I feel like I’m
hearing a lot about “truth” these days.
There seem to be a lot of people, both here in America and around the
world, who have a very clear idea about what truth is. Whether it’s folks on
the Christian right, or Muslim fundamentalists, or the Catholic hierarchy here
in Massachusetts talking about gay marriage, the one thing that seems
consistent is the argument that there is a clear, definable truth, a truth that
originates with God, and that some people know exactly what that truth is. And precisely because of how most of these
people think about God, their truth always seems to have a reactionary
character. It seems that their truth is held on to most fervently when it acts
as an obstacle to change.
Now, one way to deal
with this problem would be to downplay, or even dispose of, the whole notion of
God. This argument would be that any God-centered notion of truth is bound to
be inherently rigid and reactionary.
But I don’t think we can get rid of God as easily as that—or that we’d
even want to. I’d like to suggest instead that we need to re-approach and
re-appropriate the idea of God, for a few reasons.
I would argue that
the best response to bad ideas about God—ideas that lead to violence or
intolerance or any kind of harm—is not to deny that there is such a thing as
God, or to condemn religion as a source of social evil. Much better, to my mind, would be to foster
ways of thinking about and talking about God that correspond to our experience
of reality, and that match our ideals for how we would like reality to be.
Because if we can actually find language that more accurately and wholesomely
describes this aspect of reality, then we have some power to help shape how people
think and how they act. And what is
religion about, ultimately, if not getting people to think and act in ways that
are wholesome, that are holy?
As a rabbi, it’s
also important to me how we understand God because for so many people this
remains an obstacle to fully connecting with Jewish life and practice. If the only God ideas we encounter feel
untenable, problematic, even harmful, then how can we, why should we
participate in Jewish religious practices?
On a personal level,
it’s important to me to be able to talk about what God is, what this might
mean, because of my own experiences of coming into relationship with something
in the universe that is beyond myself. For me, Jewish and spiritual practice in
general has been about on ongoing process of opening myself to this Power,
orienting myself to the universe in such a way that I can experience blessing
and can receive direction. I experience this Power as something that obligates
me, that calls me to serve. But for me it’s not enough just to experience
this. I want to know—I need to know:
what I am in service to? And how, then,
do I serve?
An important influence and source of
inspiration for me in this inquiry is the writing of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the
founder of Reconstructionist Judaism.
Kaplan made a very helpful distinction when it comes to talking about
God—the distinction between our experience of God or Godliness, and our conception
of God.
Kaplan argued that
religious life begins with “the intuitive experience of cosmic Power upon which
we depend for our existence and self-fulfillment.” For Kaplan, there is a fundamental
human experience of the divine which stems from our interactions with the
awesomeness of the natural world, and from our ongoing search for meaning and
self-fulfillment. However much such an
experience might vary from individual to individual, at its core it is
universal in nature, it is not determined by a people’s cultural or historical
situation.
What does develop
and change, according to Kaplan, is what he called people’s “conception”
of God--the images, the metaphors and language we use to give form and shape to
our encounters with a Power that lies both within and beyond us. And one of the main problems with Judaism in
the modern era, he argued, was that our conception of God has not kept pace
with fundamental changes in how we now understand the world around us.
Kaplan began writing
in the first decades of the 20th century, as a new model of physical
reality was taking hold in the scientific community—the theories of quantum
mechanics. In this model, reality can
no longer be thought of as static. Energy can become matter, and vice versa;
the most elemental building blocks of the universe can act as particles or as
waves. At its most basic level, physical reality is flux, change, flow. To match this shift in our basic
understanding of physical reality, Kaplan argued that thinking about God as a
kind of static, identifiable Supreme Person or Being no longer makes sense,
that instead we need to think about God as a Process or a Power, something more
in line with how we understand the workings of the Universe.
Kaplan, however, was
not that interested in coming up with a coherent metaphysics, an overall theory
to explain reality and God’s place in it.
While he proposed some new ways of thinking about God, he also left huge
gaps that beg for further exploration.
So while I start
with Kaplan, I have turned to those who have drawn out in a more systematic way
some of the implications of thinking about God in this new way. This past year, during my sabbatical, I did
some reading in process theology, a school of thought that has grown out of the
work of the of the 20th century philosophers Alfred North Whitehead
and Charles Hartshorne. In process theology I have discovered ideas that seem
to be a good fit with some very fundamental Jewish teachings. The reality is that Judaism has an
incredibly rich treasure trove of ideas about God, most of which,
unfortunately, remain much less well known than the Cecil B. DeMille version of
the divine. And it is that classic,
problematic vision of God that I’d like to address today.
One of the most
unfortunate ideas about God that entered into Jewish theology some time in the
medieval period is the notion that God never changes. The argument in classic
Christian as well as Jewish theology goes like this: if God can change, it
means God might need to change, which
would mean God can’t be perfect (because if something is already perfect it
would never need to change). God by definition has to be perfect, because how
could a less-than-perfect being be worthy of our worship? So, this argument goes, while the world
changes, and people change, God Godself is somehow beyond change. The notion of
God never changing includes the idea that God is all-knowing. God never
learns—which would be a change in God’s knowledge--because God already knows it
all.
The problem,
Jewishly speaking, is that if we look at the Torah, it appears that God changes
all the time! The God depicted in the Torah is on a continual learning
curve. The stories of Genesis are
wonderful and powerful because we, the reader, learn along with God. What will happen when human beings eat of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden? In the Garden, God learns, as do we, about human
free will. God then learns about people’s
capacity for murder, when Adam and Eve’s first children, Cain and Abel, get
into humanity’s first deadly fight. When human violence and wrongdoing get
totally out of hand, God changes God’s mind, and decides to bring a flood to
wipe out nearly all of Creation. The
God of Genesis is a Being, a Power, in a constant process of evolution, of
learning, of change.
Now, you could make
the argument—and the argument has been made—that the way God is depicted in the
Torah is relatively primitive and simplistic.
This argument would be that the God of the philosophers, the God of
Maimonides for example, is far more sophisticated than anything represented in
the Torah. Maimonides himself
rationalized much of the Torah’s God language by saying that on the literal
level, the Torah spoke in terms that a simple Jew could understand.
But I would argue
quite the opposite—that using a particular kind of literary form, using mythic
language that depicts God in very human terms, the authors of the Torah were in
fact trying to convey some very sophisticated, complex notions of divinity.
For me, the most
important of those ideas is revealed in the third chapter of the book of
Exodus, when Moses encounters God at the burning bush. Moses, who’s been roaming around the desert
as a shepherd, is suddenly addressed by a divine being that tells him to go
back to Egypt and liberate the Israelites from slavery. Moses asks, who should I say sent me? What is Your name?
The answer comes in
three words: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh. The most
literal meaning of those words is: I
will be that I will be. I can thing of
no less static or unchanging a name for God than this: I will be that I will be.
The God that redeems, that liberates the Jews from Egypt, is all about
Becoming. This sense of process, of becoming, is encapsulated in the name of
God that we are familiar with in our liturgy—Y-H-V-H, a name we no longer know
how to pronounce, and instead call “Adonai.”
As Rabbi Arthur Green writes:
“This name of God [Y-H-W-H] is the starting point of all Jewish
theology. It is to be read as an impossible construction of the verb “to be”…Y-H-W-H is a verb that has been artificially
arrested in motion and made to function as a noun…Try to say anything
definitional about Y-H-W-H and it dashes off and becomes a verb again. This
elusiveness is underscored by the fact that all the letters that make up this
name served in ancient Hebrew interchangeably as consonants and as vowels.
Really they are mere vowels, mere breath. There is nothing hard or defined in
their sound. The name of that which is most eternal and unchanging in the
universe is also that which is wiped away as readily as a passing breath . . .” (Seek
My Face, Speak My Name, p. 19)
These two aspects of
YHVH also make up our experience of reality—the sense of continuity in time,
the reality of the past which flows into and shapes the present—along with that
which is constantly changing, coming into being, changing from moment to
moment.
A fundamental notion
of the early rabbis is the idea that Creation is actively sustained and brought
into being anew, each moment and each day, by the Creative Life of the
universe. In the morning liturgy we
bless ha-m’chadesh b’chol yom tamid
maasei bereshit—the One who makes
new every day the work of Creation.
In contrast to the unchanging God of the philosophers, this dynamic
Power is part of an ongoing process of creativity and change, is the cosmic
Source of newness in the world. In the words of John Cobb and David Griffin,
two contemporary process theologians:
“It is God who, by confronting the world with unrealized opportunities,
opens up a space for freedom and self-creativity.” God in this understanding is the ultimate Power of creativity,
the potentiality of all potentialities.
Yod-Hay-Vav-Hay is the Jewish name for this power, this process, that
urges us towards ever-more complex and integrated levels of existence.
So this is the first
important idea about God that I’d like us to consider. If God changes, in fact if God is the
ultimate potentiality of all potentialities—then change is Godly.
Perfection does not lie in achieving some final state of completeness.
In fact, we could argue that such a state is impossible. Change, development, evolution, are not just
natural aspects of material reality—they
are its most Godly aspects. As Kaplan argued, “creativity, or the
continuous emergence of aspects of life not prepared for or determined by the
past, constitutes the most divine phase
of reality...For God is the Creator, and that which seems impossible today
[God] may bring to birth tomorrow.” (Meaning Of God, pp. 62, 67)
It is this
foundational Jewish idea about God that gives us hope in the possibility of
real transformation. One key aspect of religious faith is the faith that the
universe is constructed in such a way as to support our efforts towards change
and growth, that part of our Godly task here on earth is the very act of partnership
in the process of becoming.
Another problematic
notion about God is the idea that God is “all-powerful,” meaning that,
theoretically, God can do whatever God wants. The kind of power that this
picture of God assumes is coercive power, the power to control other beings
completely. In such a scenario, God has
all the power, and nothing and no one else, in either the natural or human
realms, can exert meaningful power, because if God is indeed all-powerful, than
God can nullify any action taken by
another.
It is interesting to
reflect on why certain religious traditions have come to understand Godly power
as a power that admits of no mistakes, that can do whatever it wants. Perhaps
originally this came from an anxiety about the relative lack of control that we
human beings have in certain realms. As
we have been painfully reminded in recent weeks, human beings can influence the
forces of nature, but we can’t ultimately control those forces. We can’t control hurricanes or tsunamis; we
can’t control when we are born, or how many years we are given to live. In the
face of such human powerlessness, many religious traditions have imagined a
divine Being that is indeed in total control—a cosmic Power that just might, if
we implore it in the right way, make conditions more favorable for us.
Yet by imagining a
Being that decrees each and every event in the natural realm and in each human
life, people have in essence created an image of God that, if translated to the
human plane, we would call a tyrant, a dictator who can control everything in
the universe. But why? Why would we want to call that kind of power
the most Godly kind of power? By
projecting our own human urge for control, our own unhealthy fantasies of
absolute power onto God, we have made holy an idea that is the opposite of
holy.
Now I have no doubt
that the Source of Life, that which brought this universe into being, is indeed
an awesome Power, something certainly beyond my imagining. And our religious
tradition teaches that it is appropriate at times to be apprehensive before
such a Power, and to recognize our relative smallness in the cosmic context of
things. The early rabbis of the Mishnah taught that when we witness awesome,
potentially life-threatening natural events, like earthquakes and hurricanes,
we are to recite, “Blessed is the One whose power and might fill the universe”
(Brachot 9:2). The High Holyday liturgy
reminds us that “all of humanity is founded on dust…like vessels of clay, they
can break, like grass they wither, like flowers they fade, like shadows they
pass, like clouds, they become empty.”
Yet even with this
awareness, we need not imagine the divine Source of Being as a Power that
controls each and every detail of creation. We do not need to imagine a God
that cannot allow for the reality of chance and imperfection in the evolution
of the cosmos. If creativity and change
are real, if the divine process unfolding within and around us entails
ever-more complex levels of conscious life, then that process of necessity must
allow for the not-always-orderly complexity of life as it is. This is no way
makes it less powerful, less awesome.
When it comes to the
issue of human free will, and the relation of human power to God’s power, the
Torah takes very seriously the notion that power is not the monopoly of the
Holy One. From the very beginning of the book of Genesis, God does not, cannot,
control what human beings do. Human power and human choice are real. The Torah begins with a choice—Adam and
Eve’s choice to eat from the Tree of knowledge of good and evil—and the Torah
ends with a choice: Moses’ challenge to
the Israelites to choose life, to choose to do good. For the Torah, choice is real, human freedom is real, and God
spends most of the Five Books of Moses dealing with the messy reality of human
beings’ power to choose and to act.
What I have learned
from my reading of process theology is that accepting the reality of human
freedom does not mean that we need to
think of God as somehow powerless or irrelevant in the realm of human action.
Rather, people have made the mistake of attributing to God only one kind of
power—coercive power; a complete power over. In the terminology of Process Theology, we
should instead imagine God in relation to human beings as exercising
“persuasive power.”
Again, I’ll return
to the narrative of Moses at the burning bush.
Moses learns two things about God in this encounter. One is that which I discussed earlier—God as
Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, as the
transformative process of Becoming. But
Moses also learns in this moment that YHVH is a power that responds to
suffering—a power that hears the cries of the Israelites in slavery, and then
acts to begin a process of liberation.
YHVH urges Moses to become God’s partner in the task of redeeming this
slave people. Moses is given a choice: to stay an anonymous shepherd, or to
take on leadership as a prophet and community leader. Moses resists God’s demands mightily, but in the end he returns
to Egypt and begins the long process of liberating the Israelites.
This Torah story is
a metaphor for God exercising persuasive, not coercive, power. In this
understanding, God is that which offers an ideal toward which we strive, is the
Power which urges us to respond to suffering, to seek our own and other’s
fulfillment. In the language of the
prophets, God implants within us and in the world around us the Godly forces of
tzedek, justice, and chesed, lovingkindness. This
manifestation of Godly power encourages us to do the good, and offers direction
if we seek to learn how to follow it.
It cannot make us act for the
good; as we know all too well, people can always choose to do evil. But what our tradition teaches is that there
will be consequences for defying the Godly path that inheres in our
natures.
On the individual
level, our souls suffer when we consistently seek to do harm. On the level of community and society, there
are disastrous consequences when the forces of greed, of human arrogance, of
fear and small-mindedness prevail. The basic Jewish teaching is that when we
choose life, when we choose the path of justice and love, the Godly power of
the universe is on our side. In the words, again, of Mordecai Kaplan: “This is the faith that reality, the
cosmos…is so constituted that it both urges us on and helps us to achieve our
salvation, provided, of course, we learn
to know and understand enough about that reality to be able to conform to its
demands.” (Future of the American Jew,
p. 182)
It is in the context
of this understanding of Godly “persuasive power” that I would suggest a
Reconstructionist understanding of the traditional notion of “mitzvah,” holy
obligation. With a process
understanding of God, we do not have to choose between a fundamentalist
understanding of Godly commands on the one hand, and a total moral relativism
on the other. But how can we preserve a sense of obligation, of something being
demanded of us as Jews, as human beings, once we reject the idea of the
all-powerful, commanding God?
Traditional Judaism
understands “halakha,” Jewish ritual and ethical law, as a set of commandments
revealed by God, and interpreted over time by those with rabbinic authority. In
contrast, a Reconstructionist understanding is that God does not reveal Godself
to us, rather we discover God. We discover how God works and what God
wants of us in our exploration of the laws of the natural universe, and in the
development of our moral and spiritual sensibility. Our spiritual and ethical goal, then, is “to know and understand
enough” about the reality of the cosmos “to be able to conform to its demands.”
Kaplan would argue,
and I would agree with him, that Creation is not random. The existence of human
beings and other conscious creatures indicates a universe that contains within
it the source of and the potential for our continued growth and well-being. But
our tradition is very clear that we are not granted those blessings without a
deep level of commitment on our part. To fully realize ourselves as human
beings, and to preserve the very viability of life on this planet—we are indeed
“commanded” on some level. We need a
discipline, a system of practice, that will help align us with that which
contributes to life and to blessing. To conform to the demands of the cosmos,
we are obligated to create the kinds of social structures necessary to allow
all of humanity to live as fully and as sustainably as possible.
I want to finish
with some thoughts about the implications of what it might mean to embrace the
ideas about God that I have discussed this morning.
If we accept the
notion of God as a Power, a Process, that embodies change and transformation,
then it is wrong—perhaps even blasphemous—to for any religious community to
claim that they know “God’s word,” and that it is set and unchanging for all
time. If God is the Source of all
potentiality and change, always achieving new levels of possibility, how in the
world could our human understanding of “God’s word” ever be final? This is perhaps the worst kind of
idolatry—the human arrogance of knowing “the truth,” once and for all. It is
this kind of certainty that motivates those who oppress in the name of God. And
it is no coincidence that those who are most certain—whether they are Jewish or
Christian or Muslim or Hindu—also tend to be the most authoritarian, the most
liable to impose a coercive power that they associate with their understanding
of God.
On the level of our
daily lives, if we come to an understanding of God as the Power that embodies
and exemplifies creativity, change, and ongoing transformation, then we can
embrace as Godly the reality of uncertainty, risk, and chance in our own
spiritual journeys. We can take seriously the deepest teaching of the story of
the Exodus: that real freedom is like a journey into the wilderness—a journey
which promises encounter with the divine and new teachings about how to live a
full human life, but that also inherently brings risk of conflict and
suffering.
Often in our lives
we do our utmost to exert control. We tend to believe that if we could just
control as much of our lives as possible, we will be less likely to suffer,
less likely to lose that which we care about.
But the reality is that our desire for control more often increases our
suffering—because we find ourselves fighting the reality of our lives. We
become unable to live within that reality, when we really don’t have any other
choice. On some level, our desire for
control is the root of idolatry, because what are idols if not human-made
artifacts that can be manipulated by their creators? To allow for glimpses of Godliness in our lives, to open
ourselves to an ongoing awareness of God’s presence in this world—to do this,
we need to learn to live with the blessing of uncertainty.
To bless uncertainty
is to understand and accept the limits of our own human power in the face of
the awesome mysteries of Creation. It
is to accept the fragility and temporary nature of our own lives as a part of
God’s creation. It is to accept the
very real risks of our human freedom, to acknowledge the reality of
suffering—our own suffering and the suffering of others. Out of that experience
comes compassion, and an understanding of God’s nature as El chanun v’rachum, the gracious and compassionate One.
To bless uncertainty
is, in the prophet Micah’s words, to “walk modestly with God,” as we seek to do
justice and to love goodness. We may
feel very deeply our commitments to creating holy community, to building a just
society—but how do we act on those commitments with the right mix of conviction
and humility? How do we maintain an
attitude of willingness to learn, an openness to an ongoing unfolding of Truth,
when we are trying to act on deeply held values and ideals? To “walk in modesty
with God” means that we are always learning how we are to bring justice
and love into our lives, into our communities and our societies. To embrace uncertainty does not mean to make
all truth relative, to throw morality out the window, to say that anything goes. It is, rather, to bring a very traditional
sort of humility to the project of understanding what is asked of us by the
universe.
I’d like to close
with a final blessing—the bracha achrona,
quite literally. This blessing, which
is said at the end of eating a simple meal, includes these words: Blessed are
you, Adonai, who creates many and various living beings with their hisronot, their deficiencies. As Jews,
we bless our hisronot, our lacks, our
needs—those empty spaces that are not yet filled. We bless our uncertainties.
Let us bless those spaces waiting to be
filled with the Godliness within us and around us, the Godliness that is
waiting to become manifest through our words and our deeds.
Rosh Hashanah 5766