Jewish Matters

Where Was God on 9/11?


     Tisha b'Av, 586 B.C.E. The Babylonian army sacks Jerusalem, the City of David, the City of Peace. They destroy the Holy Temple, enslave the Jewish people and march them off to exile in Babylonia.
     Where was God?
     Tisha b'Av, 70 C.E. The Roman army puts Jerusalem to the torch. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews are murdered in the streets. The Second Temple is razed.
     Where was God?
     1916, Anatolia. The Turkish army murders over a million Armenians.
     Where was God?
     Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebenica and Mostar.
     Where was God?
     September 11, 2001, New York City, Washington D.C., a field somewhere in western Pennsylvania. . . .    Let me put it another way.
     Some nameless humanid invents the wheel, easing the burden of all future generations of humanity.
     Where was God?
     Rembrandt, Goya, Matisse, Picasso. Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Ellington. Rabelais, Dickens, Twain, Austen, Tolstoy, Doestoevsky.
     Where was God?
     Shakespeare.
     What do all the events on the first list have in common? What do they have in common with the events and names on the second list?
     They are all the products of human imagination and human action.
     When something terrible happens, we turn our eyes heavenward and ask, "where was God?"
     But when Sabin and Salk eliminate the scourge of polio, when the Wright Brothers teach man to soar alongside the birds, when Mozart composes The Marriage of Figaro, no one asks "Where was God?"
     Perhaps it's too easy to say, as we often do, that God's presence is manifested in the beauty of the great works of art, those creations that we consider the crown of our civilized world. Perhaps it's too terrifying to say that God permits the acts of cruelty that we consider its degradation. Or even more terrifying to consider the possibility that Osama bin Laden is right -- or that our homegrown bin Ladens, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are right -- and that we are being punished by God for some transgression of whose existence we may be totally unaware.
     We turn to God for comfort. Where is God?
     The problem, as I see it, goes back to gan eden, the Garden of Eden.
     God asks Adam to name the animals. Up to this point, the Creation has been entirely God's province, God's project. But in the moment in which the Holy One asks Adam to name the animals, he takes in humanity as an active partner, albeit a junior partner, in the Creation. And God makes that partnership explicit when he gives Adam and subsequent human generations dominion over the earth and its inhabitants.
     The idea that humanity has an active role in Creation as an ongoing event is one that can be found implicitly and explicitly throughout Jewish sacred texts.
      It finds its mose poetic and cogent expression in the Lurianic kabbalah, in the idea that when God created the world, the power of the Supernal Light was so great that it shattered the vessels through which it was directed. At that moment, Creation became twofold, with an upper level and a lower level, and Evil was born.
     Evil, say the kabbalists, came into the world, through a violent separation between those elements that had taken part in the act of creation and others that had willfully resisted, contributing to the shattering of the vessels. The elements that had fought against the creation were the nascent powers of evil but, because they opposed creation they lack the power to survive; they need access to the Divine light, and continue to exist in the world only to the extent that they can gather the holy sparks that fell when the shevirah, the shattering, took place.
     Joseph Dan, a contemporary historian of Jewish mysticism, notes that it is with this conception of the Creation that the followers of Isaac Luria achieved a wonderfully elegant unity of mysticism and ethics. And it's here that our partnership in Creation takes on its fullest meaning.
     We received from God a world that was damaged from the very start, a world in which the Holy sparks of Creation were shattered and scattered. How can we help to repair the damage? By performing mitzvot, the kabbalists and the Hasidic masters who followed them tell us. When we performa a mitzvah, we raise a Holy spark upward.
     In the modern world, what does that mean for us as progressive Jews? Quite literally, tikkun olam, repairing the world. By engaging in acts that help to restore those shattered elements of our world to wholeness, to health. By acting for social justice throughout our community, our nation, our world. (Hey, I'm the Social Action Committee chair; if the shoe fits, start lacing it up.) The social action component of tikkun olam has always been pretty much a self-evident driving wheel in the Reform movement, the actualization of the prophetic strain within Judaism best expressed by Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah.
     But there is, I believe, a more fundamental element to tikkun olam than lobbying your congressman or writing letters for Amnesty International, marching in support of Israel or in opposition to war.
     In the aftermath of the World Trade Center horrors, I received an e-mail from Rabbi Zalmen Shmotkin. Reb Zalmen is an activist in Chabad, the Lubavitcher movement, and his message is worth repeating.
     He writes:

     Much has been written about the motivation, the conditioning, the bloodcurdling ruthlessness, the precision of last week's crimes against humanity. All accounts and hypotheses point to the same simple truth: The primary motivation, the underlying force behind every action executed bylast week's murderers was: Hatred.
     Pure, unbridled, blind, indiscriminate Hatred. Hatred of freedom, Hatred of democracy, Hatred of "infidels," Hatred of Jews, Hatred of anything and everything besides the murderers themselves. Wanton, simple hatred.
     It is this that we must combat. It is this that we must eradicate.
     What is the remedy to Wanton Hatred? The Lubavitcher Rebbe of righteous memory answered this many times, with clarity and certitude: Wanton Love.
     Raw, cold-blooded, fanatical, baseless, relentless hatred can be matched and combated only with pure, undiscriminating, uninhibited, unyielding, baseless, unsolicited love and acts of kindness.
     But we need not just plain love. We need love that costs us. Love that we get nothing back for.
     The barbarians willingly gave up their lives to sow their hatred. We need to be willing to lose sleep, to suffer losses, to be uncomfortable, to sacrifice our pleasures, in order to help another human being -- with at least the precision, determination and passion that Evil's compatriots of last week employed to fulfill their mission of hate.
     Every one of us can make a difference.
The Rebbe would always quote the Maimonidean adage: Each person should see himself as though the entire world is on a delicate balance and with one deed he or she can tip the scales.
     Only a few handfuls of terrorists turned our world upside down. Let us not underestimate the power of each of us to turn it upright again.
      Every good act, every expression of kindness and love, will be a thousand antibodies to neutralize the viruses put in place by the forces of evil.
     In response to darkness, we will fill the earth with light. To defeat evil we will saturate our globe with good.

     So on some level the responsibility is ours. As these acts were human acts, the response must be human too.
     Now any good debater would call what I've just done "begging the question." Well, that's polite; "evading the question" might seem more just.
     I still haven't answered the big one: Where was God?
     Rabbi Shmotkin closes his letter by saying, "[W]hen we do our part G-d will surely do His part to protect us and transform our world to the one we all hope and year for, one that will be filled with His glory, like the waters fill the ocean."
     That's consistent with the idea of tikkun olam.
     But when a child burns his finger after the parent told him not to touch the flame, the first thing the parent says shouldn't be, "I told you not to do that. It serves you right." The parent rushes to comfort the child, to wipe away the tears and provide soothing words.
     We prayed repeatedly to Avinu Malkeinu, our Father our King, over the past two weeks. Where was the Holy Parent?
     I have an answer that many, perhaps all of you, will find not merely unsatisfying but, shall I call it "radically unsatisfying." It even doesn't entirely satisfy me but it's a conception of God I have come to accept.
     Leo Baeck, a brilliant Reform rabbi and thinker, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, once wrote that there were three types of phenomena in the world. There are those things that we know and understand. There are those things that we do not yet understand but that science will someday explain to us. And there is that which is Impenetrable.
     I think of God as The Impenetrable. As Maimonides tells us a primary attribute of the Creator's Godliness is that it is unfathomable to our minds. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes that man's awareness of the sublime and its inexplicability is an essential part of our consciousness, "that our awareness of the cosmic is our consciousness of having to be aware of it, as if there were an imperative, a compulsion to pay attention to that which lies beyond our grasp." [Emphasis in original.]
     In that compulsion lies the roots of the need to pray, the need to believe in a Deity. But it doesn't clear up the mystery of the First Cause, it doesn't answer Hume's wonderful question about existence: "Why is there not nothing?
     To my mind, the answer to that question is God. There is something because God wills it.
     Sometimes I think religious faith is like humor. Either you get the joke or you don't. Either you believe in God or you don't. After the basic premise is established -- "In the beginning, God created. . . ." -- you proceed where the story takes you.
     I have come to believe. I have a basic faith.
     But a central component to that faith is my realization that I don't, won't, can't ever understand "where God is" when I am in crisis, when a family member or friend is sick, when terrible things happen in the world.
     Where was God? I don't know.
     Not the most satisfying answer, I admit.
     But I derive some comfort from the belief that there is a God. And I derive more comfort from the sure knowledge that there is a community of people at Beth Am with whom I share some version of that belief, that there is a nation of people called the Jews with whom I partake in the same expressions of that belief, even if I don't read the texts in exactly the same light as the Lubavitcher Rebbe or even Rabbi Kaplan.
     In times of despair, in times of losses almost too terrible to bear, remember this. The Psalmist tells us that God is the healer of shattered hearts. But the vehicle through which God does that is people. So it finally does really come back to our place in the partnership. As surely as we must perform tikkun olam, as surely as we must repair the earth, we must support one another, shore up one another, we must, as W.H. Auden once wrote, "Love one another or die."