Bringing God and Judsiam into the 21st Century

On this Yom Kippur, we come here for a very special and mystical process, what the philosopher Martin Buber calls, the mysterious meeting of human repentance and Divine mercy. There is a dance – a partnership, and if so, there must be a partner. Who, exactly, is our partner and how do we regard that partner we call God? For us, two generations after the Holocaust, this is a large and difficult question. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach thought that perhaps the fascination with eastern religions in this country had to do with our anger at God over the Holocaust. He suggested that the Eastern religions were not similarly tainted.

The beginning of an answer to who our partner is must necessarily start from the information we have been given in the Torah. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain kills his brother. If God were the vengeful, angry God some ascribe to the Bible, we would expect God to kill Cain. But that’s not what happens. God protects him and sends Cain off to learn. Then in the story of Noah, when corruption grew unbearable on the earth, we would expect that a vengeful, angry God’s reaction to human greed and rapaciousness would be anger. But the Torah says, “God had heartfelt sadness.”

To bring our conception of God into the 21st Century, we have to go beyond the anthropo-morphism and personification of the early Torah, the book of Genesis, and jump to the next book, Exodus, in which God says to Moses, by my name, the four letter name of God, yud, hei, vav, hei, the patriarchs did not know me. This name is a conjugation of the verb To Be, and it includes the letters for I was, I am, I will be: past, present, and future. God’s name means being. It means existence; and when God answers Moses’ question, what is your name, God says, I shall be is my name, accentuating the future. This means that God is the unfolding of life, the continuing creativity of each day. This is a way of understanding Divinity that is more modern. Rabbi David Cooper wrote a book titled, God is a Verb, and Rabbi Zalman Schacter Shalomi has written about God-ing, using God as a verb, not a noun; and this is in fact the way we first encounter God in the Torah: in the process of creating.

Some have asked, is God inside of us or outside? The answer necessarily is: both, or even: however you choose to regard the question. We all live within life; within being and existence. It is both within and without. How we contact the Divine Presence determines the way we regard it; and Judaism has always seen God as being paradoxically, within everything and above everything: immanent and transcendent. The prophet Jeremiah wrote, “I will put my law in their inward parts and in their heart I will write it, and I will be their God.” The book of Deuteronomy also puts it very tenderly: “for it is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart to do it.” What these quotations tell us is that Law, teaching: Torah, is in us and God is in us, and also outside of us. We live in the matrix of it all, which is how this great Creating Oneness operates. Judaism gives us vital information about what works: why and how it works, how our actions affect the outcomes we observe in our lives and in the greater society: why not taking care of others causes us not to be taken care of. Why killing others causes our own dying and suffering. It is important for us if this vital information is to be operative in our lives, that we re-interpret God and Torah in our generation and for our modern understandings so that it can speak to us.

The concepts of reward and punishment are also ripe for re-interpretation. The God of punishment is an older world view. The Talmud repeatedly says, “The Torah speaks in the language of men.” (Avodah Zarah 27a). It speaks in the language of people at the time it was written, for their understanding, in that society. The Torah explains reward and punishment by saying, toward the end of Leviticus, “the same shall be done to you.” The stories in the book of Genesis impart this information over and over again. Abraham, the one who is a blessing, is blessed. Isaac, the one who makes peace, experiences tranquility. Jacob, the one who tricks, is tricked. The ones who separate, Rebecca and later Judah, are separated from those they love. Is there someone throwing lighting bolds at us, from the sky? Is life random? The Torah tells us that life is not random. There is not an angry, vengeful God in the sky waiting to punish us. Quite the opposite. We dig a hole and walk forward, into it. And there is Divine heartfelt sadness.

Did the Divine have to instruct us or make a covenant with us? Of course not. Why did the Source of Life do this: to give us this precious knowledge of what works and what does not work in our lives? Perhaps, as the sages tell us, because we are loved. Perhaps so that existence can flow in a positive direction, so things can become continually better. Perhaps, because we, as part of God, influence the contentment of the whole. Buber says that the covenantal relationship is based on destiny. As God said, it is all about the future. It is all about human knowledge and human choice. Since we are made of the Divine energy-matter continuum, we can bring our modern growing Universalism to the understanding of God and Judaism. It is difficult to be attracted to a Divinity we fear: one that is always disapproving of us or punishing us. But life, creativity, being: these ways of regarding Divinity that expand us and give us hope. Why does it matter what our conception of God is? Because we are asked to love God. This helps us make better choices. We can’t love a God we fear. But we can love life. We can love goodness; and in order to identify with that goodness, we have to conceive of a God we can love, who is not angry at us, who is on our side, rooting for us to make loving, caring choices: a Divine Parent, Source of all goodness in the Universe who we want to please. How do we act in consonance with life, how do we promote life?

These are skills we can acquire; skills that attract us, so that we want to acquire them. This information is actually in the Torah. This is a modern way to interact with Judaism. Life is good. The elevation of the spirit is good. Embracing the universality of the totality of Life is good. Judaism is an authentic spiritual path that shows us how to extend our innate goodness and expand our acceptance of all life. In this final day of turning, may we be open to the great goodness and love that we experience within and without: the love we express and the love we receive. May we turn to that goodness, as Jeremiah said, in our inward parts, in our hearts. May it guide us all year long, allowing us to use our powers of loving and choosing to promote life, promote goodness, and create blessing and happiness in the world.