It is one of the most upsetting verses in Torah: “I have now heard the moaning and I have remembered my covenant” (Exodus 6:5). Had God not heard the Israelites’ groaning previously? Had God heard the groaning, but ignored it? Or had God forgotten the covenant? If any of these is true, then the God-idea is substantially diminished.
Perhaps God is like human beings in that direct experience of another’s suffering moves us, while mere information about it does not. The raw statistics of child mortality—7.6 million children under 5 died in 2010 worldwide, the global under-five mortality rate has dropped 35 percent in the past twenty years, from 88 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 57 in 2010* —these dissolve away next to a picture of a suffering child. Such pictures fade from mind when we are confronted with the immediate reality of a crying baby.
But since that so rarely happens (suffering being hidden from view) and statistics so cold, how are we to react to the moaning we don’t hear? One answer might be what C. Wright Mills called the Sociological Imagination, the act of extrapolating from a pile of statistics to one single, exemplary story. The details may be inaccurate, but they portray a greater Truth. If we imagine a story hidden/embedded in the statistics, we might just be moved to empathy—and beyond: to action. And perhaps our own action will prompt God’s.
*Source: UNICEF, www.childinfo.org/mortality.html
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