Sermon – A personal theology for Shabbat Ha’azinu

Written by Rabbi Hannah Kingston — 30 September 2021

In a social experiment, a group of kids were asked to describe God to an illustrator. Artistic representations were then made of the god they each described. According to these children:

God is definitely not a woman.

He has two heads, a button nose, a lions mane.

He lives on a lily pad in the clouds.

He’s naked, which is pretty funny.

He also has wings, with big hands at the end, ready to control all things in the universe.

He also carries a whistle, and eats a hot dog.

The kids conclude, God may be pretty angry if he saw these drawings…

 

I wonder if adults were asked the same thing, what they would say. Because as sweet as these depictions of God were, they are most certainly not MY God. For in all honesty, I don’t know how to describe my God, or what my God would look like on paper. My God manifests in interactions, in prayer, in the small everyday miracles. My God most certainly does not eat hot dogs…

 

We have just come out of Yom Kippur a day where, faced with our own mortality, we find ourselves in close conversation with the divine. Throughout the day we plead with God, seeking the God ‘rav chesed v’emet, notzer chesed l’alafim’ – “abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation”

As Rabbi Josh said in his sermon at Neilah, it is this God that desires kindness and decency, the God and that acts with mercy and compassion, that we should aim to emanate on earth.

Yet that is not the God that is always present in our narrative. Ha’azinu contains diverse metaphors for God. God is compared to a rock, bird, warrior, father and mother. And perhaps most challenging of all, this week we are faced with a God as far removed from the God that abounds in chesed as possible, we see a God that seeks vengeance.

 

How do we reconcile both images of God, a God who desires kindness, yet is able to wreak vengeance, to make arrows drunk with blood?

 

The song of Ha’azinu traces the trajectory of God’s relationship with the Israelites, a relationship that has not been an easy ride. It began with a statement made by God, Eh’yeh asher eh’yeh – I will be what I will be.

 

God chose the people of Israel and watched over them, only to be rejected as they turned to other deities. God cycles through rage, resolving to decimate them, then regrets this. The multiple metaphors used to describe God in this piece show, Eh’yeh asher eh’yeh – God was travelling the journey with us and throughout was discovering how to be Israel’s God.

 

And now, as we are about to finish our Torah, we read:

See now! Ani hu, I am the one, and there is no God beside me. I revive and I kill. I wound and I heal.

 

Now God has a firmly established identity. God is one. One God, with many different roles and many different personas.

 

My favourite Jewish text comments on this. In Pesikta D’Rav Kehanah, a compilation of midrashic dsicourses from the 6th century, we read:

The Holy One appeared to Israel with a stern face, with an equanimous face, with a friendly face, with a joyous face:

With a severe face appropriate for the teaching of Scripture

With an equanimous face appropriate for the teaching of Mishnah.

With a friendly face appropriate for the teaching of Talmud.

With a joyous face appropriate for the teaching of Agaddah.

Therefore the Holy One said to them: Though you see Me in all these guises, I am the Eternal your God.

 

Our Torah portion uses many metaphors to imagine God, because no single one can sum up the divine-human relationship. Because our God is encountered in different ways throughout our lives, depending on our own capacity to experience the divine. Our relationship with God is complex, nuanced and ever changing.

 

On Yom Kippur, when we are at our most vulnerable, closest to death and laid bare before our creator, we needed the God of mercy and compassion. We were forced to think about the frailty of human life, the consequences of our actions, we needed to be secure in the knowledge that our repentance would be met with kindness.

 

Now past that day we find ourselves in a different place. Now we need reminding that over the next year, as we have in the years gone past, we will be drawn into moments of anger, we may seek our own vengeance.

 

The wrathful God we encounter in our narrative may be a God that we do not like. That we wish to turn away from and claim that that God is not in fact our God. But that God serves as a reflection of our own human nature, Because God, like us, is imperfect.

 

The many metaphors included in the song of Ha’azinu show that no one mode of God deserves more credence than another. Each is an imperfect and inadequate representation of the Divine.

 

And just as each of these metaphors is different, so each of our relationships with the divine is different. And just as no metaphor is given more credibility, so too no relationship with God is more credible than another. My relationship with God is not worth more than yours.

 

Further, the text of Pesikta d’Rav Kahahna goes on to say:

 

1. Levi said: The Holy One appeared to them as though God were a statue with faces on every side, so that though a thousand people might be looking at the statue, they would be led to believe that it was looking at each of them.

 

This is a striking image. God, as an almost totem pole, a contrast to the commandments in which we are told to make no physical representation of the divine.

 

Yet the image of thousands of people looking, each from their own perspective, is powerful. For a 3 year old looking up, the face of God looking back would be different to a 50 year old looking down.

As you grow, the image of God looking back will grow with you. So too as you mature, your understanding of the Divine will shift.

As Dr Barry Holtz, Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary states:

it is impossible to expect that our views about God will remain constant throughout a lifetime – an idea which, I think, holds significant implications… None of us thinks about any serious idea in the same way we did when we were children – our views about politics, art, music and even food have grown as we have. Otherwise, we would all believe that the government can do no wrong and that chocolate cake is at the heart of a balanced diet…

 

We are so close to finishing the Torah and beginning it again. Every year we encounter the familiar narratives. Yet every year they resonate with us differently. We see ourselves reflected back in the narrative of the divine. And just as God is different with each interaction, so too are we, made in God’s image. We all wear many faces, many guises with which we take on different aspects of the world.

 

This year, may we be open to our individual encounter of the divine, seeing God travel and grow with us along the way. May we grapple with the many different faces, reconciling that no one is more powerful than the other. And may we be comfortable in the knowledge that to one person God may have a lions mane and eat a hot  dog, and to another, God may just be in the vacant space.

Yisa Adonai panav eilecha, v’yasem l’cha Shalom.

May your God, turn towards you in tenderness and may you find in this encounter, peace.