By Andi L. Rosenthal
When I was four years old, I learned how to make the Sign of the Cross. As a pre-kindergarten student at the Immaculate Conception School, I was taught that this was a necessary practice to begin and end any conversation we wished to have with God. We were to use this rite any time we needed to talk to God - to give thanks, to pray for help or healing, or even just to ask a question. I remember clearly how the nuns walked up and down the rows of desks, painstakingly correcting each child as they sought to master the choreography of the ritual - the slight touching of the forehead, then the space right below the heart, first left, then right. As a child, it fascinated me that this tiny ceremony was akin to picking up the phone, or in these days, opening up a text window to send an email. Just ask the question, we were taught, and you will receive an answer.

So it was with great interest and excitement that I read Rabbi Jack Bloom's article in the latest edition of Reform Judaism magazine. Perhaps because I learned from a very young age that the signs and wonders of God's creation were all around us, or perhaps because I was taught to share my desk with a guardian angel, I found Rabbi Bloom's article to be not nearly as controversial as some would perceive.

Even though our Torah depicts God as, in Rabbi Bloom's words, "anything but all-loving," we may still be guilty of basing our expectations of God on God alone, and not on our own, limited human interactions with the limitless world of God's creation. But for me, growing up in Catholic school, with a strong sense of devotion and faith, the blessing of dialogue through ritual with the Holy One, and the notion of an unjust world that we had the power to heal through the works of our hands, God was never very distant, and rarely silent.

It's easy to see why so many people of our generation have rejected the notion of the Divine. Why would we want to be in dialogue with a God who, like any parent, has invested us with all of their foibles and faults, angers and issues, and who continually engages in conduct unbecoming to a deity, much less a human being? And if we as humans are indeed, as Rabbi Bloom suggests, indicators of all God's traits - both the good and the bad, "intolerant of imperfection (our own and others), judgmental, quick to anger when things don't go our way, and prone to act abusively and destructively," then what are our options when reflecting upon the gifts of a humanity that is created in an image that, like a mirror, reflects just as poorly upon God as it does upon us?

It would seem that in order to instruct Rabbi Bloom's "teachable God," our options are few, but essential: first, to measure these behaviors by studying text, engaging in dialogue with our faith community, and evaluating our actions - in essence, choosing as a people which God to we hope to emulate. And second, to reflect and ask ourselves if we, as individual inheritors of these both godly and ungodly traits, can do more to lead God by example. If we do not wish for God to demand the death of the woodcutter, we ourselves should not be so quick to pick up the stones. We must ask ourselves, as Moses pleaded with the Holy One in the wilderness: can we, too, subdue our anger, act with loving-kindness and consideration, judge less, love more? And going further, can we embrace in ourselves and those we love the same powerful and all-encompassing love, fairness and compassion that we demand of God?

In the Yom Kippur liturgy, we reassure ourselves with the prayer that God does not expect perfection from us; is it thus fair, as partners in God's ongoing work of creation, for us to expect perfection from God? To me, the idea of a deity who is only good and noble and reasonable and communicative is simply no more realistic than the notion of a perfect human being. But we can no more uninvent God than God can uninvent creation. No matter how unbecoming the conduct on either side of the equation, neither God, nor we, have the choice to "un-become."

Rejection of the controversial notion of achieving perfection through the violent redemption of sin was one of the reasons I became a Jew. We as Jews do not seek perfection through the sacrificial destruction of the self; nor should we expect a more just world, a world without wrongdoing, or even a more level playing field, by declaring the oblivion of God.

Day by day, face by face, word by word, we see flashes of God's 'humanity' just as often as we see sparks of human 'divinity' in those around us. As custodians of our past, we are often quick to remember the injustices and horrors, but we are also slow to forget that even in the darkest hours of our history, whether it was in Egypt or exile or even in Auschwitz, babies were born, love between husbands and wives endured, tenderness between parents and children was kept alive, friendships were formed and sustained by the will to survive. And above all, our heritage remained a living inheritance which, even after generations of struggling to understand our relationship with God, is never one thing or another, never irreparably broken and never fully whole, never entirely joyful, nor absolutely filled with sorrow and regret.

Our divinity and God's humanity; our covenant with God and God's covenant with us; the ongoing struggle to understand the language of the divine even as God struggles to speak to us - all of these things demand that the conversation continues so long as we count ourselves among those who stood at Sinai. Eternally standing at the foot of that mountain, we must still seek to master the choreography of our own human ritual if we wish to continue the dialogue: if we ask the questions, as we were taught so long ago, then perhaps, we will receive an answer.

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