Some theological exploration follows. After that is a new poem by Leiah Bowden. And links to previous COVID reflections. So be sure to scroll to the end!
It seems to me
that what we might be skirting here – several months into the pandemic, Day 52 of our confinement, Week #8 of Shabbat by Zoom – is the God problem.
We usually go light on God problems at Ner Shalom. We lead from the heart – from our experience of and longing for the Divine – and we don't worry overmuch about the unreasonable demands of a consistent theology.
But hard times do make you start to wonder. If there is a God, what kind of God is behind a world where people suffer in terrible ways? A God who permits or is somehow behind this suffering; a God who deals out life and death, is, face it, a hard God to like.
A lot of us in this room rejected the top-down, patriarchal, judgey God of our childhoods long ago. A lot of us were wounded by that God – as women, as queers, as people with disabilities, as people who don't like to be told what to do. And we've struggled with what to replace him (because that God is pretty much always “him”) with.
So we have done all sorts of remediation in our spiritual lives and in our ritual communities. At Ner Shalom we hardly ever use the G-Word. We might say “the Divine” or we lean into medieval Sufi and Jewish poetry and say, “the Beloved”.
But the problem is less language than conception. We keep having that male-king-judge jabbering somewhere in the back of our heads; he remains present in virtually all our prayers, at least if you can read the Hebrew, and those are the moments where not knowing Hebrew can be a blessing.
So as a corrective sometimes we invoke Shechinah, the Divine Feminine, to try to create some balance. And that makes a difference. But feminist theologian Judith Plaskow wonders somewhat about this (Plaskow, “Facing the Ambiguity of God,” 1991). She is concerned on the one hand that we unfairly essentialize women when we attribute to the Divine Feminine all the aspects of nurturance and caring that we want to see in God; in other words we solve our God problem by exacerbating our gender binary problem.
Plaskow is also concerned that our devotion to the Divine Feminine is serving our questionable tendency to want to make God “nice” when God isn't necessarily nice. We might aspire to be gentle, loving people, and we therefore want a gentle, loving God. But that is not a complete picture of any of us, nor of the Divine. In Plaskow's words, the “God who speaks to the feminist experience of empowerment and connection” must also “speak to the frightening, destructive, and divisive aspects of our lives.” In other words, our concept of God can't only include healing and love; it also has to take into account plagues and disasters, the brutality of the natural world, and the brutality of human societies.
If God is God, then our idea of God has to incorporate our dreams and our waking circumstances. The healing and the disease. The beauty and the danger. God must be God of humans and animals and plants and inanimate matter. God must be the God of our loved ones and the God of the people whose politics we detest. It is hard to imagine a God to be in close relationship with who can satisfy all those requirements.
So maybe we let go of God being some kind of personality. We could just say God is the Universe – the sum total of all of this. But if that is the case, if God becomes just natural forces, then as a practical matter, God doesn't exist, and why bother believing in God unless God is actually better than nothing?
If we want to lean into seeing God as Everything, then what we really want is for God to be Everything-Plus. There must be some kind of intention, awareness, some kind of care, behind the everything-ness. I don't know what form the awareness and care need to take. I am not certain, for example, if, for God to be God, we need God to intervene. But we do somehow need God to hear.
In which case, if we're going to imagine God as being the sum total plus some additional element, I'm actually down with “nice”. If what we are doing in any theology is creating God in our own image, then “nice” ain't so bad.
The upside to God being Everything, or God being Everything-Plus, is that we then are also God. We are God's actors in this world. Alongside the deer and the grubs and the grass; the DNA strands and the viruses and the laws of physics and biology. We are part of the brilliant complexity that produces both beauty and pain.
So maybe the best we can do in plague-time – the best we can do ever – is to just hold our God-idea lightly; hold it with some love and with some trembling. Bid'chilu ur'chimu as they say in Aramaic. Love and trembling.
Because this is the best we can probably do. If we are committed to monotheism, which seems a reasonably Jewish kind of ask and a reasonably Jewish kind of commitment to make, then God is God of all of it or God isn't God.
As God says in Isaiah 45:7:
יוצר אור ובורא חשך עשה שלום ובורא רע אני ה' עושה כל אלה
“The fashioner of light and creator of darkness, maker of peace and creator of evil – I am Adonai, who does all of that.”
What we experience as good and what we experience as bad – all of it comes from God. So says Isaiah.
So if we now let go of the idea that God is all good; that God is necessarily good at all, then what do we do with theology? What is the upside of a God that is the Source of everything, even if not everything is to our taste?
Well, if God is all of that, and we are part of God, then we have the ability to affect who, or what, God is. If we want a God who cares about justice, we need to be the part of God that works tirelessly for justice. If we want a God who heals our hurts, we have to be the part of God that heals. When we say those 13 attributes on the High Holy Days – Adonai Adonai El Rachum v'Chanun – that God is gracious and forgiving, patient and loving, is not an observation but an aspiration. God is those things if we make God those things. Which we do by being gracious and forgiving, patient and loving.
I confess, our being the operating mechanism of the Divine makes me a little both sad and excited. Our mystical tradition understood this dynamic even though they talked about it differently. “So above as below,” they said. If we are kind, we arouse the kindness of God. We offer chesed first, and then the dam bursts and the waters of divine kindness flow. A more poetic way of understanding the importance of who we are and what we hold as important, in relation to a Divine eagerly waiting to see what we'll do next.
Maybe that eagerness is the “plus” of Everything-Plus. God is Everything, plus anticipation. The eagerness to see how the children of this universe will respond to this universe; how we might blossom and nurture all of Creation's blossoming.
And maybe we just don't worry about so much about understanding or defining it all, and we just follow our gut. Reb Zalman, alav hashalom, used to say, “All theology is the afterthought of a believer.” So we might treat ourselves to the indulgence of believing, not as the outcome of a theological inquiry, but as an openness to an experience. And we see what we see, feel what we feel, and let the theology worry about itself.
So with these new thoughts and with a freedom to let go of them, we circle back to our opening question: where is God in all of this? And the answer is, maybe, everywhere. And to the question of why God isn't intervening, the answer might be – of course God is intervening. In fact we are doing so every day.
Leiah Bowden prepared this poem for our May 8, 2020 Shabbat service, based on words and ideas she received in the Amidah during the previous week’s Shabbat service. We had no idea we were so on each other’s wavelength. Find out more about Leiah’s work here.
Amidah Gift May 1, 2020
There is no amidah – no words or postures of praise and acknowledgement – without the admission
of frailty:
that no matter how whole we may feel,
there is a greater Wholeness that
– if we could open even just a little more than we think possible –
could enhance and expand our finite sense of wholeness
to such a degree that
we would feel that we are THAT God
THAT sense of mythic possibility
of which we have dreamed
though perhaps never thinking was real,
much less attainable.
Oh, grant yourself that gift.
Grant the world the greatest gift:
the increasing movement of Good manifest in All Being.
Other Reflections During the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Koved – Virus and Humanity
In this moment of unfolding epidemic, I am called to honor the complexity of the Creation we live in. This Creation in which uncountable species compete for space and survival, including the tiniest ones, who can sometimes, without malice, take down the mightiest among us. (March 6.) Click here.
By Our Own Hands (Vayakhel in Quarantine)
Whatever is ahead, the best of it will come from the people. We, the people, whose inspired ideas and skilled fingers will concoct new ways of being together, new ways of being, period. (March 21.) Click here.
A Planet of Priests
Torah tells us that we are meant to be a nation of priests. It is our calling and our destiny. And now the call is even broader. Because right now we are being called to be a Planet of Priests. Each of us tending the altar of our relationships with God and Earth and each other. Offering up our guilt over the profit-driven, Earth-consuming culture we have allowed to take root. And offering up like fragrant incense our gratitude for the simple and intimate gifts of connection and food and shelter. (March 28.) Click here.
The Mood that Came to Dinner
Anxiety has moved right into my house, camped out in my own living room! Leering at me with its purple face and lime green 1970s pants. And what do you do about an unwanted guest? (April 3.) Click here.
You’ve Got Mail
Talmud says a dream uninterpreted is like a letter left unread. What does this if-only-it-were-a-dream time have to say to us? (April 10.) Click here.
Through the Lattice
The doe sauntered away, leaving me wondering how we got here. Our glorious, sorry species. How did we end up living this way? So far removed from the rest of Creation that is just outside our door? How did we end up seeing this Earth so imperfectly, as if through carnival glass? (April 24.) Click here.
Isolation, AIDS Flashbacks, & Divine Embrace
There are pieces of this isolation I want to remember and bring with me when we are finally able to move freely about the cabin. But I also know that this isolation, no matter how pleasant parts of it may be, is something we will all need to reckon with over time. Because there is injury in going so long not touching and not being touched! Noticing and having to ignore the skin’s desire to feel skin, our bones’ desire to be pressed in an embrace. (May 1) Click here.