Shabbat 10 February 2024 MISHPATIM

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 12 February 2024

There’s a flood somewhere, so the story goes. People clamber on to the roof of their house to stay above the rising water to await rescue. Eventually a boat comes and people climb in. But one man refuses. “Get in,” they say, “there’s room.” He says, “Don’t worry, God will save me.” The boat goes away. It comes back an hour later. The water is now almost at the top of the roof. The man again refuses to get in: “God will save me.” Two hours later, the boat returns but the roof is completely covered and there’s no sign of the man. In heaven, he challenges God. “You could have proved Your power. Why didn’t You save me?!” “What are you talking about,” says God, “I sent the boat three times.”

So what is our image of God? Very young children often picture God as an old man, with a long white beard, a white robe, sitting on a cloud ‘up there.’ They can’t easily understand abstract ideas. So any talk of God to them must be in terms they can understand – hence this way of describing God as an old man with a beard up there.

But what happens to that image as we grow up? Some lose it; some continue, in adulthood, to perceive of God in the same way. Maybe not quite as the old man on the cloud, but still with sort of human attributes.

In theological parlance, ascribing human form and characteristics to God is called ‘anthropomorphism.’

One of the earliest translations of the Hebrew Bible two thousand years ago was the Targum, into Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Middle East. When you compare the Hebrew and Targum versions, it becomes clear that the translator was unhappy with anthropomorphisms and tried to get rid of as many as possible.

So in our Torah reading this morning we read vayir’u elohai Yisrael “Moses, Aaron and the elders saw the God of Israel” (Exodus 24:10) the Targum renders it as “they saw the glory of the God of Israel.”

Seeing God in human terms creates problems. It enables people to say, “Of course I don’t believe in God. How can you expect me to believe in God as an old man with a white beard on a cloud?!” nobody does expect that. But rather than rejecting that particular image of God and coming to a, perhaps more mature, deeper, understanding of God, any idea of God is rejected altogether a sort of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

Anthropomorphism leads us to expect certain things from God. In our times, this is most often expressed in questions like “where was God at Auschwitz?” The question behind that question is really something like “why didn’t God intervene at Auschwitz?” Which presupposes God as some sort of human being, albeit with superhuman qualities, who could have, who should have, ‘done something’ – reached down with a hand to stop the transports, say, or killed the Germans, but done something, intervened in some way.

Anthropomorphism leads us to seek divine intervention in human affairs. We want God to lift the pain from our loved ones and heal their illness. After all, is God not the great healer? We want God to relieve suffering in the world – is God not the one who feeds the hungry and clothes the naked? The Siddur is full of such descriptions of what God is and does.

The rabbis were aware of this potential danger. When we read in the Torah about God speaking, stretching out a hand, feeding the hungry and so on, they said we have to insert the word k’ilu, ‘as if.’ It is k’ilu, as if God speaks, feeds the hungry and so on.

I suppose it recognises that if we want to talk intelligibly to each other about God, we have to use words that we know the other understands more or less as we understand them. We all know what ‘speaking’ is, or ‘stretching out a hand.’ But when we talk about the infinite, that which is not human like you and me, we are obliged to use the vocabulary of limited, finite human beings – it is, of course, all we have. So we do so, but hopefully not forgetting the limitations of our vocabulary.

These are not new questions or difficulties, something only we in our enlightened times have experienced and asked. Across the ages, I assume people asked the same questions that we do about God – and we shouldn’t find that surprising. People grappled with the same issues of life and death in their lives that we grapple with in ours.

Last week we read the Ten Commandments in the Torah. One of them focusses on not making any images of God, which many believe is the reason why there are no images of God in the stained glass windows in this beit tefillah.

Leo Baeck wrote a wonderful essay entitled “Two World Views Compared.” He contrasts Jewish and Greek culture and civilisation. In Greek art, he argues, the artist tries to represent the ideal – a sculpture depicting the ideal of beauty, say, or strength, grace, wisdom and so on. Judaism followed a very different path.

The Jewish prohibition against images of God, argues Baeck, is because a sculpture, however beautiful, is an attempt to encapsulate in wood or stone something which, by its very nature, cannot be encapsulated. It suggests that it is possible to capture the Truth about something, its essence.

“It is as though,” writes Baeck, “there were a constant struggle between nearness and distance, between becoming and being….. there is a distance between the finite and the infinite, between the created and the Creator, between human beings and God; but it is, so to speak, an elastic distance, it becomes a dynamic element in the world. Energy replaces art – it is no accident,” says Baeck, “that the Bible condemns the image; it is a thing too fixed and final.” And he concludes, “a rabbinic adage has it that ‘God creates in order to continue to create.’” Nothing is fixed, can be fixed. (‘Two World Views Compared’ in The Pharisees and other essays, Shocken, NY 1966, p138)

Baeck suggests that we can only really conceive of God in terms of movement. All Moses can see, for example, is the back of God as God passes by when Moses is pressed into a cleft in the rock on Mount Sinai (Exodus 33:22).

All of which makes something in this morning’s Torah reading a bit puzzling. We read, as I said, that Moses and all the leaders of the people “saw the God of Israel.” (Exodus 24:10) It’s puzzling because we know that God tells Moses that “no person shall see My face and live.” (Exodus 33:20.) Yet they do see God – and they don’t die. It’s also puzzling because the Torah doesn’t actually say just what they did see. All we read is that “under God’s feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity.” (Exodus 24:10) God is described by the ground underfoot – which, in effect, tells us nothing at all about God.

Maybe the Adon Olam at the end of the service can give us an image. It’s in two parts. The first describes a God who is distant: God was, is and will ever be; God preceded all creation; God is eternal, unique, to whom no other is to be compared. Majestic, powerful and all that – but how can one have a relationship with somebody so remote, so far from our experience?

But the last two verses, on the other hand, are so different: they speak in the first person: this is my God, the rock I grasp, who shares my cup the day I call. God who is far and yet also very near, very approachable: the God with whom you can sit down for a cup of coffee and a chat. Maybe that’s a helpful image for us.

Way back in the last century, when I was rabbi at Southgate Reform Synagogue, we needed a new parochet, a new curtain for our Ark. I worked on the design with Liliane, one of our members, a great embroiderer, who, en passant, died just last week. Our reading desk faced the Ark so – selfishly – I wanted something that would help my focus in prayer.

We worked around two words from the last verse of this morning’s reading – esh ochelet: “Moses saw the glory of God as an esh ochelet ‘a consuming fire.’” (Exodus 24:17.) Esh ochelet. Liliane embroidered a wonderful image of the Burning Bush on the parochet – it was alive, with bits of flame shooting off, the way they do when you look at a bonfire.

Fire is constantly moving, it’s never still, never the same, always in motion, cannot be tied down, encapsulated. It has no solid or fixed form or shape, yet its presence is still very powerful. It gives us heat and light; yet we have to always be aware of our distance. Too far from it – and we feel nothing of its warming heat; too close – and we risk being burned.

I like that idea of esh ochelet, a consuming fire. It may be the closest, maybe even the best, we can get to describing God.