Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom! This week we read the double portion of Parashat Nitzavim-Vayelech, and it is our final Shabbat before the new year. Nitzavim is one of my favorite Parshiyot (here’s a challenge for every week Shabbat attendees - count how many times I say that in a Torah cycle), as it declares the inherent equality of all the people who dwell in the God’s midst: the Israelites and the mixed multitudes, the water-carriers and the woodcutters, the priests and the scribes and the judges. And the Torah is not only of equal access to each of them, it is close at hand, that none should consider it arduous to reach. Vayelech sets us up more for the end of the Torah, as Moses prepares himself and the Israelites for his nearing death. The leadership is more ceremonially passed from Moses to Joshua in the Tent of Meeting, and both compose their epic song that we will read next week. 

The Haftarah this week is from Isaiah 61, the final reading of the seven Haftarot of Consolation read in the weeks between Tisha B’Av and Rosh HaShana. It opens with the words, “I greatly rejoice in GOD, My whole being exults in my God.” These words really caught my attention. What does it mean for one’s whole being to exult in God? The Torah tells us many times, including in this week’s parasha, to love God, and sometimes the Scripture or liturgy tells us how to love God - with all our heart, soul, and might. Yet I find the concept difficult for our post-Biblical Judaism and its more undefined God. We speculate about whether our Biblical ancestors used terms like “God’s arm” metaphorically (as Maimonides suggests) or if they truly believed in an embodied God (as historians seem more inclined to believe). If they believed in a God that took very direct action in the world and interfered with human life, or if that too was meant to be understood as Divine guidance and natural or moral consequences for our actions, as we might understand it now. Our later sages, starting with the Talmud and becoming more codified with Maimonides, further developing and extrapolating out with the Enlightenment, and continuing through modern philosophy and theology, are more clear that God is ineffable and unknowable. That anything we can say or think about God is limited, and so there is really no wrong way to conceptualize the Divine, as long as we recognize that we are only conceiving of a small part of the Holy Breath of the Universe. 

It is possible, of course, to love God with all our very human bodies and minds, even if God has no body and maybe not a mind the way we generally think of it, but it feels harder to wrap my head around. I love Judaism and Jewish practice. I love how our prayers connect us to our history and values. I love the tone of Jewish minor key singing and the feel of the Hebrew on my unpracticed tongue. And I believe in God. I believe in a consciousness to life that wants us to continue the work of creation through acts of lovingkindness to one another, through building families and communities, through care of the earth. I believe that our prayers and Jewish rituals help ground us in this belief and responsibility, and that it is good for the soul to have a foundation of faith in something greater than ourselves. But I don’t know if I love God the way I can love a fellow human, or nature, or even prayer and ritual. I don’t know if I believe God can feel love Themselves, and if it matters if we love God. I don’t believe God needs our prayers or responds to them in direct ways. 

I know some Jews have more solid ideas about God, but I think this sort of ambivalence about God as a Being is pretty common in Judaism, and I don’t think that it’s a modern skepticism or a Reform idea. Judaism is a religion of action over faith. Even those for whom faith was vital, the rabbis who taught that doubt in God or certain theological elements should be met with excommunication, still valued actually doing mitzvot over any declaration or sentiment. The middle of this week’s reading, the end of Parashat Nitzavim, says, “I command you this day, to love your God, to walk in God’s ways, and to keep God’s commandments, God’s laws, and God’s rules, that you may thrive and increase, and that your God may bless you in the land that you are about to enter and possess.” There’s the command to love, but it is followed up with action: to walk in God’s ways; that is, to keep God’s commandments. Isaiah himself, who declares in this Haftarah his delight in God, who is one of the few prophets who actually wants the job - even he says just a few chapters earlier (in the Haftarah for Yom Kippur morning) that fasting and sacrifice is meaningless without justice and intention to do better. 

Hurricane Helene is crashing down on our shores, killing people in its path. When natural disasters like this occur, some may say, “This is God’s will,” or some such explanation that denies the grief of the moment. A much more Jewish response would be to sit in the sadness and concern for human life. And a very common response from many of any faith background may be to question where God is when such things happen. How can we be expected to love a God that creates or even allows this kind of destruction? On the flip side, how can we expect a Creator to love a humanity that damages the earth to the point that we are getting “100 Year Storms” every year now, or that doesn’t provide free and safe evacuation plans or transportation for everyone who needs it? To have faith in God is to have hope for a better future, and to feel compelled to work for it. To love God is to love each other and the Earth and show that love through concrete actions that make life more livable for everyone. To earn God’s favor is to create the favorable world we want. 

In just a few weeks we will be celebrating Sukkot, a holiday to commemorate our ancestors’ homelessness, a holiday to celebrate our abundance. Let us start planning now how we might work to build greater abundance for all, to eliminate homelessness, to repair the homes in the southeastern U.S. and to repair the climate and ecology of the Earth, so that our rituals are not empty platitudes but calls to action. May we truly live our mitzvot, may we live our love out loud, and may our whole being exult in a brighter future for all people.