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RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL:WHERE WAS GOD ON 9/11?JEWISH RENEWAL:JEWISH SPIRITUAL RENEWAL
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Shalom:
With the 7th anniversary of the viscous attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001, I have been asked numerous times: "Where was God on 9/11?''. For years prior to that, I was asked: ''Where was God during the Holocaust?'' The answers, Judaically, are the same.
Where was God on 9/11/2001? Crying along with us. How do we know God cries or suffers? Because man, who was made in His image, cries and suffers.
Why does mankind suffer? Is it divine payback for our sins as the Torah teaches?
The Kabbala gives a much different answer. Mankind suffers because God suffers. It is not mankind that suffers but God. The suffering we feel is not our suffering but God's suffering experience through us as if it were our own. Therefore, the Kabbala teaches, before we can liberate ourselves from suffering, we most first liberate God from His suffering.
The Zohar teaches that we know God suffers because mankind suffers. Genesis 1:27 says that "God created man in the image of Himself, in the image of God He created him." Therefore, as the Ba'al Shem Tov , the then-leftist reform founder of the now-rightist orthodox Chassidic movement said, "Man is a part of God, and the want that is in the part is in the whole, and the whole suffers the same want as the part." We can infer that God suffers because we know that mankind suffers.
"From what does God suffer?" the rabbis ask. God suffers from His exile from Himself. He suffers the separation in His Name--the "YH" divided from the "VH"-- that took place when He created the world. He suffers to return to the Unity--the wholeness in Himself-- that was shattered when He created the world. Therefore God suffers and man is commissioned to redeem Him from His suffering by returning Him to His former state of unity. This is what the Kabbalists say we mean when we say in the Aleinu adoration prayer "On that day God shall be One and His name One"(Psalm 22:29).
The rabbis then ask "How can we liberate God from His suffering? How can we return Him to Himself?" The answer is that we must be watchful and alert all the time for God. As King David wrote "at dawn I hold myself in readiness for You" (Psalm 5:3). We need to listen for God's voice "I am
listening. What is God saying?"(Psalm 85:8). Then we must speak the words that we hear God tell us and follow them.
The Zohar teaches that we know God suffers because mankind suffers. Genesis 1:27 says that "God created man in the image of Himself, in the image of God He created him." Therefore, as the Ba'al Shem Tov , the then-leftist reform founder of the now-rightist orthodox Chassidic movement said, "Man is a part of God, and the want that is in the part is in the whole, and the whole suffers the same want as the part." We can infer that God suffers because we know that mankind suffers.
"From what does God suffer?" the rabbis ask. God suffers from His exile from Himself. He suffers the separation in His Name--the "YH" divided from the "VH"-- that took place when He created the world. He suffers to return to the Unity--the wholeness in Himself-- that was shattered when He created the world. Therefore God suffers and man is commissioned to redeem Him from His suffering by returning Him to His former state of unity. This is what the Kabbalists say we mean when we say in the Aleinu adoration prayer "On that day God shall be One and His name One"(Psalm 22:29).
The rabbis then ask "How can we liberate God from His suffering? How can we return Him to Himself?" The answer is that we must be watchful and alert all the time for God. As King David wrote "at dawn I hold myself in readiness for You" (Psalm 5:3). We need to listen for God's voice "I am
listening. What is God saying?"(Psalm 85:8). Then we must speak the words that we hear God tell us and follow them.
To quote the Ba'al Shem Tov again "When I fix my thoughts on the creator, I let my mouth speak what
it will, for the words are bound by higher roots. The Holy sparks that fell from Himself when God built and destroyed worlds, man shall raise and purify back to their source: All things of this world desire with all their might to draw near man in order that the sparks of Holiness that are in them should be raised by Him back to their source. And who with good strength of his spirit is able to raise the Holy spark from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to speaking being? Man leads it to freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this. It is as when a king's son is rescued from captivity and brought to his father. Then you will release God from His suffering and He , in turn, will 'fill your mouths with laughter and your lips with song'(Psalm 126:2)."
it will, for the words are bound by higher roots. The Holy sparks that fell from Himself when God built and destroyed worlds, man shall raise and purify back to their source: All things of this world desire with all their might to draw near man in order that the sparks of Holiness that are in them should be raised by Him back to their source. And who with good strength of his spirit is able to raise the Holy spark from stone to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to speaking being? Man leads it to freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this. It is as when a king's son is rescued from captivity and brought to his father. Then you will release God from His suffering and He , in turn, will 'fill your mouths with laughter and your lips with song'(Psalm 126:2)."
This is the Kabbalistic concept of Tikun Olam, repair of the world, which is a credo of the modern Jewish movements.
"Nowhere is this enantiodromia--this conflagration between good and evil-- more clearly seen than in the constant interplay of the two opposing Sephirot (ten manifestations of God), Chesed (good) and Gevurah (evil)--which individually constitute the Right and the Left sides--light and darkness, the yin and yang--of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot," writes Rabbi Yakov Ha Kohain. It is out of this balancing act that this Tree is born.
The idea of a suffering God is not only part of Christian theology. It is part and parcel of Judaism as well. Jewish philosophy believes that God, the our Divine Father, suffers in Heaven. He suffers not because we sin, but because of His separation from Himself. His former Unity has been shattered. His Holy Queen, the Sheckinah, has fallen and She yearns to be lifted up and returned to Her King. This is why in Pirkei Avot one reads so many references to the ways one can bring back the Sheckinah, i.e. studying Torah with another, discussing Torah while three or more eat together, etc.
For Tikun Olam to be done, for God to "know" and repair Himself, He first must be known by man. But for man to know himself, he first must know God as well. The Torah shows us how God perfects man in increments. God perfects man in order that man may perfect Him, in Zohar terms. This is what Karl Jung meant when he wrote,"God must become man precisely because He has done man a wrong through Job. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even God. Because His creature has surpassed Him, God must regenerate Himself."
According to the Kabbalah, God went from being whole to fragmentary during the act of creation. His "face" was shattered. He needs man as His partner to end His suffering and do the Tikun (repair). Judaism has placed responsibility on us, as people, to fix our globe, and not think that doing ritual or not doing ritual determines if good or evil things to occur.
Of course this leads to the question "Is God good?" The sages answer "yes" and quote Exodus 34:6 "God,God, a God of tenderness and compassion." But they further ask, "Why does He permit evil?" They answer that "evil is the throne of good", and that good comes from evil. "The
indwelling Glory of God embraces all worlds, good and evil...How can he then bear in Himself the opposites good and evil? But in truth there is no opposite, for evil is the throne of good."
So if good comes from God, where does evil come from? Evil also comes from God. "Now the spirit of God left Saul and an evil spirit from God filled him" (1 Samuel 16:14). The perfection of God lies not in being merely one thing or another, but all things at all times. God is darkness and light and goodness and evil.
He is One. Satan, again a part of traditional Jewish belief, is not an opposite of God, but part of God. He is the left-hand side of the Mind of God. He is the left side of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot. Satan is not a "he," but an adversarial thought in God's mind. Satan is God's yetzer ha ra, His evil inclination.
In this past month of Av we are taught that great evil befell us on the 9th day (destructions of the Temples) but that great good came to us on the 15th day (no more people died in the wilderness of Sinai, peace came to the tribe of Benjamin, the northern tribes were allowed to travel to the
south to Jerusalem again, and the martyrs of Behar (122 CE) were allowed to be buried). The Kabbalah says that good things are born from evil.
They forecast that the Messiah will be born on the 9th of Av. Holiness must be found in impurity, just as we as Jews have made the mundane into the sacred. There is no Torah law commanding us to say a prayer before we eat. This mitzvah is a rabbinic Talmudic law from Tractate Berachot 35A. The rabbis posit that one who eats before he says a prayer of thanks to God is like one who steals from God There is the mitzvah of saying grace after meals (Deut. 8:10).
God loves us, but we are taught traditionally that He can also hate us. God even tried to kill Moses! "When Moses had halted for the night, God came to meet him and tried to kill him"(Exodus 4:24). Where as in one week's parasha we are commanded to love God, in the following portion we
are commanded to "fear God" (Deut. 10:12) as well as love Him.
King David in Psalm 111:10 writes "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and they that have sound sense practice it." Or as Jung says "Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries , who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and as vast as the sky."
Until God is repaired and no longer suffers, man will have its 9/11s, man will cry and suffer, and God will cry and suffer with us.
Shalom,
Rabbi Arthur Segal
Hilton Head Island,SC
Bluffton, SC
Jewish Renewal
Jewish Spiritual Renewal
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