Tell Me About the God You Don’t Believe In©
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| Photo by Calvin Craig on Unsplash |
Click Here for the Video of the Sermon
This year marks my 13th year as rabbi of Congregation Shaarei Kodesh. Sometimes, it seems like ages ago, sometimes, just like yesterday. There are some moments I’ve experienced here that stick with me though; some rebbes in our congregation that continue to teach me even though you spoke these words long ago.
Today, I recall one situation, the first Shiva I led at Shaarei Kodesh. One of our families lost a sibling; a relatively young woman who left three young children behind. On the last day of Shiva, as we stepped out of the home to begin our walk around the block, the walk that mourner’s take at the end of Shiva, the woman’s sibling said, “Rabbi, how could God have allowed this to happen?” I blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “I don’t know.” She answered, “Rabbi, I know it’s your first shiva, but you really should have a better answer.”
Honestly, I am glad I didn’t have the answer. Shiva houses are not the place to opine on the nature of God. The most important thing you can do at a shiva is to be a comforting presence for others, to be silent and listen rather than fill the air with the events of the day or theological diatribes. But shiva eventually ends, and we must walk back into the world. Eventually, we have to search for answers.
When I am asked that question, especially after a great tragedy, I answer the question with a question: can tell me about the God you don’t believe in? I cannot take credit for this witty response. It came from one of the greatest teachers of Jewish theology in recent memory: Rabbi Neil Gilman of blessed memory. He began our theology class with the question, can you tell me about the God you don’t believe in?
I bring this up today for several reasons. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year, but it is also a day when we ponder life’s most challenging mysteries. On Yom Kippur, we experience our death day. Like the person on their death bed, we say the Vidui/confessional prayer. When we confront our deaths, we also confront our view of God, but the God that we think we believe in, the God of our childhood, doesn’t really work for us now. The all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing God - it’s a God that we want so desperately to believe in because it helps us make sense of the chaos of the world. But that God doesn’t really work for some of the experiences we have.
Think back to the first thing you question you others when you hear someone was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer: “Were they a smoker? They must have been, only way it makes sense.”
When you hear someone got Covid: "Were they careful?”
When someone died of Covid: “Were the elderly? Did they have pre-existing conditions?”
All of these questions we ask ourselves are ways of coping with these age-old questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does one person die while another lives? What control do I have in this world?
And if I can find those answers, then maybe I’ll be protected.
This is the Unetaneh Tokef prayer in a nutshell; trying to understand the unfathomable. Are our fates sealed, or can we change them?
An all-powerful, all -nowing and all-good God would not give a person who never smoked in their lives, who took care of their bodies, get cancer. A just and good God would not let righteous people suffer.
And we think that Judaism requires us to believe in that God, and if we don’t, well, we just aren’t believers. For those of us who experienced these tragedies, as all of us will in our lives, we cope in different ways. We either change our worldview to fit into the box we think Judaism has for these answers. God is in full control; everything happens for a reason.
Or we reject God and Judaism altogether.
Or we just say, now’s not the right time, which might be true, and we file it away for a time when we are ready…but we are never ready, are we?
We want answers, and when they don’t come easily, we think that there are no answers. So we distract ourselves with everything we can. And here’s the thing - we can still be good Jews that pass on Judaism to the next generation. We might even go to shul every Shabbat, but we come to speak to Goldstein, not God. The modern state of Israel owes its existence to young Jews who rejected God, not the Ultra-Orthodox who kept the view of the unchanging God.
I will never forget the first grade I received in my theology class in rabbinical school. Rabbi Gillman asked us to explain how God could allow the Tsunami in 2005 which killed over 200,000 people in Indonesia. I wrote a beautiful paper on how humans were to blame, not God. Had Indonesia had a better system to address income inequality, 200,000 people would not be living in shacks so close to the beach. I thought it was brilliant. When I got the paper back, he gave me a big F with a comment, “You let God off the hook. Do it over.”
I really let myself off the hook by avoiding an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: my view of God.
Yom Kippur asks us to dig deeper. As we are all, in a sense, on a different spiritual level, we don’t need the distractions of this world today, we can ponder life’s mysteries.
We are not the first generation to experience the heartbreak of the world, and ask, where is God?
There was once a rabbi in the Talmud, he was one of the smartest rabbis of the second Temple period, the rabbis who literally wrote the Mishnah and the Talmud. Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuya was one of Rabbi Akiva’s star pupils, but the Talmud (Masechet Hagigah) tells a story of when his life changed and his name. Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya was a rarity in those days - he was both a Torah scholar and a scholar of Greek philosophy and logic.
Rabbi Milton Steinberg of blessed memory, a Conservative rabbi who led Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, wrote about this rabbi and the other rabbis of the Talmud in his book, As A Driven Leaf, a must-read for everyone. In the book, he re-tells a story of when Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuya lost his faith, and gained another name, Acher, the other. The story is about the little-known mitzvah of Shiluach HaKein, the sending away of the mother bird in order to get her eggs. This mitzvah has a distinction that only one other mitzvah has - if you do this, you will live a long life on the land that God promised you.
The rabbis are learning Torah in the field, debating about this obscure mitzvah and its reward. Suddenly, they notice a man say to a boy, “get all the eggs, my son, but be careful to send the mother bird away.” The boy follows his father's instructions and climbs the tree.
One of the rabbis says, “That boy will love long - he’s observing two mitzvoth at once, honor your father and mother, and sending the mother bird away, and they both have the same reward, a long life!”
A few moments they hear the fluttering of the wings of the bird, and then a scream so loud it shook the world. The rabbis rush to the scene, and they see the father holding his lifeless son. The father looks at them in utter shock: “Rabbis, is my son alive.” One of the rabbis checks, and says, “Baruch Dayan HaEmet - Blessed by the Righteous Judge,” the words of blessing we say after a death.
Eventually, the rabbis leave the father as he takes his now lifeless son home. The rabbis start their debate again, but Rabbi Elisha cannot continue.
One of the rabbis exclaims, “He will have his length of days in the world to come. God is just. It is hard to understand but let us remember that there is a better world, in which it is all day, a day that stretches for eternity.”
But something changed in Elisha - the last bit of belief in God that he had ebbed away. As the rabbis droned on and on, he silenced them.
With a terrible quiet in his voice he said, “It is all a lie. There is no reward. There is no judge. There is no judgment. For there is no God.”
Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuya left the Jewish world at that moment. He was given the name Acher, the other. To me, Rabbi Elisha’s sin was not questioning God, but walking away from God altogether.
The rabbis blamed Acher for leading others astray, but, perhaps the rabbis also have some share of the blame. They let him walk away; they did not help him struggle with the nature of God. They did not allow him to return.
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who shared the horrors of Auschwitz with his beautiful prose, wrote about an experience he had with his fellow prisoners. From this experience, he wrote a play called the Trial of God. They set up a Beit Din, three prisoners who served as the judges. Night after night, they called up witnesses for the prosecution of God, and defense of God. Finally, the Beit Din gave their verdict: God is guilty as charged.
And then, there was a silence. The head of the Beit Din in the barrack rose and said, “and now, let us pray Maariv, the evening service.”
Wiesel taught us all that there is no sin in question God, in struggling with God and the world God created; no sin in doubting God. The sin is walking away from God and community.
Today, on Yom Kippur, we think that we are on trial, but God is also on trial.
Reb Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev used to say that the most meaningful prayer and dialogue with God he ever heard was when he heard a poor, simple tailor in his town say the following words in front of the Holy Ark before Yom Kippur . . . "Dear God, I know that I have sinned in the past year. There were times when I spoke badly of others. There were times when I did not fix and mend a suit or dress as well as I could have. There were times I may have even shortchanged a customer . . . I have sinned. But look at what you have done in the past year, dear Lord. You have caused such grief. You have made so many sick. So many became widows and widowers because of you. So many suffered sleepless nights because of your actions. So, I’ll make a deal with you, God. You forgive me, and I'll forgive you!"
Today is about doubt and fear, but it is also about turning back to God and struggling with God. Today, we begin our journey toward God by challenging God.
This year, I will be teaching a theology class called, Tell Me About The God You Don’t Believe In. During our class, we will struggle with these issues - If God is all good, why does God allow evil to occur? How can we reconcile the Big Bang and the creation story in the Bible? But I also want to hear your questions, and together, we will try and find some answers. Together, we will struggle, and together, we will find the balance between faith and reason.
At the end of the book, Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuya is walking with his former student, Rabbi Meir, who tragically lost all of his children to plague, on Yom Kippur. They were riding horses, and Elisha notices that are coming to the city limit. From that point on, if Rabbi Meir kept riding his horse, he would be in violation of Jewish law. Elisha had no such qualms, but he warned his former student and friend, “Here is the Sabbath limit you must not go farther. It is time for you to turn back.”
Rabbi Meir, longing to bring his teacher back, seizes upon his words: “Master, you, too. Even as it is written, ‘Turn back, turn back, my wayward children.’”
Acher looks back at him and says, “It is too late, how could I live where I am so hated? I am shut off from returning as though a voice from heaven has proclaimed, “All may repent, except for Elisha Ben Abuya. No, I cannot return.”
But Acher was wrong. We can always turn back, we can always return.
To Rabbi Steinberg, Rabbi Elisha Ben Abuya was a stand-in for all of his congregants who were hurt by the God they thought they believed in. They were hurt much that they wrote that God out of their story.
Communities like Congregation Shaarei Kodesh are not for the staunch believers who are so sure of the nature of God that they have no questions or doubts. Together, we can fill the room with our questions, our doubts, our hopes and our dreams. Together, we can feel the presence of God as we comfort mourners, as we celebrate simchas, and we can feel the presence of God when we challenge God together.
This last year and a half has been like none other during my 13 years. We had no choice but to turn people away from physically entering our sanctuary, and now, we cannot all physically be together. But we have an obligation to return, BECAUSE of these once in a generation experiences.
Our community plays a vital role; we welcome everyone in, especially the doubters, especially those who are angry and hurt by God. We must listen, study, and struggle together.
Some of us think we are the only ones stuck in a dark room with no way out. We are scared to talk about our doubts lest we lose our place. But our tradition teaches otherwise. All of us doubt, all of us struggle, it is inevitable, but loneliness is a choice.
Now is the time to return from exile.
To struggle, to doubt, to learn, and to heal.
We can always turn back, we can always return.
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