Rosh Hashana 2023 : What if God loves us?
Rabbi Margaret
One early morning in October of 2021, at the beginning of my sabbatical — before I broke my arm, before our sweet dog and then my beloved Mickey both died — I had a dream. Years before this dream, out of the blue one day, I had received in the mail a book from an old friend of mine, the book Inner Work by the psychoanalyst Robert Johnson. It is about interpreting and learning from dreams. When I first received the book I tried to read it and got nowhere. I tucked it away on a shelf. Then all these years later, in the wake of this dream, I found the book, and this time it was just the key I needed. The specifics of my dream are my own personal iconography. But what I discerned from applying Robert Johnson’s methodology to it was that it was a dream about God: God smiling at me with pure love and fondness, God delighting in my presence.
That wasn’t how I thought about God at all. But I have had some practice over the decades entertaining ideas about God that aren’t what I think I think. Davvening a service, which I do every Shabbat, and other times as well, is an exercise in trying on ideas that aren’t what I think I think:
You have loved us with an unending love;
Blessed are You Holy God Who acts for all my needs;
You who desire life for us;
Who makes peace;
In Whose hand is the breath of all life, the animation of all flesh.
Like the method actor trying to find some resonance in the words of a script that she did not write, so that she can speak them with conviction on the stage, I have tried over the years to inhabit these words. I’ve tried to see the world that way. But mostly I have related to God as Mystery, as Beyond all words and praises we can utter in this world, as Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh — I will be what I will be…
But then, after my morning dream, I began to explore the universe for sightings of that smiling, loving, fond God. It has not been an easy year-plus for me since I had that dream. But I have come more and more to feel the universe to be full of love, full of joy. In place of the cool neutrality of my beloved night sky, I have come to sense a generosity in this universe that holds us all.
Sometimes I say “the universe” because I am shy to say “God.” The universe desires life. It is sensuous. It is generative. It exists as a huge and radiant web of interconnected energies that nourishes and fertilizes and allows for growth, that spreads and shares resources, and which also limits dominance and encourages diversity, which give everything, both living and inert, a lifespan. It wants its various strands to survive and thrive, and it provides everything needed for flourishing to occur. It grows and changes — one might even say improves — through evolution, through accident which leads to greater capacity to thrive. It includes beauty of every amazing sort to add to the delight of being part of this web-like world.
Like the method actor trying to find some resonance in the words of a script that she did not write, so that she can speak them with conviction on the stage, I have tried over the years to inhabit these words. I’ve tried to see the world that way. But mostly I have related to God as Mystery, as Beyond all words and praises we can utter in this world, as Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh — I will be what I will be…
But then, after my morning dream, I began to explore the universe for sightings of that smiling, loving, fond God. It has not been an easy year-plus for me since I had that dream. But I have come more and more to feel the universe to be full of love, full of joy. In place of the cool neutrality of my beloved night sky, I have come to sense a generosity in this universe that holds us all.
Sometimes I say “the universe” because I am shy to say “God.” The universe desires life. It is sensuous. It is generative. It exists as a huge and radiant web of interconnected energies that nourishes and fertilizes and allows for growth, that spreads and shares resources, and which also limits dominance and encourages diversity, which give everything, both living and inert, a lifespan. It wants its various strands to survive and thrive, and it provides everything needed for flourishing to occur. It grows and changes — one might even say improves — through evolution, through accident which leads to greater capacity to thrive. It includes beauty of every amazing sort to add to the delight of being part of this web-like world.
God is sometimes known as Etz Chayim, the Tree of Life — and this has particular meaning in the kabbalistic world of the Zohar. There it is taught that God, alone in God’s endless, sublime God-ness, began to desire a world. In the holy process of fulfilling that desire, God began to emanate through sefirot, worlds, aspects, qualities. In this particular teaching, there are ten sefirot —at one end, the root of the Tree, God’s ineffable beyondness; at the other end, the fruiting tip of the branches, the world of matter and energy and daily life where we all live. Many of us have contemplated the specific energies of each of the ten sefirot. We give them special attention on Tu B’Shevat — the New Year of the Tree — and also during the counting of the omer, between Pesach and Shavuot.
But tonight I think about the truth at the heart of this teaching, that the root wanted there to be fruit, that we all exist because of Divine desire, that all that is exists with an invitation to relationship in every aspect of the web, the Tree, the universe, God. All that is, including the Milky Way above and we ourselves, exist because of love.
For many years I have been moved by the teaching of Bachya Ibn Pakuda, who in the eleventh century wrote Duties of the Heart. Rabbeinu Bachya teaches that in gratitude for the gift of life we owe our lives in service to the One Who gave us life. Rabbeinu Bachya equates this relationship of service — avodah, which means both worship and servitude — to that owed to a beneficent master. He offers ten gates, ten practices that, mastered one after the next, lead to the final gate, that of eventually loving God.
Here’s a little bit of Rabbeinu Bachya:
He will then resolve to make a return to the exalted God for the multitude of benefits he has received. And when he perceives with his spiritual vision that he has no power to do so, and that the Creator has no need of him, then he will feel the obligation to humble himself and become conscious of his lowliness and insignificance, and he will then importune his understanding concerning what he has to do, that it may be possible for him to approach and draw near to God in order that communion with God will serve as a substitute for the return due to God, and his understanding will aid him to the right path in this regard. (Gate of AVODAT HASHEM — p. 235)
That equation has made sense to me since I first encountered Duties of the Heart — I am grateful to be alive, whatever life brings, and for my life I am indebted. In response I should — must — serve God with all my life energy.
But Duties of the Heart is very austere. It paints the relationship between the creature and the Creator as one of, yes, duty, khiyyuv, obligation. Here is another very different description of the relationship between the human and the divine— this one from the Baal Shem Tov, the original Hasidic master:
The one who does the right or applies herself to the teaching in the fervor of cleaving to God, he makes his body the throne of the life-soul and the life-soul the throne of the heart and the heart the throne of the spirit and the spirit the throne of the light of the indwelling glory, and she sits in the midst of the light and trembles and rejoices. As a token of this, heaven appear at each place as a hemisphere. (Buber p. 193)
Martin Buber, whose translation of the Baal Shem Tov I just read, has a little explanatory note to that bit about the token: “As the sky overarches each piece of the earth as though it were there alone and belonged to it, so the divine light does not appear in a beyond, but over every completed here and now.” What a sweet analogy — when we look up to the sky it is equally close to us wherever we are, like it belongs right over our heads. And so the Divine Presence in that stack of thrones over our bodies, is equally near wherever we are.
The Baal Shem Tov made much of cleaving to God — dvekut — literally a word that comes from glue —and of the bodily experience of the Divine. He saw the relationship between human and God as sensual and desirous, close, even, to sexual (for which he was ridiculed by his opponents…) We sit in the midst of the light and tremble and rejoice.
I suppose that by nature I am a little more reserved than that. But I am starting to sense that quiver of desire in the universe, a little like bird song, a kind of calling, of beckoning. A world in which I, and all of us, and everything, are wanted. A generous, fulsome, relational God. A God who loves.
I know, I know, the counter-evidence is massive. What about…? We all have a list right at the tip of our tongues. And deep in our guts as well. I was talking recently with a friend about this sense of divine generosity, and she very appropriately asked me, “Do you think God is moral?”
That had me thinking for a long while. So much in our world happens to hurt and destroy. But only people can be moral, or immoral. An earthquake is not immoral. A biting dog is not immoral. A flower is not virtuous. Nor is a symphony. Nor a universe. I think I can hold a universe, a God, which is generous and nurturing and supportive of existence, which encourages growth and evolution, which is beautiful, which is alive and holds life and desires life, which acts for all my needs, which is magnetized towards wholeness, which is, after all, the meaning of SHALOM.
An image comes to my mind of a fetus in the womb, surrounded with amniotic fluid. That fetus will become whomever it will become and will do whatever deeds it will do, for good or for ill. But it is surrounded with nourishing fluid, housed in a body, given developmental cues from its genetics and that of the mother who gestates, and her mothers before her, that want it to grow and to be born and to thrive.
In the 1970s two young college students co-wrote a feminist siddur. In it they rewrote the first words of the psukei d’zimra: BARUCH SH’AMAR V’HAYAH HA-OLAM — they wrote:
Blessed is the one who spoke and the world became.
Blessed is the one.
Blessed is the one who in the beginning gave birth.
Blessed is the one who says and performs.
Blessed is the one who declares and fulfills.
Blessed is the one whose womb covers the earth.
Blessed is the one whose womb protects all creatures.
Blessed is the one who nourishes those who are in awe of Her.
Blessed is the one who lives forever and exists eternally.
Blessed is the one who redeems and saves.
Blessed is God’s name.
What if we all exist, not in some cold and neutral universe but in the womb of the divine? What if we exist in a universe that wants us to thrive, and that nourishes us with life giving fluids? What if we are part of an interconnected web that brings to us what we need and carries away what no longer serves? What if we offer into that web with our breath and receive from it the breath of plants?
What if all this exists because of desire?
What if God loves us?