never remit punishment?