Erev Rosh HaShanah Davar Torah 2026: Who is God that we should be mindful of Him?
Jews are kind of notorious for not liking to talk about God. I don’t mean rabbis and cantors – we have to be comfortable with God, or at least comfortable talking about God. But the average “Jew in the pew” normally prefers to talk about almost anything else. And of course the Jews not in the pews – in New England we call them “the Jews in woods” – have often either found a connection to the Divine through some non-Jewish spiritual practice (Yoga, Buddhism, almost any kind of deep exploration that isn’t Judaism) or they have decided a long time ago that they don’t believe in God, end if discussion. Actually, this probably applies to a lot of the Jews in the pews, too!
I was surprised when so many people signed up for my “Finding God” class this past year. We studied this little book [hold it up] which explores a number of different Jewish approaches to God. Who or what is God? Does God exist, and if so, how does He/She/It exist? Is God a being, a force, or perhaps synonymous with the Universe itself? Is God interested in each of us personally, or remote and incomprehensible – or could God be both? And of course the big question for many: what is God’s relationship with the evil that happens in the world?
Our liturgy is built on the idea that God exists and has power. Pretty much every prayer we say involves an invocation of, a conversation with, a description of, or an address to, God. The first prayer for when we wake up acknowledges God : “Modah ani lefecha, Melech chai v’kayam, shehechezarta bi nishmati b’chemla – I give thanks before You, Living and sustaining King, for having returned my soul into me with mercy.” The last prayer to be said before we close our eyes acknowledges God: “Baruch Atah Adonai, HaMe’ir l’olam kulo bichvodo – You are blessed my Lord, The One Who Enlightens everything for eternity with His glory”. And the High Holy Day liturgy is really all about God – God as King, Ruler, Father, a God Who is mighty enough to arrange whether we live or die, a God Who has the power to know everything we’ve done and the mercy to forgive us.
We can – many do – go to synagogue and say these prayers with our fingers mentally crossed. We can say to ourselves, “This is the ancient tradition of my people, and it’s important to me to see that tradition carried on. I’m saying these prayers to spit in Hitler’s eye. I’m saying these prayers because it reminds me of going to shul with Zayde and sheltering under his tallis. I’m saying these prayers because this is what Jews do, and I need to show up and fulfill my responsibility to others. I’m saying these prayers because I like the sound of them, and they put me into a kind of meditative state. Or, as the old joke goes, ‘Finkelstein goes to shul to talk to God; I go to shul to talk to Finkelstein.’”
Even the authors of our liturgy had their concerns about God. Jeremy Schonfeld, in his fascinating work Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer, notes that “the prayer-book is in fact a multi-layered monologue, […] which explores the vein of dissent aroused by the divine silence following direct liturgical address.” In other words, much of our liturgy involves addressing a Deity we already know won’t answer – at least not in any direct fashion – and the order and choice of texts in our prayer books reflect the degree to which this makes us worried, afraid, and just plain angry.
Israeli poet Yaakov Orland writes, “Ani yodea, ani meshuchna… “I know, I am certain and have already proven to myself a thousand and one times that You do not exist […] what disturbs me and annoys me and embarrasses me […] is the mystery of the necessity I feel to inform you of this very day, and to share with you my personal conclusions.”
There are plenty of strong arguments against God. Books have been written on the topic. Is this whole God business just old superstitions that need to be discarded in the face of modern science and superior intellect? Voltaire famously said, “If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent Him.” Unusually for him, Voltaire wasn’t being snarky. He felt that the idea of God was essential for a functioning society. But in Voltaire’s time God was still assumed to exist – intellectuals could raise questions, but the era had not come when it was easy to simply dismiss God as a primitive notion for primitive people. Now, so many more folks are raised as I was on the idea that it’s ridiculous to believe in God. The old ideas of God – a gendered God, an all-knowing God, an all-powerful God, -- are alien to much of our experience.
Connecting to God, even locating God, is difficult. Pain, physical or emotional, can drown out the sound of the sacred. If you’re experiencing great suffering, or if you’re tuned in to the staggering amount of suffering in the world, you may easily reject any idea of God. If there were a God, surely the suffering would cease! Or, if there is a God who allows the suffering, who needs a God like that? For some, quite logically, all possibility of God died in the Holocaust.
You might, on the other hand, be happy and feeling good – in which case it’s easy for forget God and just think, “What a nice time I’m having!” God can seem irrelevant in times of joy. Only a person who has been taught to believe, or believes because it comes naturally, will bother to thank God for those good times.
And then there’s all the rest of the time – when we are neither high nor low, but simply muddling along, doing what needs to be done, running to the grocery store, entertaining the grandchildren, walking the dog, washing the dishes, working, looking at our screens… God simply doesn’t occur to a lot of people in these mundane experiences. Maimonades himself said that one could not connect with God when “occupied with the necessities of the body” or “taking care of a wife and children”. He thought you had to go off by yourself, not even in a minyan, in order to connect your intellect to the Great Intellect that he thought was God.
Since it’s so difficult to connect, why bother about God? For me, it started with my choice to become a Jew. I knew that plenty of Jews didn’t think God had anything to do with being Jewish, but I didn’t think I could sign up to join the Jewish people without making my peace with the Deity. I was helped at the time by this book. The authors use nifty spreadsheets that compare different views on ideas such as, “God’s relationship to the world,” and “The problem of evil”. Their intellectual approach allowed me to see that Judaism’s concepts about God were many and various. I can say, “I believe in God,” and be telling the truth.
I don’t really do God with my frontal cortex; rather, I experience God with my kishkes. When I am davening, or when I gaze at the beauties of nature, or when I am deeply engaged in a satisfying activity, or when I am sharing time with someone I am close to, I experience something that I have come to understand as God. Jay Michaelson, commentator, activist, and Jewish Renewal rabbi, describes this well. “When I use the word ‘God’ in an intellectual, third-person way,” he writes, “I mean what the ancient Hebrews called YHVH – What Is; Being: What Was, Is and Will Be. Intellectually, for monotheists, God is Ein Sof, infinite […] What appears, on the surface, to be computers, trees, and hamburgers are actually, in their essence, God. […] Or, to paraphrase a teaching from another tradition [Hinduism], God does not exist; God is existence itself.”
“[Yet] in the realm of the heart,” writes Michaelson, “when I speak of God in the second person, as ‘You’, then the God-language of myth and anthropomorphism is not a symptom of fuzzy thinking but an expression of yearning. Not rational, but then, neither is love – and would we be richer for auditing out these ‘errors’ from our experience? […] when I relate to Being as God, I am better able to cultivate love, reverence, connection, personal relationship, gratitude, value, and ethics. The heart prays, and cries, and opens…”
Another perspective, in some ways similar but with a deeper and wider impact, is based on the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov and his student, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. “Just as the shadow of a person does whatever that person does, so, too does the divine do what we do. Divinity is the shadow of human action. If we save a human life, so too does God; if we decide to end a human life, God does also.” Brent Chaim Spodek and Ruth Messinger explain, “At some level, the utterly transcendent divinity is right at hand, for the divinity we hope to worship is a shadow of ourselves, our best parts and our worst. If you want to see God save the innocent, you need to get up off the couch and save the innocent. If you want to see God feed the hungry, you need to feed the hungry. If you to see God stand by while the innocent suffer, all you need to do is stand by and do nothing yourself.”
We have met God, and God is, in some sense, us. “In this radical theological claim,” writes Byron Sherwin, “The performance of the commandments of the Torah help not only human beings but God as well to move from potentiality to actuality, from exile to redemption. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel boldly stated, ‘By means of the Torah and its commandments, it is as if we can make God.’”
The Torah says we’re made in God’s image, but it has wisely been said that we have made God in our image, as well. If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him – and we have. Or, equally possible, God exists, but we have to do our work to perceive Him/Her/It. Byron Sherwin quotes Psalm 14, verse, 2, “’Is there a man of reason who seeks God?’” noting, “The Rabbi of Kotsk took it to mean, ‘A man who has nothing but his own reason in incapable of seeing God.’” Jay Michaelson proposes that we follow the example of Job, who said, “In my flesh I see God.” According to midrash, God is hiding. A little boy, the story goes, is playing hide and seek. He hides a long time, finally realizing that his friend is not actually looking for him. Crying, he goes to his grandpa, the rabbi. When he tells the rabbi why he is there, the rabbi bursts into tears, too. “Why are you crying, grandpa?” The little boy asks. “Because all this time God has been hiding and wondering, ‘Why won’t anyone come look for me?’”
As hard as it can be to locate and connect to God, I have found it to be a rich and rewarding struggle. For me, the joys are more joyful, the sorrows more bearable, the beauties of the earth more visible, when I see them through God’s shadow. The tragedies and agonies of the world remain, but if we are God’s reflection, then we must repair them in order to bring God into the world. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” we read in Deuteronomy 6:5. It has been said that this means, “You must love God with all your own heart, not only with the heart of your ancestors.” You have to find Who God will be to you. I believe, after many years at this labor, that you will be rewarded if you embark on the search. Whether you bow before HaMelech, God the King, or reach out your arms to embrace the Shekhinah, God the Female In-dwelling Spirit, or simply inhabit HaMakom, God the Place, if you open your heart and mind to the experience of God, you can open yourself to a richer, wider, wilder life. Like Jacob, you may wake up in some hard and stony corner and find yourself saying, “Surely God was in this place, and I, I did not know.’
