This issue of Sh’ma Now, our second published as a digital-only edition, is easy to download, read, and share. We hope you will find it engaging.
As we approach Shavuot, the holiday celebrating our relationship with God and Torah, I have solicited essays for an issue of Sh’ma Now to expand your notion of covenantal responsibility and the dynamic power of understanding God as ever-becoming.
At the core of this issue of Sh’ma Now is the Jewish sensibility of “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh/ God-Is-Process.” I live in Berkeley, California, home to an unusually robust Jewish entrepreneurial marketplace. One of my newly forming habits is attending “Creative Commentary,” a text-study/creative writing program at the Jewish Studio Project. The studio, which hosts an array of engaging programs, is awash in color; it has the messiness of an art studio, a library of sifrei kodesh — holy books — with volumes on Jewish feminism, art, justice, and philosophy, large tables for partnered study, and a cozy couch area for conversation and singing. A number of decorated signs adorn the walls. One says, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh/ God-Is-Process.” Each time I enter the studio, I’m drawn to that bold decorative, hand-painted sign: What does it mean that one of God’s many names, the name God tells Moses to use when speaking to the Israelites, is “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh,” “I Will Be What I will Be”?
Rabbi Adina Allen, the co-founder and creative director of Jewish Studio Project and talent behind the studio signage, translated the name as “God Is Process.” Intrigued time and again, I decided to examine what this particular translation might mean. I started my search with Adina, and asked her to write about how she understands an ever-dynamic God: “God is…evolving alongside us. And we, human beings made b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image, are, likewise, not created static and sure, but rather are in our own process of becoming.” Read more.
And then my curiosity led me to another couple of rabbis and a Buddhist teacher. Norman Fisher, founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, writes personally about his own yearning to understand God. He writes: “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh implies that God isn’t a Supreme Being, somehow above it all. God is within the being-aliveness we share. And yet God is more than our ordinary sense of aliveness. God is an aspect of aliveness that is unknown and inaccessible to us. ... I’ve felt this yearning all my life, which is probably why I have devoted myself full time not only to spiritual practice but also to poetry. Somehow, through these activities my yearning can be met and expressed, however imperfectly.” Read more.
I asked Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove, senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, to introduce readers to the issue through an exploration of textual sources and stories about this particular way of understanding God. He helps connect our everyday questions about God to larger questions and the themes inherent in this week’s holiday of Shavuot. He writes about making “the revelation of Torah as the dynamic, ongoing, and covenantal process of realizing a divine truth embedded within,” thus understanding our relationship to God as manifest in our daily actions: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, helping the destitute. He goes on to write that with “God’s presence manifest in our own actions, we are, at one and the same time, fulfilling God’s Will and we are realizing the world of possibility embedded in our own humanity.” Read more.
The founding editor of Sh’ma, Dr. Eugene Borowitz, had an enormous influence on liberal theology and the idea that we live in a covenantal relationship with God. I asked Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi, who wrote her dissertation on Borowitz’s work, to explain the counter-intuitive position of a non-Orthodox theologian who felt “commanded.” Rachel writes that Borowitz offered “a new theory of non-Orthodox Jewish duty, the acts which constitute the primary expression and medium of Jewish holiness.” She goes on to write that while liberal Jews often feel ‘radically free’ from Jewish law, halakhah, she seeks “more room for the claim of Jewish... In my own religious life, I have sought out a balance of being both radically free and radically claimed. It was Borowitz’s notion of the ‘autonomous Jewish self’ that gave me the language to say that while we celebrate our autonomy as liberal Jews, if we are truly part of a covenant, that autonomy is limited by the demands of a commanding God as well as by our commitment to the wisdom and lived experiences of the Jewish people of the past, present, and future. God is therefore a constant commanding voice in the life of the Jewish people both as individuals and as a community.” For all of the talk about a dynamic and changing God, Rachel channels Borowitz’s voice so that we know just what a commanding God expects of us. Read more.
In NiSh’ma, our simulated Talmud page, three commentators examine a line from the writings of Rabbi Arthur Green: “Y-H-W-H is a verb that has been artificially arrested in motion and made to function as a noun.” (Seek My Face, Speak My Name, p. 18) We begin with Rabbi David Jonathan Cooper, who writes that while Moses wants God to have a fixed name and identity, God “in a most idol-shattering epiphany… won’t be pinned down.” And then David goes on to challenge his own assumptions about himself: “If I am to live with this God, I have to take my own unfolding seriously…What am I becoming?” Ann Toback, the executive director of the Workmen’s Circle, and author Angela Himsel respond. Angela acknowledges that when she prays, her prayer is directed to God as noun. And Ann writes that she “feels the void of that all-knowing deity…in its place, is the power of the collective.” Read more.
Our digital PDF of the issue includes “Consider and Converse,” our study guide with prompts for conversations with friends and family. Print out the PDF and bring it to your Tikkun Leil Shavuot, or holiday gathering.
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Please click here to share Sh’ma Now with your friends and family. B’vracha, Susan Berrin Sh'ma Now Editor-in-Chief |
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