The Meaning of it All 

By Moshe Levin

The following sermon by Rabbi Moshe Levin of Congregation Ner Tamid in San Francisco takes the form of a letter to a semi-fictitious Catholic priest named Malcolm.  It expresses Rabbi Levin’s theology and so captivated the editors of eCLAL that we decided to publish it in eCLAL. Rabbi Levin welcomes your comments at sfrebbe@sbcglobal.net

Moshe Levin
September 1, 1999 

Dear Malcolm, 

I was so sorry to hear that you, too, have been diagnosed with cancer.  I hope and pray that you will beat the disease.  When I was diagnosed nine and a half years ago, I was told that low-grade lymphoma was fatal but slow growing.  The doctors who diagnosed my case said that a tremendous amount of research was going on in that area, and that if I held out for about five years, I’d be okay, as a cure would certainly be found by then.  Well, five years have passed almost twice, and there’s still no cure.  But they’re much closer to it now than ever before, and I do believe that if you hold out for five years or so, there will be a cure. 

But you didn’t call me on Wednesday to ask what I knew about the research.  You called to find out how I’ve kept up my spirit and my zest for life.  And its true—I have.  I have never been angry or denied my diagnosis, that I know of.  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross isn’t always right. 

But your assumption that my strength has come from being a rabbi, a clergy person, is not quite correct.  In fact, I believe that your religion, Catholicism, and your being a priest, will be of much greater direct help to you than Judaism has been for me.  I say “direct help,” because I’m referring to the strength you can draw from prayer, and your belief in God’s Divine providence.  The help I derive from Judaism has been very subtle.  You’ll see what I mean. 

There are fundamental differences between our religions.  It is not only the Jewish assumptions about your Savior that divides us as religious people.  We Jews have an entirely different definition of God and God’s role in the universe.  This will come as a shock to you, I’m sure, but I have never prayed to God to heal me, not even once!  Oh, I’ve accepted other people’s prayers on my behalf, and I have also recited hundreds if not thousands of prayers on behalf of others.  But I have never prayed to God to heal me.  And my prayers on behalf of others never meant to me what I believe they would mean to you. 

I know where you stand, at least I think I do.  When we first met in Maryland nearly thirty years ago—do you remember?  You were about to officiate at a wedding of a Catholic girl from your parish and a Jewish boy whom she met at the University of Maryland.  And you called me out of the Yellow Pages, I think, to ask, what prayers or rituals from the Jewish faith, as you called it -- see, that’s already a difference between us.  We don’t refer to Judaism as a faith.  But that’s the subject of another letter.  You wanted to know what Jewish rituals or prayers you could include in the wedding mass that would make that young man and his family feel more comfortable.  And I suggested the Priestly Blessing from Leviticus, and you learned it in Hebrew!  I remember the shock that was still in your voice when you called me after the ceremony and told me that the groom had been upset about your including Hebrew because he felt no attachment to Judaism, and you made him feel guilty.  Actually, Malcolm, you achieved what I would love to have achieved—making that young Jewish man feel guilty about being so eager to marry a Catholic girl, in a Catholic church, by a Catholic priest.  In any case, I am grateful to that young man for one thing—that he brought the two of us together, and I’m thrilled that we have followed each other’s career all these years and have been able to stay in touch.  Frankly, I wish you were much closer to me than Seattle, but I also know that where you serve God has never been up to you.  Perhaps the diocese will assign you to Southern California once before you retire. 

But, returning to the subject.  What sustains me as I live with a life-threatening disease?  The reason I have never prayed to God for a cure is that I do not believe with even one thought of my mind that God ever gave me this disease.  I believe that God didn’t choose me to be a cancer patient and God cannot choose to heal me.  My concept of God simply precludes me from having an image that God is some form of puppeteer in the Heavens deciding who shall live and who shall die, who shall be healed and who shall succumb, and for that matter, who shall be rich and who shall be poor, who shall be elected and who shall be defeated, etc., etc. 

I don’t have that belief, not because I don’t believe in God—I do—but because I don’t believe in that kind of God. 

I don’t know if you ever saw a film called “Steam bath.”  It came out about twenty years ago, I think, and it’s a great film that every thinking religious person should see.  The film opens with a man entering a steam bath with nothing on except a sheet.  He sits down on a tiled step among some other men and begins to sweat.  Without much notice, a Puerto Rican guy comes in with a cart, a mop, and a bucket -- obviously the janitor.  This Puerto Rican man first starts mopping the floor and then, looking at his watch, he says, “Mira, I almost missed my afternoon work.”  He then puts down the mop, walks back to the cart, flicks on a switch, and buttons light up in different colors.  The janitor looks down at a screen on the top of the cart and says. “Lemme see.  Okay, a little traffic accident on Broadway and 41st, but, damn. I gonna have that stockbroker in the cab get his leg caught in the door and have to be hospitalized.  Okay, traffic is stopped all the way down to 39th and there a truck comes smashing into that station wagon, and the man’s okay but the lady, she’s gonna have big problems.  Maybe she’ll make it, maybe she won’t.  I’ll decide tomorrow.  But for sure, her face ain’t gonna be the same.  I dunno why those broads think they have to put on all that makeup.  It makes them look ugly, not pretty.  Anyway, that’s my opinion!  The market’s gonna go up 26 points today, and tonight I’m bringing in a rain cloud from New Jersey.  But in the Midwestern states, no rain.  They’re gonna have that drought for two more weeks.”  

And for several minutes the janitor goes on with his machine, and then he turns to one of the men sitting on the tiled step and says, “Okay, your turn.”  The man gets up with a less than happy expression on his face, walks to a door on the other side of the steam bath, and the Puerto Rican janitor opens the door.  It’s pitch black on the other side.  The janitor says, “Go.”  And the man steps into the blackness and disappears.  And our hero, the man who came in when the film began, begins now to realize that he has died, and the steam bath is where his eternal fate is being decided, because the Puerto Rican janitor is God. 

Now, no true believer is prepared to accept this scenario as true.  Yet that is what they believe, that God is some man in the sky who dishes out events, accidents, money, health, sickness, success, failure, and the like.  It’s the God of Tevye who is up above deciding whether or not to make this milkman rich so his wife will have chickens and he can study the holy books and give advice!  That’s not a theology—that’s a child’s version of the Bible placed on the stage, which people, my People, once believed in.  I can’t. 

Malcolm, I can’t believe that God can cure me because then I’d have to believe that God chose not to cure the people who died -- the sweet 28 year old woman who sat alongside me in the treatment room back in 1995 when we were both having chemotherapy.  I’m still here—she’s not.  If God chose to keep me alive, then God is the one who chose to put her to death.  And there’s no real reason why she should not also have survived.  And by extension, the same is true of the hundreds and thousands and millions of people who have perished in the course of one year, let alone in all of history, whose lives came to tragic ends.  There’s no rhyme or reason to who suffers and who’s satisfied.  You’ve walked down enough hospital corridors to know that prognoses are not connected to moral character or ritual observance—not in your faith nor in mine.  It is cells going haywire, it’s clogged arteries, or blood flowing into parts of the brain where they shouldn’t be.  It’s an accident that had nothing to do with the victim.  They and their families are not being punished, or tested, or purged through purposeful suffering.  They’re just unlucky, or smoke too much or gorge ourselves because we equate love with food—but it’s not God. 

Frankly, I can’t stand it when I hear someone who was one of the few that survived an earthquake or a hurricane or a plane crash, and when being interviewed by some very intrusive reporter, says, “I am so grateful to God for saving my life!  I know the Lord was with me.  People all around me were crushed and mangled in the seats, but this big knapsack—it wasn’t even mine—this knapsack fell in front of me and was like an airbag.  It stopped my seat from getting crushed.  The Lord saved my life!” 

How can someone believe that, really believe that?  I don’t mean the poor passenger who is distraught and filled with gratitude for being alive.  I understand that person’s need to give thanks, and God is the thing we've all been trained to thank.  But if one really believes that God saved this person, then they must also believe that God chose not to save that boy in 14B and that couple in 14D&F.  What kind of a God is that, who decides to save you and says no to those around you?  Is that a God worthy of thanks?  And what are the families of those who died supposed to say?  It was God’s will?  That doesn’t help, not for very long.  We both know that, because we’re around weeks later, when everyone else is gone, and we see how impotent is that answer to the suddenly bereaved family.

I suppose, Malcolm, that Jews are more sensitive than most other people about this issue because of the Holocaust.  No matter how we try, we have not found even the slightest iota of an explanation or meaning for the murder of our Six Million, of one and a half million children, of innocent parents, grandmothers and grandfathers, marched into the gas chambers.  That event stands in complete opposition to everything we had been taught about God if God was in control—that God is compassionate, merciful, just and

all-powerful.  All the characteristics of God as kind and just and compassionate are the words we recite in the synagogue on our High Holy Days.  In only two weeks, millions of Jews the world over will gather together on Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement, and we will be chanting a quote from the Bible over and over again, reiterating how kind, compassionate and merciful God is.  And all the time we sing those words, we all know that not a single ounce of divine compassion, mercy or justice was delivered to those of our millions who perished in this century, and to so many more like them the world over.

I’ll tell you something that must seem strange to the ears of a Christian, but I believe, in the bottom of my heart, that after the Holocaust, it is a sin for a Jew to maintain the same belief in God as our People had before the Holocaust.  I believe it is the sin of desecrating the memory of those who perished, to conceive of God as having the power to stop what was about to happen to them, and not do so.  Richard Rubenstein, a rabbi who wrote a great deal during the era of the “God is Dead” movement, said, “Yes, God is Dead.  He died in Auschwitz.”  What Rubenstein was saying was that the image of God people had before the Holocaust, the image portrayed so vividly by Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof—in other words, the image of God who is controlling the Universe like a king, that image is dead.  It died, at least for Jews.

I know this sounds heretical, and to you, a Catholic priest, I must sound like an atheist.  I’m not.  But I am prepared to refine, even drastically alter, my concepts of God from what my father, of blessed memory, believed, and my mother, may she live and be well, still believes, and all my ancestors before them.  In fact, I believe it is the Jewish way, and hopefully the human way, to refine one’s beliefs as each generation learns something about the world that their ancestors did not know.  That’s why the description of God in Genesis of a powerful landowner in the Garden of Eden is a different image of God from the one who consults with Abraham before destroying Sodom.  By the time we reach Exodus, we are encountering a God who has the power to order miracles like the ten plagues and to split the sea.  And that image is still different from the picture the Prophets of Israel have, of a God who appears only in visions and is committed to social ethics.  And Maimonides, who refuses to accept anything anthropomorphic of God, differs from the Sages before him who saw God as dictating the Torah from atop Mount Sinai.  Jewish thought has continued to evolve, affected by historical events and the wisdom of different sages, to this very day.

So, Father Newmann, my esteemed brother in the cloth, you’re wondering what I do believe.  If I don’t believe that God is the decider of human fate or, to put it in Jewish liturgical terms, that Emet ki ata hu dayan vekotev vehotem vesofer vemoneh vetizkor kol hanishkahot—if I don’t believe that “It is true that God is the judge who records and seals and counts and measures, decreeing the destiny of every creature,” then what do I believe, why do I pray, and why am I a rabbi? 

I’m sure you’re asking those questions, and so have all those with whom I have shared my theology.  I do have an answer for you as I‘ve had for them.  But first, let me tell you that it is “an” answer, because my response does not remain the same as my life goes on.  I don’t want it to, I don’t want to still believe exactly what I believed ten years ago or five years ago. Because that would mean that I learned nothing, read nothing, heard nothing since then.  And, also, I hope and pray that my children do not embrace the same exact theology that I have embraced, because it would mean that, despite the incredible advances in knowledge that are before them virtually every day, it would mean that they have learned nothing since they heard me espouse my beliefs.  

I believe that God does exist, but I’m not capable of talking about what God is, only how the Presence of God is experienced in the world.  I see God’s Presence, or the Shekhina as we refer to it in Hebrew, as the existence of goodness and compassion and justice and truth and meaning in the world.  I don’t see God as causing an earthquake.  I see God as the force that impels a team of strangers, from another country, to work late into the night, after all hope is lost, to still search in the hope that they may yet save another life.  I don’t see God acting as the dispenser of cancer.  I see God’s Presence in the men and women who sit by test tubes for hours on end trying to discover a cure for my disease.  I see God’s presence in the hearts of physicians and nurses filled with genuine care for us, as you will soon see when you get your first treatment. 

They do what they’re doing because they want to better the world, because they are troubled by the pain and anguish and injustice they see, and they want to infuse what they see with kindness.  We refer to these as Godly qualities because that’s what they are, the qualities of God that are possible for us to emulate, to live by, in this world. 

Not everyone let’s God in, as the Kotzker Rabbi pointed out.  Some people are like so many Serb or Indonesian soldiers who raised their guns to shoot innocent people.  And when the kol demama daka, the Still, Small Voice, called out to them saying, “No!  Don’t do this!  It is wrong, it is evil, your superiors are directing you to commit a terrible sin!”

they said, “Silence!  I do not want to hear your voice!  I am not interested in hearing what is right and wrong.  I take pleasure in my power, I feel secure in being part of this regime, I will do what I will do!”  Then, God was shut out from their world. 

So, my friend, the God I believe in is in this world, but more as a possibility, an opportunity for righteousness, than an arbitrary button-pusher.  And if I believed that God was the deciding force in life and is responsible for all the wickedness and tragedy we see, I would have no interest in praising or praying to such a God.  I would choose instead to be a blasphemer. 

One last thing.  I need to tell you what actually sustains me, because what you’ve heard so far is some of what I believe about God, not what keeps me sane in the face of death. 

The Talmud makes a statement:  Every person should walk through life with two notes, one in each pocket.  On one note should be the words, Ani afar ve‘efer—I am nothing but dust and ashes.  On the other note should be the words, Bishvili nivra ha’olam—For my sake was this world created. 

Those two notes are in complete contradiction to one another, yet the Talmud says they both are true.  Here is what they mean to me.  When I sit on a bench facing the shore where I live and watch the waves roll in and look at the endless sky, I become aware of how insignificant I am.  All this was here millions of years before me and will go on millions of years after I am gone.  In the face of the eternity of time, I am not even a radar blip, I‘m not even a point on the line.  I am totally insignificant.  Therefore, if I am to live to 85 instead of 58, so what?  My death, like my life, means nothing in the long run. Even the pain my family would feel would be lost in the full long scheme of things.  Ani afar ve’efer—I am nothing but dust and ashes. 

On the other hand, Bishvili nivra ha’olam—for my sake the whole world was created!  I am so significant, I am so important, so critical, that all this is worth being just so I can experience it!  Can you imagine, Malcolm, what a miracle we all are, just by being?  The mathematical probability, said Albert Einstein, of my being born as who I am, is not .000000001; it is zero!  Yet I am here.  And every moment of life is a miracle beyond my comprehension!  That I can see those waves, that I can walk on that shore, that I can smell that sea, that I can gaze on a sunset.  These are experiences that quadrillions of souls never had and never will!  I am in Awe of this universe and of my presence in it.  Every moment of life is a miracle!  And we must never forget that!  That’s the lesson of cancer, or any life-threatening disease!  The magnificence of the moment!  Should I complain after having been granted so many moments of this, even one moment of being?  Certainly not!  And if I choose to complain, to be bitter about the probability that I will not make it to 80, what should I say to those young people in Turkey who were buried in the earthquake, or to the children who were shot by militia in East Timor, or those infants in any hospital’s critical-care neonatal unit?  How many of them would give everything just to live long enough to be a lymphoma patient at the age of 57?  Sure, it would be nice to live to 90.  But if I’m not grateful for reaching my age and having all the magnificent blessings that have been and are still mine, then I know nothing of life.  Malcolm, I stand each day in awe of my own existence, which frankly is beyond my comprehension.  I cannot truly fully grasp the realization that I am.  How long I am is not nearly as significant as that I am, now, and have been for so long already. 

My friend, there’s a lot more to say.  But this is enough for now.  I hope that what I have learned and have come to appreciate will help you as you wake each day.  I am sorry that you’re sick.  I hope that your condition improves.  I want you to get better, and perhaps, if you carry two Hebrew notes in your pocket, it will help you face whatever comes. 

So, that’s what sustains me: not blaming God nor having any expectations of a miraculous cure or Divine intervention; seeing goodness in the world, and knowing how much of it I have been beneficiary to; and finally, standing in wonder and amazement each day that I have. 

God bless you, my friend.  Continue God’s work, for that’s what you are doing.  And stay in touch. 

Moshe

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