Rabbi Janet Marder

September 4, 2004

Does God Still Speak to People? For Justin Kahn

It’s our custom at Beth Am to invite students to ask the rabbi a Jewish question of their choice which will be answered at their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Here was Justin’s question:

“When I was younger, I thought God was a man in the sky, that he physically spoke to Abraham, and he physically handed the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments to Moses. Now I do not believe that either of these events actually happened, that God never physically came down to talk to Abraham. But I wonder: what kind of experiences do you think Abraham and Moses had, and what is the nature of your relationship with God?”

I told Justin that shelves and shelves of books have been written to answer his question, which is less about theology – the study of what God is, than it is about revelation – that is, how God is revealed to human beings.

Revelation in the Bible, we think, seems very simple – and very improbable. There are stories about God instructing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; confronting Cain after he has murdered his brother; warning Noah that there’s going to be a flood; calling Abram to leave his own country and go to a new land; arguing with Abraham about the destruction of Sodom; speaking to Moses from a burning bush telling him to go to Egypt and free the Israelite slaves; meeting the people at Mt. Sinai and giving them the commandments.

God communicates with people in these stories just the way one person would talk with another. But how can we make sense out of the idea of God speaking? Does God have vocal cords which produce sound? Jewish tradition has always denied that God has a body, let alone a body that looks like ours. Imagining God’s voice immediately leads us into problems of gender. What kind of voice would God have – a tenor, a baritone? Surely not a soprano! What language does God speak? And what sort of accent would God have?

Already in the middle ages, Jewish sages had long ceased to take literally the accounts of God “speaking” to people in the Torah. What then could be the experiences that gave rise to our biblical stories?

We have some clues from the Bible itself. For in several passages, prophets have experiences of God which come to them in dreams, both sleeping and awake. These prophets, such as Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Daniel, see powerful visions, and they awake to normal life feeling transformed, with a sense that God has sent them a message which it’s their responsibility to bring to the people.

Elsewhere in the Bible, human beings experience God through powerful encounters with nature. Psalm 29, for instance, describes the greatness of God’s voice: “The voice of God shatters cedar trees….It makes the mountains skip like young calves…The voice of God kindles flames of fire. The voice of God convulses the wilderness.”

And in a third and fascinating passage in First Kings, the prophet Elijah, under threat of death by Queen Jezebel, flees alone to the wilderness. In despair at the failure of his mission, he pours out his heart to God and pleads with God to take his life. “Come out,” God calls, “and stand on the mountain before God.” The text says that God passed by. There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks, but God was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came fire, but God was not in the fire. Finally, after the fire came “kol d’mama daka” – a phrase that is sometimes translated “a still small voice.” That is the only answer that Elijah gets; but it is enough to send him back to the world to do God’s work.

What are we to make of these alternative descriptions of how people come to perceive God? They help us focus on the kinds of religious experiences our ancestors knew, and that we can still have today. First, we have powerful dreams and visions of how the world could be – sometimes they even come to us from studying Torah deeply and reading the words of the prophets.

Isaiah saw a vision in which nation would not lift up sword against nation, and every person would sit under his vine and his fig tree, and none would make them afraid. Through his words we can have the same vision, and we understand the divine message the prophet is trying to bring us.

We read the words of Ezekiel, who saw a vision of a valley filled with dry bones, and heard the bones declare, “our hope is lost.” Then he saw them grow new flesh, rise up and come back to life. Those of us who have witnessed the birth of Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust have seen the same vision, and we are as awed by the miracle of our time as Ezekiel was in his.

 Like our ancestors, we are stirred by the incredible power we feel emanating from the natural world. A psalmist said, “the heavens declare the glory of God.” When we look up into the night sky we’re blown away by the beauty and mystery of the cosmos. A psalmist says that God’s voice smashes cedars and is mightier than the rushing of waters; we’re awed by the magnificent force of a great storm, or by grand canyons and majestic mountains that make us feel our own smallness in the universe.

Most important for us, today, though, may be our experiences of the still, small voice – the quiet yet overpowering consciousness inside us of what is right, of what is real, of what matters in this life and what is essential for us to do. The still small voice speaks the deepest truths we know. It comes to us at moments of intense joy and also in sadness, when we feel most alone. The still small voice can lift us out of despair, as it did Elijah; it can remind us that our lives have meaning and purpose, and that there is work to be done in this world.

So I believe, Justin, that God still speaks to us today. We are called today, as Abram was called, to begin new adventures and take courageous journeys; we are called, as the prophets were called, to stand up for what is right and speak out for justice; we are called, as Moses was called, to go down to Egypt and to help those who are in pain.

Our Sages said that the voice of God still echoes from Sinai, and that if we could turn off all the noise and tumult in this world, we would hear it, reverberating down the ages forever. But, as Rabbi Eugene Borowitz writes, “God ‘speaks’ like an FM radio transmitter – but most people listen to the world via AM.” Religion tries to help us tune in – “to change our sensitivity so that we can get something of the message which surrounds us.” In the end, it’s about making ourselves into a receiver which can pick up the signal.