The following d’var was delivered by Danny Brown at Shabbat morning services on February 1, 2020/6 Shvat 5780 in celebration of finishing a year of studying the weekly Torah portion.
Introduction
Shabbat shalom. I initially asked the Rabbi if I could take an aliyah and give a Dvar Torah actually because I’ve just completed a full year of reading the weekly Torah parshiot and I wanted to take a moment to honor that journey. I felt that I could engage with the Liturgy and Jewish ritual and thinking about God a lot more thoughtfully and with more meaning if I had a better baseline of knowledge of Jewish text and abilities with Jewish ritual. And that’s certainly been true already. Let me rewind. Back to Hebrew school, sometime in my early teens.
Some of my most fond memories of growing up Jewish are sitting in Hebrew School class with my best friends, being atheists. Why were they fond memories? Well, I think it was because I had such strong feelings about my skepticism of all things about God, and it was really cool to have two best friends who agreed wholeheartedly. But yeah, we were nothing but skeptics. You see, we grew up Reform, two of our fathers are doctors and the other an engineer, and at least in my family, my parents never talked about God, or the stories in the Torah, or anything like that. So when it came to Hebrew School, and I was learning about these things, it was too easy for the idea to prevail that God was literally a Sky Daddy, sitting in a throne up in the sky with a white beard, and the humans of the Torah were talking to said Sky Daddy, who lived up in the, well, sky. And, with the scientific worldviews my best friends and I had, it would have been hard to not reject that. So, cue my lifelong estrangement from any sort of connection to the Jewish understanding of God.
Now I’m curious: whether it was in your childhood or not, who has a similar experience of just being alienated from any Jewish understanding of God? Right, I thought so. (Side note: A lot of people raised their hands here). I like that we as Jews take pride in being called Israelites, the children of Israel, you know, since Jacob got his name changed to Israel in honor of his struggle with a Divine Being, thus, as children of Israel, we are also God-Strugglers or Divine-Strugglers. It’s cool, and I take pride in that as well. But, we have a real problem if people are straight up leaving Jewish ritual or can’t bear to bring themselves back to it due to this massive barrier of God-estrangement. That much seems obvious. The flip side of that is that it’s vital that we can establish an understanding of God that makes sense to us. Fortunately for me, over the past year, I’ve actually come to an understanding of God that feels like a solid starting point for me. My goal today is to share that understanding with you.
Part 1 - How I got to Adonai Echad
As I said, over the past year I’ve engaged a lot more with Jewish ritual, which is kind of how I’ve come to these ideas about God. In addition to beginning to reading the Torah weekly, over the past year I have also held my first Chavruta with Debbie Rosenberg, learning about the Amidah through My People’s Prayer Book; I began wearing my Tallis to services; I started covering head and shuckling during Amidah when it feels right, and I started saying the Shema at bed - that challenged me the most.
I started saying the Shema because it was childhood practice that my Mom and I did together sometimes. But, after a short time, I realized the words were somewhat empty to me. So, I began to study to dig into what the words of the Shema are about. I found that the Shema represents the Jewish theology of ethical monotheism. God is one, All of existence is one, the universe is one, and that oneness is the source of ethics. The universe moves as one. Therefore, our actions impact the whole world. What goes around comes around. Our liberation is bound up together. Because all of life is interconnected, we have a great responsibility to all of life. This made a lot of sense to me.
I started thinking about it more. The oneness of the Eternal One is also reflected in a scientific understanding of Time. Past, present, and future are linked in an unbroken chain. Think of the butterfly effect - if some minute action didn’t take place millions of years ago, things might be radically different in the present. It’s simply a logical understanding of cause and effect. All actions have an impact. Some of them end up having ethical ramifications. Because all of life is interconnected, we have a great responsibility to all of life.
This made sense to me. So I started saying the Shema in Hebrew and then elaborating on what I actually believed those words to mean in English. For example: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O’ Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One. Listen, Israelites, my fellow Jews, who I hold in the highest regard, my understanding of the Divine is shared by us, and that is Oneness. The more I did this, the more I realized that this notion of God felt very true to me. It felt to me like the fact that everything is interconnected actually is one of my main motivations for being ethical. It also felt very scientific to me based on observations of the world, it didn’t feel surprising to me, and it also felt like one that wouldn’t be hard for other Jews to also find true.
Part 2 - Finding validation for God-struggling in Torah
I think that trying out different ideas about the Divine is great. Trying to see your view of God in the Jewish tradition is great, it’s important. But feelings of not being Jewish enough persist.
There was a time in my life that I didn’t identify as Jewish, because my atheism was so strong, my disbelief in what I perceived to be Jewish theology made me feel like I wasn’t Jewish. And it’s very real; how long can one engage in a tradition if they feel estranged from something so central to it? But, it is undeniable that Jews struggling with God is an essential part of the Jewish tradition.
And as I said, struggling with the Divine is inherent to our identity as Jews. We as Israelites are Divine-Strugglers, God-Strugglers. It’s a cool story, but I don’t think I used to believe it was true. I felt that my struggle with God actually made me less Jewish. It wasn’t until I began reading Torah that I realized, struggling with God is truly an essential piece in the 5 books of Moses. The Israelites and Moses both have some great struggles with God.
Moses first encounters God at the burning bush. Moses seems to pretty quickly accept that it’s God interacting with him. Which is interesting that it happens so fast, but ok Moses you do you. God tells Moses to get with Aaron, assemble the Israelites, tell them God appeared to him, and that he’s gonna take them out of Egypt.
So Moses and Aaron do just that. They assemble the elders of Israel, they perform the signs of God, they tell them God appeared to Moses and Moses is gonna free them from slavery. And the Israelites believe them. Which is also interesting how fast that happens. Can you imagine a bunch of Jewish elders being summoned, being told by a couple people and shown that the Ultimate Divine Force is going to free them from this terrible fate, looking at each other and shrugging, saying, “eh, so it must be God”?! Like, the quote from Exodus 4:29 is literally, “then Moses and Aaron went and assembled all the elders of the Israelites. Aaron repeated all the words that the Lord had spoken to Moses, and he performed the signs in the sight of the people, and the people were convinced.” The people were convinced!
Spoiler alert: that doesn’t last long. Pretty quickly once the Israelites get out of Egypt, they make a golden calf and point at it and say “this is the God that brought us out of Egypt”. God gets so mad at these stiff-necked Israelites that God wants to destroy them all. God literally says, “I see that this is a stiff-necked people. Now, let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them.” (Exodus 32:9)
Moses talks God down from that, but the point is: Our ancestors have ALWAYS been stiff-necked and stubborn, especially when it comes to not having one clear idea of God!
Let’s keep going. As we know, Moses dies before the Israelites enter the promised land. That is something he knew was going to happen - God told him so. Why did God decide that Moses would die before entering the promised land?
In the book of Numbers, God told Moses to speak to a rock and water will come forth to nourish the Israelites. Instead, Moses taps on the rock twice with his staff and water comes out. God tells him that now he won’t enter the promised land because he did not believe God when God told him water will come from only speaking to the rock.
So Moses also has a history of not fully believing this God. And it was such a significant disbelief, that God decided to not let Moses enter the promised land at all. Moses’ literal life’s work was to lead the Israelites there, and Moses’ disbelief and defiance of God was so great in this moment that God decided to not let Moses into the promised land. Let that sink in.
So defying God, disbelieving in God, having stubborn disagreements about the nature of God, all of these things are AS Jewish as believing in God. If you’re an atheist Jew, or if you ever felt disagreement with the Jewish idea of God, you are a stiff-necked Israelite. Thank you for carrying on that tradition. You’re just like our ancestors always have been. You are also following in the footsteps of Moses. Our ancestors would be so proud. And we have to remember that.
Conclusion
To conclude, I don’t think total estrangement from God is sustainable. There seem to be three options available as long-term solutions - to disengage with Judaism eventually, cause it’s hardly sustainable to be estranged from God, or to coast along your whole Jewish life keeping the God-thing at a distance, or to struggle with it, and find a way for it to work. I choose to struggle with it.
Another thing I learned about Moses is that he was actually the first in our tradition to learn the true name of God, Yud-Hei-Vuv-Hei. The first one. That is to say, Moses knew God more intimately than any of his ancestors did.
So I wonder, why can’t we do the same? In a moment where some traditional ideas of God feel like they don’t work, can’t we dig down and get to know God even more intimately? I think that those of us who have felt God-estranged can do just that. Atheism and God-estrangement isn’t just a rejection of the ideas we’ve been presented with. It’s also a longing for a deeper truth.
So I have my starting point. Ethical monotheism. God is one. The universe, the world is one. Because all of life is interconnected, we have a great responsibility to all of life. I find this baseline theology validated in the Shema. And still there’s more we must do. There’s a lot within the liturgy and within Torah I don’t know how to reconcile. It’s a journey. But this can be a starting point. Shabbat shalom.