Oct 8 2008 - Where is God?- (Kol Nidre, 5769)

This is the night that brings us into dialogue with God. This solemn night of Kol Nidre begins the period in which we are to repent the sins we have committed against the Eternal. This is the evening we are to begin to speak of our sin, fess up to these short comings, and repent the wrongs that we have done throughout the past year.

You know, a lot of people are talking about this business of dialogue these days. There is even a debate among peace advocates in Israel over whether or not there should be programming involving Israeli and Palestinian kids together. Is it healthy to remove the barriers and strip these kids of their defenses by pushing them get to know the other, to work and learn to be together, to develop those bonds that come of living and striving together; and then, at the end of the program, toss them, like fish, back into their collective seas of turmoil, unrest, resentment and even bitter hatred? How healthy can it be to do this to children? And haven’t we heard of this kind of dilemma before?

There are politicians who have urged the American people to consider talking with our enemies. Here is Iran, moving as fast as it can---head long-- toward developing a nuclear weapon. Here is a despotic leader who not only has denied the legitimacy of the state of Israel, but has sworn to destroy her, to wipe from the face of the earth…and we have alleged leaders who think that by sitting down and talking to this thug and his mullah minions that he and they are somehow going miraculously to change their minds and their direction. It is synonymous with changing other dictators, from other eras, who ultimately made good on their threats and promises, tossing the well meaning negotiators the bones and ashes of millions of people, ours uppermost.

And speaking of the Holocaust, the general mess our world is in, today, and dialogue isn’t it about time that God came to dialogue with us? If we have fallen short of the mark, and assuredly we have, isn’t it time for God also to own up? [Chutzpah! He’s talk pure chutzpah!] No, I mean it. I honestly mean what I am saying. Isn’t time for a din torah, a hearing in a court of Jewish law, in which we can and should place God on trial? Tomorrow we shall read of our brothers and sisters who perished in the Nazi camps. We shall struggle all over again to come to some comprehension, to some understanding, to some level of remembrance. In contrast to these levels, however, I do solemnly hope that no one comes to a level of forgiveness…no one my age or older should ever be able to forget or forgive. We were raised to believe in a caring and loving God, a God who teaches (or used to teach) justice, and kindness. We remember the command to be holy for the Lord our God is holy. Our God stands for goodness…in fact, on Rosh Hashanah, we celebrated the Almighty’s creating each piece of Creation, and calling it all good. Then, God went on to challenge humankind to be good, but when God saw that goodness wasn’t the object of humanity’s pursuits, God nearly destroyed the world by drowning it. But, God saved one good man, Noah, and hoped that, through him and his family, we’d get a better gene pool and would progress in our goodness, forward into history.

Well, sorry, folks. It didn’t happen. The tug of war between good and evil has continued through out the centuries. Sometimes people have won their freedoms and have succeeded in living harmoniously---for awhile. But it didn’t and doesn’t last long. And as we have advanced through the years, so has the lethality of our weaponry. Our ability to kill one another…that “other,” who also is made in the image of God, also developed weapons which were increasingly more potent and robust. But as humanity marched forward into the future, God, on the other hand, seems to have receded.

By the time we reached the 1900’s, God appears to have departed the world altogether. Now, where disease took fewer and fewer lives, humankind seemed intent to make up the difference. A true cynic might say that mass murder, whether in Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo, Darfur or China, has accorded us all a collective curb on the growth of the population of the world. But it isn’t so. The world’s population continues to grow ever faster, ever faster and faster. And the number of our genocides, while a scourge upon humanity’s collective soul, just seems to increase with nothing to stop the massacres, people slaughtering people.

But the question for this evening is ‘where is God in our world?’…at least since the 1900’s. I choose this century somewhat arbitrarily because, I must begin with the enormous blood letting which World War I entailed. But, you could easily raise the question, “Why stop there?” I wouldn’t argue with you. I was just setting a point in history when things got particularly out of hand, un-god-ly, if you will.

Tonight of all nights, it is time to ask the question…if we are really to repent the sins we have committed against God, then is there truly a God at the other side of this equation that legitimizes our activities, now and for the next several, several hours? If we are to enter into dialogue, is there an entity on the other side with which or whom to speak?

Please understand that I really am not here to shake up your belief in a personal deity. I just have come to believe that there’s enough pain, misery, destruction, and death in this world to ask the question. I believe, as opposed to the Religious Right in this country, that God is too much invoked these days, too much depended upon for miracles that will never come about, too much sought after…in place of what we ourselves ought to be taking responsibility for!

If I come to this Kol Nidre eve and ask openly and forcefully where God was in Auschwitz and why God did nothing to ameliorate the suffering and murder of millions of my people, I do not expect that I shall ever get an answer. French Jews got none when, in 1122 they were expelled from their country. The Jews of England got none in 1290. The Jews of Spain, though they lived in a golden age in that country for decades, got none in 1492. It was, however, their fate to suffer the bloody and cruel Inquisition which took the lives of many thousands and expelled thousands more. These Jews, rife with despair, lifted their complaints to heaven, crying out for Divine mercy, asking to know why God was letting this happen to them. When expelled and defeated, their answer was to turn to different forms of mysticism, much as many in our post-Holocaust day have turned to Kabballah. Over time, a distance from the calamity developed and belief once again became possible. Perhaps it will be for me and for my generation that the lot of us will have to pass away before trust in a personal God will be fully re-capture-able, re-ignite-able.

To my despair and disgust, I do not know if humanity actually learns anything from these gruesome exercises. We wander lands that have been poisoned and yet we refuse to accept responsibility for what befalls us. We turn our faces ever upward, but do not take the time to look or develop what is inward. We create social and governmental systems which betray us and deceive us, and then we turn to God when the time is long past due to have done anything to correct the evils we have either wrought ourselves or allowed to arise in our midst. We turn to God and we blame the Almighty as though God were the one responsible for the fouling our seas, polluting our air, wrecking our economy, increasing the numbers of and causing the plight of the poor and the hungry and the destitute. We keep this ruse going until either through war, revolution, or some other sort of upheaval, usually taking decades, things take a turn for the better and some technological, socio-economic, governmental or scientific change turns the evil we do around…if individuals like you and me are fortunate enough to survive, and we get some sort of a fresh start for yet another round of history.

People keep looking for God to pull us out the fire. OK, if it isn’t God, then it’s God’s messenger or messiah. But, after over 6 to 10 thousands year of recorded human existence, don’t ya think we’d have begun to catch on? Our salvation isn’t going to come from the heavens. That’s what our torah portion, Nitzaveem, tomorrow is going to imply. God isn’t going to swoop down and stop trains that are headed at each other from colliding. It just isn’t going to happen. And on a larger scale, if people choose to be bestial to one another and decide to go to war with each other, God isn’t going to jump out of the clouds and call a halt to it all. Come on, people. Let’s get real.