Where Is Your God Now?

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When I was 18 years old and an entering Freshman at SUNY Albany, and I say this with some embarrassment, I knew precious little about the Holocaust except for the fact that it happened.  I needed an elective, so I signed up for a course entitled something like The Holocaust and Jewish Thought.  Little did I know that the real course title should have been God Was Murdered at Auschwitz, Now What?  With the luxury of hindsight and what an attorney friend of mine calls the benefit of mature reflection, studying the Holocaust and asking where God was during the Holocaust as a way to fill in some credits was both grotesque and obscene.  But there you have it.

Looking back, I was in no way prepared for my professor, Jerome Eckstein.  Eckstein was a doppelganger for the pipe smoking and, box-bearded Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity a classic movie which was nominated for 7 Academy Awards in 1944.  Robinson plays a methodical claims adjuster for an insurance company with a linear, step by step, hyper-methodical mind -- As in life, all payouts must be meticulously justified.  People ultimately get what they deserve.  And for my esteemed professor, Dr. Eckstein, at the very least, how we talked about the Holocaust and God had to make meticulous sense.  How his students felt mattered far, far less than what his students thought.

Not only had I never studied the Holocaust before, I had never studied theology before.  When I was18 my connection to God was a connection of the heart through feelings and emotions and faith…not at all a connection of the mind, of thoughts and ideas gained through thinking and study. 

Dr. Eckstein demanded, he required that I used my mind instead of my heart when considering God and for me it was an assault, he was twisting my arm to ask questions which for me were threatening if not emotionally terrifying.

How could a God of Justice, the Judge of all the earth as Abraham called him at Sodom and Gomorrah, allow for the radical injustice of the Holocaust let alone the genocides hence and before of Rwanda and Bosnia and Cambodia and Armenia.

We’ve heard these answerless questions before, but in some ways we still act in odd denial – maybe our hearts are still not ready for the pain of the challenge:  If God is all knowing and all powerful, and if the Jews are God’s Chosen People, then God in his omnipotence were the Gas Chambers a biblical punishment? How can this be?  I want no part of this God.

And if God has purpose behind this injustice, then how can I be faithful to this God, a God who predestines the destruction of his own children?  I want no part of this God either.

And what are we Jews to make of the very idea of a covenant with God upon which so much of Judaism is based in light of, or more accurately, in the dark, dark shadow of so much venality, cruelty and exquisitely deliberate and meticulously inflicted suffering and destruction.  A God who violates the most basic agreements?  I want no part of this God either.

Professor Eckstein, a yeshiva trained conservative rabbi, became a professor of philosophy in a secular university – that should have told me something.   He introduced me to an idea that stole my wind.  If God is a God of Justice, if God is the God of the Covenant, then given the gas chambers alone, let alone the rest of the world’s cruelties, we live in a time when that notion of God must be dead[i].  Put a little more gently, the very idea of God must at best be eclipsed[ii] and we are in the darkness of that hard and lonely reality.  Ultimately then, we are alone.

I grew up singing about God, a God loving us and caring for us and worrying about us.  Eckstein was attacking the wholesomeness motherhood and apple pie.  And I was not prepared to be forced to think.

Some years ago, I started a Yom Kippur morning sermon with the following confession: I really had no idea what happens to us after we die.  In the vulnerable moments after a sermon is delivered wondering if my message was worthy my temple treasurer stormed toward me, quite incensed, he blurted, he fomented, he spewed, after I’m gone, I want my rabbi to know what happens to me.

Just like my temple treasurer who wanted to know that God would be with him after he died, when I was a college freshman, I would have been happy enough to know that God was with me, today, dependable and loving, merciful and tender, helping me make good choices and there to help me stand again when I fall.   In my pre-Eckstein days, God would protect me and I never gave it a second thought. 

Then, as required reading for Eckstein’s course I read Elie Wiesel’s Night.  In one gruesome and pivotal scene which describes the indescribable, the public hanging of a child before imprisoned and starving Jews…as the child slowly strangled to death because he wasn’t heavy enough for the momentum to have carried him down quickly enough to die immediately, a man standing in line behind Wiesel, with rage and resignation as the young boy slowly choked to death, asks “Where is God now?”  And, Wiesel writes “I heard a voice within me answer him: Where is He? Here He is. He is hanging here on this gallows.”  Wiesel saw his idea of God die, slowly gasping for air, right in front of him.

What is left of faith and God and religion in a world where God’s children with premeditation, using all their skills and talents, destroy one another.  I could not believe that I found myself agreeing at least at that moment with the Jewish thinker who with the foremost believer that God is dead, Richard Rubinstein: “we have nothing to hope for beyond our bodily lives…our religions with their impressive rituals are but the distinctive ways we share and celebrate a condition entirely enclosed within the fatalities of an absurd earthly existence.”[iii]

In other words, the reality is that when we’re dead, we’re dead, there’s nothing before we’re born and nothing after we die and that and we invent the idea of God and religion to give meaning to life in a hard, messy and unjust world that is otherwise absurd. 

Well that’s uplifting. 

But that’s where Dr. Eckstein led me and I followed him to what felt like the edge of an abyss.  And like so many before me and after me, along with many far more learned than I, along with many whose lives filled with agony heaped upon agony who have asked: What’s the point?  There really is no purpose to me being here.  And in a world so upside down, why not just do what Ecclesiastes teaches, that there is really and truly nothing better under the sun than to do than eat, drink and be merry.[iv]

Generations of reform rabbis who took their studies at the New York Campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, studied theology with Rabbi Dr. Eugene B. Borowitz.  He taught there for 54 years until his death in 2016,  Dr. Borowitz wrote and taught and wrestled with the complicated realities of Jewish life and is on the Mount Rushmore of 20th century liberal Jewish theologians.   Mostly, Rabbi Borowitz taught us how to think and how to think about the idea of God…and, just as importantly, he taught us what those before him, our earlier philosophers and theologians thought about God, placing the great ideas of the yesterday in healthy context.  His great gift was putting the most complicated thoughts in terms the somewhat intelligent like me could understand.

Years later, for eight years, I was his rabbi in Stamford CT and I do miss him so very much.  Every year on Yom Kippur in his deep and sonorous and seasoned voice he read Who shall live and who shall die…his was truly the voice of God…He also lead our weekly Torah study group, and it was kind of like having Joyce Carol Oates or Susan Sontag leading a your weekly book group.

But his NY students will thank him forever for helping us think clearly about the ideas of great Jewish thinkers who like Eugene Borowitz also scuffed their knees and wrenched their hips God wrestling…Dr. Borowitz for me picked up where Dr. Eckstein left off.

He taught us about Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism who saw Jewish Peoplehood through an anthropological lens, Mordecai Kaplan asserted that at its heart, more than anything else, more than even a religion, Judaism is a civilization with all the ingredients that it takes to be a civilization, that at its core, Judaism is about peoplehood and culture, Kaplan’s is famously a Judaism Without Supernaturalism, a Judaism with a God idea as opposed to a Judaism with a God.

He taught us about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who famously marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, who wrote about praying with his feet, that with our deeds and our courage and our sweat, our prayers can be answered, that with our tenacity, God can be invited into our lives, Heschel coined a stunning idea he called radical amazement, that there are stunning wonders beyond language, and that these wonders are sometimes to be found in our most mundane and tedious acts….that the road to the sacred is through the ordinary, that God’s gifts are daily and right in front of us.  For Heschel, nothing is more important to God than how we treat one another and for us to become fully God’s partners, with work, we can come to see that “God is the premise of our existence, not the possible outcome of our inquiry.  Life is not about us searching for God, but about God searching for us.[v]

When my seminary, Hebrew Union College started admitting women in numbers the faculty was exclusively male.  Eugene Borowitz caused quite a hubbub when he would leave his office empty at appointed times so that new mom-rabbinic students could nurse their babies. 

Gene Borowitz writes eloquently about the influence of women on the way we all now talk about God, how we handle gendered language, how we can talk about God in both feminine and masculine terms and how our faith is coming to be more and more relational and less hierarchical.  Jewish feminist theologians are asking if using the metaphors of monarchy, God as King or Queen, perpetuates a culture of human’s dominating one another.  And these women are helping us create new lenses through which to see both ourselves and the way we talk about the Sacred.

But fewer of Eugene Borowitz’s teachings do I remember more than the impassioned way he discussed the God of relationships, the God of the way we connect with one another, the God in the hyphen that connects me to you, or you to God.  It was the Jewish existentialist Martin Buber who conceived the I-Thou relationship, the God of connectedness when we treat one another and the world around us with sanctity and reverence, when we are deeply and caringly connected with and to one another, when time and space compress and all there is is us, when all there is is you and God, you and your world, you and your partner…that in being truly and courageously present with others, that in that honest and naked vulnerability, our thirst and search for trust is in itself Sacred, that when we connect as a choir with one another, it is in that connection that we find the Sacred.

The disorientation of this COVID moment somehow brought me back to the imbalance and deep anxiety I lived in those first weeks as Dr. Eckstein’s student, how rattled and unsettled I was when my emotional routines were turned inside out.

Our world, each and every person on earth, is now and newly vulnerable to COVID-19.  In our isolation comes anxiety.  While we await a vaccine, we are vulnerable.  

Of course we reject as preposterous the idea that God rained COVID down as a punishment like fire and burning sulfur coming down on a world of sinners.

Of course we reject as at best offensive the idea that 200,000 Americans died because it was their fated and predestined time to die and their fate sealed according to what was written in last year’s Book of Life…we understand that the metaphor serves to help us focus on how we live our lives.

We Jews have learned, the hard way, that the idea of a God who can interfere with the cruelties people inflict on one another is simply a bad idea.

And we have learned, the hard way, that while the earth has everything we need to live, unless we are good stewards from this moment forward and change the way we relate to the earth and the sea and the air, the earth will not be able to sustain us.  This has absolutely nothing to do with God or the role God plays in our lives.  This is a scientific fact.  When someone says, I don’t believe in global warming I see subtitles which read I don’t believe in facts…it’s as ridiculous as saying I don’t believe in gravity.

But when it comes to God, let me share what I have learned, let me share both what I think, what I experience and what I feel.

I experience things that are precious, sacred to me, holy to me.  The relationships I have with those I love are precious and sacred to me, I experience amazement and intense connection with the world around me…I stand on earth, a speck of consciousness floating on this tiny pebble earth, I’ll be here for 70 or 80 rotations around the sun, I look up and see the light of stars long gone…I smell the miracle of fresh Challah, the sip of an icy cold Chardonnay, I study the sacred texts and lessons from my ancestors, and a transformation at Sinai when our tribe became a people with a new idea that the sacred is nameless and faceless and this nameless and faceless Sacred wants us to be moral and good, we became a people who one day a week pause to breathe in and breathe out slowly, that treating workers fairly is a precious act, that caring for the vulnerable is a higher level of behavior, that we can learn and learn some more and learn more than even that…that we can grow beyond any vision we have for ourselves…that we can join in community and in caring for one another we can reach for and wrestle towards the precious and the sacred and the amazing…

In this COVID moment, of terrible loss and pain, of anxiety and isolation, I see and know firsthand some of the sting and ache that come with simply being human.  I see terrible failures of state past and present…but I also see courage on display every day, that is sacred, I see love on display every day, this is sacred, I see unrequired kindness and altruism, that is sacred…all of these things, together for me…are God on display, God at work, angels come to life…that we are able to reach and be better tomorrow than we are today, this stretch is Sacred.

…to me, every musical and poetic pore sees the Sacred, and yes, the transcendent right before my eyes…every-day.

Through a dark and painful night, Jacob wrestles with God, he emerges with a limp and in pain, but he emerges and his name is Israel, Our challenge then is to live fully with one another wrestling with the world as it is, and learning how to walk, sometimes in pain, with one another, with the certainty that in the morning we’ll do a better job of holding one another up along the way.

[i] See Richard Rubinstein’s After Auschwitz, Bobbs-Merrill 1966

[ii] See Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God, 1986

[iii] Rubinstein ibid.

[iv] Ecclesiastes 8:15

[v] See Eugene Borowitz’s Choices in Modern Jewish Thought, Behrman House, 1995