On Gods and Mortals

Rabbi Jack Bloom's provocative view of our relationship with God centers on the God of the Torah, and I respectfully suggest that we 21st century Reform Jews relate to Somebody altogether different. Taught as we are that we are made b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, we are more likely to look in the mirror than in the Torah to develop our picture. I find more truth than poetry in the story of the little boy huddled with his crayons over a sheet of paper, whose mother asks what he is doing. "I'm drawing a picture of God," he replies. "But Sammy," his mother remonstrates, "nobody knows what God looks like." "Of course not," says Sammy. "I'm not done yet." I connect the Sammy story to the explanation we are given for praying, not to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but rather to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob - not three Gods, but three different drawings of the same God. This gives implicit permission for each of in succeeding generations to make our own drawings. As someone not particularly grounded in theology or philosophy, I read Torah as the effort of my ancestors to explain the world around them and to differentiate themselves from their neighbors. I am proud to be descended from folks whose differentiation was to hold themselves to a higher standard and who attributed that choice as a response to a Higher Power. But a God who would stone the Sabbath violator or permit the Holocaust is not the kind of God in whose image I want to find myself - and therefore I have to look at Rabbi Bloom's God Who was active in history in the time of the Torah as the portrait drawn by our ancestors based on what they understood of their world, and transform that God into the One we know today, who learns from us by mirroring us, learning as we learn. Thus when Rabbi Bloom discusses our getting in touch with a flawed God, I understand him as telling us to get in touch with our own flaws. (I am uncomfortable with his wounded God, which strikes me as a Christian understanding.) And the flaws - God's? Ours? - seem to relate to self-improvement, rather than to either ethical or ritual behavior. The God of the Torah was understood as concerned with both; the God of Pittsburgh 1885 was perceived, perhaps with an assist from Isaiah, as concerned only with the ethical. What is God concerned with today? In our contemporary picture, what's God wearing? What's God eating? In the audio, what language is God speaking? In Pirkei Avot, the Chapters of the Fathers, we read Mikol melamdei hiskalti, I have learned from all I have studied with. In studying here with Rabbi Bloom, we seem to be learning that God is studying alongside us, and presumably learning alongside us. And thus this relationship for the sake of Heaven can flourish and the God of the 21st century, who has evolved from the God of the Torah, can be our Partner, our Teacher, and our Student, as we can be God's, in perfecting the work of creation, starting with ourselves. . .