Passing through the Sea of Reeds, with the water like a wall to their right and to their left, the people Israel praise God in song. Describing God’s mighty acts, the Song of the Sea praises God as ish milchama, a man of war. With anger and triumph, with a strong hand and marvelous wonders, God acts in history, performing miracles to prove that the God of Israel is incomparable, defeating Pharaoh with his courtiers and chariots and magicians and pantheon of gods carved in stone. Israel’s God of War sends a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, majestic and amazing and even perhaps terrifying. The God of Exodus is a transcendent God: beyond the limits of human experience, lofty and mighty, capable of deeds we could never achieve, huge in ways our mind cannot even comprehend.
God not only frees the people Israel from enslavement but brings them to the foot of Mount Sinai. There the people experience the cacophony of the giving of the Ten Commandments. A distant God sends forth a thunderous voice, and the people respond by recoiling in panic and fear: “[A]ll the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance” (Ex 20:15). Speaking from on high, God’s voice overwhelms the human senses. The God of Sinai is transcendent.
Yet the God of Sinai, the God who gives the Ten Commandments in a rush of wind and smoke, with the blast of the shofar and in a booming voice—this God of Sinai points to another image of God—a God not transcendent but immanent. This God of Sinai gives the Torah not to Moses alone but to all the people Israel—past, present, and future. This God of Sinai speaks the Ten Commandments to “you,” to each individual standing there at the physical Sinai, and to each of us, standing symbolically at Sinai each week when we ascend this bima to carry the Torah scroll to be touched and heard by our whole community. The God of Sinai is immanent: a God who dwells with us, a God who can and does act in the lives of individuals.
God as transcendent, God as immanent. God as incomprehensible, God as intimate. In many communities, these two contrasting images of God serve to close our service in the song Adon Olam, “Eternal Lord” (My People’s Prayerbook, Vol. 5, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman). The poem Adon Olam begins with an image of the transcendent God as King, distant and mighty, but it ends with an intimate God, a God I can count on as an individual. Often we miss the remarkable lyrics, caught up in the many sing-song melodies for this typical closing hymn. Here is the entire poem, as translated in Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman’s guide My People’s Prayerbook:
Eternal Lord who reigned supreme,
Before all beings were created,
When everything was made according to His will.
Then He was called ‘King.’
And when all shall cease to be,
He alone will reign supreme.
He was, He is,
And He will be crowned in glory.
He is One. There is no second
To compare to Him or consort with Him.
Without beginning, without end,
Power and dominion are His.
He is my God, my living redeemer,
My stronghold in troubled times.
He is my sign and my banner,
My cup when I call on Him.
In His hand I trust my soul
When I sleep and when I wake.
And with my soul, my body too,
Adonai is mine. I shall not fear.
The beginning of Adon Olam presents an image of God the Judge and King. This is a God who always reigned; before creation, before there were even human beings to worship God, God ruled. In the moment of creation, with works to prove God’s power and with human beings to serve God, God is called “King.” Yet God will rule, as the poem says, “when all shall cease to be.” With or without creation, with or without human beings to worship God, this Eternal Lord, this transcendent God, has always ruled, will always rule. Past, present, and future, the transcendent God is eternal, “crowned in glory,” with no one to compare. This all-powerful God is distant and cold, a sort of Intelligent Design, scientific or philosophical God, a power that sets the universe in motion and withdraws to the heavenly heights.
And then, as Rabbi Hoffman notes, “just when the poem overwhelms us with God’s grandeur, it changes course to proclaim God’s intimate involvement with each and every one of us” (My People’s Prayerbook, Vol. 5, p 97). In the last two verses of Adon Olam, we each proclaim that this transcendent, mighty, all-powerful God is “my God, my living redeemer, my stronghold in troubled times.” This God is close and involved, like God at the end of the Noah story, giving the rainbow and a promise never to flood the earth in hasty anger again. But the God in Adon Olam is more intimate than that. This God, “my God,” is the one to whom I entrust every single night my very being, all that I am, in the faith that this same Eternal Lord who rules forever will return my soul to me each morning. As Torah scholar Dr. Ellen Frankel writes, “This awesome ‘Eternal Lord’ who made everything, who rules supreme, this very same being I am able to invoke by name: Adonai” (Ibid., 95, emphasis added). As we leave the safety of the sanctuary and walk out into the night, Jews declare faith in a transcendent God who is, for us, immanent—an all-powerful God upon whom we can call, in whom we trust our souls.
The final words of Adon Olam are “Adona li, v’lo ira”—“the Eternal is mine, and I shall not fear.” This is what Rabbi Hoffman calls “the greatest Jewish promise of all: [that] even the most miniscule and shattered of lives matter to the infinite intelligence of the universe whom we name God; since ‘Adonai is mine; I shall not fear’” (Ibid., 97). A powerful assertion: that this abstract notion we call God, this powerful being sitting in judgment over the entire universe, this all-knowing being cares for even the most imperfect, the most insignificant, of human experience. No matter who I am, God cares about me and for me. I matter to the Ultimate Being in the universe.
Where is this immanent God in the Ten Commandments? It is easy to identify the transcendent God at Sinai, with the overwhelming voice and the fire and the smoke and the thunder and the lightning and the blasts of the shofar. Yet it is God who, in this week’s Torah portion, encourages us to understand God as immanent, as with us, as in relationship with each of us.
After the parting of the Sea of Reeds, after the signs and the wonders, after the plagues and the drowning of Pharaoh and his chariots and his charioteers, God speaks to Moses and the people about their relationship. But God speaks not of mighty deeds and power and loyalty to the Eternal Lord who rules eternally. Instead, God says, “You have seen […] how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me” (Ex. 19:4). We sometimes associate the eagle with might and majesty, but this image of the eagle bearing the people Israel on its wings is the image of a parent bird teaching its young to fly (see, for example, The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, p 413). God could have listed all the mighty acts it took to free Israel from Egypt, but in this first conversation with Israel in the wilderness, God does not focus on the kingly or the transcendent. Instead, God focuses on a loving relationship with the people Israel. God depicts this relationship as intimate. God informs the people of the covenant they will soon make at Sinai by invoking the image of a parent bird nurturing its young and teaching them to act on their own in the world. God says to each of us, through this covenant, I will teach you to fly.
Each of these ways of thinking about God—transcendent and immanent—can nourish us or push us away. Neither is “better” than the other, and the Torah offers us both ways to connect. In some ways, it is up to us: can we hold onto the notion that the created world, huge and powerful and incomprehensible and impersonal, moving according to scientific processes that certainly do not need us to continue in their natural cycles, might also contain a Divine power that cares for each of us? To be God’s chosen, then, would mean being cared for, being the young eagle lovingly taught by its majestic parent. But sometimes being chosen feels different; sometimes we wonder, if God is so very active in human life, precisely what God is doing. When we experience a tragedy, when we lose a loved one, when we struggle with infertility, when we face disease or loneliness, we do not always feel borne up on eagle’s wings, but cast from the nest before we’re ready to fly. Perhaps, in those moments, we’d prefer that God “choose somebody else for a change.”
This summer, in my hospital chaplaincy work, I often felt the pull of each of these ways of relating to God: transcendent, immanent. In the chaos and the accident of how disease strikes, I saw the transcendent God, what philosophers of the past called the “Unmoved Mover,” the power that created the universe and set all its processes in motion, then withdrew, letting the universe continue in its natural cycles and evolutions. I thought about a transcendent God who created the human body, with all its strengths and daily miracles, certainly, but with all its vulnerability and impermanence.
And yet how unsatisfactory that view can be when we face death or illness or uncertainty. I recall my conversations with a Pentacostalist Christian woman, lying in bed for months in the ward reserved for women with “at-risk pregnancies.” This woman, happily a mother of two, had already endured years of infertility, two miscarriages, and a stillborn child. She knew tragedy and pain, and now, here she was, facing an uncertain future. Where was God for this woman? When her baby went into cardiac failure in her womb, the doctors took her for an emergency C-section. She survived, but her tiny son did not. And as I sat with her and her husband, each of them asked, Where is God? Is God in this moment, now? Did God make this happen? Whether transcendent or immanent, none of us in that room could imagine a God who would make this happen or even “let” this happen. Instead, we found the intimate, caring God in the comfort we could offer one another. We found the immanent God in our ability to cry out to God and receive, not necessarily the answer we were looking for, but a response nonetheless. We found the immanent God in the Psalm that encourages us to reach out to God with all our emotions: “Out of the depths I call to you, God.”
In our darkest moments and in our most joyous, when we mourn and when we dance, in our sowing in tears and in our reaping in joy, we can fulfill our side of the covenant established at Sinai by relating to God both as transcendent and as immanent.
Even in those overwhelming Ten Commandments, God reminds us of the intimate relationship we are invited to cultivate through the covenant. When the people heard the overwhelming voice and the thunder and the lightning, they heard God begin, “I, Adonai, am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (Ex. 20:2). The first commandment is a declaration: I the Eternal am your God. Perhaps this is merely an introduction. But the Midrash interprets this commandment differently: “I am the Eternal [if I am] your God”—in other words, “I can be myself only if you acknowledge me” (Midrash haGadol in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, p 490). Here in the first commandment, the first words God speaks directly to the entire people Israel gathered at Mount Sinai, we find both the transcendent and the immanent God, both the God of all time and space (the immeasurable God) and the God of our individual days (the intimate God). “Anochi Adonai Elohecha,” “I am the Eternal your God,” we each heard at Sinai. Each time we conclude a service, we have an opportunity to respond, “Adonai li, v’lo ira,” “The Eternal is mine, and I shall not fear.”
Shabbat Shalom to the community at Temple Beth Am, and thank you to those of you who helped to inspire this sermon.