Rosh Hashanah 1 5770 

Gd is Not Superman

I am very happy and moved to see everyone here for my second High Holiday season. I welcome those who are new here, including Cantor Frankel. We welcome back some previous members, welcome back to Baton Rouge and/or to your Beth Shalom family. And we also feel the tremendous loss of some of our members who celebrated the Holidays with us last year but who have gone on before us. They are no longer with us physically, but their memories, their love, and the way they shaped our lives will always be with us.

We assemble tonight as a community of Israel, here to praise Gd as we have been commanded by our Torah. וּבַחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִי בְּאֶחָד לַחֹדֶשׁ מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ יִהְיֶה לָכֶם כָּל־מְלֶאכֶת עֲבֹדָה לֹא תַעֲשׂוּ יוֹם תְּרוּעָה יִהְיֶה לָכֶם And the seventh month, on the first of the month, shall be declared a holy day for you. You shall do no manner of work. It shall be for you a day of the sound of the shofar. Without these three elements, Gd, Israel, and Torah, we would not only not be able to observe Rosh Hashanah, but there would be no Judaism. After all, if there were no Israel, who would be Jewish? Without Gd there would be no Torah, and without Torah, how would Gd and Israel communicate?

For Torah is nothing more or less than the means of communication between Gd and Israel. Some Jews believe that the Torah was physically given by Gd to Israel on Mount Sinai, and some believe that to be a metaphor. Some believe that only the ten commandments were given on Sinai, some believe that only the first two commandments were communicated directly to Israel, and some believe that only the first word of the Aseret HaDibrot were communicated directly. And what is that word? אנוכי. I. In other words, Gd revealed the fact of His existence on Mount Sinai. The rest of the Torah, the whole Tanach, the Temple, this Rosh Hashanah service, and Judaism itself is, some people say, no more or less than the response of the Israelites to that one word, אנוכי. 

But however Gd communicated with Israel, the Torah, its laws and practices, is certainly the means by which we communicate with Gd. Yes, of course we pray, but the Torah and the tradition that springs from it tells how to pray. And even more than free prayer, what defines us as Jews and not as just nice people or spiritual people, are the מצוות, the commandments. 

The fact that all of you are obeying the commandment to commemorate ראש השנה on the first day of Tishrei, the commandment that I read from the book of Numbers a moment ago, is not incidental to the fact that you are Jews! By obeying the commandments we are sending a message to Gd of our love, our obedience, our understanding of the sacred nature of the world. So in a sense these three pillars of Judaism can be reduced to two. Gd and Israel, with the Torah the relationship between them.

All of Judaism is about communication between human beings and the Holy One, blessed be He. But who is He? And is He He? What do we really know about Gd?

Maimonides wrote that the more we try to describe Gd, the less accurate the description becomes. Gd is really beyond our ability to comprehend. Maimonides suggested that we would do better by describing what Gd is not. For example, not human. Not limited. Not created. 

Although human beings canot fully comprehend Gd, most of us do have in our minds some idea of Him. One of my teachers, Dr. Carol Ochs, says that by the time we are seven or eight we have developed a concept of Gd. This concept is often a combination of what we have learned in Religious School, the kids’ Bible stories we have heard, our parents, perhaps our teachers, perhaps a man we once saw with a long white beard.

But we are children. Therefore we understand Gd as all good. Therefore we see Gd as all powerful. Gd is Superman. And therefore, kids expect Gd to act like Superman. When we are in trouble, Gd will fly in and take care of the trouble. When there are bad people, Gd will protect us, the good people, from them.

Psychiatrists talk about the trauma people suffer when they discover that their parents are not all powerful, that their parents cannot always protect them from harm. We also discover that our parents are not all good, but human, a mixture of good and bad. Parents may have only good intentions, but everyone makes mistakes. And there are parents, unfortunately, who do not even have good intentions. But what about the trauma we suffer when we we see that Gd will not always protect us from harm?

The word ‘theodicy’ refers to the problem of evil in the universe. The problem appears because of a view of Gd that we have when we are children. Some people never outgrow this view of Gd. Like our view of our parents when we are small, we say that Gd is all powerful, all knowing, and all good. And if that is true, there should be no suffering in the world.

It is a difficult problem. Gd can do anything. Gd is all good. And bad things happen to good people. This is a puzzle. If Gd can do everything and is completely good, why doesn’t He keep bad things from happening to us? Why isn’t Gd more like Superman? And if Gd is much, much more powerful than Superman, why is there evil in the world at all?

There are a number of possible solutions to this puzzle. One answer is to say that Gd is all powerful and Gd is all good but we are not. If bad things happen to us, it is because we are bad, and Gd is punishing us. This was a traditional Jewish answer to the problem of theodicy. By the nineteenth century this answer was looking very thin. The holocaust more or less put an end to this idea. Only a few  fundamentalists still insist that we suffer because of our sins. People who still divide the world between ‘good guys’ (always us), and ‘bad guys’ (always them). People who have never outgrown a childish view of Gd.

Other religions deal with the problem of theodicy by saying that yes, Gd is all good, but there is another power that is evil. This power can somehow battle with Gd, defeating His good intentions. This idea limits Gd’s power, for otherwise how could anyone fight Gd? Judaism has never accepted the idea that there could be a divine or semi-divine power that struggles against Gd. 

Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People famously posited that Gd is all good and all loving but not all powerful. Gd would like to help you when you are sick, Gd would like to save you when you are in trouble, said Kushner, but He cannot. 

We might describe this concept of Gd as ‘Gd as Batman.’ Powerful, good, doing his best to fight the bad guys, but he can’t be everywhere at the same time. When Rabbi Kushner’s son died, he decided that he would rather believe in a Gd who could not save his son than a Gd who could have, but chose not to.

I believe there are things that Gd cannot do, not because He is incapable of doing them, but because it would conflict with other things Gd has done. For example, Gd has chosen to give us free will. If a person wants to do something foolish and self destructive, Gd could stop her. But He won’t. 

The world as we know it could not exist without our ability to make a choice between good and evil. There would be no right or wrong. And if a person performs her self destructive action, she may very well suffer for her choice. Would anyone choose good over evil if there were no consequences for our actions? Would we have learned so much about the human body if Gd cured all diseases? Would we have invented so many wonderful machines if Gd gave us anything we wanted?

Gd is not Superman. Gd will not keep us from making bad decisions, and Gd will not protect us from the consequences of our decisions.

Gd is not Batman either. When we mature, we realize that no one is completely good and no one is completely bad. Although Batman is not all powerful, he is still a completely good person who protects good people from bad people. I do believe there are very bad people in this world, and very good people, but no one is always good or always bad. And all of us, good and bad, can have a relationship with Gd if we want it. 

Remember that all of the people in the Torah who are loved by Gd are imperfect. Abraham, Sarah, Rebecca, Jacob, Joseph, Benjamin, Miriam, Moses, David-- none of them are all good. And let me ask you, where in the Bible is it written that Gd is all good? The Bible says Gd is just. It says He keeps His promises. It says He has promised to make the descendants of Abraham a great nation. Nowhere does it say that Gd is good. We know that Gd can be good. He can also be like a devouring fire. Sometimes the Tanakh compares Gd to a mother protecting Her child, and sometimes to a man of war. 

We have a hard time reconciling our concept of a good Gd with His demands that the Israelites destroy their enemies, man, woman, child and beast. We have a hard time reconciling our concept of a good Gd with a Gd who gets angry, who threatens to destroy the Israelites when they create the Golden Calf, and who does destroy all people and animals except for the few on Noah’s Ark. We have a hard time reconciling that Gd with a good Gd because even Gd is not all good.

The very first prayer we say after the Barechu begins בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ, אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, יוֹצֵר אוֹר, וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶךְ, עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא אֶת הַכֹּל. Blessed are you, Adonai our Gd, who creates light and fashions darkness, who makes peace and fashions everything. But when this line originally appeared in the book of Isaiah, it was יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא רָע, who creates light and fashions darkness, who makes peace and creates evil.

Gd Himself creates evil! We don’t want to tell that to young children! They want to believe in a Gd who will keep anything bad from happening! And they should. They should also believe that their parents will keep anything bad from happening. Until they grow up. And then they should have a more mature view of their parents. Why not of Gd as well?

There are people who never grow out of the idea of Gd as Superman. Some of them become fundamentalists, and some lose their faith in Gd altogether. Those who become fundamentalists must see the sufferings of others as punishment for their sins in order to maintain their belief that Gd is all good. If you do not believe that everyone who suffers suffers because of his sins, but you do believe that Gd is Superman, you will be lead to disbelief. Because you will look around the world and see suffering, and you will ask yourself “Where is Superman?” And the only conclusion you can come to is that there is no Superman.

Both fundamentalists and non-believers should read Isaiah. Even without Isaiah, you can figure it out yourself. If Gd created the world, and there is evil in the world, Gd created evil.

This is a concept of Gd that is useful for adults. The question one might ask is this: If there is evil in Gd, why should I worship Him? What good, as Kushner said, is a Gd who has the power to save me but does not?

It’s a good question. I can only take you back to the metaphor of Gd as parent. When we find that our parents are only human, that they make mistakes, do we disown them as parents? When we realize that our parents do bad things, do we say that they are not worthy of being parents? Or do we try to help them become better people, as Abraham did with Gd when Gd wanted to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? Because there are two important things about our parents, and only these two things really matter:

One, they are our parents. For better or worse, they brought us into the world, and we will always have that connection.

Secondly, they are bound to us with ties of love. Not everyone loves her parents, and not everyone is loved by her parents. But usually, there are ties of love. Sometimes overt, sometimes hidden. Sometimes simple and pure, and sometimes in a strange and complex way. But love. 

And we know those same things about Gd. He is our Gd, who created us, and who brought us out of Egypt. And we know that Gd loves us.

How do we know? We see it in this beautiful world, and in the lives we have been given. We know it because Gd says so. And He promises never to abandon us. What does it mean that Gd loves us? It means that yes, sometimes Gd will help us. But just as our parents don’t do everything for us, especially after we become adults, Gd will not do everything for us. He will not protect us from all harm. It doesn’t hurt to ask. But we must not feel betrayed if Gd does not answer our prayers. 

What does it mean that Gd loves us? It means that He is there for us, in good times and bad times. He suffers when we suffer, and He is glad when we are happy. He was there with Joseph in prison, and He was there when Nachshon waded into the waters of the Sea of Reeds. Gd is here for us as well, and will not abandon us in life or in death.

Gd is not Superman, but that is a good thing. Superman would make life less interesting, less important. The fact that Gd, a being beyond our imagination, who exists without time or space, loves us-- that adds to the depth and mystery and beauty of existence.

Who is Gd? How can we know, when we hardly know our own families? But we love our families. We don’t turn our backs on them for not being perfect. Gd does not give up on us because we are not completely good. Let us extend to Gd the same courtesy.