Comments Delivered at Kol Nidre 2006

Avinu Malkeinu:  Our Father, our King.  These words are so connected with the High Holidays, and yet… how many of us truly resonate with them, truly respond emotionally?

God as Father and King.  As someone recently said, “It’s so politically incorrect!”  I trust we all realize that God is not a guy, and that to refer to God as a male is simply a limitation that comes from the Hebrew language, which requires all nouns to have a male or female gender. 

Some prayer books are better than others in not giving God a gender.  The Chaverim machzor for tonight’s service is among the best; as far as I could tell, nowhere is God referred to as “He.”  This is all the more impressive because this prayer book was complied 22 years ago, in 1984, when the Jewish world was just becoming aware of the need to use non-gendered language in our prayers.

But the issue--and I would say the problem--is much bigger than gendered language.  I’m talking about the whole subject of who, or what, is God.  Michelangelo’s depiction of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is great art, but not great theology.  That Old Man In The Sky image simply does not work for us any more.  In fact, many people have a problem with any type of anthropomorphic view of God, that is, a view that gives God human characteristics. 

Unfortunately, the Torah itself does just that:  God is portrayed as a character in the drama, as a sort of superhuman who speaks, who has strong emotions, who takes sides, who punishes and rewards.  No wonder our liturgy calls God “our father, our king,” because that is how God is portrayed in our scripture:  like a parent who loves, scolds, tells us what to do, rewards us and punishes us.  The Torah also shows God like a king who rules over us, who leads us into battle, who has power over other kings such as Pharaoh.

It’s a shame that for most of us, our religious education ended when we were teen-agers.  Perhaps that is why many of us at some point have said aloud or to ourselves, “I don’t believe in God.”  As teens, we were old enough to reject the all-too-human notion of God, but not yet old enough to appreciate the maturity and subtlety of many Jewish views about the nature of the Divine.

Thinking about this seems to me particularly urgent during the High Holidays, especially on Yom Kippur.  This is the one time in the year when everything else stops, and we examine our lives, our relationships, our failings and our shortcomings.  And at the center of all our prayers--of thanksgiving, of praise, and plea for forgiveness--is God.

How meaningful can this holiday be if we do not really believe in God, or do not know to whom or what these words are addressed?

I was talking recently with a friend of my mother’s.  She told me she feels hypocritical when she attends services.  The prayer book has her say words that that she does not believe, because she does not believe in the God to which the words are directed.

This woman does come to High Holiday services in spite of her feelings, because--as she told me--she is Jewish:  she identifies as a Jew and wants to be part of the Jewish community and its activities.  I wonder how many of us have a similar feeling?  We are happy to be here, we even want to be here, but we feel some kind of disconnect with the prayers  and the God-talk.

Earlier I spoke of the maturity and subtlety of many Jewish teachings regarding the nature of God.  The Hebrew word that is often translated “God” is actually never pronounced.  The four Hebrew letters that make up the Name have as their root the verb “to be.”  So in Hebrew, we are praying to pure Being-ness, the “was-is-will be” of all life, all existence. 

Unfortunately for those of us who speak and pray in English, we lose this more subtle notion of the divine presence.  Instead, what we have is the English word “g” “o” “d,” which I suggest is actually a form of shorthand.  The word “god” is a general English term that everyone uses, but that means something personal and probably different to each one of us.  We are just using the same label, and that is why we sometimes cannot connect with other people’s use and meaning of that label.

Even though many of us have questioned, or even rejected, traditional notions of God, I believe that most of us do have a sense of something spiritual, transcendent, holy, beyond our rational knowledge or understanding.  I am talking about something that exists along-side of and separate from our rational thinking.  The person who once said to me, “I’m a scientist; don’t talk to me about God!” was not recognizing that our soul yearns for something that our minds cannot grasp.  Of course, notable scientists such as Einstein have spoken of something beyond their understanding, separate from their scientific, rational thinking.  That’s what I’m talking about.  We cannot get there through reason.  The path to something we might call “God” is through the heart, is through a yearning, or is through experiences that we cannot explain rationally.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner tells of an incident that illustrates this.  He was leading a class of grade school students one Shabbat afternoon.  He hoped to have a lively discussion, so he asked them if they believed in God.  Not a single one raised a hand.  They weren’t being difficult, or disinterested, they were simply saying by their silence that they could not relate to his question.

A bit later he thought to ask them a different question.  He asked if any of them had ever been close to God.  All of them raised their hands.  So he asked them when and where.  One by one they described a specific time:  one told of the previous evening when her family lit the Shabbat candles. Another spoke of a time a few months before when he was angry and sad at the death of a grandparent.  And still another spoke about helping his parents the week before, even though he didn’t feel like it. (Honey From the Rock, p 16-18)

So let me ask the question tonight:  Have you ever felt the presence of God?

There is another way to put this:  Think of a time when you felt overwhelmed by the natural world:  by the magnificence, the complexity, the detail, the variety of creation.  

Has there been a time when you were moved to tears by the courage or nobility of another human being? 

Do you recognize the voice within when it tells you the right thing to do, even if it’s not what you want to do?

All of these are elements of the holy, of the transcendent, of that which takes us beyond being “merely human.”  That which we might call “God,” is present when we feel ourselves in awe of nature, when we are in harmony with our higher selves, when creativity flows through us, when we compassionately feel the magnificence of other human beings.  God is the life-giving energy that pulses through the cosmos, through all living things, through the smallest blade of grass.  God is that still, small voice within, our inner moral compass.

What if we were to direct our prayers this Yom Kippur to that personal experience of the transcendent, whatever it might be for you?   We could continue to say the word “God,” but we would inwardly be appealing to that which we personally encounter in the depth of our soul.  We would be calling out to our source of strength during times of adversity.  We would be appealing to the moral order of the universe with which we yearn to be aligned.  We ask forgiveness for falling short of what we know to be right.

That is the yearning that can move us to tears when Karla sings Avinu Malkeinu.  Our hearts soar beyond the limitation of the words, we leave our rational doubts behind, and through our song and our prayer we glimpse for a moment that mystery we might call God.