Spirit and Story
Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. A new article will be posted here every other week.
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If God Ain’t A Tarheel Fan, Then Why Is The Sky in Carolina Blue?
By Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner
Nothing drives me
more crazy than when I hear an athlete thanking God for a three-pointer, a twenty foot
putt, or a touchdown. “Do you mean to
tell me that God sits around guiding balls into particular places?” I wonder, “A God in the sky with two hundred
channels of ESPN watching and working magic with each play?”
Moments like these tempt me to buy
into the philosophy of men like Sherwin Wine. Wine, the Michigan rabbi and chief proponent
of Humanist Judaism, has a lot to say about God. “God
is an ordinary English word like ‘table,’ ‘chair,’ or ‘rug,’
” Wine argues, a word which he is “sick and tired of using.” Wine views God-talk as irrational, and ultimately
as a source of human confusion that undermines our ethical strivings.
So, would it be
better to rid ourselves of the irrational God-talk that we hear from athletes, hurricane
victims, movie stars, even public officials? Would
it be in our interest to replace the outmoded prayers of synagogue life with poetic
musings of a different sort?
After many years of
dwelling on this question, I’ve come to some conclusions:
The word “God” is not like the word “table,” but a lot more like the word “love.”
Imagine writing a
valentine to your sweetie which said, “We are mutually compatible partners and we
have developed a trusting relationship which I value very deeply.”
Your partner would
respond, “What about saying, ‘I Love You’?”
You’d argue—“Hey, I
don’t ‘believe’ in ‘love.’ But
all the things that you mean by love are in my letter to you.”
Your partner would
say, “Just tell me that you love me!”
You’d reread
the card. They’d begin packing their socks.
Here’s my
analogy: “Love,” like the word “God,” is used to describe a totality
of experience that we can’t fully describe.
For example,
someone recovers from an illness, and says, “Thank God.” I hear this a lot, but I don’t understand
these words as saying, “Thank the chief executive officer of bodily function in the
sky.” What I hear is: “I am in a
state of gratitude to the totality of my experience—the doctors, the medicines, the
nurses, the support of my family, the elements of chance, everything.” It is that “everything” which we cannot
fully describe that we call God.
And that is what I
use the word “God” to mean -- “the totality of connections that I
can’t even begin to describe.”
Sherwin Wine would
call my desire to reconcile with the word God an “apologizing, redefining, and
explaining” of theology. But I think
that this definition of God is a healthy one, and one grounded in the tradition. The kaddish says, “God is beyond all blessings,
poems, and worship.” The Yigdal reads, “God is unknowable, and there
is no end to God’s unity” (i.e., no language can capture what the word
“God” means). In prayer,
“God” is a code word for “totality beyond description” as
“love” is a code word for “feelings beyond description.”
I could give other
examples of how I understand Judaism to advocate for such a God. Yet the basic understanding is the one championed
by Maimonides —by removing God from the earthbound (no idols or men are God), we have
made “God” a force that is beyond body and language. And even though we may use body and language to
speak of God, we are doing so poetically, conscious that the real picture is more than our
personal descriptions.
The reality is that
if we don’t take it into our own hands to “redefine”/
“reconstruct” God, then we’re leaving it in the hands of some rather
narrow-minded people. They will define
“God,” and they have a pretty nasty track record concerning how their definition
leads to irrational ends.
So there you have
it, I believe in God. And though I cringe
when I hear God attributed to a home run or a slicing backhand or a 7-10 split, part of me
says, “Yeah, this ball moving in such a way at this very moment is beyond
description, and this person is experiencing the totality of existence…my God!”
