The God of Broken Spaces

 

The God of Broken Spaces

Rosh Hashanah 5786

        I am searching, this year, for a God of the Gaps.

Not those kinds of gaps. “God of the Gaps” is a phrase that usually refers to explaining gaps in scientific knowledge with miracles. That is not the gap I am looking to fill. I am seeking for something to hold together the fractures and great divides that exist between us in society, as they continue to broaden year by year, a continental shift in our understanding of one another. 

It seems that the divides between us only keep growing, separating us from those whom we might otherwise love or at least respect. Our cultural environment encourages us to ignore the places of strength in our agreements. Instead, we are urged to peer ever more deeply for opportunities for disagreement, to look for reasons to push one another away, for ways to widen that gap. Too often, we create the cavern between us based on assumptions, on misuse and misunderstanding of language, on finding excuses to categorise one another’s perspectives without question or curiosity. 

        When I was growing up, the World Wide Web was being touted as something that would bring us all together. But while we can now speak with someone on the other side of the world immediately, we are also siphoned by technology into echo chambers. We are fed into algorithms which ensure that we are surrounded with people who agree on what is “Good” and “Normal”, and we’re shown the worst face of those who disagree - and then we are encouraged to project that image of the Other writ large upon one another, all while other people in other echo chambers learn what is “Good” and “Normal” in a very different way. 

I am concerned for us all. 

I know, as I say this, that what is on the minds of many is Israel. And it is valid. Many of us, maybe even all of us, have seen relationships break down over this conflict. I have felt myself pushed away because of someone else’s beliefs about my beliefs about my Zionism; and I have witnessed myself closing down over my understanding of someone else’s beliefs, too. And I’ve also been humbled by conversations that have made clear that we are simply using one word two different ways. That actually, we might agree on the important thing after all. 

        But in our world, there is so much talking and so little listening. And the stakes are high. They are high personally, as we have all experienced - and they are high societally, as we feed into extremist pipelines by shoving one another further into echo chambers. 

And so I am searching for God in that broken space, for understandings of the Divine that can help reshape and reimagine our place in it. 

        I would like to share with you some of what I have found: three classical and creative re-imaginings of three classical Torah stories. One about God’s place in Creation; one about our place in Creation; and one about the revealed thing that lies between us. 

        We’ll begin “in the beginning”. After all, it is the birthday of Creation - the universe is now 5786 years old, give or take a few billion. In the beginning of B’reishit, we’re told the story of Creation starting with the chaotic material that exists and what God does to bring order. This story gets reimagined by the mystics, who are more interested in the place of God before and during the act of Creation. The creation narrative of Lurianic Kabbalah goes instead something like this: 

        In the beginning, there was only God. And in order to create space for something to exist which was not God, the Divine had to retract, a process referred to as tzimtzum. And just like that - there was room for a universe to be. Except there was a problem. Left behind in this universe was divine light emanating, but no vessels can truly contain divinity. And so those vessels shattered. 

        Brokenness is a natural consequence of existence. And our job, according to Isaac Luria and his followers, is to gather together those broken shards and lift them up. We do this by fulfilling mitzvot, by prayer, by meditation. The Holy One, in order to create something Other, now requires our participation in holding it all together. 

        So maybe God is broken, too. 

        It is a different image of the Divine to sit with. The mystics are not so constrained by Greek theological language like omnipotence. The Divine can just be broken, too, can need us, too. We don’t have to imagine that relationship with something so far beyond us has to mean we will be rescued and redeemed. We can be Rescuer and Redeemer, too. 

        God can be there, in the broken space, just as fractured as we feel. 

        I will come back to Creation. But first: on Revelation.

        The Torah describes the first set of Tablets of the Ten Sayings (/Commandments) as being inscribed mizeh umizeh, this side and that. Rav Hisda (Talmud Shabbat 104a) explains that the writing being on both sides means that it was carved all the way through. If you stood on one side of the tablets, you could see through each line of each letter, straight through the stone. 

        But this leaves us, of course, with a problem of letterform engineering. Two Hebrew letters are closed all the way around: the Mem Sofit (Final Mem: ם) and the Samekh (ס). If I carved either of those letters all the way through the Tablet, the stone in the middle of the letter would simply fall out - and a circular hole does not a Samekh make. Rav Hisda, of course, knows his alef-bet, and so he sees this problem coming. He says: “The [Final] Mem and the Samekh in the Tablets stood via a miracle.” 

(That is how you do God of the Gaps.)

This is a famous story, but it had never occurred to me before this year to think more seriously about that Mem Sofit and that Samekh, and the implications of the miracle. But I found myself considering what the miracle was really for. Surely, I thought, that first Mem Sofit and that first Samekh were going to tell me something about the nature of the miracle. 

I have strange news for you. You cannot see this in the tablets above [in the synagogue], because they are truncated versions of the statements, but the first Mem Sofit of the Ten Sayings appears in the first statement: I am God, so says God, who brought you out from Mitzrayim - Egypt. And the first Samekh appears in the second of the Ten: lo ta'aseh l'kha pesel; you must not make a pesel, a graven image. Our first miraculous letters, held there by divine decree, exist to maintain the structural integrity of the words “Egypt” and “Idol”. 

Lest you think this is a coincidence - Rav Hisda's is not the final word on the miraculous words. In the Jerusalem Talmud (Megillah 1:9), Rabbi Levi steps in to add the Ayin to the mix, because in the older Hebrew script, the Ayin was a closed circle. He does not go through the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet to see what else might cause an issue of structural engineering - he just wants the Ayin to be noted as miraculous. And where, you ask, is our first Ayin in the Ten Sayings, our first stone standing by virtue of God holding it within the gap? It is also in the first of the Ten: in the word Avadim - Slaves. 

                                                                    The Ayin and its ancestors.

According to these two rabbis and this creative reimagining of the giving of the Tablets of the Covenant, there was a miracle that first appeared in the holding together of Egypt - Idolatry - Slavery. 

I’m convinced they were being quite deliberate. It seems to me that the miraculous letters which should have first broken the Tablets of the Covenant, our relationship with the Divine - the letters that leave behind an empty space where sacred words should be - are precisely the kinds of things that should break us. The experience of being foreign and oppressed; slavery itself; the impulse toward ascribing divinity to our own control. And yet, they do no such thing. We are not broken, not entirely. Perhaps this is precisely the miracle: that things that should break us are somehow held together. 

I see, in that miracle, the families I know who are held together by love even when our cultural context keeps pitting them against one another. Relationships that maybe could be closer, in a warmer world, but have not cracked open and allowed the love to spill out. Communities still finding ways to sit in the same room, to pray together, to remain in conversation, even when it is sometimes profoundly difficult. 

Sometimes, the miracle is not the magic fix. Sometimes, the miracle is the decision to keep trying, the decision to stay in the room. To be further apart than we would like, but not so far that we lose sight of one another. Sometimes the miracle is not falling apart long enough that we can work on coming together again. 

What if we saw the ability to prioritise love and respect as, itself, miraculous? 

One third story. 

Back to Creation. 

At the end of the first week, God creates the human being. In the first version of the story, God creates the human being as a singular thing, HaAdam, but that Adam is both “male and female”. In the second story, God seems to create one person and then creates the female out of the male. The Midrash (B’reishit Rabbah 8:1) reconciles the two stories by utilising the strange grammar. God did indeed create one creature, so say the rabbis; one creature with two faces, which faced away from one another. In the creation of “man” and “woman”, what God did was split them apart where they were joined back-to-back, and allow them to turn around and see one another. It is a much more helpful reading of the wording all around; Eve is created from Adam’s tzela, which means side more naturally than rib, and now we know why the first person is The Adam up until there are two people: because The Adam and Adam are not one and the same. 

It also means that what God created “in God’s image” was us, together, but unable to see one another’s faces. The act of solving loneliness was not to create another person; it was to allow the two-faced creature to turn and to see itself. It means that when we recognise the image of God in one another, that “image of God” is actually relational. We need one another to experience the image of God. 

In the Midrash’s careful and creative reading, it is precisely the brokenness that allows us something: the opportunity to see one another. 

I have long said that the idea that everyone is made B’tzelem Elokim, in the Divine image, is supposed to be a challenge. It is easy to see the sacred in the faces of those we cherish. The challenge is whether it is possible to hold onto this very basic Jewish belief looking into the faces of those we have no reason to care for. It is, I think, the most important idea that humankind has ever had. It is the basis of everything about equality.

And here, in this Midrash, the ability to see someone else, in all their Otherness, as fully human - it is the solution to the loneliness of that first creature, and it is how we interact with God. 

I don’t imagine that any of this is easy. I also don’t imagine that it comes without its own setbacks, in a world in which there are bad actors and there is advantage to be taken. 

But I do wonder.

I wonder what it would mean for us, if we saw brokenness in the world as being a brokenness in the fabric of divine reality, and saw our job as working to fix it. 

What it would mean if we found joy and comfort in the miracle of things not falling apart entirely - what energy we might find in love if we saw the ability to stay together, even if more distanced, as miraculous. 

What it would mean if, when we were pushed by our cultural context into shoving one another away, we responded with a fundamental belief that Otherness is sacred. If we reframed disagreement as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of it. If someone being across from us could be precisely what allows us to understand the image of God. 

So no, I don’t imagine it would be easy. But I do imagine that it might be the only way forward. I do imagine that the more we model it in the world, the more likely we are to pull the broken edges together. 

May it be a year of sweetness and of healing. May it be a year of finding God in broken spaces, recognising miracles all around us, and seeing the divine image more clearly in one another. 

Shanah tovah um'etukah.