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Last Shabbat, those of us who were here were privileged to experience this year’s Confirmation service.  There are few, if any, more uplifting moments in synagogue life than witnessing our young people, upon concluding their formal Jewish education, publicly affirming their identity as Jews, their sense of what it means to be a Jew, and their faith in God.  Personally, I especially appreciate their individual insights into what God means to them.

Developing a personal theology is a major segment of the Confirmation class curriculum.  Right from the get-go, I tell the students that there is no such thing as right or wrong when it comes to our personal beliefs about God.  There is only what is right and wrong for each of us.  That’s what makes it personal.  We then go on to explore some of the classical teachings about God, out of our tradition, and some not so classical, and even radical, beliefs about God.  I do this, not to hand them a theology on a platter but rather to expose them to a variety of theological approaches with the hope that they will come to understand that they can pick and choose, and create, a constellation of beliefs which will truly their own; which will work for them; which will serve to help bring their own sense of God into sharper focus.

Invariably, when we begin this study unit, the students have little or no sense of what they believe about God.  The vast majority affirm that they do believe in God, but precisely what they believe is unclear, if not obscure.  I call this the neon sign theology; believing in God but when called upon to describe what it is we believe in, all we can envision in our mind’s eye is something akin to a neon sign flashing “G-O-D, G-O-D”.

Of course it saddens me when confronted with the fact that after 10, 11, 12, and in some cases even 13 years of religious school, our students have so little grasp on their concept of God.  It saddens me but it doesn’t surprise me.  It doesn’t even disappoint me though I know that it really should.

Why doesn’t it surprise me?  Perhaps it is because we as Jews tend to gloss over our beliefs about God and focus more on our obligations to God.  In fact, very often we like to describe one of the differences between Judaism and Christianity as involving the primacy of “deed” over “creed”.  While Christianity places great emphasis on one’s belief in God and in the divinity of Jesus, however the various denominations of Christianity understand that divinity, Judaism tends to emphasize the mitzvot, the behaviors we believe that God expects of us.  Indeed, Judaism holds that deed is more important than creed; that God cares more that we behave according to the divinely set standards than about how and what we believe; that for God to place creed - belief - over deed - mitzvot - would be nothing more than an act of divine egotism.  Our God cares more about tikkun olam - the perfecting of the world than about fulfilling the Divine Ego.

So it is not surprising that in our religious school and in Jewish religious schools throughout the world, the vast majority of time is spent on exploring Jewish behaviors and issues of Jewish identity; Jewish people­hood - for these behaviors are the behaviors that mark us as a Jewish people, as a Jewish community - and rela­tively little time is spent exploring the nature of the God who expects such behaviors from us.

This is only compounded by the nature of classical Jewish theology itself.  Ever since the ancient days in which we lived side-by-side with Canaanite pagans who worshiped gods that they could see and touch and describe in human terms, the Jewish people have emphasized that our God is a being utterly different from us, who exists purely in the spiritual realm and not the physical one, and therefore is beyond physical description.  The Ten Commandments itself charges us to refrain from making any graven image of God, and the greatest sin of the Children of Israel in the wilderness was the making of the Golden Calf.

As Jewish theology would continue to evolve, not only would our God be perceived as being beyond phys­ical description but also beyond human comprehension.  The early Jewish mystics made it very clear that to truly be exposed to the essence of God is to risk almost certain madness or death.  And Maimonides, who traditionally is considered the greatest of Jewish philosophers, was so militant in the belief that we humans cannot even begin to conceive of the nature of God, that he stated that the only positive thing one can say about God is that God exists.  Aside from that, we cannot talk about the character of God in positive terms, for to do so would be to insult and diminish God.  For our understanding of such matters as “unity” and “goodness” are based upon our human experiences of such qualities, and as such are tainted, not coming anywhere near the purity of God’s nature.  Therefore, according to Maimonides, we can only talk about God in the negative; we can only talk about what God is not, and never about what God is.

Coming out of such a tradition it should be of no surprise that Jews have a tendency to avoid seriously exploring what we believe about the nature and character of God, and that we feel far more comfortable exploring the universe of mitzvot; the actions we can take to further our relationship with God and with our fellow Jews; the actions that we can take to make us more “Jewish.”

Yet there is a serious, if not fatal, flaw in this approach to our faith.  If we fail to explore our connected­ness with God, then we run the danger of significantly eroding the very foundations of why we perform mitzvot in the first place.  Yes, mitzvot help to make us better human beings.  Feeding the hungry and standing up for the rights of the oppressed are mitzvot.  Yet serving humanity is only part of what is necessary in relating to God.  It is not the totality of that relationship.  One can serve humanity and think nothing of God.  One can serve humanity and be an atheist, believing that no God exists.  Yet without an awareness of God’s presence and of our relationship with God, our social values - our perceptions of what it means to serve humanity - can easily shift into a convenient relativism.  What is good too easily becomes what is good for me, or what is good as long as it doesn’t inconvenience or burden me.  Without an awareness of God’s presence and of our relationship with God, there is no drive to live by standards which strengthen that relationship; which draw us closer to God.  A God which, at best, is nothing more than a flashing neon sign, cannot inspire us to strive for our highest selves in the company of others.  In the end, we are left striving for our most self-indulgent selves; our most comfort driven selves.

If we are to raise ourselves up to a higher level of existence, we need to sense God’s presence, not just in the sanctuary on Shabbat, embodied in some prayers and songs, but in the conduct of our daily lives.  We need to hear God’s voice speaking to us, counseling us, urging us, as we struggle with all matters of our mundane existence.  We need to discover that every moment is a sacred moment, every choice a sacred opportunity, every word a prayer.  For it is only then that life can become holy.

Yet to achieve this level of spiritual awareness - of God consciousness - we need to deepen our con­sciousness of God.  We need to struggle with what God really means to us, and in so doing, bring God to life in our lives.  For only a truly living God can impact upon our daily existence.  Only a God who is real to us, who makes sense to us, can talk to us.

Yet for most of us, such a God does not exist in our lives.  At least not yet.  For most of us, God is absent from our lives, except in times of tragedy.  During the Rosh Hashanah reception in the Cantor’s and my home, following the horror of the September 11^th tragedy, one of our congregants - now deceased - came to me most distraught.  “Rabbi, how could God let such a terrible thing happen?”  I tried to discuss the matter with her, but it was to no avail.  God was at fault.  The irony, of course, was that in all the blessings of her life, and of our world, she never ascribed God as the source, yet in the tribulations, the responsibility rested upon God.

For so many just like her, God has become the universal scapegoat; the One responsible for every ill and woe in the world.  But God is more than a scapegoat.  God is a companion and an ally, in good and in ill.  Those who see God only in the darkest of times do so because they have failed to embrace God in the brightest of times.  Their God is the God of the curse, never the blessing.  Yet it is not because God is malevolent or because they are cynics.  Rather it is because they have chosen to close God out of their lives until circumstances are so overwhelming that they are forced to face the fact that their lives are not completely in their control; that there are other forces out there - forces greater than themselves - and they arrive at the conclusion that such forces, such hostile forces, must be God.

We sorely need a healthier perspective on what God means to us, both as individuals and as a Jewish people.  We need to heighten the level of God consciousness in our lives.

It is to this end I announce to you that, even as our congregation’s program year draws to an close and we are about to slip into our summer worship schedule, I plan to dedicate a significant portion of next year’s Shabbat worship experiences to joining with you in exploring our own personal theologies; to giving body, depth, and substance to what it is that we as individuals and a congregation believe about God and what role God plays in our lives and in our world.  We will be pursuing this through sermons, discussions, and text study.  Hopefully, by this time next year, each of us will be able to claim that we have a better understanding of God in our lives; that we have a heightened sense of God’s presence, not just in the sanctuary, but in the home and on the way; and that we know that the journey is just beginning, for it is a lifelong journey; one which we eagerly embrace.

AMEN

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