The beloved Rebbe Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev once called upon all the people in his shtetl to assemble in the town square the next day at noon. He had, he said, an announcement of the greatest importance to make. He called upon the merchants to close their shops, parents to bring their infants, and everyone, with no exceptions, to be there to hear the announcement.
“What could it be?” the people wondered. Was a pogrom imminent? Perhaps a new tax? Was the Rebbe going to leave? Was he seriously ill? Did he know the time when the Messiah would come, and was he going to reveal it?
At noon, the entire community was present with no exceptions, and everyone waited with bated breath to hear what the Rebbe would announce. At last, he appeared and said simply, “There is a God.”
A couple of features of Jewish life should be apparent from this story, rendered by Rabbi Harold Kushner. One is that we often think that it is only our generation, modern generations, for whom the notion of doubt is a central feature of Jewish life; that in previous generations they were all pious, they all had their humble sense of faith, and that only in today’s world do we question our relationship to God.
And yet this story could not exist if doubt wasn’t present in the minds of the townsfolk, if they didn’t have their own ambivalence about God’s existence. They must have, or, at the very least, on some level, their relationship to the divine must have been struggling, which is what yielded the Rebbe’s declaration.
Or alternatively, Rebbe Levi Yitzhak himself had been through this period of ambivalence, this period of distance, and he was reminding himself, simply, there is a God — a clarifying notion he hoped would be of inspiration to his community.
I recognize that will not resonate with everyone. As this story suggests, our people have been wrestling with God, with who and what God is, if anything, since our ancestor Jacob first wrestled with that mysterious figure who appeared to him in the night — and the mysterious figure who subsequently blessed Jacob with the name Yisrael, which means “the one who wrestles with God,” wrestles with the Divine.
The story resonates for me as someone who tries to place God as my north star, who tries to follow the words of the psalm which says שִׁוִּ֬יתִי יְהֹוָ֣ה לְנֶגְדִּ֣י תָמִ֑יד: “I have set God’s presence before me always;” and yet who still needs the simplicity of Rebbe Levi Yitzhak’s reminder; who still gets distracted by all the wiles of the world and sometimes just needs that simple message — there is a God, whatever that means — and all that flows from it.
So this sermon, recognizing this community’s diversity when it comes to theology and spirituality, recognizing that some of us feel fully distant from notions of the divine, from God, and fully accepting and embracing of that diversity as a source of goodness in this community — this sermon is about giving ourselves permission, if even for only these ten days of t’shuvah, the ten days of return during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to explore what is at the heart of each and every page of our mahzor, this book our ancestors have bequeathed to us, inviting us to plumb what is at the heart of those pages, that heart being God.
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ, our story begins: In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep, a wind from God swept over the water. And God said, יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר, let there be light. And there was light.
So it begins: our recognition of the universe’s capacity for darkness, for chaos, for mystery, while teaching that God created it — and imbued it with the blessings of order, of goodness, of light. God saw the light — vayar Elohim et ha’or, ki tov, that it was good; the created world is, fundamentally, good.
Still, we can all see that, as the commentary to Etz Hayim notes, “it is also an unpredictable world, a world capable of growth and change and surprise, of love and pain, of glory and tragedy,” not simply sameness in perpetuity.
The commentary goes on to say that the world is this way in part because on the sixth day God created אָדָ֛ם, humanity, us — human beings who have the freedom to choose how we will act. That is one of the themes of these Yamim Nora’im, these Days of Awe: that we have choice, agency, freedom — and that our choices create new realities, bring about new circumstances in the world — sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, sometimes, we’re not sure.
And these Days of Awe also teach that God is not indifferent to the human experience, indifferent to the new circumstances we bring about, even though it sometimes feels that way.
At the beginning of the next book of the Torah, Sh’mot, Exodus, it says וַיֵּאָנְח֧וּ בְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֛ל מִן־הָעֲבֹדָ֖ה וַיִּזְעָ֑קוּ: The people of Israel were groaning under Egyptian bondage and cried out. And their cry for help from bondage rose up to God. וַיִּשְׁמַ֥ע אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶת־נַאֲקָתָ֑ם: God heard their moaning, וַיִּזְכֹּ֤ר אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־בְּרִית֔וֹ: and God remembered God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. This is Yom HaZikaron, after all. Another name for Rosh Hashanah is Yom HaZikaron, the day of remembrance. God, according to Jewish tradition, is not only the transcendent power, ordering the universe, but disconnected from our lives; God is present, hearing us, remembering us, present with us — in each minute turn of the heart we make.
So, if God is present with us, why did it have to come to “remembering,” we wonder? If God is so close and intimately experiencing us, why did it take our “crying out” from pain and bondage for God to take heed of our plight, to remember the covenant and to send Moses to free us?
And what about all the cries God didn’t hear, the babies tossed in the Nile, in that generation and this one? Or all the cries that God heard and seemingly ignored? What about them?
That short handful of questions has probably driven more people from religion than any other; more relationships to God have foundered on the shoals of that question than on any other: if there is a God who is good and just, why is there pain and suffering?
The imperfection in our world is mirrored in the imperfection of the answers I am able to offer you. We can search far and wide, in tradition after tradition, secular and religious, and never find a perfectly satisfying response to these questions. This is the season of repentance, and in that spirit, let me say that I am genuinely sorry that I don’t have a resolution to offer you on the question of why there is brokenness in the world.
And yet the absence of a definitive resolution need not mean the end of our quest, or the disengagement from our story. For me, it is the continuous engagement in that quest, in our story, that helps me experience some healing, some wholeness in the midst of brokenness.
One answer in Jewish tradition, of which there are many, recognizes this brokenness.
This midrash, from Rabbi Hayyim ben Yoseph Vital of Tzfat, teaches that at the beginning of time, when God began the creation of the universe, God recognized that the light God would create was so powerful that it had the capacity to eclipse, to envelop, to obliterate even, all of existence. So when God said, yehi or, “Let there be light,” God encased this light in vessels, casks. God sent forth these vessels to the
place of the universe like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light.
But when these vessels arrived at their destination, in the space of creation… they shattered. And the universe resulted from the combination of ingredients: shard of vessel, spark of light, shard of vessel, spark of light. Sparks of light were scattered throughout the newly created universe, like sand, like seeds, like stars, covered by shards of vessels.
This is the universe we now know today — eons later, sparks of light hidden in broken shards, the brokenness we experience in the world.
As the teaching goes, this is why humanity was created. To gather the sparks no matter where they are hidden.
I love this midrash because it gives us a sense of purpose while also explaining the universe’s brokenness.
And yet, questions remain: If God is omnipotent, all-powerful, why couldn’t God just make stronger vessels? Why did they have to break?
Judaism recognizes the inherently unanswerable quality to some of these questions in another story of Jewish tradition, the story of Job. Job is a pious man whose family dies in a cosmic bet between God and ha’satan, the mysterious adversary. Heartbroken and furious, Job demands to know why, in the face of his piety, this injustice has been wrought. God responds with questions of God’s own, according to the text: “Have you ever commanded the day to break?” God says to Job, “Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been disclosed to you? Have you seen the gates of deep darkness?”
There are hints, sometimes explicit statements, in Jewish tradition, of olam haba, of the world to come — of what’s beyond the gates of death; of a way in which injustices, brokennesses in this world, are made whole in a world we cannot yet experience, in a world beyond this plane of time or existence, in a world still to come.
Still, God’s answer to Job is marked by questions: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? When the morning stars sang together and all the divine beings shouted for joy?”
God’s answer to Job, paradoxically in the form of a question, seems to be that the dimensions of the universe — both the dimensions of the natural world, and the dimensions of divine justice, life, and what’s beyond life — are beyond the capacity for human beings to fully know, that there is a certain ineffability, a certain ungraspable essence to God and to life.
When God summons Moses in response to the crying out of the Israelites, Moses asks God, “What shall I say to the Israelites when they ask for your name?” To which God replies, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.” Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, variously translated as “I Am That I Am;” or “I Will Be What I Will Be.” As the Etz Hayim commentary notes, it defies easy translation. The phrase “has been taken to mean ‘I am pure being’” or as the “psychologist Erich Fromm takes it to mean: I, God, am in the process of becoming… And you, human beings, fashioned in the image of God, are also in the process of becoming.”
But this name of God, ehyeh asher ehyeh, perhaps the most prominent self-disclosure in all of Torah, is not just an intellectual, abstract name. It’s a deeply relational one, too — a name imbued with feeling.
As the Etz Hayim continues, the name may be connected to the nearby phrase in which God tells a concerned Moses: ki ehyeh imakh, “I will be with you,” “I am God who will be with you;” with each of us. “You cannot understand My nature,” the commentary continues, “but you will know Me by My presence, and you will walk with Me when you follow My mitzvot, my pathways.” I will be with you.
This reminds me of another story, one that I learned from Rabbi Winokur, which originated with British Rabbi Jeffrey Newman:
A man was going from village to village, everywhere asking the same question, “Where can I find God?” He journeyed from rabbi to rabbi, and nowhere was he satisfied with the answers he received, so quickly he would pack his bags and hurry on to the next village. Some of the rabbis replied, “Pray, my son, and you shall find Him.” But the man had tried to pray and knew that he could not.
And some replied, “Forget your quest, my child, God is within you.” But the man had tried to find God within himself and failed.
One day, the man arrived, very wearily, at a very small village set in the middle of an enormous forest. When he found the rabbi’s house, he went in, and the rabbi was studying. He waited a moment, but he was impatient to be off to the next village, if he could not be satisfied, so he interrupted, “Rabbi — how do I find God?”
The rabbi paused, and the man wondered which of the many answers he had already received would he be told this time. But the rabbi simply said, “You have come to the right place. God is in this village. Why don’t you stay a few days? You might meet [God].”
The man was puzzled. He did not understand what the rabbi could mean. But the answer was unusual, and so he stayed. For two or three days, he strode round and round, asking all the villagers where God was that morning, but they would only smile and ask him to have a meal with them. Gradually, he got to know them and even helped with some of the village work. For months, he stayed in the village, and then for years. He became part of the village and shared in all its life. He went with [them] to the synagogue on Shabbat and prayed with them. And sometimes he knew why he prayed, and sometimes he didn’t. And sometimes he really said prayers, and sometimes only words. And then he would return with one of [them] for a Shabbat meal.
Gradually, he began to believe that God was in the village, though he wasn’t quite sure where. He knew, however, that sometimes he had met [God].
So the man went back to his town, and God went with him. And the man enjoyed studying and praying, and he knew that God was within himself and within other people. And other people knew it too, and sometimes they would ask him, “Where can we find God?” And the man would always answer, “You have come to the right spot: God is in this place.”
God is in this place. One of the beautiful features of this story is the capacity to encounter God in the everyday. Sometimes it takes us until we are at our breaking point to turn to God — moments of fear, moments of grief, moments of regret. Certainly, those are legitimate pathways to God: as tradition teaches, the gates of t’shuvah, the gates of return, are always open.
And what this story teaches is that we don’t have to wait for those harrowing moments to encounter God. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel describes this phenomenon differently: “Rushing through the ecstasies of ambition,” he writes, “we only awake when plunged into dread or grief. In darkness, then, we grope for solace, for meaning, for prayer.” And we find it.
We can find God in the wilderness. “But,” Heschel continues, “there is a wider voluntary entrance to prayer than sorrow and despair,” that entrance being simply, he says: “the opening of our thoughts to God. We cannot make God visible to us,” Heschel says, “but we can make ourselves visible to God,” opening our thoughts to God, inviting God in.
Back to Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.
The Etz Hayim commentary teaches that “It is significant that this name of God is not a noun but a verb.” “The essence of Jewish theology,” it continues, “is not the nature of God (what is God?) but what I’ll call the experience of God — what difference does an experience of God make in our lives?”
“What then does God’s name mean?” the commentary continues. “It may mean any one or more of the following: God exists. God is more than we can comprehend. God, or our understanding of God, is constantly growing.”
May our growth, in whatever shape it takes, continue into the New Year.
