Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
Several years ago, two men from very different backgrounds, two men who had never met and did not know each other, each wrote the same book. It wasn't word for word the same; that would really have been suspicious. But they were two books conveying the same essential and somewhat controversial message. Richard Elliot Friedman, a commited Jew and a Bible scholar, wrote The Hidden Face of God, and Jack Miles, a former Roman Catholic seminarian who once had thoughts of becoming a priest, wrote God: A Biography. The message of both books is that the Bible is the story of the gradual disappearance of God.
In the opening pages of the Bible, God is all there is. Nothing else exists, and nothing happens until God makes it happen. As the story progresses, God remains an active presence, indeed a dominating presence, pulling strings, telling people what to do, raining plagues on Egypt.
Then by the time you get to the age of the prophets, God's role has changed. Now God is no longer in control. Now God urges, God scolds, occasionally God complains "Why don't people listen to me?" No longer an all-powerful Master of the Universe.
And finally, by the time you get to the latest books of the Bible, books like the story of Esther, God's name isn't mentioned at all. What we are left with, the authors maintain, is a God who created the world and then gradually withdrew from it until today, God is a vague memory, someone who figured more prominently in the lives of our great-grandparents than in our own, His absence today more conspicuous than His presence.
Miles uses the analogy that may have occurred to some of you, to the relationship of human parents to their child. The parents create the child, they give it life. In the beginning, the child is completely helpless and dependent on its parents. The child begins to grow up but the parents are still in charge. They set the rules, they pay the bills. When the child becomes a teenager, the parents realize they have less control and their tone becomes much like that of the biblical prophets, teaching, warning, sometimes complaining. Then the adolescent grows up, takes responsibility for his or her own life, and the parents recede into the background and ultimately pass on and become memories. That, Miles suggests, is what happens to God.
His thesis is not all that different from the questions I hear a lot of you asking: Why doesn't God speak to us the why He spoke to previous generations? Why doesn't He intervene to save good people in trouble the way He used to?
I think Miles and Friedman are wrong, on a couple of counts. First of all, how can anyone tell when an invisible God has disappeared? Maybe God is still there, still active but working in more subtle ways and we have lost the art of recognizing Him. For me, the issue has never been theology, the nature and power of God. It has always been the challenge to recognize God when God has been active in our lives. Remember, one of the themes of the Torah readings on Rosh HaShanah is the difficulty people have recognizing God.
Moreover, I find especially Miles' biblical scholarship interesting but seriously flawed. The name of God doesn't appear in the book of Esther not because by that time God had faded from public consciousness but because the book of Esther is a novel. It's basically a secular book that somehow found its way into the Bible. There are psalms written at about the same time as the book of Esther and they are all about God. The book of Daniel comes from a later century than Esther and it's all about God's involvement in shaping world history.
But more significantly, Miles' analogy to the parent-child relationship doesn't really make his point. Do our parents ever really disappear from our lives? No matter how many years pass or what happens to them or us, their example remains with us; their advice and even their criticism (maybe especially their criticism) continues to echo in our hearts. And I think something similar happens to God's relationship to the world. God doesn't have to be splitting seas or making the sun stand still every day for Him to have a defining impact on our world and on our lives in it. I would rather speak of the hidden hand of God, the invisible but nonetheless crucial activity of God, than of a disappearing God.
Let me give you a couple of examples. One of the texts that critics always cite to document God's withdrawal from the world is the book of Esther. It's in the Bible but it never mentions God. But is God really absent from the story of Esther? The name Esther in Hebrew means "I am hiding." Does it refer to Esther's concealing her Jewish identity? Or does it refer to God staying out of the way until the moment He is needed?
The turning point in the Purim story comes at the very beginning of chapter 6: Balayla ha-hu nad'da sh'nat ha-melech. That night, the king could not sleep. One midrash claims that the reference is not to the King of Persia but to the Ruler of the Universe. The Jewish people are in trouble and God decides He has to do something about it. But even without that interpretation, what happens to reveal God's hidden hand? The king can't sleep, so he tells his servants to read to him from the dullest, most boring book they can find, to help him fall asleep. What book do they find? They read to him from the story of his life, the chronicles of the Persian court. They have just finished reading the part where Mordecai uncovers a plot and saves the king's life when he hears footsteps in the corridor. It's Haman, who has decided he can't wait several months to kill the Jews. He wants the king's permission to hang Mordecai the next morning, the same Mordecai the king has just been reminded as having saved his life.
Now remember, this is taking place in a world without electricity. People didn't keep working late after it got dark. They went to sleep. So when the king hears footsteps outside his bedroom, his first thought is not "I wonder which of my ministers is working late tonight." It's "I wonder who that is, hanging around outside the harem at an hour when decent people are asleep." That sets him up to believe the worst about Haman when Queen Esther accuses him of threatening her life.
But where is God in all this? I see God providing a happy ending to the Purim story by having created a world in which people are free to choose between good and evil, and if they choose evil, they are capable of doing a lot of harm. But when they choose evil, that choice inevitably leads to their downfall. Sooner or later, evildoers overreach. They try to get away with too much, and that is when they lose everything. Haman was all set to have his scheme succeed, but that wasn't enough for him. He reached for more and brought himself down in the process, even as Hitler was able to cause immense suffering to millions and God could not prevent him from doing that without compromising human moral freedom. But ultimately, like Haman, he overreached, he united the whole world against him and at the end, he went down in flames.
And I believe the same thing will happen to the people who attacked the United States six years ago this week, because God's world is made so that it will tolerate evil for only so long and then will spew it out. In the words of the psalmist, "the wicked may spring up like grass and the doers of evil may flourish for a moment, but their fate is to be destroyed forever."
How else does God come into our lives, sometimes without our realizing it? How does the hidden presence of God affect what we do? One of my all-time favorite passages in the midrash reads "God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes but everyone who looks in it sees a different face." I have always loved that saying because it seemed to legitimate the fact that different people have different notions of God and everybody else doesn't have to be wrong for me to be right. But last year I read a story that helped me find another level of meaning in those words.
I don't know how many of you recognize the name of Viktor Frankl. He was an eminent Viennese psychiatrist in the 1930's who was sent to Auschwitz, miraculously survived and wrote a book about his experience there called Man's Search for Meaning, which I think is one of the great books of the 20th Century. In his autobiography, Frankl tells this story:
When Hitler took over Austria and life became uncomfortable for Jews there, Frankl was able to get a visa to come to America but could not get one for his elderly parents. They urged him to leave, telling him that they had already lived their lives but he had his whole life ahead of him, with the chance to do great things. He was torn. He didn't know what to do, to stay with them in Nazi occupied Austria or to do what they urged and save himself by leaving them behind. So Frankl, who was not a particularly religious man, prayed to God to send him a sign telling him what to do.
That evening, when he came to his parents' home for dinner, he saw a piece of marble on the table with Hebrew writing on it. His father explained that Nazi youths had vandalized the synagogue the Frankls belonged to, and he had found a broken fragment of the façade which had displayed the Ten Commandments lying in the street. Unwilling to leave it there, he picked it up and brought it home. Frankl examined it and recognized that there was only one place on the façade it could have come from. It was the first word of the Fifth Commandment, "Honor your father and your mother." He took that as a sign that God wanted him to remain in Vienna with his parents.
What would it mean to say that God answered his prayer by sending him that sign? I can't believe that God inspired those young vandals to desecrate the synagogue and throw pieces of the Ten Commandments in the street so that Frankl's father would bring home that particular piece of marble. I'm not even sure that staying in Vienna with his parents was the right answer. What I believe is that God is like a mirror.
God did not tell Viktor Frankl what to do with his life. God appeared to him as a mirror, and in that mirror he saw himself clearly. God led him to understand who he really was, what his basic values were and what was important to him. What he came to understand looking into God's mirror was not what God demanded of him but what he demanded of himself. Looking into God's mirror, he understood with greater clarity than he had had before that he was simply not someone who could worry about himself and leave other people behind.
To cite a text that may be more familiar to you than either the Bible or the writings of Viktor Frankl, there is a scene in one of the seven books of the Harry Potter saga (and there are probably forty or fifty people here who could tell me which book, and maybe even which chapter) in which Harry is shown the Mirror of Erised. (Erised is Desire spelled backwards.) You look into it and it reflects back to you your deepest wish, something you may not even realize you yearn for. God's mirror is not a mirror of desire. God's mirror is a mirror of self-awareness. It pictures you as God sees you. It reflects back to you the image of who you want to be, even if you don't know it. You look into it, as Frankl did, and for the first time, you see yourself more clearly than ever before, and that is how you come to a decision.
Some of you may have read, in that new magazine VOICES put out by the Conservative movement, the article by Professor Neil Gillman who teaches Jewish philosophy at the Seminary. He writes of how he grew up in Quebec with a minimal Jewish background, how he went to McGill University to major in philosophy and French literature. Then just by chance, he attended a lecture by Will Herberg on Jewish though and was utterly blown away. He realized that the problems that Jewish philosophy wrestled with meant more to him than the issues he was studying in general philosophy. He went to the Seminary, was ordained a Rabbi and stayed on to teach. In the article, he writes about how he was transformed by that one lecture, and says "that I wandered in to hear a lecture on Jewish philosophy must in retrospect be attributed to God's doing." Now I know Neil Gillman. He is a classmate and friend of mine. His theology is very similar to mine, maybe not as provocative. I don't think he really believes that God gets involved with how an undergraduate student spends his evenings. When Gillman writes that, what I hear him saying is that the decision to go to the lecture, and his life-changing response to it, was a case of looking into God's mirror and realizing, with a clarity he had never known before, what issues he really cared about.
I can relate to that. In 1961, I had been a rabbi for less than a year. I was serving in the Army as post Jewish chaplain at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I had gone east for a conference of Jewish chaplains and, with several colleagues who were stationed in the Midwest or southwest, was returning to the base, flying from New York to Chicago and then catching a plane to Oklahoma.
We got to LaGuardia airport and learned that New York City was blanketed by fog and there would be no planes taking off for two or three hours. We landed in Chicago several hours behind schedule and there I faced another delay until my plane for Oklahoma would take off, and I realized that something terrible had happened. Between the delay in New York and the flight to Chicago, I had finished all the reading matter I had brought for the trip. Now Robert Louis Stevenson once defined an intellectual as someone who could sit for an hour with nothing to read and not be bored, so I guess I don't qualify. I went to the newsstand and started to browse. Most of what they had on display were books I wasn't interested in reading and would not have wanted to be seen reading.. Finally I found one book that didn't have either a scene of violence or a half-naked woman on the cover. It was called The Moral Judgment of the Child by a Swiss psychologist I had never heard of, named Jean Piaget. I bought it, sat down to read it and, like Neil Gillman listening to Will Herberg, it changed my life. I would never have become the person I am if I had not read that book.
Piaget examined children's attitudes to the rules of the games they played Why do you do that? Why can't you do something else? He discovered that children's attitudes toward obeying rules went through three stages, from unquestioning acceptance to breaking rules just for fun, to see if you could get away with it, and finally to sitting down with friends and working out changes in the rules that everyone could accept.
As I read that, I realized that Piaget's description of the evolution of morality, a sense of right and wrong, in children paralleled the history of religion, from unquestioning obedience to challenging in the name of freedom, and finally to coming to accept a set of standards we can all agree on. At first, rules are the will of God. In the end, they are a divine-human partnership, a human institution based on divinely revealed insights.
When I got home to Fort Sill, I wrote an article on the evolution of the idea of God as law-giver and sent it to the Reconstructionist magazine. They liked it and printed it and shortly after that, they asked me to expand it to book length. That ultimately became my first book, When Children Ask About God, which was published in 1971.
It sold in small but respectable numbers and a year later was put out in paperback by Schocken Books, a distinguished publisher of Judaica. It was because of that connection to Schocken that, when the original draft of When Bad Things Happen to Good People had been turned down by two commercial publishers, I sent it to Schocken . They accepted it and you know how things worked out from there.
Now if I were to say to you, as Neil Gillman says about the Herberg lecture, that I experienced God's intervention in my life that evening at the Chicago airport, what would I mean by that? I certainly don't believe that God sent a fog over New York City, inconveniencing thousands of travelers, solely in order to get me to Chicago with nothing to read. And I certainly don't believe that God stacked the newsstand with nothing but murder mysteries and romance novels plus one book of child psychology to manipulate me into reading a book I might otherwise never have picked up.
What I believe is that, at that moment, God held up a mirror in front of me, a moment in which I had to ask myself what I was about as a person, even as God did for Viktor Frankl in Vienna and for Neil Gillman in Montreal. What did I learn about myself from my reluctance to read a bad book rather than be bored on an airplane flight? And what did I learn about myself from the fact that I was drawn to a book about children's understanding of right and wrong, and that when I read it, I connected it to things I had been worrying about even before that? Other people were perfectly happy reading those other books because when they looked into God's mirror, that was they answer they got. I looked into it and saw a very different face.
It's Rosh HaShanah. It's the beginning of a New Year. We don't know what is going to happen to us in the coming year for good or for ill, but it's safe to say that at some point, probably at several points, we will have to make decisions that will reveal something about us. They may concern our families, they may concern our work, they may be moments of either resisting temptation or giving in to it. But when that happens, it won't be a question of "what should I do?" It will be a question of "what kind of person am I?" And that is when you look into God's mirror and find an answer there that you won't find anywhere else.
When you have a major decision to make and you are confused and uncertain about what to do and the uncertainty is driving you crazy, and suddenly the fog lifts and you understand what the right thing to do is, it's because you have just looked into God's mirror and found your answer there. God's mirror helped you to discover who you really wanted to be. When someone disappoints you, hurts you, maybe even betrays you, and you find yourself capable of forgiving that person, not approving or endorsing but forgiving, rising above vindictiveness, that happens because when you looked into God's mirror, when you asked yourself "what kind of person do I have to be to be most comfortable with myself?," that was the image that looked back at you.
There is a story told about a simple farmer in the shtetl who goes to the market one day and one of the things he sees there is a mirror. Now he is such a simple person that he has never seen a mirror before and he doesn't know what it is. He looks at it and concludes it's a picture of his father. It's such a life-like picture, it almost seems to be looking back at him, and he is fascinated by it. He buys it from the vendor, but when he takes it home, he's embarrassed by what he paid for it, so he hides it behind the barn. But he is so fascinated by this life-like picture that several times a day he goes out to the barn just to look at it. His wife sees him doing this and she wonders what he's doing. She begins to worry, "What is he doing behind the barn? Is he carrying on with one of the women from the village?" She goes out to check, sees the mirror, and never having seen one before, says "Aha, he does have a girl friend and he keeps her picture here by the barn. But you know what, he wants to fool around with an ugly old hag like that, he can have her!"
My friends, what do we see when on Rosh HaShanah, we look into God's mirror? Do we like what we see there? A year ago, Nora Ephron wrote a number one best seller about how she hates to look at herself in the mirror as she grows older. A generation ago, social critic Lewis Mumford suggested that the refinement of a better mirror was one of the significant achievements of the Middle Ages, because for the first time people had a clear idea of what they looked like. It gave them an identity. For us, on Rosh HaShanah when we open the Book of Life and see our true selves, our choices, our priorities reflected there, that is God's mirror. We look into it and we learn something about ourselves, who we have been and who we might be. And if we see something there that we don't like, this first day of a New Year is a perfect time to do something about it. After all, isn't that what a mirror is for?
Shanah Tovah.