Dear Reader,
Welcome to the final installment of God Wasn’t In The Lesson Plans. I hope you have enjoyed this series and that you are left with more questions than answers.
You can find links to the previous parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3.
Love, Meg
The Children of Israel
Here we are, at the edge of the Red Sea. The Israelites have fled Egypt after the death of all first-born Egyptians and they are looking out onto the water:
When Pharaoh drew near, Bnei-Yisrael lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them! So they were terrified, and Bnei-Yisrael cried out to HaShem. They said to Moses, “Have you taken us away to die in the wilderness because there were no graves in Egypt? Why have you dealt this way with us, to bring us out of Egypt? Did we not say to you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone, so that we may serve the Egyptians? It was better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness!’” (Exodus 14:10-12).
The people don’t believe in Moses or his God. Shortly after this cry we get one of the most notorious miracles of Torah. It is here, as the Israelites are begging to return to the house of bondage, that the scene is set for a miracle. For, can a miracle happen when one expects it? Is a miracle not precisely the impossible becoming real? Or rather, maybe a miracle is less about the event or thing that occurs, and more an orientation towards the world. More to this later.
The sea parts and they are free to sing, dance, and witness the awesome power of The Divine. Surely, this God cares for the Israelites, will see to their well-being, and has the power to do so. However, all too soon, the people forget and yet again feel alone in the wilderness: “So the people complained to Moses saying, ‘What are we going to drink?’” (Exodus 15:24). Of course, God provides them with water. Then, they begin to complain about food:
But the whole congregation of Bnei-Yisrael murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. Bnei-Yisrael said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of HaShem in the land of Egypt, when we sat by pots of meat, when we ate bread until we were full. But you have brought us into the wilderness, to kill this entire congregation with hunger” (Exodus16:2-3).
Again! They forget again of the great capacity of God and dream of slavery Egypt. They fear they have not been liberated at all but duped into dying a horrific death of starvation (never mind the fact that God has just sustained them with sweet water and parted the Red Sea for their crossing).
Yet from this doubting or rather, despite it, the people are given manna – a food miraculously rained down from heaven. It is of note that the people do not seem to see the manna being rained down from heaven, though the Torah says this happens: “Then HaShem said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you” (Exodus 16:4). Instead, the people notice the flakey manna in the morning and ask what it is.
I can imagine that watching manna fall from the sky could have been an incredible moment of affirmation for the Israelites. Yes, God does want to sustain us, they might have said. Or, even if they did see the manna falling, would they would it have mattered in the long run, or just to calm them for the moment. The Israelites seem hellbent on remaining skeptical. That, or they all have issues with short term memory.
With this general attitude, we come to Mt. Sinai. Moses ascends the mountain and the people begin to stress.
Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Get up, make us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what’s become of him!” (Exodus 32:1).
The people are overcome with the chaos of uncertainty. “We do not know what’s become of [Moses!]” they cry. They refuse to fully process the entire situation, that God has saved them, nourished them, and answered every single one of their requests. They refuse to understand the gravity of what they have just seen.
They are living miracle to miracle and yet refuse to draw near.
All the people witnessed the thundering and the lightning, and the sound of the shofar, and the mountain smoking. When the people saw it, they trembled and stood far off. So they said to Moses, “You, speak to us, and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid, for God has come to test you, so that His fear may be in you, so that you do not sin.” The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was (Exodus 20:18-21).
The people stand far off refusing to experience the miracle any longer. “Do not let God speak to us,” they say. Make it stop! It is too much for the people – too overwhelming to experience God on their own. And yet, they desire Gods to “go before them.” How much more “before them” can they get?! What do they mean?
The people want something of their own making – something to hang on to. They want a theology.
The Children of Israel give us much to consider. First and foremost, they refuse to remember all of their encounters with God. You can almost hear them shouting, Lo dayneu! It is not enough! Being freed from Egypt was not enough. The parting of the Red Sea was not enough. The sweet water and manna was not enough. The thundering from Sinai was not enough. Will anything be enough? Were they slaves too long? Had God forgotten them for too long?
Nevertheless, they want a God. They want a concept, not a meeting. They do not want miracles yet their God is manna from heaven and a thunder from the mountain. They want a statue – a thing you can make with your own hands.
Buber writes:
Man desires to have God; he desires to have God continually in space and time. He is loath to be satisfied with the inexpressible confirmation of the meaning; he wants to see it spread out as something that one can take out and handle again and again – a continuum unbroken in space and time that insures life for him at every point and moment.
I empathize with the people. Who doesn’t want something they can touch –something they don’t have to doubt. And yet, their God appears in doubt.
They cannot hear God, not because God isn’t calling out, but because they will not draw near. It is too scary. They would rather make for themselves a God, as so many of us do. But what statue parts a sea? What books of theology shake the earth? Is this the trade-off – certainty for miracles? Must we suffer the anxieties of doubt to make the bed for miracles?
Sarah laughs. She doubts and she laughs and she names her miracle laughter for there is nothing else to say.
Concluding Thoughts
What you have just read is an exercise in readiness. I hope that in writing I make myself readier for miracles.
What I mean by miracles is actually quite simple. Take the plum for example. The plum is a wonderful, fleshy fruit. In eating it we can live until tomorrow, grow old, and partake in a full life. The plum grows on a tree that lives off of sunshine, water and nutrients. A tree can produce many plums which have seeds in them to create even more trees. And the plum is sweet and satisfying and expresses life like a little poem. Yes, the plum is also a scientific thing that can be explained through photosynthesis, etc... But the plum is The Infinite incarnate, too.
My threshold for miracles is low because I have found that when I draw near to all parts of my life, I do not name miracles so much as they call out to me. I write to be ready to receive all the plums of the world.
So, then what do I mean by doubt as being the context of a miracle? Despite my awe of the plum, I confess that mostly I see the plum as a mundane thing – something to chew on my way to work without a thought of its majesty. When I do that, I am like the Children of Israel, eating manna from heaven but refusing to see it fall from the sky. When I do that, I am not looking for the miracle of the plum. Then, when I notice it again, when the plum calls out to me and I can see within it the eternity of this universe, the miracle of the plum contrasts with my otherwise desensitized view and it is so much brighter.
I would be fooling myself if I said that I live my life, day in and day out, with an awareness of the divinity of the plum. But when I return to it, and remember it for the miracle that it is, it is like I get to experience the miracle for the first time. This is what I mean by doubt is the context for miracles – it is in the contrast that the miracles are so sweet.
But it is in the willingness to see the miracle – the willingness to see the Burning Bush – that we in fact get to see it. I write to be ready and willing. Seeing it once does not mean I will see it always. Just as drinking water today will not quench my thirst tomorrow.
But then I ask myself, who cares to be ready? Why “leave one’s way of life” to ready oneself for God-knows-what? To ask this question, to me, gets at the heart of it all – why live this life fully awake? Why care about a stupid plum?
In his memoir of spiritual self-discovery entitled Stalking Elijah, Rodger Kamenetz writes about his own journey of spiritual discovery. He reflects upon the thoughts of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. He writes:
For Nachman, who felt the winds of Enlightenment change coming to the shtetl, even the moment of doubt is sacred. In fact, especially sacred. The moment of supreme doubt is a main gate, another door to God. But as Nachman predicted in despair toward the end of his life, for most of us the crisis has gone beyond doubt. Today, there’s an absence of questions. We don’t know that we don’t know, we don’t care that we don’t care.
While I greatly appreciate the sanctification of doubt that Kamenetz presents, when I read this, I shudder because I know what it means to not care that I don’t care. Maybe we all do. I know how it feels to move through life from doubt to doubt as the Israelites do, or worse, from apathy to apathy. Sometimes we do this in the depths of a depression we can’t control. Do we ever control how much we care?
It would be easy enough to say that I write Torah because I simply care about Torah. But that would avoid the real reason and thing I fear to say. In truth, I write my own Torah to choose to vigilantly avoid the otherwise utter loneliness of this world. When I am in Torah, I don’t feel lonely.
When I am in Torah, I see the miracle of the plum. I draw close to something eternal – maybe my people. Maybe, myself.
Sources:
Buber, Martin. I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1970).
Kamenetz, Rodger. Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Todays Jewish Mystical Masters (New York, NY: Harper San Francisco, 1998).