Rabbi Susan Grossman: July 2006 Archives

Maimonides once explained that we can only know God by what God is not: God is not limited. God has no end and no beginning. God has no corporeal form and therefore no gender (which is why I use only gender-neutral language to refer to God).

However, we also have certain positivist beliefs about God. God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, which leads us into a variety of dilemmas about why bad things happen to good people (for which I most appreciate Rabbi Harold Kushner’s answer in When Bad Things Happen to Good People).

God is indivisible, one unity, though God has different qualities or attributes, such as mercy, kindness, truth, forgiveness, graciousness, etc. (Exodus 34:6-7). We are to emulate God’s qualities in the world: as God is gracious, so are we to be gracious to others; as God shows kindness, so too are we to show kindness to others.

God works through history. The continued existence of the State of Israel is modern evidence of God’s hand, even as the experience of the Holocaust reminds us that humanity can collectively fail God’s expectations of us. (As a famous Holocaust survivor once quipped, do not ask where God was in the Holocaust, ask where man was.) God has a special relationship with the Jewish People, but maintains a love for and relationship with all God’s children, not just the Jews.

God is beyond our comprehension, which is why there are so many different Jewish understandings of God, and each only captures an infinitesimal aspect of who God is.

To the scientist, the complexities and elegance of life are evidence of God as the Creator. To the humanist, God is the Judge and Ultimate Moral Arbiter, therefore there are some moral absolutes, for example that murder, stealing, and unequal laws for stranger and neighbor, rich and poor are wrong. To the mystic, God is the Source for All, caring for human beings on a small and grand scale, intimately involved in our lives as the source of all abundance, strength, and support, and concerned for the fate of the world, working behind the scenes if no longer in front of it. Every act we do can bring God’s blessings further in to the world or push them away from the world.

What is great about Jewish theology is that there are many different ways of thinking about, relating to, and connecting to God: God as transcendent Creative Force; God as immanent companion; God as Pedagogue, leading humanity to self-actualization.

As Jews, we can praise God, we can be angry with God. We do not even technically have to believe in God to be considered Jewish. However, according to Hasidic teaching, we are not supposed to ignore God.

What does God mean to you?

Zionism is as old as Judaism.

It began when God first spoke to Abraham and told him to leave his homeland for a land that God would show him. That same land would be promised to his great grandchildren, the children of Jacob, renamed Israel, for having struggled with the Lord.

Just as all Jews remain family, albeit grown into a nation, so too Israel remains our family, as well as our national, homeland. There is something in each of our deepest souls that is drawn to Israel like iron is attracted to a magnet. It takes a certain level of awareness, of one’s self, of one’s Jewish identity, to be able to express, as the great poet Yehuda HaLevi did, that almost subliminal yearning: “My heart is in the East but I am in the West.” However, when we get to Israel, for the first or twenty-first time, we find we feel as we feel no where else. We feel we are home on a level we may not be able to understand or explain.

That is one aspect, the spiritual aspect if you will, of what Zionism is and historically has been throughout the ages. The other has been the political aspiration of a people for its homeland as a place of security, freedom, and self-expression, the values our American forefathers expressed as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is an ancient aspiration, going back thousands of years as the Babylonian exiles sat by the banks of the rivers there and remembered Zion (Psalm 137).

The political and spiritual are intertwined, of course. The Maccabees successfully fought for, and gained, independence from the Seleucids in the second century BCE for the freedom to observe Jewish tradition. In their victory was a sense of God’s miraculous hand. According to the historian Elias Bickerman, without the Maccabees’ victory, Judaism and its monotheistic message (and with it the future of Christianity and Islam) would have been lost to the world.

As the centuries passed, an independent Jewish nation of Israel at peace with its neighbors has become one of the essential Jewish tests of messianic days. That is why, in 1967, with the liberation of the ancient Jewish Quarter from Jordanian occupation during the Six Day War, then-Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren penned the prayer for the State of Israel to include the messianic phrase that we are in the beginning of the time of our ultimate redemption. It is a redemption that does not deny other peoples the right to their own national identity, security, freedom and or self-realization. However, Zionism does demand those rights for Jews as a people among the other peoples of the world who demand, or enjoy, such rights for themselves.

Some, like Israel’s (largely ceremonial) President Moshe Katsav, want to limit full participation in the Zionist dream only to those he agrees with. Thankfully, others like Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in including the Conservative movement in his World Zionist Organization coalition, show the value of including everyone in the family around the table.

We here in the West would be foolish to think that we can survive as Jews without the lode stone of our ancestral home calling to us, inspiring us, grounding us. It is not only a question of how much more secure we Jews are, here and around the world, now that we again have a powerful state willing to protect Jews everywhere. It is a question of who we are and how we define and discover our true selves as we engage the opportunities and threats of the 21st century.