CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Fall 2019.
Copyright © 2019 Central Conference of American Rabbis. Used by permission of Central Conference of American Rabbis. All rights reserved. Not to be distributed, sold or copied without express written permission.
RABBI RICHARD AGLER (NY78) is the founding rabbi, now rabbi emeritus, of Congregation B’nai Israel in Boca Raton, Florida. He currently serves as co-director of the Tali Fund, Inc., and as resident scholar at the Keys Jewish Community Center in Tavernier, Florida. The Tragedy Test: Making Sense of Life-Changing Loss is his first book.
Thoughts on a Living God
by Rabbi Richard Agler
A God about whom we dare not think is a God a thinking mind cannot worship.— E. S. Brightman1
Writing my book The Tragedy Test: Making Sense of Life-Changing Loss—A Rabbi’s Journey, required a healthy quotient of God-thinking. The book looks at questions such as, Where is God in tragedy? What kind of God-understanding can help us through it? and What kind of God-understanding fails us when we most need it?
Bringing the book to life was not merely an academic exercise. These questions, familiar to clergy of all faiths, became burning issues for me after my wife Mindy and I experienced the sudden, accidental, and tragic death of our twenty-six-year-old daughter Talia in 2012.
We know that such questions are at least as old as the Book of Job. Most often, rabbis face them in the wake of serious loss. Most often, we take our cue from Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981). We acknowledge that there are things we cannot explain, that there are questions we cannot answer— and we hug. If we think it will be comforting, we might also add words about olam haba (a life after this one).
It is a decent response insofar as it goes, and it is what my family experienced after Tali’s death. In the near-term, we were cared for, extraordinarily, by colleagues, family, friends, and loved ones. I’ve said that no one should ever have to go through something like this, but anyone who does should only be taken care of by people of the caliber who cared for us. We were grateful beyond words for every bit of it.
But when the dust settled, it was clear that we were only at the beginning. In addition to the continuing heartbreak, and even in the presence of the redemptive tzedakah projects we had under- taken in Tali’s name, there were too many questions that I needed to answer but couldn’t. If this was true for me, an arguably mature rabbi, what did that say for everyone else?
So I sat down to write. For the most part, to come to terms with one essential question: What, in the name of God, had just happened to us?
Things like this are not supposed to happen. She was too good. We had done everything right. Not perfectly, of course, but right. It was catastrophically unfair.
And where was God? The Righteous Judge of our tradition, who asks devotion, service, and decency from us in exchange for blessing, and we are told, protection, in return? Where was that God— the God of our sacred texts, books, and legends? That God was nowhere to be found, at least not by me, at least not then.
Again, these questions are not new. Like all of us, I knew many ways to answer them. But now, when I needed them most, those answers were not good enough.
The God Questions
Rabbis typically become rabbis for love of some combination of God, Torah, and Israel. For me it started with God. I believed there was a God. I believed I had experienced God. As a young adult, with sky above and mother earth below, I felt a powerful sense of what I took to be God’s presence. No drugs were involved. I later learned it could be described as a mystical experience, such as have been recorded in every age and culture since time immemorial.
I had also experienced what I took to be God’s presence on countless occasions since—in my rabbinate, as a husband, father, friend, and while journeying through life in general. Now, in addition to the shock on the emotional, family, and every other level, my spiritual-religious life was upended, too. Where was the God I had been serving? Where was the God I thought I knew?
We’ve all had to answer questions like these. What about the Holocaust? That one, of course, is relatively easy theologically because we can blame human evil, free will, and standing idly by. Other times it’s not so easy. Why did my child die of cancer? Why would God do this to me? How can I believe in a God who acts in such a way?
Some rabbis, echoing voices from within the tradition, say things like, God has a master plan and while it may be hidden from us, we need to have faith that it exists. Or, Her work on earth was done and God took her to be in heaven. Or, It’s not that God didn’t answer our prayers, it was that God said no—for our own good, of course. And, Even when we don’t comprehend them, God has God’s own reasons. We heard some of that too. Generally not from colleagues (with the exception of a Chabad-nik or two), but from everyday people. I was forgiving. People were simply trying their best to be comforting.
Most of us, I’m guessing, don’t say things like that. As graduates of the School of Kushner, we plead ignorance and act pastorally. Again, that’s probably wise. There are things we don’t understand, and it’s better to admit it than to pretend otherwise.
Yet as a rule, we do not quote Elisha ben Abuya, “Leit din v’leit dayan” (there is no justice and there is no judge)—either. Nor do we customarily offer counsel based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Life’s but . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”2
We don’t quote them, even if we have moments when we strongly suspect they are right, or at the very least, onto something. Who among us has not thought that there’s an awful lot of hefkerut out there? And that the evidence that a responsible adult—much less a Dayan Emet (Righteous Judge)—is in charge is, at best, insufficient.
Neither of these alternatives appealed to me. The first, that God had some unfathomable reason, might be acceptable in some batei midrash, but to the grieving parent of an innocent child, or at least of a child who had not committed a capital offense, it is basically obscene. No God who is supposed to be just, to say nothing of loving, can act this way.
If the terms of the relationship are that I need to love and serve God with all my heart and then God is free to rip my heart out for no comprehensible reason, we might well describe the relationship in psychological terms as abusive. I had no interest in being a party to any such relationship.
Living in Aher’s or Macbeth’s world of no justice and no Judge, of sound and fury signifying nothing, did not appeal to me, either. And Kushner’s prescription likewise fell short. I was hugged. I felt the love. It was beautiful. Now what?
I needed something more. A life without a living God seemed as unpalatable to me as a life with a God who deliberately took Talia. Where was the faith that made sense, was coherent and supportive? I made it my business to look for it.
Progressive Jews, non-progressive Jews, nonaffiliated Jews, so-called secular Jews, and for that matter non-Jews—all suffer life-changing loss, and all ask these same questions. People want to know what faith, theirs or any other, has to say in response.
We want to know how faith is going to help us get through. Not just for the shivah and sh’loshim, but for the rest of our lives. These questions go to the very heart of what faith is for—and they cannot be dismissed. When we take on the rituals, pray the words, and support the institutions to the extent that we do, we expect faith to be there for us when we need it.
There’s an analogy to soldiers, police officers, and first responders, whose jobs, some say, are ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent terror; yet it’s their ability to help us during those moments of one percent terror that we collectively appreciate and pay them for.
Religion’s equivalent is loss, especially grievous loss. What is faith going to do for us during that one percent of the time when everything is on the line, when we are desperate for understanding, when it really matters?
We Need to Answer Them
Before I address this religiously and spiritually, I’d like to look at how it may be affecting us institutionally.
We know that we are living in a period of diminished religious affiliation. We have all heard numerous explanations for it. But there is one explanation we haven’t heard very often—at least I haven’t. It is that people keep their distance from established houses of worship because they are not especially impressed with the God they meet when they are there.
Those who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” and those who, when asked for religious affiliation, answer “none,” meet a God in synagogues, churches, mosques, etc., who may not make as much sense as they wish God would—or need God to. Not to put too fine a point on it, the God of “organized religion,” the God of many of our sacred scriptures and legends, is a God who offers too many answers that are inconsistent with people’s life experiences and understanding.
I suspect that we, who are deeply invested in the whole enterprise, and are relatively sophisticated about it, may be willing to cut our texts and traditions a certain amount of slack. Those who are not may be less inclined to do so.
Rasha v’tov lo and tzaddik v’ra lo (the wicked who prosper and the righteous who suffer) are ancient conundrums. But they may matter to moderns and postmoderns more than we realize. And rabbis, priests, ministers, and imams who try to square the circle of a just and powerful God who allows (or even orchestrates) unjust outcomes may not be helping.
While historically, people may not have always liked the answers they heard (e.g., that God has God’s own reasons; that it’s a mystery; that she’s in heaven; that God said no; that God is doing this because he loves us), they didn’t always have anywhere else to turn. Today, they do. They are free to walk out the door with little, if any, social or cultural price to be paid.
Perhaps we should consider that people are disaffiliating because the God they meet in established houses of worship is not credibly, or adequately, addressing questions they are asking and consider important—those one percent questions that really matter.
When Tali died, that God was not credibly or adequately addressing them for me, either.
I needed a God that didn’t ask me to believe in propositions that were, at best, holdovers from ancient times or at worst, upon further review, cruel and abusive. I needed an understanding of God that provided, to the greatest extent possible, believable answers to those one percent questions that really mattered.
The God of Law and Spirit
I may have found one. I hasten to add that this God does not give me everything I want, or even need. It may not give you everything you want or need, either.
Of course there are people who say that a God who doesn’t give us everything we need is not much of a God to begin with. After all, we turn to God because there are gaps in our understanding, and in our lives. We turn to God to help us explain the inexplicable. We turn to God because we want wholeness, completeness (sh’leimut).
But as thinkers have pointed out for generations, if God really is, and does, everything, then the responsibility for the world’s innumerable horrors rests on God’s hands and shoulders. We are, at best, uncomfortable with this.
My former understanding of God finessed these issues and was perhaps too quick to plead ignorance in the face of them. In exchange, God provided me with comfort and reassurance.
My new understanding offers, I believe, greater understanding but, alas, less reassurance and comfort. No wonder that I, and many others, do not choose this path, or make this trade, unless we feel there is no other choice.
All this has led me to the God I call the “God of Law and Spirit.” It is not complicated. The “Law” is derived, in varying degrees, from the understandings of Maimonides, Spinoza, Einstein, and others. In short, there is no getting around the fact that there are Laws in the universe that rule us all. They are invariable and immutable. The laws of physics and nature pervade everything, everywhere, from the most distant cosmos to the subatomic particles within us and around us. We either live in accordance with them or we do not live at all. I understand God as being one with these laws.
In addition to Law, there is Spirit, the qualities we all recognize as essential for religious life, for spiritual life, and even for life itself: love, kindness, compassion; the pursuits of wisdom, justice, holiness, and sacred experience.
Critically, and sadly, this God of Law and Spirit is limited. This God cannot and does not overturn the laws of nature in order to bring about desired outcomes on behalf of any person, people, or nation. And it is fruitless to try, and wrong to say, “It could happen so you might as well ask.” Because making such requests only lays the foundation for a future sense of disappointment, resentment, anger, or even betrayal when God fails to act in what we perceive to be a just fashion.
Lest we think that this is radical or heretical, it’s pretty clear that our Rabbis understood this dynamic as well. We can see it in their descriptions of t’filat shav, the so-called vain prayers that ask God that the fire we see in the distance be at someone else’s house or the sex of our unborn child be one or the other.3 The outcome of these events have already been determined and it is vain, empty, foolish, and wrong to ask God to change them.
It may be helpful to ask how many of our own prayers, by whatever name, formal or informal, official, published or not, are, in reality, t’filot shav, requests to change the laws of nature or events whose outcome has already been determined. In other words, how many of them are prayers addressed to a God who is not there?
Accepting this perspective means accepting that God is limited. It means accepting that God cannot, and certainly does not, do anywhere near the number of things we would wish, want, or need God to do. But while God does not implement justice in this world—God being far too limited to do so on her own—God’s Spirit can inspire us to do so.
We can be strong in that Spirit—and we need to be. Spirit can change outcomes. But it does not prevail anywhere near as often as we would like. In the age-old struggle between Law and Spirit, in case of a tie, the Law wins.
There are certainly times when we would prefer it the other way. But the God who is Law and the God who is Spirit, this God who is limited, is a God who makes sense.
The answer to the question, “Why did this tragedy happen?” may well be that the Laws of the universe required it to. When my one-hundred-pound daughter was hit by a three-ton motor vehicle moving at speed, the Law instantly determined what the outcome would be. Fini.
But not quite Fini. Even after death and tragedy, Spirit lives on. And again, while it cannot do everything, it can do a great deal. Spirit enables us to heal from tragedy and trauma—in part by teaching us to honor, and build upon, legacy. Spirit enables us to feel, and recognize, k’dushah—that which is most holy. Spirit can bond us together, healing in community.
Reconnection
The God of Law and Spirit may well be worthy of our devotion, service, commitment, and aspiration. Because it is neither wrong nor foolish to believe that:
1. The laws of physics and nature are all-encompassing, universal, and determinative.
2. These laws, God’s Laws, if you will, can create tragic outcomes—for no higher purpose or reason.
3. God does not intervene in our lives to prevent such tragedies—or to inflict them.
4. God nevertheless lives in Spirit. Through the sacred values of goodness, love, wisdom, compassion, justice, and more.
I daresay that this describes the God that many, if not most of us, believe in. But it is not the God that we have taught to our people, certainly not in any clear, much less systematic, way. It is not the God who is reflected in many of our most popular sacred texts, liturgies, and holidays. We’ve signed on to too much mythological narrative and not enough reality. And in tragedy, much of that mythology fails—and fails spectacularly.
Again, it took a tragedy for me to work through all of this. I was willing to do it because I was committed to and invested in a living Jewish faith. That faith had done much for me and when I needed it to do more, happy day, it could. Differently to be sure, but my living faith survived.
The God of Law and Spirit may not be all the God that we, or for that matter I, want. This God does not provide soothing answers to life’s real horrors. But it is a God who provides honest ones. I’ve come to think of the God of Law and Spirit as a God for grownups.
This has been my journey. Even in retrospect, it has been a blessed one. I’m going forward with my learning, with my service, and with my faith in God, Torah, and Israel.
I am teaching, I am doing charitable work, I am perpetuating my daughter’s legacy, and I hope, through the publication of The Tragedy Test, to be sharing these ideas with others.
But I remain deeply wounded. And no God in whom I can believe, at least at the present time, can erase that.
Epilogue
The words of the Twenty-Third Psalm are as famous as any in the Bible. After Talia’s death, one of the words, and subsequently the Psalm as a whole, took on new meaning for me.
The well-known final verse reads, “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of God forever.”
The first word of the verse is almost universally translated into English as “surely.” But the original Hebrew, ach,4 may not mean “surely” at all. According to the Rabbis, ach is a particle of speech indicating limitation or diminution.5 Employing this definition, we can render the beginning of the verse as: “A lesser sense of goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. . . .”
If we have, in fact, walked through the valley of the shadow of death, we know full well the diminished sense of God’s goodness and mercy that now accompanies us. We can extend this under- standing and read the psalm’s conclusion as: “Nevertheless, I will dwell in the house of God forever.”
Having been under the cast of death’s shadow, we are not the same people we were before. There is no sense pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, walking along the paths that lead to righteousness give us some sense of being, still, in the presence of the Holy One who is Most High.
Notes
1. E. S. Brightman, The Finding of God (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1931), 26.
2. Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 5, scene 5.
3. Mishnah B’rachot 9:3.
4. אך.
5. JT B’rachot 9:14b, אכין ורקין מעוטין.