Yitro – Where is God?

(This is another reposting of a “Parasha Puzzler” from when I was “Reb on the Web” at Kolel: A Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning. This one’s from 5759-1999.)

“Where is God?” From the standpoint of many Jewish theologies, it is a question that doesn’t make sense. Since God is not a physical object, “where” is not a category that can be attached to It. And yet we ask it all the time. “Where was God when …” or “I’m looking for spirituality, for meaning…. Where can I find God?”

The Torah often speaks of God as if He/She/It had a “where.” I think it may be worth noting some of those pointers to “where to find God” in this parashah.

In Chapter 18, verse 12, we read that “Aaron and all the elders of Israel came to eat bread with Moses’ father-in-law before God.” What does that mean, “before God?” One possibility is given in the Talmud Yerushalmi — the Talmud that was completed in the land of Israel a couple hundred years before the Babylonian Talmud. (The latter is the Talmud that is meant when people just say “Talmud.”) :

Rabbi Yishma’el taught: “Aaron and all the elders of Israel came to eat bread with Moses’ father-in-law before God.” And did they really eat “before God?” Rather, from this we learn that one that greets another person greets, as it were, the Shechinah. (Yerushalmi Eruvin 5:1)

Or maybe God is up in the sky. Maybe we can find Him there. Our parashah does tell us that God “came down” to Mount Sinai (19:20). And some of our traditional commentators aren’t particularly troubled by that. But I am just not willing to believe that those lucky astronauts in the space shuttle are any closer to God than me.

I have a feeling, though, that the Biblical “sky” or “heavens” (shamayim) meant something different than ours does. It seems not to have been so much “way up there” but to have extended just about “down to here.” Thus, in Genesis 1, God created “the heavens and the Earth.” Everything that’s not Earth — that’s not ground or attached to ground — is “heavens.” Or in a more gruesome example, in Second Samuel 18:9, Absalom gets his head stuck in a tree and is left hanging “between heaven and earth.”

In our parashah, after the Ten Commandments, God says (Exodus 20:22-23)

…You have seen that I spoke with you from the sky. Do not make around me, do not make gods of silver or gods of gold for yourselves.

God’s speech “from the sky” is contrasted with gods of silver and gold, or even the possibility that God might be representable in silver and gold. Perhaps in our contemporary idiom, “out of thin air” would be closer to this use of the Biblical “sky.” We sometimes forget the (still) revolutionary power of the notion of a God that is the liberator of an entire nation of slaves, that speaks to us out of thin air, and that can in no way be encapsulated in the products of those that control the means of production. In our world, generally, power is associated with things and money. Not so God’s power. God’s biblical name, YHWH, is just breath — not a single solid consonant in there. But it turns out that faith in the Living Breath can topple empires that worship dead objects.

Where is God? As you hear the Ten Commandments read this week in Synagogue, or as you study them, imagine a nation that three months ago (in their time — two weeks go in Torah-reading time) was an oppressed mass of slaves. They are free now in the wilderness. They’ve been through some trials, and thought they complained against Moses and God, they apparently have passed the test; they are worthy of being spoken to by the Divine. Tradition says that you and I, too, were there. They stand at the foot of the mountain piercing into thin air, and they are addressed:

I am YHWH, your God. It is I that took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage….

Perhaps you will again be able to hear the liberating Breath of all Life and will again gain a sense of “where” in your world to look for the living God.

Tzom Shovavim

I’d like to recommend a fasting practice I started to observe last year, Tzom Shovavim. 

In our congregation’s interfaith work, I’ve been impressed by the spiritual (and, probably, health) benefits of Ramadan fasting for our Muslim friends and went looking whether there was any equivalent Jewish practice of a period of sustained fasting.  It turns out there is. It’s called the Shovavim Fast and the version I’ve taken on involves a sunrise-to-sunset fast Monday and Thursday for the six weeks from the Torah portion Shmot through the week of the Torah portion “Mishpatim,” or, in Jewish leap years, through Tetzavah (when the fast is called Shovavim Tat, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment.) So much of the spiritual path is about encouraging ourselves to live with purpose and awareness, and an extended period of fasting is an excellent way to do that.

The Shovavim fast seems to be of late Medieval kabbalistic origin and was never widely accepted.  Perhaps because of its obscure origin and sporadic observance, it also has a very wide range of versions of practice – more than most other Jewish customs.  Some variations include: Fasting only in leap years; fasting only Thursdays; fasting every day except Shabbat, Rosh Hodesh, and Tu BiShvat; fasting half days; replacing the fast with giving tzedakah or eating vegan/vegetarian. There is a version in several hassidic communities of replacing the food fast with a speech fast (“tzom dibur”), in which one doesn’t say anything at all except words of holiness.

Why these six (or eight) weeks? The simple answer: the acronym of the Torah portions spells out the word, “shovavim – שובבים,” meaning “wayward,” or “naughty.” That word appears only twice in the Tanakh, both times in Jeremiah Chapter 3, when God says twice: “Return, wayward children! שובו בנים שובבים” So the acronym of this Torah season is taken to hint at the passage in Jeremiah, telling us that this is a good season for the spiritual work of return – teshuvah. And fasting is a standard ritual of teshuvah. (When a leap year extends the fast, the acronym is also extended: Shovavim Tat. I’ll say a little about that below.)

There are also deeper connections that can be made between teshuvah and this series of Torah portions, spanning from enslavement to liberation, revelation, and the establishing of a just society.

One set of connections is based on a relationship between a sin of Adam and that process moving from Egyptian slavery to justice.

Devarim Rabbah (Margulies edition) 1:12
Rabbi Simon said: For one hundred thirty years, Adam stayed away from his bed. Why? Since he sired Cain and Abel, and Cain arose and killed Abel, and not only was he killed, but even Cain was headed for curse and destruction, … When Adam saw that, he said: If this is what I sire, and they head for curse…. What did he do? He stayed away from his bed a hundred thirty years, as it is said, and Adam lived one hundred thirty years and afterward he begat in his image and likeness (Gen. 5:3). What did the Holy Blessed One do? Added more desire to his desire, so he had intercourse with Eve and begat Seth.

Adam refuses to sleep with Eve for a hundred thirty years! God is clearly unhappy and has to intervene.  But what’s the problem exactly? In the above version, it’s seems that Adam has despaired of humanity and its future. He thinks “original sin” makes humanity hopeless and not worth perpetuating, and that, itself, is a sin! That very much speaks to me, and we’ll see that the Exodus narrative is very relevant to it. Luria follows a version in the Talmud (Eruvin 18b) that imagines Adam begetting all sorts of demons in those 130 years. The sin is that he wasted semen, and, worse yet, instead of making babies, it made demons! I have to say I’m not very interested in that version of this story, but many hassidic versions of Tzom Shovavim do take that direction and concentrate on the tikkun of sexual sins.  (It’s anxieties about sex and pregnancy that explain the particular attachment of this fast in some circles to leap years; In Hebrew, a leap year is called a “pregnant year.”) Finally, I’d like to suggest another possible understanding of Adam’s hundred-thirty year sin: Adam refused to take any responsibility for the sin of the fruit, blamed it all on Eve, and thought that angry distancing, negating the other, would somehow help the situation. Another excellent sin.

But what does Adam’s long sin have to do with the Exodus story?  It may be that the connection is originally based on another midrash (Bemidbar Rabbah 13:20): “Go calculate that from the day our ancestors went down to Egypt until the day Moses was born was one hundred thirty years.” So if Moses’ birth is the beginning of redemption, the experience of enslavement and slavery lasts exactly the same time as Adam’s despairing/angry separation from Eve. Perhaps, our ancestors thought, the two are connected?

Certainly, according to the Torah, our ancestors in Egypt did something that Adam refused to do: make lots of babies.  And they, too, had reason to despair. In fact, a well-known midrash (for example in Talmud, Sotah 12a) speaks of Moses’ father, Amram, divorcing his wife, Yocheved, after Pharaoh decreed that all the Hebrew baby boys should be thrown into the Nile. And all the Israelites followed his example. But their daughter Miriam convinces him that his decree is worse than Pharaoh’s for it eliminates the daughters as well. He remarries Yocheved (and everyone follows suit) and Yocheved bears Moses. And do you know how old she was? The same passage suggests that she was born just as Jacob and his family entered Egypt, so she was 130 when Moses was born! The connection is made very explicit  in the kabbalist Torah commentary Ba’alei Brit Avram by Avraham Azulay (17^th cent.), who claims, citing Isaac Abravanel, that Yocheved was a reincarnation of Eve, and Moses was a reincarnation of Seth.

We need not “accept” all that extravagant storytelling, but we can agree that the human condition gives reason for despair both due to our general existential state, and due to our specific political and social sins, and that the Exodus story teaches the importance of hopeful, self-responsible action.  We mustn’t reject the other and we mustn’t reject the future. Teshuvah – repentance – is not an act of despair or self-abnegation.  It is an act of hope. It’s based on the faith that the future can be better. Sometimes “shovavim” is translated “rebels” or “rebellious ones.” Rebellion, too, when done right, is an act of hope.

So this season of Tzom Shovavim can be a season of repenting of our despair and of committing to hopeful action, action that, as in the Torah, looks forward to the needs of future generation and works toward a just society for them that is an appropriate dwelling-place for the divine. 

There’s another understanding of the connection of this cycle of Torah readings and the return of wayward children brought by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s chief desciple, Reb Noson (in Likutei Halachot, Yoreh Deah, Laws of Shaving 5:9). Here, Reb Noson is working with the hassidic notion that the essence of “exile,” of which bondage in Egypt is the paradigm, is exile from God – more exactly, exile from the knowledge that God is right here with us all the time:

And this is the quality of Shovavi”m, when those who are fit have the custom of fasting and crying out to blessed God with prayers and penitential liturgy. For in this season, we read in the Torah about the exile in Egypt, and their redemption, which came through their crying out, as written above.  And we need to do the same now in this exile, as written above.  And so: “Return, wayward children – shuvu banim shovavim” (Jeremiah 3:14, 22), for the essence of troubles and exiles – may the Compassionate One save us from them – is in a lack of knowing, which is the quality of the wayward, when everyone goes around in the world like a literally crazy wayward person, as it is said (Isaiah 57:17), “The went wayward on their [own] heart’s path.” And when a person understands all this about themselves, how they are wayward and literally crazy, because they follow the stubbornness [or: imagination] of their heart and don’t pay attention to the eternal end-point, they will certainly have pity on themselves and do a lot of crying out to blessed God, and in that way will merit, in accord with their own qualities, to understanding and knowledge, which are the essence of the means to redemption generally and specifically, for each person and each time, as is written above. 

For Reb Noson, we’re “wayward” in the sense that we’re stuck in our own heads, wrongly thinking (like Adam!) that we’re separate beings, unconnected to the Web and Source of Life, and that’s a form of exile – the main form of exile. And so, like our ancestors in Egypt, we need to cry out, and, the Torah promises, our cries will surely be answered as we discover that we can march out of our “Egypt.”

I’d like to invite others to join me in reclaiming this fasting practice. Some of the benefit of the Ramadan season is not only in the fasting, but in the nightly gatherings to break the fast. Perhaps (after the pandemic) Jews can also take up that lovely practice for Tzom Shovavim.