From the Cyber Torah Archives

What would it mean to talk to God?  How is it possible to encounter God on a daily basis?  We struggle with these questions because we want the sense that a higher loving caring being is looking out for us.  Yet by contrast with the stories we read in the Bible, we today struggle with doubts.

These last two weeks we have been reading about the miraculous encounter between God and Moses.  The Torah teaches that Moses, unlike any other prophet (let alone the rest of us) spoke to God "Not through riddles or dreams, but face to face [panim el panim]."  God speaks to Moses as clearly as I can speak to you. Maimonides emphasizes the special quality of the relationship between God and Moses and points out that Moses had achieved human perfection and therefore became worthy of this level of communion with God.

That does nothing to help us with our problem.  The special quality of the relationship, the assumption of perfection in Moses, all these things only serve to push God even further away.  Moses can have direct speech with God but we simply cannot.  Yet I do believe that God's presence can be felt directly in our lives.  I do believe that God sometimes chooses to answer prayers and become a direct participant in our daily lives.

We face several barriers in feeling God's presence in our lives.  First, we feel that our concerns are unworthy of direct response from God.  My own petty concerns are beneath God's notice.  How can God possibly care about my having a cold?  There are people dying in the world!  Does God really care about helping me resolve some problem at work?  There are wars and people suffering enormously!  Second, we feel that we are unworthy of direct experience of God.  Surely God has more important or more moral or more religious or more whatever people to spend His time on.  Moses may have been perfect and therefore merit direct speech with God, but I am far from perfect.

These two concerns misunderstand what God is and reflect our own insecurities.  Limited humans that we are, time is our most precious commodity.  Each of us has only so much productive time in a day and how we spend it reflects our priorities. Ha-Kodesh Barukh Who, the Holy One Blessed Be He, the One Who Spoke and Created the World, is not like this.  God is infinite.  God has as much time as God wants.  God's willingness to be a part of each of our lives takes nothing away from anyone else.

Further, we are all created "Btzelem Elohim" in God's image.  Our being in God's image refers "not to the color of our skin but to the content of our character (M.L. King Jr.)."  God has created each one of us in a way that makes us by our nature worthy of God's attention.  We may sometimes feel unworthy but that simple act of reaching out to God in prayer by definition elevates us.

A friend of mine had gone through a very difficult year which had included the loss of her father and a decision to leave her job.  She had rarely prayer for her own personal needs but for whatever reason asked God for help in her loneliness.  Within a couple of days she found herself listening to some audio-tapes that talked about spirituality and different ways of reaching God.  She found the message uplifting and thought it spoke directly to her, telling her that prayer had meaning and the Someone listened.  Something like this can be explained as coincidence.  It lacks the clear face to face experience of hearing God that Moses had.  Yet I believe that it is in such coincidence that God communicates with us.

A better model than Moses for us today might be Tevye the Dairyman from "Fiddler on the Roof."  A buffoon, a man who is comical in his continual misquoting of the Bible and Rabbinic sources.  Yet someone for whom God's presence is palpable.  Tevye constantly talks to God as an intimate friend, a partner more dear to him even than his wife.  That God never directly answers does not seem to bother Tevye.  For Tevye, life is a conversation with God.

My faith varies.  Sometimes I truly believe that God interacts with us in ways such as that story of my friend above.  Other times I believe it is only coincidence and I am trying to fool myself with a convenient comforting notion.  Our tendency today is precisely to over-intellectualize and to psychologize our way out of belief.  Buber calls this a "holding back of an I" which "despossesses the moment, takes away its spontaneity.  The specifically modern man who has not yet let go of God knows what that means:  he who is not present receives no presence."

Perhaps I fail more than I succeed, but I, more like Tevye than Moses, nevertheless strive to be present and in so doing build relationship with God.