Who Was That Girl?

I was terrified to watch the video. I cringed when I saw myself on the screen—but it wasn’t me. It was some confidant, young woman. Who was she?

I am not sure what she was talking about in her d’var Torah. It sounded vaguely Buddhist, but I don’t think she’d read much about Buddhism back them. And I remember she was so proud that what she said was all her, that she could identify and express what was inside herself.

What she said was smarter than she knew. If I'd watched that video three years later, would it have helped me get through that difficult time?

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The day after my conversion, a friend called me and asked, “So what happened?”

I surprised myself by saying, “It was like a wedding.” My answer surprised me because I don’t know anything about weddings and I’ve often wondered why people get married.

After that, I began to notice how frequently the analogy of marriage occurs in Jewish thought. God is married to the Torah, the Sabbath is married to the people of Israel, Shechinah is the partner of God, and even we are partners with God in perfecting the world.

There’s one midrash that I particularly like, probably because it’s a little racy.

The rabbis compared Mt. Sinai to a chuppah, the canopy under which a bride and groom are married. When the Israelites worshipped the golden calf at the foot of the mountain where they were about to enter the covenant with God, it was tantamount to a bride committing the act of adultery under the very chuppah where she is to be married.

So when I learned that my Torah portion included the story of the golden calf, I immediately thought of this midrash. However, as I studied the portion, I became confused. Why do the Rabbis compare idolatry and adultery? And what is wrong with worshipping a molten calf? God is everywhere, but since we can’t truly comprehend that, why can’t we have a symbol to help us focus our attention?

Why is it that the idol we made lead us away from God, while the Torah’s stories about God can lead us toward God? How is an idol different from a story? Either one can only approximate what God truly is.

In most of the Torah, God is not immense or perfect or beyond human comprehension, and yet we know that God must be all those things and more. But, if these stories are all right, why was worshipping the golden calf wrong?

Perhaps it is because we made the calf after we had asked Moses to keep God far from us. We chose to worship a molten calf because we didn’t want to experience God.

But after Moses left, we became afraid, we felt abandoned and we wanted something to cling to. We were afraid because it felt as if God was not with us. It felt as if God’s heart had turned away. Despite everything God had done for us, we still did not trust God.

Recollections of the Sea of Reeds and the thunder at Mt. Sinai were not enough for us and in our fear, our hearts turned away from God. We sought something else to cling to but what we chose to cling to would not have helped us deal with the reality of our fear.

When we are experiencing a powerful emotion, such as fear or pain, we immediately look for something to erase the feeling: more television, more hours at the office, socializing, reading, anything to avoid facing the feeling and the cause of that feeling. But if we can’t face our own suffering, how can we face the suffering of other people and take action to alleviate it? The diversions we seek are merely idols, like the golden calf, they cannot wash away our pain or even bring us a little comfort. They cannot substitute for our souls’ marriage with God.

Unlike the golden calf, the stories in the Torah are like a good marriage because we tend to struggle with them. When God instructs us to commit an act we find reprehensible, we try to find out what God was really trying to tell us. When the story is of God, walking like a person, in Gan Eden, we assume it is an analogy for intimacy with God. God is described in anthropomorphic terms partly because that is the easiest way for humans to understand God. The stories use familiar images to describe mystical things. So I can distinguish a difference between stories of God in the Torah and this idol.

The idol was our own creation. It could not have guided us through the wilderness and it could not have taught us how to live well.

The familiar imagery of the Torah, which often describes God as a person, also teaches us how to behave ethically toward other human beings. Relationship is essential to Judaism. And there is one relationship that Judaism seems to especially emphasize. Perhaps it is the hardest one of all: marriage.

The first commandment God pronounces in the Torah is “Be fruitful and multiply.” Tradition has it that marriage is so important that God braided Eve’s hair before her wedding.

Tamar Frankiel wrote, in The Voice of Sarah, “more than in any other tradition, marriage is the essence of Jewish work in the world. Only in the union between man and woman can we touch with our own natures the process that the whole world is about: to come together, to overcome our separation, to be at one.”

Our relationship with God should mirror our relationships with other people. But what are we supposed to do when our souls’ marriage to God turns rocky, when we feel abandoned by God, when our hearts have turned away from God, and when we are certain that God’s heart has turned away from us?

It may be human nature to run from difficult feelings and to seek distractions, but eventually, it sinks in that idols can’t help us. At that point, all we can do is sit with what we are feeling, experience it fully and get familiar, even comfortable, with it. Then suddenly our perception of reality becomes a little bit clearer. But it takes a very long time to reach that point of increased clarity. And during that time, there is nothing to hold on to.

Luckily, we are always being held. I imagine that the thing holding us is an ark, an ark that is made of the Jewish community, the rituals and the theology of Judaism. Judaism is not something we can cling to. It will not erase our pain, it will not make everything better, but it will hold us, as it has held our people for thousands of years. While we are being held we can get to know our pain or sadness or fear, become comfortable with our feelings and begin to see reality. In time, our hearts will turn back to God and God’s heart will turn back to us.

The Torah is saying that the Israelites should have waited quietly, they should have sat with their fear, they should have let themselves be held by their community and by their new religion. Better still, they could have done what Moses does later in this Torah portion, or as Elijah does in this Haftarah portion: wrestle with God, argue with God. The Israelites could have shouted to God to come back.

When our relationship to God seems to wane, we must make an effort to be reunited with God because we are partners in the covenant. The reality may be that God is always near, but that is not our experience. We can feel abandoned by God, just as we might feel abandoned by a person. Sometimes we draw strength from the depth of a relationship, at other times, we feel disconnected from that same relationship.

For three years, Judaism opened a new universe for me. One day I realized that I would not be alive in any meaningful sense unless I made a commitment to become a Jew. My conversion was the best thing that ever happened to me. I changed, the entire world changed. For more than a year, it seemed that God couldn’t shower enough blessings on me, but this past year was very difficult. And during this crisis my connection to Judaism seemed to be fading. It seemed so unfair that a faith that had meant so much to me, a faith I had sworn to uphold always might become meaningless.

I began to look everywhere for comfort, but nothing helped. Then one Sabbath, after Torah study, someone asked me, “Why did you become a Jew?” I said that I’d never been able to answer that question. I also told her that even though Judaism had brought me so much joy, I was losing my connection to it.

She said to me, “So, the honeymoon is over.” Her comment was like a bolt of lightning. It reminded me of the comparison I had made the day after my conversion. And I realized that if the honeymoon is over, there must still be a marriage. The relationship still existed and I could fight to renew it.

So I yelled at God. Later, I regretted the language I used, but the point is I did turn to God. I trusted that God would hear and care and respond.

Elijah’s words to God in this week’s Haftarah portion are “Anaini Adonai, anaini. Answer me, O Lord, answer me. That this people may know that thou, Lord, art God.”

And God responded, for God is also bound by the covenant between us. God has been gracious to us. Each of us stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai; each of us was invited to enter into that marriage with God. So even if the honeymoon is over, the marriage endures. Sometimes, it’s all joy and, other times, it’s all work, but it is our covenant. So today, I renew my commitment to rely on God for the strength to struggle against idols and to enter more fully into a relationship with God.