Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 30, 2022 18:06:45 GMT
On Erev Rosh Hashanah, we saw how returning to community meant returning not just to a physical space but to a different way of viewing ourselves – as part of a larger whole of the community of Israel. It meant stepping out from the shadow of individualism that particularly became essential during the pandemic to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and thinking now especially about those who are not in our immediate orbit. On Rosh Hashanah morning, we reflected on how asking God to renew our days as of old was not an expression of desire to return to the past but rather to return to being constantly renewed as Judaism has always been renewed. We considered how we can either be passive in that renewal or active, directing it and the entire community as we head inevitably toward redemption.
Hashiveinu Adonai eleicha v’nashuvah, chadeish yameinu k’kedem – bring us back to You, Eternal God, and we shall return, renew our days as of old [Lam. 5:21] Where on Rosh Hashanah we considered the second clause in that verse – renew our days as of old – our focus now shifts to the first – “bring us back to You, Eternal God, and we shall return.” What does it mean to be brought back to God? Teshuvah is fundamentally a return to God, which is why the prophet Hosea says, "Come, let us return to the Eternal God.” [Hos. 14:2]
Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote [Man is Not Alone, p.282] that a pious person is possessed by their awareness of the presence and nearness of God. He says that, “Everywhere and at all time, they live as in God’s sight, whether they remain heedful of God’s proximity or not. They feel embraced by God’s mercy as by a vast encircling space. Awareness of God is as close to them as the throbbing of their own heart, often deep and calm but at times overwhelming, intoxicating, setting the soul afire.” He talks of the convergence with God as being “unavoidable, inescapable; like air in space, it is always being breathed in, even though one is not always aware of continuous respiration.” Heschel was lucky. A lot of Jewish theologians seem lucky. Heschel was enveloped in the presence of God, which is why he could say that “God is either of no importance, or supremely important.” To Heschel, God was supremely important.
Why is it that Heschel could so easily meet with God, could so easily hear God’s call, but it’s so difficult for so many of us? How was it that Heschel could say that “the true meaning of existence is disclosed in moments of living in the presence of God” but for most of us the living presence of God is totally illusive? To answer this question, I turn to one of the two people I have known who I am sure met God – Rabbi Lionel Blue, of blessed memory. In an extraordinary reading that will be in the Yom Kippur morning service, Rabbi Blue says that meeting God can be very simple and, if it is not, then maybe the mistake is ours, maybe meeting God is difficult because we’re not being our honest selves to God, or because our prayers have not been genuine. Perhaps, he says, it’s because we do actually meet God but don’t recognize God, or maybe we don’t like what God says to us so we pretend we never met God instead. Perhaps we are frightened where God may lead us. It’s a very profound reading that really speaks of how Lionel carried himself and lived with God.
But how could we not recognize God? By reading the Torah portion every week, and by studying Mishnah and Talmud, by praying liturgy that is based on early Rabbinic metaphors, even if it is embellished with contemporary readings, Jewish theology advances very slowly. The God whom most Jews know is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy - a judgmental, Deuteronomistic, anthropomorphic, male Deity who is awesome and simultaneously loving, terrifying and also forgiving. They know God to be intrusive, invasive – so we learn to “Know what is above you – an eye that sees, an ear that hears and that all your deeds are written in a book.” [Avot 2:1] That God is sometimes patient and loving but also sometimes fickle – demanding animal sacrifice in the Torah, then saying through the Prophets that animal sacrifice without good deeds is repugnant, and then saying in Rabbinic literature that all God wants is the offering of the heart in prayer and not offerings of animals at all. This is the God Who wants us to live ethically but Who also tests us cruelly. For example, this is the God Who demands that Abraham offer up his son on Mount Moriah as a test [Gen. 22:2], Who allows the Opposing Angel to ruin the life of a perfectly righteous individual just to see if he will end up cursing God [the Book of Job]. This is the God Who wipes out most of the human race in a Flood [Gen. 6-9], Who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah [Gen. 19], Who lays waste to Egypt so that the Egyptians or the Hebrew will appreciate God’s power [Ex. 7:5, Ex. 29:46], Who commands the Israelites to wipe out the other nations [Deut. 7, 20]. Of course it’s difficult to meet such a God. Who, indeed, would even want to meet such a God? It may be almost impossible to recognize God because so many of the stories told about God form a barrier to any kind of meaningful encounter.
Rabbi Blue suggests that maybe one of the reasons that we find it difficult to meet God is because our prayers have not been our own. And of course, that’s true. Who among us has the spiritual fortitude to pray from Kol Nidre to Shacharit to Musaf to Minchah to Yizkor to Ne’ilah without referring to traditional liturgy? The problem becomes when we rely totally on the liturgy to become the source of our prayer, as opposed to being the inspiration for our prayer. Prayer is not the words on the page, it’s what happens to us when we recite the words on the page or when we choose not to. Rabbi Blue also says that maybe we hear what God says to us but don’t like it because we are too comfortable and don’t want to change – I have some sympathy with that position, which will lead into my sermon on Kol Nidre focusing on what it means to be called.
I think that I disagree with Rabbi Blue about one thing – I don’t think meeting God is simple at all. For him, I could believe it, but not for the rest of us. In fact, I think we have to dismantle three millennia of often misogynistic, violent, racist, intolerant theological models before we can come close to even recognizing God. If it’s so difficult and also so important, how then do we return to God?
To me, the answer is in the story of Jacob who wrestles with God in the Book of Genesis [Gen. 32:22-32]. It is God who first wrestles with Jacob, but he then wrestles back. Just as God calls to us and wrestles with who we have become or have failed to become, so we then wrestle back. How do we wrestle? With questions like… Are you really the God of the Bible? Are you really the God of the Talmud? Are you really the God of the High Holy Day prayerbook? We wrestle back because that’s the Jewish tradition to argue with God – Abraham does it regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah [Gen. 18], and Moses also argues with God regarding whether or not the Israelite people should be wiped out after the apostasy of the Golden Calf [Gen. 32:11-14]. In both of those instances, the argument against God is the same – essentially, “I thought You were better than that.”
So, if both Abraham and Moses can make that demand, why can’t we? Why can’t we take God as God appears to us in the prayer book and say exactly the same? That’s not specifically a challenge to God but to the model of God that is presented to us. Nonetheless, why can’t we say “You seem to exemplify the best and worst of humanity – of transcending the self and working toward perfecting the world while being embedded in human pettiness and misogynistic and nationalistic hierarchy, and I need You to be better than that”? In the 2020 Pew Survey, we learned that while 56% of all US adults believe in the Biblical God, only 26% of American Jews do. Interestingly, while 33% of American adults believe in another higher power, the percentage of American Jews who believe in the same was 50%. I see this as a good thing. It means that American Jews are more likely to have a theology that transcends the Bible. And although the idea of returning to God is a Biblical idea, that doesn’t mean that we have to return to the God of the Bible or of the Talmud. We could return to the perfect yet distant God of Maimonides, to the unlimited God of the Kabbalists, to the pantheistic God of Spinoza, to the immanent panentheistic God of Chasidism, to the transnatural God of Kaplan, to the God as the source of wonder of Heschel, to the Eternal Thou Who can be encountered of Buber.
To be clear, there is value in every single theological model in the past, even if I seem critical of more ancient ones. The God of the Bible, for example, regrets that way God acted in the past [Genesis 6:6-7, I Samuel 15:11], and God is open to learning and acting differently to how God originally intended to act [Examples include, amongst others, Exodus 32:14, I Chronicles 21:15, Psalm 106:45, Jeremiah 18:8, 26:13, Joel 2:13, Amos 7:3]. The God of the Talmud is more universal than how God is represented in the Bible, connected simultaneously to heaven and earth, wanting prayer and not animal sacrifices. Returning to God, then, cannot mean returning to God as presented on the page. Returning to God must mean wrestling with God in order to come to a loving relationship with God.
Returning to the themes and metaphors of the High Holy Days affords us a wonderful opportunity. It introduces us to new metaphors and allows us to struggle in new, exciting directions. We spend longer in prayer services than during the rest of the year, giving us more time than ever to process the metaphors presented in the liturgy in a communal setting. When we struggle with finding God through the words of the page, we can even take our eyes away from the page and look in the face of others around us and in them see the face of God. After all, we were created b’tzelem Elohim [Genesis 1:27], in the image of God, not physically but metaphorically, so we can spend some time reflecting on what that means for us. We could even go so far as to see how we are masked and that could thereby help us reflect on the early Rabbinic notion of hester panim, the hiding of God’s face.
This Shabbat, and this High Holy Day season, then, let us work out what teshuvah as a return to God might mean to us. Let us wrestle with the way that God has been represented in differing times in our tradition and wrestle with ourselves, so that we might come to recognize, encounter and truly return to God. And let us say, Amen.
Hashiveinu Adonai eleicha v’nashuvah, chadeish yameinu k’kedem – bring us back to You, Eternal God, and we shall return, renew our days as of old [Lam. 5:21] Where on Rosh Hashanah we considered the second clause in that verse – renew our days as of old – our focus now shifts to the first – “bring us back to You, Eternal God, and we shall return.” What does it mean to be brought back to God? Teshuvah is fundamentally a return to God, which is why the prophet Hosea says, "Come, let us return to the Eternal God.” [Hos. 14:2]
Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote [Man is Not Alone, p.282] that a pious person is possessed by their awareness of the presence and nearness of God. He says that, “Everywhere and at all time, they live as in God’s sight, whether they remain heedful of God’s proximity or not. They feel embraced by God’s mercy as by a vast encircling space. Awareness of God is as close to them as the throbbing of their own heart, often deep and calm but at times overwhelming, intoxicating, setting the soul afire.” He talks of the convergence with God as being “unavoidable, inescapable; like air in space, it is always being breathed in, even though one is not always aware of continuous respiration.” Heschel was lucky. A lot of Jewish theologians seem lucky. Heschel was enveloped in the presence of God, which is why he could say that “God is either of no importance, or supremely important.” To Heschel, God was supremely important.
Why is it that Heschel could so easily meet with God, could so easily hear God’s call, but it’s so difficult for so many of us? How was it that Heschel could say that “the true meaning of existence is disclosed in moments of living in the presence of God” but for most of us the living presence of God is totally illusive? To answer this question, I turn to one of the two people I have known who I am sure met God – Rabbi Lionel Blue, of blessed memory. In an extraordinary reading that will be in the Yom Kippur morning service, Rabbi Blue says that meeting God can be very simple and, if it is not, then maybe the mistake is ours, maybe meeting God is difficult because we’re not being our honest selves to God, or because our prayers have not been genuine. Perhaps, he says, it’s because we do actually meet God but don’t recognize God, or maybe we don’t like what God says to us so we pretend we never met God instead. Perhaps we are frightened where God may lead us. It’s a very profound reading that really speaks of how Lionel carried himself and lived with God.
But how could we not recognize God? By reading the Torah portion every week, and by studying Mishnah and Talmud, by praying liturgy that is based on early Rabbinic metaphors, even if it is embellished with contemporary readings, Jewish theology advances very slowly. The God whom most Jews know is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy - a judgmental, Deuteronomistic, anthropomorphic, male Deity who is awesome and simultaneously loving, terrifying and also forgiving. They know God to be intrusive, invasive – so we learn to “Know what is above you – an eye that sees, an ear that hears and that all your deeds are written in a book.” [Avot 2:1] That God is sometimes patient and loving but also sometimes fickle – demanding animal sacrifice in the Torah, then saying through the Prophets that animal sacrifice without good deeds is repugnant, and then saying in Rabbinic literature that all God wants is the offering of the heart in prayer and not offerings of animals at all. This is the God Who wants us to live ethically but Who also tests us cruelly. For example, this is the God Who demands that Abraham offer up his son on Mount Moriah as a test [Gen. 22:2], Who allows the Opposing Angel to ruin the life of a perfectly righteous individual just to see if he will end up cursing God [the Book of Job]. This is the God Who wipes out most of the human race in a Flood [Gen. 6-9], Who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah [Gen. 19], Who lays waste to Egypt so that the Egyptians or the Hebrew will appreciate God’s power [Ex. 7:5, Ex. 29:46], Who commands the Israelites to wipe out the other nations [Deut. 7, 20]. Of course it’s difficult to meet such a God. Who, indeed, would even want to meet such a God? It may be almost impossible to recognize God because so many of the stories told about God form a barrier to any kind of meaningful encounter.
Rabbi Blue suggests that maybe one of the reasons that we find it difficult to meet God is because our prayers have not been our own. And of course, that’s true. Who among us has the spiritual fortitude to pray from Kol Nidre to Shacharit to Musaf to Minchah to Yizkor to Ne’ilah without referring to traditional liturgy? The problem becomes when we rely totally on the liturgy to become the source of our prayer, as opposed to being the inspiration for our prayer. Prayer is not the words on the page, it’s what happens to us when we recite the words on the page or when we choose not to. Rabbi Blue also says that maybe we hear what God says to us but don’t like it because we are too comfortable and don’t want to change – I have some sympathy with that position, which will lead into my sermon on Kol Nidre focusing on what it means to be called.
I think that I disagree with Rabbi Blue about one thing – I don’t think meeting God is simple at all. For him, I could believe it, but not for the rest of us. In fact, I think we have to dismantle three millennia of often misogynistic, violent, racist, intolerant theological models before we can come close to even recognizing God. If it’s so difficult and also so important, how then do we return to God?
To me, the answer is in the story of Jacob who wrestles with God in the Book of Genesis [Gen. 32:22-32]. It is God who first wrestles with Jacob, but he then wrestles back. Just as God calls to us and wrestles with who we have become or have failed to become, so we then wrestle back. How do we wrestle? With questions like… Are you really the God of the Bible? Are you really the God of the Talmud? Are you really the God of the High Holy Day prayerbook? We wrestle back because that’s the Jewish tradition to argue with God – Abraham does it regarding the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah [Gen. 18], and Moses also argues with God regarding whether or not the Israelite people should be wiped out after the apostasy of the Golden Calf [Gen. 32:11-14]. In both of those instances, the argument against God is the same – essentially, “I thought You were better than that.”
So, if both Abraham and Moses can make that demand, why can’t we? Why can’t we take God as God appears to us in the prayer book and say exactly the same? That’s not specifically a challenge to God but to the model of God that is presented to us. Nonetheless, why can’t we say “You seem to exemplify the best and worst of humanity – of transcending the self and working toward perfecting the world while being embedded in human pettiness and misogynistic and nationalistic hierarchy, and I need You to be better than that”? In the 2020 Pew Survey, we learned that while 56% of all US adults believe in the Biblical God, only 26% of American Jews do. Interestingly, while 33% of American adults believe in another higher power, the percentage of American Jews who believe in the same was 50%. I see this as a good thing. It means that American Jews are more likely to have a theology that transcends the Bible. And although the idea of returning to God is a Biblical idea, that doesn’t mean that we have to return to the God of the Bible or of the Talmud. We could return to the perfect yet distant God of Maimonides, to the unlimited God of the Kabbalists, to the pantheistic God of Spinoza, to the immanent panentheistic God of Chasidism, to the transnatural God of Kaplan, to the God as the source of wonder of Heschel, to the Eternal Thou Who can be encountered of Buber.
To be clear, there is value in every single theological model in the past, even if I seem critical of more ancient ones. The God of the Bible, for example, regrets that way God acted in the past [Genesis 6:6-7, I Samuel 15:11], and God is open to learning and acting differently to how God originally intended to act [Examples include, amongst others, Exodus 32:14, I Chronicles 21:15, Psalm 106:45, Jeremiah 18:8, 26:13, Joel 2:13, Amos 7:3]. The God of the Talmud is more universal than how God is represented in the Bible, connected simultaneously to heaven and earth, wanting prayer and not animal sacrifices. Returning to God, then, cannot mean returning to God as presented on the page. Returning to God must mean wrestling with God in order to come to a loving relationship with God.
Returning to the themes and metaphors of the High Holy Days affords us a wonderful opportunity. It introduces us to new metaphors and allows us to struggle in new, exciting directions. We spend longer in prayer services than during the rest of the year, giving us more time than ever to process the metaphors presented in the liturgy in a communal setting. When we struggle with finding God through the words of the page, we can even take our eyes away from the page and look in the face of others around us and in them see the face of God. After all, we were created b’tzelem Elohim [Genesis 1:27], in the image of God, not physically but metaphorically, so we can spend some time reflecting on what that means for us. We could even go so far as to see how we are masked and that could thereby help us reflect on the early Rabbinic notion of hester panim, the hiding of God’s face.
This Shabbat, and this High Holy Day season, then, let us work out what teshuvah as a return to God might mean to us. Let us wrestle with the way that God has been represented in differing times in our tradition and wrestle with ourselves, so that we might come to recognize, encounter and truly return to God. And let us say, Amen.