(RNS) — Why do I believe in God? Yes, we clergy ask ourselves that question, and more than occasionally.
I’ll share my short list of reasons.
I have found the presence of God in nature: Two weeks ago, I visited Glacier National Park in Montana. I gazed at what I can only call divine architecture. I watched sunlight dance across alpine peaks. I breathed air so pure it felt like prayer. I saw water so clear I wished it were a text that could be so clear. At that moment, I could have echoed the psalmist: “The heavens declare the glory of God … ” (Psalm 19:1)
I have found God in the glory of human creativity: God is there in the way a Mahler symphony builds like creation itself, from chaos to order to majesty. I have felt the divine pulse in a Rothko painting, in a Bach chorale, in the deliberate brushstroke of a Chagall angel and maybe even especially in an exquisitely crafted guitar solo.
I have found God in relationships: It’s what Austrian-Israeli philosopher Martin Buber called the “I–Thou encounter,” that when one person says to another hineini — I am here, fully present and unguarded.
I have found God in the sanctuary: It’s being surrounded by a worshipping, singing community, the air thick with melody and yearning.
I have found God in study: When sacred texts come alive and the voices of our ancestors echo through the generations.
But this week, I found God in the story and resilience of my people, on the night of Oct. 12 into the morning of Oct. 13, as we watched the hostages being released.
That night, I felt the presence of the God that our liturgy calls Go’el Yisrael — who redeems Israel. I felt that presence in the collective intake of breath, in the tears of my brothers and sisters as they waited for the moment when captives would walk free. That night, God was in the tears, the trembling, the reunion of bodies and souls.
The next morning, I found myself in synagogue. The words of the liturgy exploded off the page for me, as they have countless times in the past, but as if they were written for precisely this moment in time. For example:
- “Blessed is God … who gives the mind the ability to distinguish day from night”: We now know the difference between the night of exile and the tunnels the hostages had been trapped in for two years, and the day that brings sunlight again.
- “Blessed is God … who frees the captive”: Or, perhaps, echoing the late Rabbi Harold Schulweis, that which frees the captive is godliness itself.
- “Blessed is God … who has made me Yisrael”: I am Israel. I am the entire Jewish people. Their experience lives in me.
All that, and more.
The phrase from the Book of Samuel reads, “netzach Yisrael lo yishaker,” or “The Eternal One of Israel does not lie” (1 Samuel 15:29). God’s truth is not fickle; God’s covenant endures. I found God in the resilience of my people — that stubborn, irrational conviction that despair is forbidden.
Through these last two years, we have buried our dead, we have mourned our children, and yet we have never stopped saying Am Yisrael Chai — the people of Israel live. And, crucially, we have never stopped singing “Od Avinu Chai” — our heavenly parent still lives. The relationship persists. God has not abandoned us because we have not abandoned God.
For me, this has always been the most effective — not proof of God, because we cannot prove that God does or does not exist, but a pointing toward God — the eternal nature of the Jewish people. When Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia, asked his Lutheran pastor for proof of God, the cleric told him simply: “The Jews.”
This week is Shabbat Bereshit. The Torah cycle begins anew. God asks Cain, who has killed his brother Abel: “Ayeh Hevel achikha?” — “Where is your brother?” That question has echoed through every generation. In many ways, the entire Torah is an extended answer. The text insists we name our brothers and our sisters, that we not look away from their suffering.
Today, we know where our brothers and sisters are. Some have emerged from the tunnels of Gaza, blinking into the light. Some will return only to the Earth, many of their bodies yet to be found and brought home. Let us name and lift up this collective heartache.
So, yes, I believe in God. That faith makes me strong enough to look across the boundaries of resentment and revenge, to truly encounter the Palestinian people not as abstractions or enemies, but as human beings created, as we are told in Bereshit, b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God. I see the possibility of the divine in the face of the other, echoing French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who said the face of the stranger is the most eloquent text of revelation.
And I believe in God because I know that creation is not finished. God is still speaking the world into being. Every act of compassion, attempt at peace and refusal to dehumanize is another word in that ongoing divine sentence.
During my sleepless night earlier this week, I saw a glimpse of that blessing. I saw tears, relief, fear and gratitude braided together — the raw material of redemption. I saw human beings acting in godly ways, freeing the bound, comforting the grieving, yearning for peace.
I believe in God not because of miracles that suspend the laws of nature, but because of moments that reveal the law of love. It’s not because God shouts from the heavens, but because people whisper “hineini” — “I am here” — to one another in the dark.
I can only imagine what the families of the hostages were saying to their loved ones. Those literate in the Bible (and in Israel, who isn’t?) might have echoed the words Jacob said to his estranged brother, Esau: “To see your face is to see the face of God.”
One last note from those morning blessings: “Blessed is God … who girds Israel with gevurah,” which the Reform prayerbook, Mishkan T’filah, translates as “strength,” but which really means “heroism.” That is what these last two years have required — all those blessings, all those prayers and countless others.
These years have required a fierce heroism — not only of military strength, but of spiritual resolve. Blessed is God, who frees the captive.
