From the Rabbi

This past Sunday, Rabbi Liz spoke at the First Unitarian Congregation’s Sunday morning service while Reverend John Marsh was out of town. Her sermon’s title, “What’s God Got To Do With It?”, made everybody nervous. She managed to put people at ease — just as she would do when she talks about God at Or Haneshamah — with personal reflections, some old-fashioned teaching, and a little exercise. Here are a few excerpts from the message:

As a child, for some geeky reason, I knew the meanings of omniscient and omnipresent, and while not at all comfortable with or accepting of those notions, I didn’t outright reject them either. Nothing in my experience “proved” the existence of such a force in the universe, but the omni-presence of the concepts sure fascinated me.

So I continued to learn, spending lots of years, as it happens, in church. What I observed is that both Judaism and Christianity came to speak of God knowing that the language was working its metaphorical buns off, while sticking to biblical and anthropomorphic terminology. God — the God of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, that is — was never a person, a mortal, a perpetually old dude with a white beard AND a strong right arm, but we’ll still go on using the God as a Person language, even as our intellectual capacities and theoretical developments render this illogical…

…There are those who declare that [Mordecai] Kaplan would “turn over in his grave” if he knew what was happening in his name today, particularly along the edge of new age spirituality/talk about the transcendent realm. As Judaism has expanded its borders to take in those born Jewish but whose spiritual quests had taken them to other shores, they have brought back a comfort with the language of spirituality, and therefore, with God language…

…Torah, we can discern, is a record of a glimpse of a memory of the Divine. Revelation is an echo. Maybe sometime, somewhere, someone actually “heard” God’s voice from heaven. But WE ALL have every opportunity to encounter awe.