What I Should Have Said Over Lunch: 15 Reflections About God and Life

Rosh Hashanah Morning Sermon
September 21, 2017 – 1 Tishri, 5778

One day last winter, a wonderful couple in our congregation invited me to their home for Shabbat lunch after services on Saturday morning. I won’t tell you who they are, but let it suffice to say that they were wonderful hosts, and that they’re in this room right now. For our purposes here, we’ll call them Bob and Ellen.

Bob and Ellen welcomed me warmly into their home that day, which was good, because I had just spent the morning teaching 7th graders, and leading services, and schmoozing with more people than I could count, and I was tired. Having a nice, quiet lunch with these kind people was going to be really nice.

Walking into Bob and Ellen’s house, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person they had invited for lunch that day. Bill and Sarah had already gotten there, as had Karen and John. I was glad to see them all. Bill, Sarah, Karen and John weren’t their real names, of course. I won’t tell you what their real names were. I’ll just say that they were all wonderful people, and that most of them are in this room right now.

Ellen had prepared a magnificent spread for lunch – there was fish, and chicken, and potatoes, and soft warm rolls, and almost every kind of salad you could imagine. Ellen, as many of you in this room know first-hand, is a very good cook. We all filled up our plates and moved into the dining room, where Bob and Ellen were sure to seat me at the place of honour – right at the head of the table – with Bill and Sarah to my left, John and Karen to my right, and Bob and Ellen down at the other end.

At first, everything went fine. We talked a little about the weather, they asked me how I liked Calgary, we schmoozed a little about Temple – it was all good. But then, John spoke up. “You don’t see me at Temple very often,” he said, “because I don’t believe in God. I like being Jewish, of course, but I’m more of a cultural Jew. My parents were Jewish, their parents were Jewish, I care about what happens in Israel. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t know how anyone can really believe all that stuff about God. I mean, really? There’s a being up there in heaven somewhere controlling everything that happens here on earth? And that being created the world in six days? And that great, awesome creator really cares about what I do on Saturdays, and whether I eat bacon, and who I choose to marry? Really?”

Then, Karen spoke up from across the table. “I believe in God,” she said, “only I don’t believe that God is an old man up in the clouds. God is a power within yourself. God is that part of me that loves my kids, and finds joy in having my morning coffee, and is kind to my friends. God’s not an old man in the clouds, God is part of the human spirit.”

From down at the other end of the table, Bob spoke up. “I guess I’m more traditional than you two,” he said. “I do believe in God, and I believe that God created the world. After all, a day back then wasn’t necessarily just 24 hours long, and you don’t have to throw out science to believe in the bible’s creation story. ‘Let there be light’? That’s just a dramatic way of describing the Big Bang. Same with the parting of the Red Sea. I read an article describing how there are tidal pools over there that could have created what the bible calls a miracle.”

“I don’t know about the bible,” said Sarah, but I just can’t help but think that there’s something out there. After all, could the things that I can see, feel, touch and hear be the sum total of all existence? There must be something more…something greater than me…something out there that makes the world tick the way it does. “

And that’s when it happened. With a genuinely inquisitive look on her face, and with kindness in her voice, Ellen turned to me and uttered these words. “Rabbi,” she said, “What do you think?”

It was a perfectly legitimate question, of course. And in fact, some might have even said that, in that context, not to have asked the rabbi to chime in would have been downright impolite.

What did I think? I remember exactly what I thought. What I thought was, “This fish is delicious; I’m tired; it’s Shabbat; I’m a rabbi…the last thing I want to do is to think about God!”

What I said was…well, to tell you the truth, I don’t really remember what I said. I mumbled something, and all I remember is that it sounded utterly unintelligible, if not downright stupid. And I remember that the people sitting around that table all nodded their heads very politely, and that someone said “Hmmm….that’s interesting,” and that that response was far kinder than my lame answer to their very good question deserved.

Since that Shabbat afternoon, that conversation has weighed heavily upon me. The people around that table asked their rabbi a very good question, and they deserved far more than I gave them. (It’s just that the fish really was so good!)

So today, at long last, Bob, Ellen, Bill, Sarah, John, and Karen, I’d like to answer your question. And the rest of you who are here, if you’re so inclined, you can listen in, too.

Reflecting upon it, I realize that my thoughts about God don’t fall into any neat organization, so instead of trying to give you a systematic theology, I’ll instead share some random observations about God, which I hope will give you some insight into my thoughts about this important question. There are 15 of them in all, and some of them might contradict one another. I’m afraid you’ll have to live with that.

1. Part of the reason that I didn’t have a ready-made answer to the question about my God-belief is that I’m Jewish, and Judaism isn’t a very theological religion.

A non-theological religion? It almost sounds like an oxymoron, but that’s what Judaism is. In Judaism, we don’t tend to talk about God very much, we just sort of assume that God exists, and then quickly move on to what we’re supposed to do. After all, we’ve got to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and do no less than bring the messiah. We don’t have time to sit around and talk about God very much.

Other religions are far more theological. When people study to be Christian priests or ministers, their seminaries usually insist that they take dozens of courses on theology. Do you know how many theology classes I was required to take during my five years of rabbinical school? One – just one – and many of us tried to finagle our way out of it.

We Jews don’t talk much about God, but perhaps we should. Let’s face it – maybe in this area, there’s something we can learn from our Christian brothers and sisters.

2. Many scholars, particularly during the Middle Ages, set out to prove the existence of God. With all due respect to these great sages, I don’t think that what they set out to do is really possible. I could use scientific fact and logical reasoning to prove the existence of the neutron to you, but proving the existence of God doesn’t work like that. With God, it’s different. If you don’t believe that God exists, then I doubt there’s anything I can say that will get you to change your mind. And the same is true if you do believe in God.

Does love exist? Yes. Does despair exist? Of course. How about hope, and fear, and bliss? They exist, too. Can I prove the existence of any of those things? No, I can’t. You just kind of have to know – to have felt those things or to have seen those things – to be truly persuaded that they exist. Real theology is the same – it is based on human experience rather than on logical deduction.

3. What? You say that you don’t believe in God? Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. My guess is that I don’t believe in that God, either.

4. When people say that they don’t believe in God, what they usually reject is the idea of an old man in the clouds, pointing his finger and making everything turn out just so. But that’s a childhood image of God, which, as I said, is one that I don’t accept, either. Might there be other images of God that we could and should embrace? I think there could be.

5. On second thought, no, there aren’t any such images. Remember, Judaism forbids us from making any images of God. God, after all, is infinite, and any image of God that we can get our brains around makes God finite. Our limited human brains just can’t do infinity very well. The moment we can conceive of something, we limit it, so that something that we’re conceiving of can’t be God.

The great, 12th century philosopher, Maimonides, pointed out that God is infinite, so we can never really know what God is. The thing is, he continued, that we talk about God all the time. “God is great,” we say. “God is compassionate. God is just.” Maimonides suggested that words must function very differently when we use them to describe God than when we use them in other contexts, because words try to tell us what something is, but we can’t know what God is. With God, Maimonides suggested, words must mean the negation of their opposites, but not the words themselves.

The negation of their opposites? Huh?

What he was saying is that when we say “God is good,” we really don’t know what that means, because as finite humans we don’t really understand God’s goodness. When we say “God is good,” therefore, all we can really take from that is that God is not bad. Knowledge of what God’s goodness is will always elude us. Similarly “God is great,” can only really mean, “God is not small.” The true nature of God’s greatness is beyond our capacity to know.

In layman’s terms, what Maimonides was really saying, I think, is that if you’re really religious, you’ll acknowledge that God is so great as to make God almost impossible for us to know. True piety makes a person into a reverent agnostic.

6. Judaism teaches us to experience God in time, rather than in space. The traditional Jewish question is not “Where is God?” but “When is God?” Some of the “whens” when I’ve experienced God are: at the births of my kids, seeing rainbows, standing before the ark with bar and bat mitzvah kids, singing “Ode to Joy” in the shower…in German, seeing you gather at shiva minyans, Shabbat naps, telling a good joke, teaching Torah, watching Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine, and saying “I do” while standing next to Caron under the chuppah. That’s ten times when I’ve felt God’s presence; there have been many more.

7. I think that God created you just the way you are for a reason – the challenge is to figure out what that reason is. God doesn’t make many mistakes; He’s made a few, but most were in the 1970s. And even if you were alive back then, those mistakes probably didn’t have anything to do with you. Unless you wore a leisure suit.

8. In Judaism, as I said, we don’t talk about God very much. We do, however talk to God all the time. We say, Baruch Atah Adonai. Blessed are You, Adonai. If you’re a religious doubter, you might want to try it sometime. No, don’t turn your brain off, just put your questions on hold for a moment. Just temporarily, put your doubts aside, and talk to God, anyway. You might be surprised at what happens.

9. Some people are quick to point at the Holocaust and other such horrors when speaking about God. “You see,” they argue, “God must not exist. If God did exist, then atrocities such as these wouldn’t have happened.” It’s interesting to me that these people take the existence of evil to be proof that God doesn’t exist, but they usually don’t take the existence of good to be proof that God does exist. It seems to me that if you’re going to take the Holocaust as proof that God doesn’t exist, the least you should do is be fair to God and take things like kindness and compassion and courage as proof that God does exist.

Or perhaps you should say, instead, that the existence of good and evil don’t have anything to do with whether God exists. Maybe God is powerful, but not all-powerful. Maybe God created a world with good things in it, but hasn’t yet been able to perfect it.

None of us is perfect, but we still exist. Perhaps the same is true of God.

I don’t blame God for the Holocaust – I blame the Nazis.

10. God also takes a hit for evil caused by nature, as well as evil caused by humans. How can we believe in God, some people argue, when there are children who die of leukemia, or when the lives of good men and women are cut short by stroke or horrible disease, or when hurricane flood waters ravage the lives of people in Houston and Florida, and elsewhere?

Here too, I just don’t get the question. It assumes that for God to exist, the world has to be a perfect place. Maybe God is present at every moment, inviting us to work as partners in building a world that is good and kind, one that reduces suffering every day. Maybe, like a loving parent, God can’t remove our pain, but instead can help us learn to deal with it, and be there for us when pain rears its ugly head. Maybe God isn’t in the cancer or the hurricanes, but is rather in the tears we shed for our losses, in the awesome power our world has to heal, in the grand, dark, terrifying mystery of it all.

11. In Judaism, one of the most commonly used names of God is one we don’t know how to pronounce. In Hebrew, it’s spelled yod-heh-vav-hey, and it’s kind of like God’s first name. We don’t say it out loud, because we’re not on a first name basis with God. Instead, when we come across it in prayer or scripture, we use a replacement word for it – Adonai. What we do know is that yod-heh-vav-hey comes from the Hebrew root meaning “to be.” In this sense, God is the root of being, the foundation of existence. God is that which gives meaning to all that is.

12. Another name we use for God is Elohim, which means judge. God is the source of all that is just and fair in the world.

13. We use other names for God in Judaism, too. We call God, Hamakom – the place, referring to God’s omnipresence. We call God Harachaman, the Merciful One – it comes from a word meaning womb…God’s mothering presence. We call God, Avinu Malkeinu, our Father, Our King, even though such gender specific language rightly makes us uncomfortable. We refer to God as Shechina – the feminine, intimate, indwelling presence of the divine. All of these terms give us a hint of something that we can glimpse but never fully understand – God as the ultimate in justice, compassion, parental love, and all the rest.

14. We live on a little planet spinning its way through space, rotating around a little star called the sun and swirling its way through our galaxy and the vast reaches of space. Most of us will be here for only a century or less – hardly a blip in time in the ultimate scheme of things. Headstones will mark our burial places, but in time they too will crumble to dust, and within a few centuries, most of us will be forgotten. And yet, I can’t help but believe that ultimately there is some meaning to this existence of ours, that ultimately, the things I do in this tiny span of my life have some transcendent meaning, and that that meaning is somehow rooted in the existence of a being who cares about me and who cares about what I do.

Ultimately, I just can’t bring myself to believe in atheism.

15. So, yes, I believe that God exists, and that we see God in those transcendent moments of life. And I believe that God cares about what I do – that God wants me to be kind, and just, and compassionate. I believe that God wants me to cherish life deeply, and that one way to do that is through ritual – rituals like our festivals, and Shabbat, and hanging mezuzahs on my doorpost and giving regularly to tzedakah. I believe these things because I believe in God as the root of my being and the ultimate purpose of my existence. I believe that life isn’t supposed to just be lived, it’s supposed to be holy. And that has everything to do with God.

Bob, Ellen, Bill, Sarah, John, Karen, I’m sorry. I was tired that day, and the fish was really good, and you caught me off guard. This answer is far more long-winded than the one I gave you over lunch, and probably far more than you wanted. It’s not complete, but I hope it begins to respond to your very good question. Let’s continue to struggle with it, and perhaps, this year, we can continue to take some steps toward deeper understanding, and a better life for us all.

Shanah Tovah