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Chavurat Lamdeinu

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God: A Re-Introduction

Rosh Hashanah AM, 5767.Day One
Sept. 23, 2006
Chavurat Lamdeinu, Madison NJ
Rabbi Ruth Gais God: A Re-Introduction

The pre-Socratic Philosopher, Xenophanes, wrote in the 6th C., B.C.E., “But if cattle
or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men
do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own- horses
like horses, cattle like cattle.”
This might sound like the comment of a sceptic. But I say it is the remark of a deeply
religious thinker who recognizes the limitations of our ability to understand the
nature of God and points out one of many pitfalls we encounter in our attempts to
deal with God.
It seems to me that whenever times are tough, God gets an especially bad rap.
Certainly these are not the best of time, nor the worst of times, but I confess to
moments of deep despair recently, even fear, and I know from what I’ve heard that I’
m not alone. There are plenty of things to worry about: global warming, pollution,
terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the precarious state of affairs in Israel and the mid-
east, unworthy leaders, wars, strange viruses, the plight of the refugees in Darfur,
the huge and growing huger gap between the haves and have- nots in the US and the
world – just to name a few on the macro –level. And in our own lives, we all have our
own individual sorrows, fears and disappointments. It’s enough to give us plenty of
sleepless nights; it’s enough to make people heap blame for what’s wrong in our
world upon God and religion.
So I’m taking it upon myself for the next few minutes to put in a few good words for
God, and perhaps for religion as well, to reacquaint us with God.
God’s in trouble these days, because we often haven’t thought enough how we
understand God.
For example, it’s before the beginning of the big game. The coach calls the players
together. They all huddle together in a tight circle. Mouths are dry, some of the team
may feel like throwing up; then, individually, or maybe in a group, they start to pray.
“Dear God, let us win.” Of course, across the field, odds are that the other team is
probably feeling just as sick to their stomachs and is also praying to God, just as
fervently, for its own victory.
The bumper stickers on the cars and vans of the patriotic pious read, “God bless
America.” Are we asking God to curse the rest of the world? Do we really believe in
such a partisan God? What’s our explanation for God not answering the prayer of
one team ? They didn’t deserve to win? They were bad? Why do only Americans
deserve God’s blessing? Are we so much better than the rest of the world?
This is a naïve understanding of the nature of God that has a long history going all
the way to a time when our God was just Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, and others of their clan. Our God was a god like Ba’al of the Canaanites, or
Kemosh, chief god of the Moabites, or all of the patron deities of every city or state in
the ancient pagan world. This way of thinking of God has at its core polytheism, the
belief in many gods, or at best henotheism, the belief that one god among the many
gods is supreme. But we do profess to be monotheists- so why are we using this
kind of language in the 21st Century?
YOU’D THINK WE”D OUTGROWN THIS KIND OF THINKING, BUT CLEARLY WE HAVEN’T.
And that’s funny, because Jewish theology long ago moved away from this concept
of God. The teachings of the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the rest represent a
huge leap towards understanding God.
When the ancient Israelites were threatened with destruction from the huge military
machines of ancient Assyria and Babylonia in the 8th and 7th centuries, B.C.E. they
sought reasons for the disaster that was happening. The answer, given time and
again by the prophets of the North and the South, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
was that they had forsaken the God of Israel, turned to idol worship and broken the
eternal covenant. They had caused their own destruction by their wanton behavior.
Their neglect of the poor, the hungry, was seen as a deliberate breach of the
covenant, a form of neglect of God as well. Assyria and Babylon could attack and be
successful only because they were God’s agents of destruction, and therefore
carrying out God’s will, not theirs. Their own gods did not exist.
God, as understood by the prophets, is not just the God of the Israelites. God is the
lord and master of history, controlling the destiny not just of Israel, but of Assyria,
Babylon, and the rest of the world. There are no other Gods.
As Second Isaiah reveals: There is no god beside Me, no God exists beside me….
For I am God, there is none else. Ci ani el v’ein od.” (Isa. 46: 21)
God is no longer the God of one place; God goes into exile with the Israelites and
eventually, the prophets declare, God will be acknowledged as more than the God of
the Jews. First Isaiah foresees this, saying: “On that day…The Lord of Hosts will
bless them, saying, Blessed be My people Egypt, My handiwork Assyria, and Israel
my heritage.” (Isa. 19:24) We repeat this in our liturgy at the end of the Aleinu: “ Ve n’
emar, v’hayah Adonai l’melech al col ha aretz.Ba yom ha-hu, y’hiyeh Adonai echad u’
shmo echad” A partisan God is not possible. There is one God for all mankind.
The God that emerges from the prophetic teachings is no longer Yahweh, but is now
God, with a very capital G, the ultimate sovereign over all mankind and all the world,
This leads us to right where we are during the High Holy Days, praying to Avinu
Malkeinu, God the father, God the king, and Xenophanes’ problem of the inadequacy
of human language to describe God. Maimonides, almost 2000 years later,
understood this problem very well when he stated that the only way we can describe
God is by saying what God isn’t. Once we start to describe God in our image, male-
female, good –bad, loving –punishing, we quickly run the risk of falling into the
partisan God trap fallacy and all other problems of a relationship that seems like a
human relationship.
Our liturgy, in particular the High Holiday liturgy, fosters this, emphasizing constantly
our anthropomorphizing God: we pray to God to inscribe us in the Book of Life, we
pray to God to judge us mercifully and to forgive us. We supplicate God the father,
the shepherd, the gardener. We do all this because we are human and need to
connect with God and have only human words to do this.
The ancient rabbis were no different and it is from them that we get our vocabulary
of prayer. What they wanted and what we want, after all, is communication. We pray
but to whom, to what and to what end? Monotheism is really hard. To worship an
invisible God requires great faith. We are commanded, for example, to love God, but
what does that mean and how do we do it? Is it like loving another human, a parent,
a lover? I think the answer is yes, it is LIKE that, because it is only in those terms
that we can love God. But as Ezekiel understood when he tried to describe his vision
of God in the enthroned God, what he saw was always prefaced by the Hebrew
preposition “c- like.” Or the word “d’mut- likeness:” –
“Above the expanse over their heads was the likeness of a throne, in appearance
like sapphire –c’mareh even shapir – and on top, upon this likeness of a throne,
there was the likeness of a human form d’mut c’mareh adam. From what appeared
as his loins up, I saw a gleam as of amber- what looked like a fire encased in a
frame; and from what appeared as his loins down, I saw what looked like fire. There
was a radiance all about him. Like the appearance of the bow which shines in the
clouds on a day of rain, such was the appearance of the surrounding radiance. This
was the appearance of the likeness of the Presence of the Lord.”
The translation is clumsy but so is the Hebrew. Language fails. All languages fail.
Language is inadequate, as Maimonides and Xenophanes know very well.
If we can’t even describe what God looks like, how can we presume to know what
God wants and does not want?
The thing is, we want to know what God wants. That’s what religion tries to do, to
give us a system of behavior that that religion believes is the correct path towards
the Divine. Humanizing God makes it easier for us to talk to God, but, as we’ve seen,
has its dangers as well.
If we reject the notion of a God who is like us, a God created in our image, what do
we do? We acknowledge this truth: that God is other, kadosh, in its original meaning
of separate. God is what we aren’t- or so it would seem. “Shma Yisroel, Adonai
eloheinu, Adonai echad” = God is one- God is alone, unique – we are overcome with
awe. But another translation: God is one – God is oneness, unity – a greater and
deeper truth and-we are part of that unity.
In the book of Genesis, Jacob flees his brother Esau, stops for the night somewhere
and has a vision of God. He wakes and says, “Surely Adonai is in this place and I did
not know it!” In translation we miss a significant peculiarity in the Hebrew. The
Hebrew reads: “Achen yesh Adonai bamakom hazeh ve anochi lo yadati.” The
peculiarity is the addition of the personal pronoun “anochi- I” which is not needed in
this sentence since the verb “yadati” means “I did know.” This additional pronoun
adds emphasis – “surely Adonai is in this place and I did not know it.” The Biblical
text wants us to understand something important. It wants us to understand that
what kept Jacob from knowing that God was in that place was Jacob’s “anochi-
ness,” his “I-ness,” his ego, his identity as Jacob, we might even say. In other
words, it’s Jacob that keeps Jacob from God. It’s Ruth, my separateness, my unique
Ruth-ness, that keeps Ruth from God, it’s you that keeps you from God.
The wonderful mystery is that having a relationship with God demands giving up the
boundary of one’s self. God, in Jewish mystical terms, is the ein sof – that which
has no limits. The otherness of God is really not so and the way to access God’s
unity is to give up our own otherness, our own borders, our anochi-ness. What
keeps us apart is our insistence on being apart, being separate. God is the ultimate
other, but we are a part of that other. In order to be a part of God, we have to
relinquish our separateness. We have to give up the part of us that seems to be
what makes each of us unique, separate, in order to enter into God’s one-ness. This
is very hard to do, because we are most of us very fond of ourselves. But this is the
true end of all religious endeavor..
Making God in our image is a tool for us with our limited language and limited
intellect to use to make the concept of the infinite divine oneness that is God
intelligible. We can perhaps find an entry point into understanding God’s oneness,
when we think of God as a father, a mother, a king, a lover, a friend, When we truly
pour out our hearts to God, the mother, friend, child with focus and intent, we allow
ourselves a moment of unity with our Source. That is, when we allow ourselves to
disappear, even if for an instant, we become one with the Divine. Then we are not
separated any longer by the artificial constraints of language and form. Mother,
father, child, God all are blended and all are one. From that perhaps fleeting moment
of yichud, unity, comes strength, comes compassion, comes justice, comes our
desire to make the world good, comes love.
The Jewish seeker of God does not go into the wilderness to sit alone on a pillar to
find God. The Jewish seeker finds that moment of unity in a variety of ways: through
prayer, through study, through acts of tzedakah and loving kindess – all ways to take
us away from our “anochi-ness,” “Surely Adonai is in this place and I did not know
it.”
“Surely Adonai is in this place and I did not know it.”

k.y.r.