As a young man I was preoccupied - personally, and then professionally - with questions about God: the search for God, the experience of God, the centrality of God in Jewish religious life, other religious traditions’ views on God, the role of God and divinity in human life, how one might find God in everyday life. Inevitably too, and looming behind all these questions, there was the so-called ‘silence of God’ during the Shoah.
Thinking it
was part of the job of rabbis to talk about these things - and puzzled
sometimes at how infrequently I heard colleagues talking about this stuff - I would
often give sermons on these themes. As
if I thought I was some sort of expert on the topic.
I can now
see, of course, how presumptuous this was. But it felt like a mission, of sorts,
to keep on talking about God: to bring God under the spotlight, as it were, and
try and illuminate all the issues and dynamics and problems and uncertainties
surrounding this central character of our Jewish religious drama - although a
phrase like ‘character…in our religious drama’ was not how I would have spoken
about it in those days.
But over the
years something changed. I changed, I suppose - some people might call it
maturing or growing up, though I’m not sure that’s quite the right language to
capture what happened. But gradually,
over the decades, I became aware that I
was talking about God less and less - and often in sermons not at all. Certainly
it wasn’t the focus of a sermon, as it had been in the past. If I was feeling
particularly playful - or maybe it was just pious, or pseudo-pious, I don’t
know - I might slip in a reference to God - almost as an aside to the themes I
was exploring, a bracket as it were, but definitely not as the main topic.
So what
happened? Why did God disappear, or fade from view, from what I found myself
talking about? There were many reasons - psychological, theological, intellectual,
spiritual, professional - but rather than open these up here. I want to focus
on a couple of verses from this week’s Torah reading in the hope that through
them I can cast a light on what changed in my approach to this youthful
obsession of mine.
Our sedrah
began with chapter 18 of Genesis. Va-yay’ra elav Adonai
- “the Eternal One appeared to him…”, as Abraham sat at the entrance to his
tent in the heat of the day… (Genesis18:1).
And it
continues Va-yisar aynav va-yar - “and he lifted up his eyes and he saw…”.
The text is subtle here, it separates off the verb ‘to see’ from what he sees.
This suggests it isn’t just ordinary seeing, it’s more like ‘insight’ than
‘sight’. (The Hebrew doesn’t distinguish between these two).
The next
word is ve-hinei, “and behold” - the word always acts like a jump cut in a film, as the narrator ‘cuts’ to
the subjective view of the character. So now the storyteller lets us find out
what Abraham sees: shlosha anashim nitzavim alav, “three
people are standing waiting above him” - he’s sitting, they are rearing up
above him. (The word used for ‘standing’ n’z’v means ‘standing waiting/preparing for something’, a different word from the everyday Hebrew word for the physical
act of standing a’m’d).
This is great
storytelling: graphic, very precise, you can picture it in your mind’s eye,
each word crafted to add a detail to the picture, so that you can see it (it’s
like the specificity of individual words in a poem, or a Rembrandt painting
where each brushstroke counts).
And what
does Abraham do? The next word begins the second half of the sentence - but
it’s not an action word, it’s a reflection word, the action is inwards: va-yar
- again! - the word is repeated, it comes in each half of the sentence and
Abraham has another moment of insight, where what he sees with his eyes joins
up with what he’s seeing within himself, what he’s intuiting is happening. Va-yar
va-yaratz... “And he saw; and he
ran out of his tent to greet them…”, and he bows low before them. Honour,
respect, reverence, humility.
We are used
to reading this ‘bowing down’ gesture in relation to Biblical characters, it
comes dozens and dozens of times, it’s so familiar we stop even thinking about
it. But it may be worth noting that this is the first time it is used in Tanach,
the Hebrew Bible. In this scene, at this moment, this act of bowing down opens
up a new way of people relating to each other. It’s an archetypal moment:
respect, reverence in the face of the other, humility, making oneself smaller,
giving space to the other. Abraham as an exemplar of a particular mode of being
with the Other, of the ethics of interpersonal behaviour, the dynamics of I and
Thou (to use Martin Buber’s language). Each Thou a glimpse of the Eternal Thou.
This is his first impulse: he runs and prostrates himself.
This leads
into the actions for which this scene is perhaps better know - and what’s
talked about by the rabbinic commentators - his hospitality: water, food,
shelter, provision. But what I’m wanting to focus on here is how the outer
hospitality - the material hospitality and generosity - is preceded by another
kind of hospitality, if we want to call it that, the hospitality to the lived
experience of being in the presence of other human beings, souls like oneself,
the hospitality of making space for a shared humanity with the other, with the
stranger, the traveller, the ones who arrive from elsewhere, those who arrive
out of nowhere - which is always somewhere.
Isn’t this a
key aspect of the insight Abraham has? That these strangers are fellow
travellers on the road through life, fellow human beings dependent on what
provisions they receive on the journey - (we can also call it Kafka’s insight)
- an insight into the way we all depend on each other to get through life, to
get through the day?
But
Abraham’s moment of insight is, remember, repeated: there are two moments of
insight, two levels of revelation that follow on the heels of each other, as
thoughts do - Va-yar…Va-yar - because Abraham also has a moment of
insight not just into our shared humanity with the other, with the
stranger, but even more profoundly, insight into this being one way that God
is present in the world. It’s not just an awareness that, as we are
accustomed to say in a rather abstract formulation, humanity is made “in the
image of God/the divine”, b’zelem Elohim, as the beginning of Genesis
puts it (1:27). But what Abraham realises in a more personal way - what the
storytellers in their exquisite narration are signposting - is that in the
encounter with another human being, God , Adonai, is present.
That’s how
the narrative unfolds - Adonai appears to Abraham, verse 1. That’s the
storyteller’s omniscient ‘objective’ perspective, as it were. The narrator is
telling us what is going on, what we are going to see illustrated, illuminated.
Va-yay’ra elav Adonai - “the Eternal One appeared
to him”. But what does Abraham actually
see? What he sees are three people, people like him, three strangers. That’s
his subjective experience - people awaiting a response. And the text dramatizes
how what he sees with his eyes is linked to what he sees with his mind’s eye;
and what he realises, what his insight is - and it is a theological insight and
a spiritual insight - is that the divine appears in the everyday, the divine
appears when you open your eyes to see what is in front of you, the divine is
present in our interaction with others.
And that this experience is - for want of a better word - God. Or
rather, this is also God.
We are not
talking about a transcendent God here, something over and above us, beyond us,
we are not talking about a creator God, separate from our lives, but an aspect
of God here and now, present, waiting for us to see and to respond. Seeing with
the eyes in this story isn’t enough, it is reflecting on what he sees and
responding to what he sees, that makes Abraham into the exemplar, the model for
Jewish lives, Avraham Avinu, the founding father of a new way of seeing,
a new way of thinking about God.
If you look
through all these chapters in which Abraham appears, he doesn’t seem to speak much
about God - he doesn’t give sermons about God to his family, or to those
the Torah describes him encountering. He mentions God to Isaac at the Akedah,
but that’s just about it. But in our text today he introduces a way of thinking
about God - or rather the storytellers use him to dramatize a way of thinking about
God - that is ‘horizontal’ as it were, not ‘vertical’. (I’m borrowing Rabbi Arthur
Green’s language here). It is a way of thinking about God as what is enacted on the human level; which is why - one of the reasons why - I
stopped talking overtly about God and started talking more about compassion and
justice, and generosity, and kindness, about human qualities and capacities,
through which the divine enters into the world. God is revealed through us,
through us inhabiting these so called ‘divine’ qualities and enacting divinity
in our everyday lives. 'Horizontal' Judaism is a Jewish way of being and thinking
in which God is present in and through the human, rather than God split off
from humanity.
Who knows,
maybe in these latter years of my rabbinic life I might return to my roots.
There’s still a lot to say, to puzzle over, to explore and wrestle with, about Ha
Kadosh Baruch Hu, the Holy One of Israel, Ribbono shel Ha-Olam, the
‘Master’ of the Universe, Avinu Malkenu, ‘Our Father, Our Sovereign’,
there’s still quite a bit of life in the old dog yet - and I’m not just talking
about me.
[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, October 23rd 2021]
