When I was in college, I began to seriously doubt the existence of God.  

As strange as it sounds, I was in the middle of leading High Holy Day services at Tufts University when I looked down at the liturgy I was reading and thought “Do I believe any of this.” 

Imagine, I’m standing up there, reading one of the most iconic images from the High Holy Days, the prayer, Unitanei Tokef, which we will hear tomorrow, a prayer that speaks about God judging our fate for next year, deciding who will live and who will die, describing humanity standing beside the angels in Heaven, gripped by fear at our unknown fate, and thinking, “How could I be saying something, that I can’t image is true?” 

This moment kicked off for me, perhaps my life’s greatest crisis of faith. And in hindsight, as I will hopefully show you tonight, I am so glad I had that experience. 

A little background.  

I’ve wanted to be a Rabbi since before I remember. I have an early recollection of sitting there in religious school services and staring at my Rabbi, thinking, I want to do that someday. 

Soon, where other kids played firemen, I Bar Mitzvahed my sister’s dolls. 

Naturally, I took all the steps one needs to move forward on that path toward rabbinic school. I went to Eisner, a Jewish summer camp, got involved in our religion NFTY chapter, and chose to specifically attend a college which offered a Comparative Religion Major and four years of college Hebrew.  

But during that High Holy Day Season, it seemed the dream was beginning to crumble. I remember thinking to myself over that fall and winter about the many things I knew I could not believe. I would open up my pocket Torah commentary and think to myself: God can’t be jealous, or God has no gender, or God has no body, or God cannot command us to kill the Canannites simply because they live in the land we want.  

Soon, I was ready to postpone my dream of becoming a rabbi until I could resolve the “God question.” 

It took until the following summer for me to sit with a Rabbi at Eisner Camp and hear from him that it was OK that I felt this way.  

It was during that brief conversation, sitting on the bleachers by the baseball field after my campers were all asleep that Rabbi Eric Gurvis told me a story I had heard numerous times but hadn’t really internalized. 

In the Torah, Jacob has been estranged from his brother for 20 years and tomorrow they will reunite. Scared for what that meeting will bring, he sends his family across the Yabok River and is left alone. Soon, a strange being comes and begins to wrestle with him. As Jacob begins to win the fight, the being asks him to let him go, since the dawn is breaking and he needs to return home. Jacob, knowing that there was something special about his sparring partner, bargains with him. “I’ll let you go,” he says, “if you bless me first.” 

Turning to Jacob, the being says, “Your name will no longer be Jacob (meaning heel – since he was born grabbing on to the heal of his brother, fighting to be the first born) but Israel, Yisrael in Hebrew, which  means he who wrestles with God.” 

Rabbi Gurvis turned to me, “The essence of Judaism is asking the exact questions and wrestling with the same doubts that you have been. You don’t have to believe everything you read. The simple act of questioning doesn’t make you an apostate. It makes you Jewish.” 

Now that I’ve been in a rabbinic role for almost a decade, it’s funny how many times I’ve channeled Rabbi Gurvis’ reassurance to others in my midst. There is no phrase I heard more from people in our congregation during this first year than “Rabbi, I don’t believe in God.” Sometimes it’s said by a strident 12-year-old. At other time by a sheepish patient when I ask to pray with them at their bedside.  I was taught by a professor when faced with these statements to ask them to describe the God they don’t believe in. And more often than not I also don’t believe in that God.  

I have a mentor who often quipped that you should never ask a congregation, “who believes in God?” because you don’t want to know the answer. 

It’s a laugh line. But it’s a false dichotomy, because we haven’t defined our terms. There are some here who are true atheist, believing that the phenomena we experience can only be described by the chemicals coursing through out bodies. And if that is you, there is a place for you right here. There is no theological litmus test and your voice will always matter in the conversation. But much of the time, people use the term atheist to explain the fact that their spiritual worldview is too wide to encompass what they read about God in our sacred texts. And if that’s the definition, I’m pretty sure I would number myself in that category. 

Sadly, because God is so tied to classical Jewish images with which people may not agree, most Rabbis stay away from talking about God altogether. There are many safer topics – Jewish ethics and values, interpersonal dynamics, family, forgiveness – all of which don’t cause a large percentage of congregants to shift uncomfortably in their seats at the mention of a topic to which they cannot relate. But the idea of God is central to Judaism, and to discount that is to lose an important part of our religion and heritage.   

Talking about this problem, my mentor, Rabbi Rachel Timoner confessed a few years back to her congregation:  

“Because I know this about so many of you, because I’m trying to help you relate, I find myself avoiding the word God. The prayer says “It’s good to give thanks to God.” And I’ll say, “It’s good to give thanks.” The prayer says, “You’ve loved us with a great love, Adonai our God.” And I’ll say, “You are loved by a great love.” 

I have to admit that sometimes I do the same. My problem is that I’m quick to make God into an analogy rather than the focus of a discussion. Last week, in our family Rosh Hashanah services I found myself talking about the idea of “Grace,” the fact that God loves you even if you don’t deserve God’s love, which actually a central theme of the High Holy Days. But because I was nervous that others might not want to talk about God, I jumped ever too quickly to discussing the act of grace in parenting, something more relatable, and yes, much safer. 

But that’s actually not fair to you and it’s not fair to our rich Jewish heritage either. As Rabbi Timoner continues “We have made God a taboo in God’s own house.” 

Tonight, I want to challenge us to look anew at the question of God. 

Judaism is the record of three thousand years of God-wrestling, and the primary question our ancestors are wrestling with is what they mean when they say that word “God.” 

For some, God is the image put forth in the book of Daniel of the old man with a white beard, standing above the clouds. This is the classical view of God that appears in paintings and movies. And though it speaks to some, others want something different. 

And if you are in the later category, you should know that Judaism itself isn’t monolithic on its definition of God. 

Maimonides in the 12th century saw God as unchanging. For this reason, God doesn’t hear our prayers because to do so would be to change God – one moment God doesn’t hear us, the next, God does. Instead, he explains, God is constantly pouring forth blessing and it is our responsibility to refine ourselves, so we might become a vessel to catch those blessings. 

In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza imagined that God and nature are one. For Spinoza, God is the substance that makes up the universe. Every person, every flower, every breath of air is an experience of God, in fact it is God. Later this thinking would lead Albert Einstein to proclaim that in a world of science “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. 

As time progressed, more and more thinkers expanded the universe of meaning contained within the word God. In the 20th century Martin Buber taught us that God can be the space that exists between two people when they are having a profound and connected interaction. Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of reconstructionist Judaism, told us that God can be the source of strength and creativity that pushes all of us, and all of creation, to reach our true potential and virtue. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good people (and no relationship to Steven) saw God’s power as limited. For him God does not have the power to make us well when we are sick or sick when we are well. Germs do that. God does, however, have the power to make us brave and to walk beside us as we face the hardest parts of existence. 

But as much as these thinkers are helpful in expanding the universe of what the word “God” can mean, I have a confession to make. I’ve always found problems with trying to understand God from words in a book. Religious philosophy, which is what this is, like all philosophy can be very helpful at times in expanding our vocabulary and framing questions in new ways. But at other times it just becomes logic puzzles and word games. Case in point the famous paradox of omnipotence: Can God make a rock so big that God can’t lift it? If God can do anything God should be able to make that rock? But then isn’t God lacking if God can’t lift it? While intellectually stimulating, these philosophical quandaries do little for my religious sensibilities.  

For this reason, we God-wrestlers have to reframe the question about God. Instead of looking for answers that makes intellectual sense to us and applying it to God, we have to experience the world, interrogate moments of connection, transcendence, and holiness and figure out where God might have dwelt in their midst. 

After that night of discussion with Rabbi Gurvis, I became a student of theology. I attended whatever classes I could that would broaden my understanding of God. I took Jewish books out of the library and I searched for answer. 

But as Rabbi Harold Kusner writes in a different work (which I will paraphrase), “If studying theology is like reading a menu, then religious experience is like eating dinner.” 

And I was still hungry. 

And then it happened. I hadn’t felt any real connection to God in some time. In fact, the real catalyst to my crisis of faith had come a few months before that fateful High Holy Days, when during a program about God at camp, a teen turned to me and said, “You don’t really believe in God, do you? Tell me, you lead services, have you actually felt God when you lead?” I had no answer for her. 

As a young song leader and prayer leader, I wasn’t proficient enough at my craft to make room for God. My attention was on singing in key, my tempo, my capo.  

It would take until the winter of my senior year, before I could be present enough in services to have an authentic religious experience in prayer. I was leading the prayer Shalom Rav with the melody many of us know. There is a moment right before moving from the second verse into the chorus where there is a silence, a true pause, before the final chorus. In that moment, when we stopped singing, each of us inhaling before moving on, I felt God’s presence rush in and fill the room. I will be spending my life, reflecting back on the nature of that presence, using theology and philosophy to explain what I felt that evening, but in that moment, it mattered less what God was, than that God was there. 

Since then, I’ve realized that many of my own moments of transcendence happen not at services but somewhere else. Think back to when in your life you have felt true moments of awe, or when you have felt an organic and unexplainable connection, or a deep love that seems to defy expectation. 

Was it on the top of a mountain? Were you staring into the face of a child? Were you held up by something during a tragedy? Was it an experience with art or music?  

You can use a myriad of words to describe those moments? Why be afraid to let yourself include God as part of that description? Surely if God exists, God is expansive enough to include your own definition. 

I’ve always loved the Hindu Proverb about a blind king, who rules a kingdom of blind subject. He’s heard in story books about this thing called an elephant and wants to understand it. He brings one into the castle and asks his blind advisors to line up and tell him about the nature of this elephant. 

After spending some time feeling with their hands, they come back to him with the answer. One says an elephant is thick like a tree trunk. Another says it’s smooth and comes to a point like a strange shell. Another that it’s large and floppy like the walls of a tent. A final one says that it’s narrow with a puff on the end, almost like wheat.  

In truth, an elephant isn’t its leg, it’s tusk, it’s ear, and its tail. But also, each of these part of the elephant is an authentic experience of the creature. The problem for these wise men wasn’t the elephant per say. It was that their scope was narrow. 

Every metaphor in our prayer book, every vignette in our Torah, every philosophical treatise, every theological statement, is one person, or one era’s attempt to explain their experience with God, their piece of the elephant.  

Just because someone once experienced God differently than you and wrote it down in your prayer book, attempting to put words to that ineffable experience using their own cultural references of symbols, doesn’t mean that your own take, your own words, your own metaphors are any less profound. They might have felt God very far away and powerful, and living in their milieu, used King. You might feel the same and use the words Universe or Cosmos.   

When we read something with which we don’t agree, doubt should not turn us off to it. In fact, doubt itself is an act of faith. For rather than growing indifferent, doubt keeps us engaged in the struggle, reminding us to keep interrogating our assumptions until we settle on something that makes sense to us. 

Despite being a rabbi, I don’t have many answers about God. I can’t explain why bad things happen in this world, though I have some ideas. I can’t tell you what happens after you die, though I have some musings. I can’t tell you where God is, what God is, or even how to find God, though sometimes I have a feeling. 

What I can tell you is that I need God. For it is in the pursuit of God that I explore some of the most fundamental questions in life. It is in God that make way for things far bigger than myself. It is through God that find a prism to see the holiness around me.  

This year, I want to ask, what if you allowed yourself to get past what you don’t believe and start exploring what you do? What if you embraced your doubts but let go of your cynicism? What if you let God mean life or love or hope and then prayed for those things through the language of Judaism? 

I’m not sure I will ever feel done wrestling, but that’s the point. But in the meantime, I’ll pray, I’ll wonder, I’ll hope, I’ll marvel, I’ll be amazing and surprised, connected and estranged, alienated and embraced. And in the meantime, I know God, in whatever form, in whatever way, is smiling down on every one of those steps.