What follows is the D’var Torah I delivered this past Shabbat on how theology can sometimes help us make sense of the world:
Are you there, God? It’s me, Nathan Kamesar.
One of the questions I ask week after week, and really moment after moment is, where is God in this? Where is God in my heartbreak? Where is God in my joy? Where is God in indecision; where is God in boredom? Where is God in suffering, where is God in elation?
If all is One, if m’lo khol ha’aretz k’vodo, if all the world is filled with divine splendor (Isaiah 6:3) then how can we let God in at each of those moments, including and perhaps, especially where God’s presence is less obvious?
For some this is a natural, comforting question. It’s a way of not getting stuck on the hard parts of a particular moment, not getting caught in a loop of a particular dynamic that is keeping us from growing, but instead asking how we are being called to respond to it.
Still for others, I recognize that the call to look for God in the hard places is, at first blush, not an inviting one. Perhaps the image of God that we have formed in our minds is not welcoming: we’ve been raised on depictions of a God who is punitive and harsh, judgmental and rigid, rather than on alternative available depictions of God that include Divine compassion, love, and forgiveness.
Or perhaps regardless of which depiction of God is central for us, we bristle at engaging with a God who could allow the level of pain and suffering that exists in the world, and so that even if we might imagine a personal relationship with God that might feel comforting, we can’t get over the hurdle of understanding how such a God with whom we might have that relationship could permit this level of hardship in the world.
No religious tradition answers that question—the question of how to reconcile a good and loving God with the level of injustice we see in the world—with perfect satisfaction. Inherently, when we are dealing with the unknown, dealing with the transcendent, there are questions we can’t fully answer.
Still, I think there are a couple of planks of Jewish theology that I’m not sure are emphasized enough in Jewish education, that I think can at least go some distance in aiding us in wrestling with these questions.
These planks were distilled for me in an article on Jewish pastoral care in responding to domestic abuse by Dr. Gus Kaufman, Jr., Wendy Lipshutz, and Rabbi Drorah Setel.
The first plank they lifted up, which I’ve reflected on many times from the bimah, is the concept of tzimtzum, Divine contraction, which leads to a necessary partnership between God and humanity. This comes from the Kabbalistic tradition that prior to creation, prior even to the chaos of tohu vavohu, all was God; the ein sof. Undifferentiated Divinity without end. In order for God to create the world as we know it God had to contract, withdraw, part of God’s Self, to allow there to be creation; diversity; life—though God also had to reinfuse this space from which God contracted God’s self with God’s light in order for the world to exist, for nothing could exist without God. So the resulting world was, in essence, produced through a mixture of God’s presence and God’s absence; the world couldn’t exist with God’s overwhelming presence, but couldn’t exist in God’s absence either. God created a world made with God’s light encased in vessels of God’s absence. When the vessels shattered upon the creation of the world, God created humanity in order to be God’s partner and lift up the sparks of shattered light and reunite these sparks with their Source, through mitzvot—sacred human action.
Under this theology, as the authors write, and as I’ve shared before, God is the source of healing, compassion, and justice, which can provide a sense of hope. Human beings have free will to act for good or for bad and to bring light into the world. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t; but they have the capacity to lean on God as a source of strength in seeking to do so.
Which leads to the second plank of Jewish theology that I find helpful upon encountering injustice in the world.
Again, in the context of domestic abuse, this time in the heartbreaking context of providing spiritual support to a child in a family in which domestic violence has occurred, the authors offer the traditional Jewish teaching that all people have been created with a yetzer hatov, an instinct for the good, and a yetzer hara, an instinct for the bad. This, the authors write, “may be helpful in explaining why the father the child loves hurt their mother or why the mother they love failed to protect them from their father.” The teaching here is that each of us is called upon to make the yetzer hatov, the good part, stronger than it is, and stronger than the yetzer hara; and that we all have the responsibility to do so.
This understanding allows us to hold sacred the teaching that we are all created in the image of the Divine, and, as the authors write, “that we can condemn an action as wrong without negating the personhood of the one who committed it.”
All of this is really a teaching about theology. Theology, meaning the study of the nature of God, is both inherently a study that can never be completed, can never be verified, can never be definitive, and which nonetheless is part of the sacred practice of what it means to be Jewish of what it means to be Yisrael—the ones who wrestle with God, who wrestle with the Divine, seeking to make meaning of our time here on earth, seeking to establish a compass that helps us navigate the unknown.
Wrestling with this question of where God is in relation to the injustice in the world, and sitting with reflections that teach that God is present even while human beings have ownership of their inner lives and outer choices, allows me to continue to explore the question of where is God in each moment I encounter—not simply asking whether God is present (which for me the answer is, yes, it couldn’t be any other way, but for you might be different)—not simply asking whether God is present, but, in what way? Is God offering comfort? Is God calling out for a response? Is God asking me to be patient?
I try to open myself up to the field of possibilities at each moment. Are you there, God? It’s me, Nathan Kamesar.
What’s next?
Wishing you each moments of peace and joy in your search. Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi K
