God's Role in All This

By Susan Esther Barnes

Last night I had just passed the halfway point in Rabbi Lawrence Kushner's excellent book I'm God; You're Not, pictured above, when I reached a passage on pages 124-125 and came to a screeching halt.

This is where he says, "When you're facing an unknown future - and the future is always unknown - you have three options. First option: everything is fated, it's all meant to be. In other words, predestination."

He eventually settles on what he calls the third option, that God is everything, concluding "the entire glorious, horrible, holy, terrifying wondrous mess we call creation is a continuous manifestation of the Divine." He says, "Everything is the way it's supposed to be."

Maybe I'm a little dense, but I don't see how what he calls option 3 is effectively different than option 1. In neither case do I see any room for humans to have any effect on the outcome of anything. Either options strikes me as an invitation to sit back and do nothing. It's all predestined and/or it's all the way it's supposed to be anyway.

I don't understand why he so quickly dismisses what he calls option 2, or free will. He claims that if we excercise free will, that means God "refuses to intervene," and that would mean "God is effectively irrelevant."

The trouble is, he is basing his conclusion on a faulty assumption. Humans can have free will without God having to refuse to intervene. Even if God doesn't do things for us or make us do things, God can still influence us to do things.

A few years ago when this same Rabbi Kushner spoke at our synagogue, he told a lovely story. (I may have misremembered some of the details, but the important parts are here.) He was leading a Torah Study group when he had to leave early to meet with the bar mitzvah family before services started. The room was crowded, so it took him a while to extricate himself.

Then, for no apparent reason, and even though he has never done anything like this before or since, he squeezed back into the room to whisper in a man's ear, "Don't look now, but that woman in the red dress sitting across the table from you is a rabbi, and she's single." Then he left.

When Torah Study was over, the man struck up a conversation with the woman, they started dating, and eventually Rabbi Kushner presided at their wedding.

Why did he turn around and squeeze back into the room to say such a thing to this man? I would say he was excercising his own free will, but that the idea to do it was God's, not his.

Based on this story, as well as my own experiences, I would say God is giving us hints, giving us helpful suggestions, in a still small voice on a regular basis. Sometimes we're listening; often we're not. Sometimes we follow God's suggestions and things get better for us, and sometimes we don't, and things get worse.

This isn't to say that every time something bad happens to us it means we've done something wrong or failed to listen to God - far from it. In fact, if that were the case, we wouldn't really be exercising free will at all, we'd just be trying to avoid punishment. Random things happen, both good and bad, through no fault or action of our own or God's.

But God sees things we don't see, God has the big picture view, and God wants our lives to be better. So maybe option 4 (or just a revised option 2) is that, when faced with an uncertain future, we have the ability to act on our own free will. And the more we make God relevant in our lives by listening for and following God's good advice and suggestions, the better off we will be.

Life is Fragile

By Susan Esther Barnes

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon at the memorial service of a man who died suddenly, and too young. Parents should not have to bury their children in any case, but a week ago this man, his parents, his wife, and his young daughter all thought he was fine, and now he's dead.

In a remarkable service, with over 800 people in attendance, we learned that although he technically was survived by only a couple of siblings, an astonishing number of men considered this man to be their brother.

From the boy he met in grade school by throwing rocks at him, to his brothers-in-law, to his work colleague, we heard story after story of his sense of humor, his kindness, his generosity, his gift of expressing interest in people and making them feel at ease.

But one day last week he realized something was wrong, and he went to the hospital, and within days he was gone. And in his final act of generosity, he donated his organs, giving life to others who will now be able to go on to leave their hospital beds, and hug their families, as he will not.

I was grateful to the rabbi for saying he does not believe the death of this man was God's will, but that it was an accident of nature. He said God did not will it that this man's daughter should grow up without her father or that the rest of his family and dear friends should lose him so soon.

It serves as a reminder to us all: Life is fragile. Be thankful for today. We never know what tomorrow may bring.

Is Giffords a Jew, or is She Just Jew-ish?

By Susan Esther Barnes

In all the greater storm about the shooting of Representative Giffords, may she and all those wounded on that day have a full and speedy recovery, on the side there is a tempest in a teapot about whether the Jewish press should refer to her as Jewish. She is an active member of a Reform synagogue, but her Jewish roots are on her father’s side, not her mother’s.

In the world of Reform Judaism, one is considered Jewish if one is raised Jewish and either parent is Jewish. In Orthodox Judaism, one is considered Jewish only if one’s mother is Jewish, or if one converts to Judaism in an Orthodox conversion process. So as far as Giffords and her synagogue are concerned, she’s a Jew, but as far as an Orthodox person is concerned, she is not.

Although there are some who refer to others as “half Jewish,” I don’t believe there is such a thing. Either you are Jewish, or you are not. The question is, where do you draw the line? And who gets to say where that line should be drawn?

It is troubling to me that an ordained rabbi can work with someone as they go through their conversion process, and declare that person Jewish, only to have other people deny the Jewishness of that person.

In Israel, there are thousands of soldiers who moved to Israel from Russia and converted while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, but who the Chief Rabbinate has declared as still not halachically Jewish.

Is this what God wants? I don’t think so.

These claims about who is, or is not, halachically Jewish are made as if there is no disagreement as to the interpretation of halacha. In fact, halacha has been debated and changed over the years, as our understanding of God, humans, and the world around us has evolved.

We are taught that all Jewish souls, both those on earth at the time and all those as yet unborn, were present when God made the covenant that created the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai. Many of those souls are here on earth now, seeking to join their people through the process we call conversion.

To deny them their rightful place among us, to push them out by saying their rabbincally supervised conversion is not halachically acceptable, strikes me as an unconscionable disregard of God’s will, an enormous chillul hashem - desecration of God’s name.

It is well past time for us to recognize that matters of halacha have never been settled. Different people interpret the law differently. Each person must follow his or her own beliefs about the right interpretation, according to the teachings of their rabbinic authority. At the same time, we need to recognize that differences do exist, and concede that the only one who truly knows God’s will is God.

So let’s honor the good will, knowledge and authority of the rabbis – all of them – and accept anyone declared by a rabbi to be Jewish as Jewish, and let God be the final arbiter.