My Understanding of God

In childhood, I wasn’t told explicitly what God was. I learned God through stories from Torah, from reading the Haggadah and being taught midrashim, and from prayer. In all these scenarios, God was the God from tradition and Torah: almighty, all-knowing, all-good, everlasting, everywhere, male. I was somewhat comfortable with these characteristics until I watched my Grandfather slowly deteriorate over the course of half a decade as he battled cancer. My Grandpa, made in the image of this God, was not given the roadmap for how to beat his cancer from the all-knowing God. The Almighty certainly did not stretch out His arm like He did in the book of Exodus and remove the spreading tumors. At the same time in my life I was learning about the Shoah, and the same questions arose: How could an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent Creator allow this to happen? Confronted with these inconsistencies, I came to one of the possible conclusions: the idea of God was a crock, and so I threw God away. It never occurred to me that what might actually have been a lie was not God, but my theology—a lie I was telling myself because I didn’t have access to another story.

            It was in college and rabbinical school that I encountered Process Theology, Emmanuel Levinas, Eugene Borowitz, Abraham J. Heschel and other thinkers that offered me another way. I now start with certain key first principles: God is not all powerful or all knowing, and I simply refuse to discuss the problem of evil in the terms that it classically has been discussed. The only “omni” I still accept in my theology is omnipresence, for I really do believe that God is everywhere. When I remove these incompatible characteristics from God, in many ways I remove the problems that were long insurmountable for me, and I am left with a God that I can respect, aspire to, pray to, and challenge.

I have spent too much time in my life trying to figure out what God is with little assurance that any of my conclusions thus far are anywhere near correct. Maimonides himself taught that the endeavor to know God is impossible, and that we should instead work to carve away, like a sculptor and a block of marble, all those pieces that we know are NOT the Divine, leaving us with a clearer silhouette. I rely instead on my ability to know God when I, miraculously, can notice and experience those things that point toward God: God is in the notes of a chord sung in perfect harmony by a group of strangers. God is in the wide eyes of a child who experiences new information like revelation from Sinai, and God is in the teary eyes of a spouse who sits next to their partner’s hospital bed for hours on end. God is in the Strong Nuclear Force and thermodynamics and gravity and meiosis and our nervous systems and the life cycle and the water cycle. If I had to make a guess, God is really the more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-ness of our Universe. Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. Was-is-will-be.