I had a wonderful long talk about God recently with a seven-year-old friend of mine, who gave me permission to mention our conversation today. I had asked her to meet with me over the summer because I needed her help in thinking through how to talk about God.
My little friend told me that sometimes before she falls asleep she wrestles with the question of whether or not God exists. She then articulated for me the logic she was using: Either such-and-such is true, in which case God exists; or such-and-such is true, in which case God does not exist. It sounded like it was only a matter of time before she would come to a logical conclusion.
As I listened, and as I heard the either/or nature of the logic, I tentatively offered her what I had been thinking about, as another way of framing the question of God’s existence. Then together we played around with ways to say it that would be understandable and useful. I hoped that this alternate way of framing the question would perhaps liberate her from the forced choice she was headed towards.
What I would like to offer to all of you today, on this holiest of holy days, is a similar possibility of liberation.
Liberation from what? Liberation from a deep misunderstanding about God. Liberation from a deep misunderstanding about belief in God, that has been a stumbling block for the Jewish people for a couple of hundred years.
What I have to say today may sound radical to some of you, and it is, in the sense that the word radical means “of or having roots.” This message of liberation is rooted in Jewish tradition going back thousands of years.
I know that many of you are in need of liberation, because I have heard it many times: “Sorry, Rabbi. I don’t believe in God.” Or “Sorry, Rabbi. My teenager just announced that she doesn’t believe in God, and frankly I can’t really argue with her.”
You instinctively say “Sorry, Rabbi” because deep down you believe that to be a good Jew, you ought to believe in God. Right? And you believe that of all people, of course the Rabbi does believe in God. Right?
So here is my first radical statement of liberation to those of you who don’t believe in God: The God that you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either. So you have nothing to apologize for!
Let me summarize the God that many of you don’t believe in. My apologies in advance to those of you who do believe in this God that I am about to describe. And please keep listening, because I want you to hear that there is an alternative – and that in the end, being Jewish is not about what you believe anyway! Being Jewish is not about what you believe.
The God that many of you don’t believe in is the biblical, personal God. This is the God who does things, who listens and responds, who is sort of like a very large, very powerful invisible person, only somehow more so. It is the God who speaks from a burning bush, the God who splits the sea so the Israelites can walk through on dry ground, the God who answers (or perversely doesn’t answer) personal prayers… the God who should have saved us from the Holocaust but didn’t. It is the God that doesn’t make logical sense to a thoughtful older child, and is therefore so often rejected as “not existing” by the time of bat or bar mitzvah. It is the God that leads thoughtful people like you to conclude that religion is naïve, and that only science can be trusted as a map of reality.
But what if I told you that there is an alternative Jewish vision of God? – a vision of God that is compatible with science, critical thinking and rationality, and which yet encompassing our experience of mystery, awe and wonder?
I won’t go into the various historical factors and occurrences that led to the situation we are in, but suffice it to say that a major thread of Jewish tradition was snipped out of the tapestry and almost lost a couple of hundred years ago. Since then, we have been “sold a bill of goods” about God that is missing this precious thread.
So what is God, if not the biblical personal God we learned of as a child?
First of all, “God” isn’t a Jewish word. The primary Jewish word for God is yud-hey-vav-hey, a series of four Hebrew consonants without vowels, which sounds like a breath when you try to say it out loud. YHVH. We say “Adonai” (my Lord) when we come to this word in the text because it is traditionally unpronounceable. This four-letter name is an impossible grammatical form of the verb “to be.” The best possible translation is perhaps “Is-Was-Will Be” all at once.
In the words of my teacher Rabbi Arthur Green, YHVH is “the wholeness of being, the energy that makes for existence, the engine that drives the evolutionary process.” It is the “inner force of existence itself,” “the animating spirit of the whole great evolutionary journey.”*
In other words – recognizing that words can only take us so far – God is Reality with a capital R, unfathomable, mysterious. God is all there is. God is not a being, God is Being with a capital B.
This is an ancient perspective. For example, we sing in the Aleinu prayer: “Ka-katuv b’torato, v’yadat ha-yom v’hashevota el l’vavecha – Ki Adonai hu ha-elohim ba -shamayim mi-ma’al. V’al ha-a’retz mi-tachat – ain ohd.” Which means: “As it is written in the Torah: know this day, and place it on your heart, that YHVH is God in heaven and beyond, on the earth and below – there is nothing else.” Ain ohd – there is nothing else. There it is – hiding in plain sight in our prayerbooks behind a chirpy little tune. And you’ll see it elsewhere, once you start looking.
Some of you may have come to this sense of Oneness through a spiritual experience, or through exploration in Buddhist meditation or yoga or some other non-Western path. My message of liberation to you today is that you don’t need to say “Sorry Rabbi, I’m not religious – I’m spiritual.” Because this belief in and experience of Oneness is not only found in other cultures, but is deeply rooted in Judaism as well. We have it in our own religious “tool kit,” it’s just that it has been buried out of sight for the past few centuries.
I believe that it is also possible to come to this perspective through reason, as well as through study and contemplation.
Now, what about all these WORDS in the prayerbook? Aren’t we supposed to believe them?? Avinu Malkeinu, we sing on the high holidays, which means: Our Father, Our King. Who – or what – do we imagine we are praying to?
There is an expression used by our ancient sages that “the Torah is written in the language of humans” – meaning that it uses ordinary language to express the un-express-able, to point us towards deeper truths.
The Torah was never meant to be read literally. Never. Literalism is a fairly new phenomenon historically, and decidedly un-Jewish. The words of the Torah and our liturgy are all attempts by people who have experienced the reality of God in their lives to point us in that direction using metaphor and poetry. To take their words literally is a big mistake. We believe that our scriptures speak the truth, but not that they are literally true. They are gateways to truth.
At the same time, our tradition has always acknowledged the deeply felt need we have to be in relationship with something greater than ourselves. Out of this need, we have personified God, projecting human attributes so that we can feel ourselves to be in relationship with that which animates us. We say baruch atah Adonai – blessed are you YHVH – not because God is a person, but because we are relational beings.
As with any attempt to talk about God, at some point words become stumbling blocks – so I will stop at this point and shift to my final question: What is the practical significance of all of this? Let me suggest three possibilities:
First, I am on a campaign to advocate that “Do you believe in God?” is not a Jewish question!
There’s a joke about this. When asked “do you believe in God?”, the appropriate response is: Do I believe in God? It depends what you mean by “God,” it depends what you mean by “believe,” and it depends what you mean by “I.” I find this to be very funny, and at the same time very deep and true.
In the end it doesn’t matter what you believe that God is or isn’t. Judaism isn’t about believing, it’s about doing! Jewish spiritual practices – including the recitation of prayers using God language – are all designed to take us somewhere, to alter our consciousness you might say. So if you are not actively “doing Jewish,” you are missing the point.
Second, if everything in existence is a manifestation of that dynamic force which we refer to as God, then it follows that everything in existence is deserving of respect and care. To say that all people are “made in the image of God” is not a statement about physical resemblance – as if God had arms and legs – but is rather pointing towards the truth that we too are manifestations of that dynamic force which we refer to as God – and from this worldview springs the ethical imperative to deal justly and mercifully with all people equally.
And a third practical implication – Young children may have more natural access than we do to the experience of the Oneness of all things. They live awe and wonder and mystery on a daily basis. We in fact have much to learn from them.
How can we support our children – and ourselves – in rejecting a narrow idea of God without mistakenly believing that we are really rejecting God and Judaism? How can we share with our children – as we explore it ourselves – the ways in which our Jewish spiritual tool kit can deepen our awareness of Reality with a capital R?
My conversation about God with my little friend this summer went on for about 20 or 30 minutes, until she got shpilkes [antsy] and wanted to show me her cartwheels and backbends and swimming dives off the park bench where we were sitting. Such conversations are so precious. I hope to have more of them, with all of you. Being alive is such a grand mystery. Let’s explore it together, while we can.
* Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition, Arthur Green, Yale University Press 2010. Art’s teachings were the inspiration for this sermon, and many others.
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