“God” Is A Tricky Word
I’ve been struggling with this word “God”.
The word “God” gives me anxiety. What does the Rabbi mean when she says “God”? Who is this “God” that the prayer praises? Why is “God” hiding in a burning bush? This is “God, Lord of the Universe” we’re talking about here, and I’m just not sure that I’m ready to declare anyone galactic emperor.
Why bother with Judaism (or religion at all) if I can’t get past such a simple word as “God”?
Maybe that anxiety is misplaced, though. “Israel” literally means “to struggle with God”. That is to say that there is a people — a nation — that has been named after this same struggle.
As I read deeper into Jewish theology, it’s amazing how different “God” has been interpreted over the ages. Moses Maimonides describes “God” by induction — as both nothing that we can imagine and something that we cannot imagine. (That’s hard for an agnostic to argue with.) Mordecai Kaplan describes “God” as a “Process” or really the sum of all natural processes. Martin Buber describes “God” as the other side of a relationship, something that intimately guides us without having to say a word.
In Judaism, there seems to be more freedom to question (see previous post). After all, “actions are more important than faith.” Actions (laws, mitzvot) are canonized, but less so creeds. (Forgive the parallel Catholic language.)
There is an implicit assumption that we are all wrestling with our own angels.
I was struck by a line in Rabbi Eugene Borowitz’s tome, Liberal Judaism:
[R]evelation is a human response to God’s reality.
Borowitz often refers to progressive revelation, or the idea that “God” is revealed differently in every age. The first word in the sentence, “revelation”, is therefore our growing (and changing) understanding of our existence.
Even though we have that uncomfortable word “God” on either side of the sentence, it’s the “human response” that stands in the middle. “Revelation”/understanding is about human action. And human action is not unknowable.
Let’s play “God” Mad Libs. Go ahead and try putting in different understandings of “God” into that sentence:
- Revelation is a human response to the unknowable in reality. (Maimonides)
- Revelation is a human response to the sum of all natural processes. (Kaplan)
- Revelation is a human response to the intimacy we feel with reality. (Buber)
These sentences lead to conversations that are vital and exceedingly human struggles for anyone dedicated to living a thoughtful life. These are conversations that I have had with myself — and maybe you have too — without ever using any words that start with a capital G. Too often, it seems, I’ve stopped at that word “God” — burdened by the baggage of a thousand images of an angry man in the sky. It is still an uncomfortable word for me, this word that means so little and so much.
Maybe it is not the word though that truly makes me uncomfortable but, to Borowitz’s credit, the human response to that word.
Surely we have all been amazed at the wonder of life. Filled with awe when it comes to the unknowable. But to name that relationship with reality as “God” can seem to put us in a class of people whose “human response” to reality may be bigotry. May be hatred. Violence. Ignorance. Misogyny. Terrorism.
When confronted with the realities of how factional a word like “God” can be, people sometimes say: “that’s not my God”. But is that true? Are we sharing different realities? Maybe it would be more appropriate to say: “that’s not my response” to life, to reality.
Whatever that word “God” means, at least it is clear that I am not the only one struggling. Maybe you’ve forgotten that too? “Israel.”
