Shabbat Shalom

About fifteen years ago, I taught Bible at a Jewish high school in Los Angeles. I vividly recall introducing the syllabus to my 10th grade students on the first day, when David P. raised his hand and interrupted my train of thought. “But I don’t believe in God,” he said, and although I took him at his word, I also understood his implication that absent a belief in God, there was no point in studying the Torah. “This class is not about your theology,” I answered, “it’s about understanding the heritage of the Jewish people and the impact that this text has had on hundreds of generations of people across history.” He was not going to be excused from taking the class. These days, the way I often respond to such a protest is by pointing out that the image of God that comes to your mind – the one you do not believe in – is one that I do not believe in, either. Typically, it involves an old man with a long white beard perched upon a cloud pulling the strings of the human marionettes below or throwing lightning bolts at us. In truth, it is much easier to describe what we do not believe in than to capture in words what we do believe in.

We are confronted with this issue this week in Parashat Yitro, which tells of the Israelites at the base of Mount Sinai when they witness the presence of God and receive God’s Instruction. The Torah is explicitly clear that what the people observe is the trembling of the earth, thunder and lightning, fire and smoke, loud noise and the sound of trumpets, and clouds covering the top of the mountain. Somewhere in the midst of that multi-sensory experience, we assume, is the presence of God. But later in the Bible we learn of a totally opposite description of God’s presence when God appears to the prophet Elijah (I Kings 19):

And lo, the Lord passed by. There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind – an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake – fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still, small voice [the voice of God].

So which is it? How is God’s presence experienced? In the great noise and chaos of Mount Sinai, in the time of Moses or in the still quiet of Mount Horeb (another name for Mount Sinai, no less!) in the time of Elijah?

Each of us experiences God’s presence differently, and we even experience it differently at different moments in time. What unifies us when we say the words of Shema Yisrael, declaring the one-ness and uniqueness of God, is not that we all accept the same description of God, but rather that we agree that God’s presence is unique and unparalleled in the universe (whatever that might mean). Does God hear and answer our prayers? Does God intervene in our daily lives? Does God have a physical form? Does God speak? These questions challenge us and they are ultimately unanswerable (by definition – that’s what makes God transcendent, beyond anything that human beings can know or relate to completely). However, the mystery that is God cannot paralyze us, as it did my student in the high school Bible class. It cannot hold us back, because what we do know to be true is that there is a Force that brought the world into existence, a Reason that it continues to exist, and a Purpose that compels us to make every day of our lives count. That Force, that Reason, that Purpose – we call it God. Moreover, we know that we are Jews because we have inherited a rich and complex tradition and history from our forebears, and that experience originated at Mount Sinai 3,200 years ago, no matter what it is that may have occurred there. The Israelites experienced God at Sinai. We experience God every day. Not a man, not a cloud, not a lightning bolt. God.

Now go and seek the meaning of God’s presence in your life.

Shabbat shalom.