God At The World Trade Center
Kol Nidre 2001
September 27, 2001
Rabbi Mark Shapiro
This past week , the Mets and the Yankees played their first games in New York since September 11. The NFL was back in business. The new television season is also beginning this week.
Life goes back to normal – at least a bit.
We start to raise the flag from half mast, although I still find myself thinking about 9/11 and pursuing those amazing new stories which seem to emerge every day.
One of the most powerful stories about September 11 appeared last week in our own local newspaper, The Union News. It was a first-person account from a survivor who had an office on the 80th floor of One World Trade Center. Susan Frederick wrote the story for the Union News because she is a native of Holyoke, and her words provided an incredible perspective on what it was really like to escape down 80 flights of stairs.
What caught my eye was the way in which the author concluded her harrowing account. She wrote, “It is surely by God’s miracle alone that I got out. I am grateful to be alive…Amazingly, I never felt afraid, and I believe that was because I truly felt God’s hand upon me. It was not my time and I’m sure God heard all the prayers on my behalf.”
“It is surely by God’s miracle that I got out…I felt God’s hand upon
me…I’m sure God heard all the prayers on my behalf.”
What do you think? How do you feel when someone speaks about God in this way?
What did God have to do with what happened on September 11?
Here’s my response. When I read those heartfelt words at the end of the newspaper article, I hesitated. I wondered how someone whose family member died at the towers would feel about the claim that God heard some prayers and, by implication, not others. I could hardly tell Susan Frederick not to feel what she feels about God’s involvement in her escape, but I wonder where God was in over 6000 other circumstances.
I’m hesitant in general about invoking God’s name too easily. I remember a very faithful Episcopalian priest whom I worked with when I was a rabbi in New York. Our two congregations were involved in a variety of outreach projects for the homeless.
One night at a joint meeting, Father Godly (it’s true that was his name) announced to all present that we should make plans to build our own shelter for the homeless. Someone asked where the money for the project would be found. Others asked similar questions. It didn’t matter. Father Godly said that God had assured him the money would be found.
We all left the meeting scratching our heads and more than a bit concerned about the project’s viability. In face of Father Godly’s firm faith, it had seemed so crass to talk budget. Nevertheless, we knew budget would be an issue.
Lo and behold, two days later a letter arrived at my synagogue. Father Godly wrote that there had been some reconsideration. God’s spirit was, it turned out, not so clear on the dollars and cents. God had changed God’s mind. We weren’t going to build the shelter anytime soon.
As I said before, I like to be modest when it comes to invoking God. Perhaps it has to do with the historic experience of our people. For 2000 years, one of our greatest problems was the certainty Christians had about God. They knew who God was and what God said, and we didn’t. So it was that, “in the name of God and truth,” we Jews suffered centuries of contempt.
For that matter, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack were also certain of God’s will. God told them what to do, and the result is the horror we have witnessed in America.
God talk can be dangerous. People who are too sure about something as absolute as God frighten me.
But having shared those reservatioins about bad faith, I’ve got to admit that what Susan Frederick wrote was probably quite innocent and certainly 100% sincere. “I felt God’s hand upon me…I’m sure God heard the prayers…”
So let me take another crack at this idea of God’s presence and what God might have to do with the wounds inflicted upon our country two weeks ago.
On the one hand, I could sum it all up by saying I don’t believe God had anything to do with the terrorist attack. That was an evil brought about by human beings who exercised their free will to wreak havoc. If free will means anything, if being responsible for our conduct means anything, it has to mean that God didn’t cause the attack and God couldn’t stop the attack – not if we still want to be fully human with the freedom and the risks that entails.
I always remember what Elie Wiesel wrote in his novel, Gates of the Forest. When Gregor, the survivor of the Holocaust, meets a rabbi after the War and demands to know where God has been, the rabbi responds, “Auschwitz (read evil of all sorts) proves that nothing has changed. Human beings are capable of love and hate. We are good and bad together.”
The choice for good or evil is ours.
What I’ve just said may sound abrupt – even harsh. But I don’t mean it that way. In fact, I’m removing God from one aspect of the tragedy we’ve endured because I want to place God in another crucial spot. You see, I do believe God has something to do with what’s been happening in New York and elsewhere. My sense of this was captured in the headline of an article carried last weekend by one of New York’s major Jewish newspapers. They called the article – Blessings Amid Tragedy. They subtitled the article – Stories about the Nation’s Crusade of Compassion.
The article itself told stories about the magnificent ways in which so many New Yorkers have responded in crisis. The residents of an assisted living facility in Battery Park had to be evacuated to another facility. Volunteers from everywhere in Manhattan made the move possible for these senior citizens.
Students from NYU set up a table to collect donations. An advertising exec walked by; thought their signs could be more persuasive; went to his office; designed fabulous materials; and returned to donate the new signs.
As one of my colleagues wrote me last week, “God is not found in the attacks on innocents or in the proclamations of religious zealots. No, God is found in the humanitarian efforts, the motivation people have to help one another, in the people who open their homes to strangers at such critical times. God is found in the rubble at ground zero, in the compassion of those who work around the clock, digging with hope to find survivors. God is found in the search by loved ones with pictures around their necks walking through the streets seeking any kind of clues to help them in their search. God is found in our own desires to be in touch with those we love, when danger casts its shadow over our world.”
As Rabbi Harold Kushner has taught, God is found in our response to evil. This wave of caring and commitment that has swept over the country is, for me, a manifestation of God. God’s at work when we humans behave at our best.
But is that what God is? Where God is? Is all this really God at work or is it just good people doing very, very good things?
If you want to be critical, you could argue that where I’m finding God, I’m actually stumbling upon human nature. That’s what is evident in America – a fundamentally co-operative, caring people.
God isn’t some motivational spirit; God is “melech ha-olam.” God is the Ruler of the Universe. No matter how nicely I phrase it, you could argue that God has to be God the way you’ve always had God described. If not, then the whole God conversation is a sham.
Before you draw that conclusion, let me try one more time. Let me remind you about the great God story in our tradition. As ancient as it is, the story says something modern about what God may be.
It’s the story of Moses as he shepherds his father-in-law’s sheep in the solitude around Mount Sinai. According to the Torah, one day Moses is attracted by the sight of a bush that is somehow burning without being consumed. Moses approaches the bush cautiously and is surprised when he realizes God is using the bush to communicate with him. Moses is then given the most awesome task of any biblical figure. He is told to go free his people and he is guaranteed that God will support him.
Now comes the crux of the story. As Moses hears what God wants him to do, Moses decides to go for broke. If God is talking, Moses decides he’ll find out exactly who and what God is. So he asks God what God’s name is, which is like asking God – WHO ARE YOU?
The ancient writers of the Torah take this opportunity to leave all future readers with this response. God says, “EHYEH ASHER EHYEH – I shall be what I shall be.”
Which means….well, you tell me. It doesn’t mean God is King. It doesn’t mean God isn’t King. I think, instead, this is the Torah’s way of claiming, in the midst of a world with idols for everything, that God cannot be categorized. God is more supple than that. God is elusive.
I shall be what I shall be – whatever God is is destined always to be just beyond our last definition. God is a mystery.
All this means we shouldn’t ever forget that our descriptions of God are only metaphors. God isn’t really a king or ruler of the universe. That’s a metaphor which comes to us out of the ancient world where the metaphor of king was the best way to suggest something ultimate to our ancestors.
But in 2001 perhaps that metaphor isn’t as workable as it once was.
Perhaps we can do better by understanding God as a presence or a spirit. One contemporary poet has suggested we should call God “the source of life.”
I like to imagine God as a bubbling spring, a soft insistent force that wells up in us and around us. Rather than commanding from on high, God supports and sustains values and ideals that struggle to surface in human life. God is the bubbling stream of goodness coursing through the universe.
As such, God can be suppressed, repressed, or ignored. But God does keep trying to break through. God pushes, prods, and urges us to grow, rise above ourselves, and be better.
This is not conventional God talk, but it doesn’t have to be. For as long as we remember that even Moses was left with an open-ended definition of God (I shall be what I shall be), it becomes permissible – even necessary – for us to form our own images of God.
In fact, when it comes to imagining God for a new century, I like what Rabbi Harold Shulweis has written. It’s based on an exercise he used when his daughter was very young. It’s written as a conversation, but it’s a conversation that goes to the heart of what God may be.
“Touch my nose,” Shulweis (slightly adapted by Mark Shapiro) writes as he begins the conversation with his child.
Touch my nose, my ears, my eyes with your hands.
Touch, then, my arms and chest
Feel their shape
How real they are.
Now, touch my love.
No, not my chest or arms
touch my love.
You are puzzled.
How is one to touch love and where is its place.
It's not here or there
But who would deny its reality.
Where does it reside if it cannot be
pointed to as with other limbs.
It is less real, less important
than my chin?
There are matters not subject to
taste or sound or smell or sight
or touch.
Elusive to definition but known
without doubt.
Known to make us cry and laugh
to move us to unimagined heights
to courage and self-sacrifice.
Such things like love or God
Cannot be fingered or
poked.
And of such things
it is wiser to ask not what
but where and when.
Not what is love
and what is God
But where is love and when is love,
and where is God and when is God.
So where and when is God for me?
God was on this very bimah when the Seventh Graders and their parents stood here for a blessing only three days after the terrorist attack. It was a somber, frightening evening when we were supposed to be launching the youngsters on the year of their Bar/Bat Mitzvah journey. We huddled together that night. Hands were held. Kisses were exchanged. It was a quiet, awesome moment when it surely felt as if God was present.
Watch tomorrow morning. We’re going to call to the bimah every tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grader for an aliyah. There won’t be much room. There will be lots of jostling. But if you pay attention and if we slow the pace down for a moment, I think we’re going to sense God.
When a bride and groom hold hands under the chupa. I also feel that presence. It’s there between the couple and it’s so very present in the eyes of their parents.
Even at a funeral God can be felt. Amidst the sadness, there is a tenderness and a longing that transcends the moment. Something sacred can happen. There is still excruciating pain, but between the beginning of a funeral and its end, we can touch something that roots us and sustains us.
So it is that when a jetliner demolishes a beautiful building, God is the presence telling us to recoil and reach out to help the victims as best we can.
When tragedy leaves thousands in need, God mobilizes the caregivers and inspires one or many more emergency workers to go beyond duty into another realm of dedication.
Does God punish evildoers? Does God reach out to protect those who are good?
I don’t know. I can’t guarantee that good is rewarded by a God who is good. Even the Talmud acknowledges what Nachman of Bratslav told us last week: The world is a narrow bridge.
But remember too what Nachman said next – Do not be afraid. Do not despair.
Why?
Because what we humans do can soften the harshness we encounter.
Because God does pulse within us to strengthen our goodness.
Because ultimately we are not alone.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh…
The bush burns unconsumed, and we are made better by that quiet, enduring Presence.