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Today in Huffington Post’s Religion section, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach took some time to write about our nation’s reaction to the horrors that occurred in CT last Friday. Specifically, he blasted President Obama’s speech for not holding God accountable to His own standards regarding life and protection of the innocent. As he basically accuses Mr. Obama of tickling the nation’s collective ears with the comfort that his voters seek, Rabbi Shmuley also says what he would rather have heard.

…then in the face of tragedy I would rather hear him say, “Lord, we Americans are a righteous people. We spend endless blood and treasure around the world to untie the hands of the oppressed, to protect the rights of women, and to safeguard children from terrorists. We give huge amounts of charity and Synagogues, Churches, and Mosques dot the fruited plane. We have Your holy name printed even on our money, and we have a national day of Thanksgiving to thank You for Your bounty. We deserve better than to see twenty tiny precious souls slaughtered so brutally. In the name of all that is righteous and as the Chief Magistrate of this great nation, I ask You, I implore You, I demand of You, to protect our children, Your children, from harm, so that all the peoples of the world will see Your great hand in history and how the innocent are allowed to flourish, prosper, and grow old with children of their own.”

Perhaps, Rabbi Shmuley, you should pay a little closer attention to the Scripture you cited throughout your article and rethink your suggestion.

You asked the right question. “Why God is silent and seemingly absent in the face of so much suffering is the real question about the Sandy Hook massacre.” Why did you then proceed to ignore it? You asked the question and then proceeded to write an article railing against God for making the wrong decision rather than looking for the answer to the posed question. Why indeed is silence and absence the response we are getting from God today? All you did was tell God what He should have done and how we should respond, never stopping to consider that maybe God allowed that (and other tragedies that have been and are yet to come) because we are out of line. It’s not like He doesn’t spell out for us what He wants.

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  Micah 6:8

If we are to live justly, we must live by His standards of justice, not our own. If we are to love kindness, it is to be in accordance with His kind of kindness, not the niceness we prefer, and even if we could stretch out our definitions and interpretations far enough to believe that we do okay with the first two, I’m afraid Meatloaf’s “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad” doesn’t apply here because I’m fairly certain there is nothing about the way we live in our country that could be misconstrued as walking humbly with our God, unless we redefine “Our God” as entertainment or money or diversity or something more appropriate to the American Way, and even then we would be hard-pressed to call anything about what we do “humble.”

Now, I know what I’m about to say flies in a somewhat countercultural direction and certainly is politically incorrect in terms of our deification of diversity, but Rabbi Shmuley, are you stupid or something? I’m fairly certain as a Rabbi you’d be familiar with the laws God handed to Moses at Sinai. What am I saying, of course you are. You referenced what Moses said to God at that very time regarding the Golden Calf incident. Did you just forget then that commandment number one is “You shall have no other gods before me?” Because, that’s the only way it makes sense that part of your justification in what you would rather have heard could be that it’s a good idea to tell God that we are good people because we helped build mosques. Pretty sure those two things are at odds with one another. God’s not a fan of us being “good people” who proclaim our own righteousness because we do lots of “good works.”

The idea that God owes us sounds like precisely the kind of entitlement mentality that has been running rampant in our nation for decades, and it reeks of pride. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that there are plenty of people in the system who are grateful to have the chance to make it and who use it as a stepping stone toward a better life, independent of government funding, but more often than not, that is not the case. In every tier of our society, “You owe me,” is becoming a catchphrase regarding everything from lower taxes to gun rights to employment to welfare to (insert request here). And, our solution when we don’t get what we want is to either get angry and jump up and down and scream in order to effect change or to get mad and say, “Fine! I’ll just take my ball and go home!” whether that means withdrawing from the argument or the nation like our secessionist friends to the south are threatening. Not once are we hearing thoughts about humbling ourselves and praying for God to bring healing to our land. We don’t pause to consider how we may be at fault. We are way too prideful for that. We are about doing everything bigger and better than we have done in the past and doing every bit of it ourselves. We have to be. The things we are pushing through lately are things God hasn’t been to keen on in the past. And it’s doing nothing by widening the division in our country.

Without question, God is love. He makes that clear for humanity over and over again throughout His word. From the first act after Adam and Eve sinned when He made garments for them, God has been acting on our behalf because He loves us. From the story of Jonah, we can see that God is all about redemption and second chances. But first, He is Holy. God does not make room for His people, His creation, to put other things, gods, or ideals in His rightful place. Historically, God is in the business of promoting and protecting His holiness, and we have become a nation that stomps all over it.

In a spiritual context, we are prone to identify with Jerusalem, but we have become Jonah’s Nineveh.

We are a nation who regularly expects God to do everything to protect us while telling Him to get out. We argue about whether He should be part of our pledge. We argue about whether He should be on our money. We kicked Him out of schools years ago but we are quick to call on His name when tragedy strikes. We act like teenagers jumping up and down telling our parents we hate them right before we stick out our hand and ask for the car keys for the evening. We want God on our terms, and He’s not. And so we must ask ourselves, as Rabbi Shmuley rightly suggests, “Why is God silent and seemingly absent in the face of so much suffering?” The answer, “Because He loves us and He wants us to wake up.”

Maybe, the solution is to start acting like we want Him around. I think His word even tells us that “if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14.

By the way, that’s what Nineveh did, and that’s when things changed.