Too truthful

If I had to write a Bible, I would say that once they left Sinai, they become great Tzadikim and great Hasidim and the only thing that they did henceforth was to praise God. They would not murmur against Moshe Rabbenu. Instead, we have frequent rebellion. It was worse than at Columbia [University in the 1960s]! Does this make sense in the light of all the great things that happened to them? And so the question I ask myself is: “Ribono Shel Olam, why do you bother with us?” That the Ribono Shel Olam should bother with us who are so rebellious and so ungrateful, so callous, so hard-necked, so stiff-necked is the great paradox. The only way to understand the paradox is that God takes man very seriously.—Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 157