I want to share with you one of my favorite, and one of the most personally impactful, rabbinic teachings that I’ve ever encountered.
An allusion is made to it in the final blessing of services today, and if you were reading closely just now in the margins of the page, you may have just discovered it. It’s based on a text from sefer יְשַׁעְיָהוּ, the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah, in the verse I’m about to share, is preaching to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, probably sometime after a wave of Israelites have returned from exile in Babylonia to Jerusalem. They’ve returned, but not all is restored. There is still some brokenness inside them, and brokenness in the land to which they’ve returned. Jew and non-Jew alike are living together in these broken ruins of Jerusalem.
Isaiah, as a prophet, channels the voice of God:
כֹּ֚ה אָמַ֣ר יְהֹוָ֔ה
Koh amar Adonai
“Thus said Adonai,”
Isaiah says. “Observe what is right and do what is just. I will bring those who do this to My sacred mount,” God says,
וְשִׂמַּחְתִּים֙ בְּבֵ֣ית תְּפִלָּתִ֔י
V’simahtim b’veit t’filati
“And I will bring about joy for them in a house of My prayer.”
On one level, this sounds like your standard, prophetic verse, proclaiming a form of salvation if we would but follow God’s exhortations to pursue justice.
But according to the rabbis of the Talmud, the sacred compendium of rabbinic tradition, the Torah that supplements the Torah, they say that there is actually something foundationally important in this verse. Granted, to them — to us — there’s something foundationally important in every verse, every letter, every pen stroke in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, but something jumps out to them about this verse in particular when God says, “Beit T’filati,” House of My prayer.
What is so important? Well, the Talmud tells us, “Rabbi Yohanan said in the name of Rabbi Yosei, that ‘The verse does not say the house of their prayer,” the people’s prayer, “but rather, Beit Tefilati, ‘the house of My prayer.’”
And who is “My” in this context?
God.
“From this,” Rabbi Yohanan said in the name of Rabbi Yosei, “we learn that Kadosh Barukh Hu, Holy One, Blessed be God,” prays.
God prays, too.
Well, if you’re like me, you have a lot of questions. Why does God need to pray? Isn’t God omnipotent, all powerful; or omniscient, all knowing?
To whom does God pray, isn’t there just… God? Who would God pray to?
What does God pray for? What could God possibly need?
The Talmud ventures an answer to this last question:
“Rav Zutra bar Tovia said that Rav said: ‘God’s prayer is:
Yehi ratzon milifanai sheyikhbeshu rahamai et ka’asi
May it be My will that My mercy will overcome My anger.
God’s prayer, the rabbis teach, is that in God’s own internal struggle between anger and rahamim, mercy, compassion, the compassion wins out.
There is so much to unpack here.
I first encountered this teaching as a young man when I was reading through a eulogy of my father, by one of his best friends and classmates, Rabbi Michael Cohen. It has been foundational to my theology — my understanding of God — ever since.
This is so for a number of reasons.
For starters, I’ll be the first to name that young men, me no exception, and young women, too, young people, well actually old people, too, okay, all people, make bad choices in life, sometimes a series of them, and I was someone who went through periods of life racked with shame and guilt.
To have it suggested to me in a tradition that I hold dear, from the words of someone I revered, that above all else in the universe, God cherishes rahamim, mercy, compassion, and that I, too, may have been worthy of that compassion, was, I don’t think it is an overstatement, life altering.
Understanding that our tradition teaches, as articulated in the mahzor, that ad yom moto tehakeh lo, God, you wait until the day of one’s death, and im yashuv, if that person returns, miyad tekablo, You, God, immediately embrace them. While human beings don’t need to forgive you for your mistakes, God does. God embraces you on your return, cherishing compassion above all other attributes.
But the paramount nature of mercy is not the only reason this text spoke to me so profoundly. At the risk of offering something heretical, or at the very least paradoxical, this text in an important way humanizes God, in a manner that, I believe, can have a profound effect on our relationship to Divinity, which, for me, is the source, the root, from which the rest of our life flows.
We often cite a corollary to the point about portraying God’s humanity from the first chapter of the first book of the Torah, Bereshit, Genesis, which says,
וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ
Vayivra Elohim et-ha’adam b’tzalmo.
And God created humankind in God’s own image.
We are each created in the image of the Divine, in the image of God, all of us.
The suggestion here is that the reverse is true: echoes of us, whispers of us, reverberations of us, are present in God. Sure, there is a danger in projecting our ego onto God, in mistaking the lamp for the light, but when we consider our complexity, our pain, our aching, our struggles, our ambivalence, our joy, our pathos, our feelings of love and connection with those around us, our yearning for what is good and true, do we imagine these experiences were manufactured out of thin air? Do we not imagine a God who knows these experiences, too, as well, if not better than we do?
If the whole universe comes from God, which I recognize is not something all of us believe, but if it does, do we not imagine the whole range of the human experience, and more, comes from God, is in God, too?
I imagine a bridge, a continuum, from humanity to God and back, a bridge built of empathy, pathos, feeling.
We struggle to control our anger; according to this tradition — so does God.
We long for the connection, the reassurance, the solace found in prayer — so does God.
We reach out for connection to the Source of the Universe — so does God, even if, for us and for God, it is to be found somewhere deep within us.
Now, I want to be clear — Judaism doesn’t speak with one voice when it comes to theology, to an understanding of God.
If anything, Judaism is marked not by dogmas, by singular beliefs from which no one can deviate for fear of being not Jewish enough — no, it’s marked by diversity of belief; two Jews, three opinions. The Talmud offers that Rabbi so and so says X; Rabbi such and such says Y, with no resolution of who is right, simply the preservation of the diversity of views — what I believe to be an ingenious religious move that helps us hold space for doubt, hold space for the recognition that we each will have different depictions of God that move us, (even while they also struggled to achieve — and in many cases did achieve — community cohesion through synchronization in religious practice, if not religious belief).
Rather than embrace the anthropomorphic — or, more accurately, anthropopathic — God described in the teaching I’ve just shared, anthropopathic meaning a God that evokes human-like emotions, the Rambam, Maimonides, says that the best way to connect with God is to try and get as far away from human descriptors, human associations, as possible. Even as seemingly uncontroversial a description as “God is wise,” Maimonides suggests, has us conjure up a wise human being — only more so — and that does a disservice to understanding God, Maimonides says — misleads us, because God is on such a different plane, so beyond the human descriptor of “wise,” that to use that descriptor simply leads us astray.
We can say what God is not… God is not narrow-minded; God is not petty; God is not obtuse — God is beyond these attributes — and we can keep going like this until we essentially “know” God through process of elimination. But saying what God is confuses us by boxing God into human boxes. This is an alternative Jewish path to take when seeking to encounter God, to know God.
There is spirituality somewhere in there; somewhere in that theology: encountering the world and recognizing the limits of language. Encountering a tree but not having the word “tree” to describe it, we can truly marvel at what is before our eyes. Try that for a moment — picture a tree, and then relate to the tree, without the use of the word “tree.” Remove the word from your mind. Strip the world of preconceived categories. There can be power and spirituality in recognizing the limits of language, and in recognizing that Godliness transcends all language.
Still, Jewish tradition also has it that God spoke and called the world into being.
וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר
Vayomer elohim yehi or
God said, “Let there be light”
וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר
Vayehi or
and there was light.
There is power in speech and what it is able to evoke for us — the worlds it is able to create in our imaginations and in our reality. So I want to take us through a couple more midrashim, tales, if you will, woven for us by our rabbinic ancestors in their efforts to articulate their understanding of, and to connect to, God’s humanity.
We’ll start with an overarching midrash, an overarching teaching from Pesikta Rabbati, a medieval text which cites Rabbi Levi for the following teaching: “B’Sinai.” At Mt Sinai,
בפנים הרבה נראה להם הקב”ה
B’faním harbeh nirah lahem haKadosh Barukh Hu
“God appeared to the people at Mount Sinai with many faces: a threatening face, a severe face, an angry face, a joyous face, a laughing face, and with a friendly face. [Further, to some, God appeared standing, to others seated, to some as a young person, and to others as an old person.]”
As we said, the Torah opens up a number of different pathways for encountering God, depending on our circumstances in life. There are multiple pathways into the Divine, depending on who we are and where we are in life, and opening ourselves up to different ways of encountering God doesn’t change God’s underlying essence. It merely allows us to connect, to plug in, to draw strength and inspiration from the Divine in the ways we need to carry out our tasks in the world.
Here is another, this time again from the Talmud. It opens up with a debate about whether or not God mesahek: alternatively translated, makes sport, rejoices, laughs. Does God laugh? One rabbi, Rabbi Yitzchak, whose name, ironically, comes from a similar word meaning laughter, says that God does not have fun, does not laugh, at least not until the day before the Messiah comes and inaugurates an age of redemption. On that day, Rabbi Yitzchak says, God will laugh. Until then, no.
But because this is the Talmud, that is not the only voice: Rav Yehuda says that not only does God laugh; God laughs, has fun, everyday. To demonstrate this, he proceeds to go through how God spends God’s entire day, each day. There are 12 hours in a day, he says. (Back then, they divided a 24-hour day into 12 daytime hours and 12 nighttime hours).
שלש הראשונות
Shalosh harishonot
“During the first three hours”
הקב”ה יושב ועוסק בתורה
HaKadosh Barukh Hu yoshev ve’osek baTorah
“The Blessed Holy One sits and studies Torah.”
It is God, after all. We would expect nothing less than God being devoted to Torah.
Still, there is also something profound about the implication that God is not done learning, about the implication that God has the humility to say, not once but every day, I need to go deeper, need to stretch the limits of My capacity to grow, to evolve, to learn. That’s how central learning is to God’s day to day activities and, by implication, how we might imagine ours. According to the Talmud, that’s the first three hours of God’s day.
שניות יושב ודן את כל העולם
Shniyot yoshev vedan et kol ha’olam.
During the second three hours, God sits and renders judgment over the entire world.
In doing so, God sees, the Talmud says, that the proper sentence is, according to this rabbi, kelaya, destruction, and yet, the rabbi says, God spends part of that second three hours moving from the throne of judgment to the throne of mercy, part of the central imagery of Yom Kippur. Yes, God sees that, according to the strict letter of the law, we, the world, are liable. But God spends God’s considerable energies and time moving from the throne of judgment to the throne of compassion, understanding that even if one, even if the world, is technically guilty, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the right result is to rain down on us with strict judgment, that a bridge of compassion is the better result. Once again, we have God wrestling with these twin instincts of judgment and mercy, with mercy, compassion, understanding, prevailing.
The rabbi continues with God’s daily activities.
שלישיות יושב וזן את כל העולם כולו
Shlishiyot yoshev vezan et kol ha’olam kulo
“For the third set of three hours, God provides nourishment for the entire world”
From the tiniest bug, it says, to the largest ox. Like some cosmic agricultural steward going about their daily chores, God puts forth nourishment into the earth. Though perhaps it is up to us to ensure it gets to everyone who needs it.
רביעיות
Revi’iyot
And the fourth — and this is relevant to our initial question about whether or not God has fun, laughs — for the fourth and final set of three hours…
יושב ומשחק עם לויתן
Yoshev u’mesahek im Livyatan
God makes sport with Leviathan.
Now, I understand that most of our Hebrew School educations did not cover giant mythical ocean creatures like Leviathan, and today is not the day to go deep there, but suffice is to say the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, does make passing reference to this giant ocean creature, and the rabbi cites this to strengthen his case that God mesahek, has fun; laughs. Right there in Psalm 104, it says
לִ֝וְיָתָ֗ן זֶֽה־יָצַ֥רְתָּ לְשַֽׂחֶק־בּֽוֹ
Livyatan zeh-yatzarta lesahek-bo
“There is Leviathan, whom you formed to sport with,” to play with.
Therefore, the rabbi submits, God does indeed laugh not just on the one day, but every day, and not just with Leviathan, the Talmud says, but with all of God’s creations. So yes, God laughs.
Now, lest we think the rabbis leave it at that, they continue opening up portals, stretching our imagination for how we might conceive of, and relate to, HaKadosh Barukh Hu, The Blessed Holy One.
It’s true, one Rabbi, Rav Acha, retorts. For a while, God did laugh everyday, but, he says:
מיום שחרב בית המקדש אין שחוק לקב”ה
Miyom sheharav Beit HaMikdash ein s’hok laKadosh Barukh Hu
“From the day that the Temple was destroyed,”
אין שחוק להקב”ה
Ein s’hok laKadosh Barukh Hu
“there is no more laughter for the Blessed Holy One.”
Now there is something you need to understand about the Temple being destroyed. On one level, the Temple being destroyed is the Temple being destroyed — an epochal moment in the life of the Jewish people and their relationship to God, severing the traditional lines of communication — sacrificial offerings — between God and God’s people, dispersing them into exile, inaugurating a stage of history in which brokenness reigned. That in and of itself — dayenu — that would be enough to upend God’s laughter.
But it actually goes further than that. The temple being destroyed symbolizes the general state of the world as we know it, in contrast to its Edenic origins and in contrast to its redemptive future. Not the peace and harmony that we once knew and pray will return again, but the general state of the world’s brokenness is what is symbolized by the destruction of the Temple; that is a condition in which God no longer laughs, this rabbi argues, offering a few scriptural verses as proof.
Okay, the rabbis say, if God is no longer spending the fourth quarter, the final daytime set of hours, of God’s day playing sport and laughing with Leviathan, how does God spend that block of time each day?
יושב ומלמד תינוקות
Yoshev u’melamed tinokot
It says, “God sits and teaches little ones,” God sits and teaches Torah to schoolchildren, citing a verse from Isaiah as proof.
Little ones? The famous Rabbi, Rashi, asks. To whom does this refer? Little ones in school today? No, Rashi answers,
שמתו כשהן קטנים
Shemetu k’shehen ktanim
“The ones who died when they were young.”
God, the rabbis are teaching, he concludes, is spending God’s final three hours each day teaching Torah to young children who left this world too soon.
We grow up in a world with pretty central imagery for who and what God is. Barukh Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha’olam, Blessed are you, My Lord, our God Melekh, King, Sovereign of the universe.
Earlier today, I tried to share how we can plug into, how we can access God as Melekh, God as King, putting ourselves in a posture of pure devotion, pure surrender. But I fully acknowledge that I’m offering that as someone who already bought into traditional religious experiences hook, line, and sinker. For someone who may be exploring a relationship to the divine from the water’s edge, the imagery of lord and king is hardly going to be inviting.
And yet that is clearly not all that our tradition has to offer.
The richness of our rabbinic tradition offers a tapestry of experiences of the divine that go far deeper than the classic sovereign — depicting God’s pathos, God’s heartbreak, God’s yearning, God’s struggle.
When the prophet Jeremiah is concerned about the people’s deviation from the covenant, from what is good and true, he says to them, “If you will not give heed,”
“My inmost self will weep, due to your arrogance.”
These words come from the prophet Jeremiah, but the rabbis imagine that it is really God saying this. That it is God who says God’s inmost self weeps, heartbroken by our deviation from what is good and true — by the burning of the planet; the harassment of the immigrant; the neglect of the widow and orphan; by poverty, hunger and war.
My inmost Self weeps, the rabbis imagine God saying.
“But is there really weeping by the Holy One, Blessed be He?” The Talmud asks. Didn’t a revered rabbi, Rav Pappa, teach: There is no sadness from the Holy One, Blessed be He, as it is stated in the Book of Chronicles: “Honor and majesty are before God; strength and gladness are in God’s place?”
In this case, the Talmud resolves the dispute: this statement, that God does not cry, is referring to the outer chambers; the statement that God cries is referring to the innermost chambers, where God can cry in secret.
God has ambivalence over how transparent to be with God’s heartbreak.
Now, some of you may be wondering how we can square these depictions of God — pained by the failure of the people to follow through on their commitments; heartbroken over the destruction of the Temple; struggling between God’s instincts toward anger on the one hand and compassion on the other — how we can square these depictions of God with the classic depiction of God as the savior at the sea, splitting the sea, hurling the Egyptians into it, scolding the angels not to sing upon their demise. How do we square these alternative, seemingly opposed, depictions of God?
There are, I think, at least a couple of ways to answer this.
One, remember: God appeared to the people at Mount Sinai with many faces: a threatening face, a severe face, an angry face, a joyous face, a laughing face, and with a friendly face. [Further, to some, God appeared standing, to others seated, to some as a young person, and to others as an old person.]
Put in our contemporary vernacular, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,” Walt Whitman wrote. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Who is larger than, who contains more multitudes, than the ein sof, another phrase for God meaning “that which has no end.”
God is present in all of this: in our strength and in our surrender, in our courage and in our fear, in our heartbreak and our healing, in our anger and in our compassion.
At different moments, we need different experiences of God: U’vshofar gadol yitaka, v’kol d’mamah dakah yishama — The great shofar will be sounded. and the still small voice will be heard. Our tradition seeks to provide us with a multitude of pathways into the divine. It’s up to us to play with them — like colors on a palette which we mix and arrange with our brush, sweeping this way and that until we find the richness and texture that moves us, all of these depictions ultimately flowing from the same underlying Source, Jewish tradition says.
So on one level, these different depictions are different pathways to God.
But another way to ask the question of how we square these different depictions, perhaps a more pointed way to ask the question, is to ask specifically, how do we square the understanding of a God who intervenes in history, of a God who is omnipotent, the source from which all the world flows, with a God heartbroken over the evils of the world. Put most pointedly, if God is so heartbroken, why doesn’t God do something about it?
Jews have been asking this question since Job, if not before. Job to whom God answered resoundingly, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Do you know who fixed its dimensions; Or who measured it? Who set its cornerstone When the morning stars sang together And all the divine beings shouted for joy?”
The universe is pretty vast and mysterious, God seems to be suggesting. There’s a lot we don’t fully grasp.
When it comes to God’s relationship to the heartbreak in the world, this teaching suggests, rather than ask where is God, the question might be, how can we help facilitate God’s presence here. Our task, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says, “is to open our souls to God, to let God again enter our deeds.”
He tells the story of the grandchild of Rabbi Baruch who “was playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid himself and stayed in his hiding place for a long time, assuming that his friend would look for him. Finally, he went out and saw that his friend was gone, apparently not having looked for him at all, and that his own hiding had been in vain. He ran into the study of his grandfather, crying and complaining about his friend. Upon hearing the story, Rabbi Baruch broke into tears and said: “God, too, says: ‘I hide, but there is no one to look for me.’”
Judaism teaches of a partnership — of a partnership between God and man. Ki Anu Amekha, we sing, oh so many times on Yom Kippur, we are your people and you are our God. We are your treasure, you the one who is near us. Rabbi Deborah Waxman opened up the question to her community: how else might we depict this dynamic? “We are the notes;” they said. “You are the score;” “We are the waves, and you are the ocean; we are the words, you are the poetry behind them.”
We can imagine the synergy between God’s presence and humanity’s action. We pray to find the harmony that weaves them together. We pray to draw inspiration from the source of life, fueling us in our actions revealing God’s presence here on earth.
In that eulogy of my father, my father who died suddenly at the age of 35, here is what his friend, Rabbi Michael Cohen, wrote: “On the train coming back from New York, Daniel [Kamesar] taught what would be his last Torah to me. He told me that there is a Midrash that when God prays, God prays that God’s mercy will always prevail over God’s strict judgment. I went to sleep with that wonderful Torah floating in my head waiting to continue talking about it the next morning on the train. As you know, Daniel did not make that train.”
“I am left,” he wrote, “with that Torah in the wake of Daniel’s death. What do I say — that God’s mercy did not prevail in this case? It is the type of question I would have asked Daniel. Like an unfinished symphony, that conversation is unfinished and will remain unfinished.”
I am unable to finish that symphony. To square the circle of why there is heartbreak in a world created by a just and compassionate God. I can only say that, for me, imagining a God struggling, praying for the strength to do what is right, gives me strength as I try to do the same. Paradoxically, this depiction of God’s vulnerability opens me up to feel strengthened by God.
May we each find our pathway to the Source of Holiness.
G’mar Hatimah Tovah, and may we be inscribed for good in the Book of Life.
